Canadians Page 19

  O Canada depicts a country of the postcards, not of the history books. Geese take off, deer leap, caribou race, salmon run, skiers ski, hockey players knock pucks around until one scores. It seems a country where hardly anyone lives, where the vistas go on forever and the seasons come and go. The voiceover uses “eh?” more than once too often.

  Had any Americans been searching the film for support in the upcoming invasion of Iraq, they would have found only military bands both smaller and less well outfitted than most American high school marching bands and a circle of period-costumed soldiers firing … muskets.

  If this was Canada as Americans see their neighbour, heaven help Canadians. The pavilion itself has as its centrepiece a miniature CN hotel that looks to be a combined Château Frontenac, Château Laurier, and Banff Springs Hotel—all since 1982 bought out by the American-based Fairmont Hotels chain. Alongside the hotel are a miniature “Victoria Gardens” and a pile of false rocks intended to be the Rockies though they look rather more like Arizona or New Mexico. The young workers at the pavilion wear black-and-red lumberjack shirts reminiscent of the Canadian yokel parodies of Bob and Doug McKenzie familiar to American fans of Second City TV. The souvenir booth sells, as expected, hockey pucks, but also Davy Crockett coonskin caps—perhaps to remind Americans that Canada is still a place where we trap our own clothes.

  You wouldn’t expect American ignorance of all things Canada to surprise the young people who work there, but even they sometimes get caught off guard. “I know this is going to sound stupid to you,” one American man asked in the days before I happened to drop in, “but where’s Canada?” They thought at first he was joking. He wasn’t.

  “You know where the continental United States sits?” one of the lumberjack-shirted workers asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “You know where Alaska is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, all that green in between—that’s Canada.”

  Green … pink on the old school maps in the days of the British Empire, white on the weather maps, the country no more considered than a hallway whose occasional new paint job goes unnoticed. No wonder that when Toronto won that 1992 World Series—played in the SkyDome that doesn’t exist at the Epcot Center—U.S. Marines headed out into Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta in a dignified procession featuring the Stars and Stripes held high on one pole, Canada’s red maple leaf on the other—upside down.

  Canadians, of course, were outraged.

  And yet, characteristically, they were also delighted—as if knowing “right side up” on one’s own flag translates into some greater worldliness, some undeniable superiority. Ridicule of America is a northern necessity of life, as Canadian as blueberry pie.

  The modern master of the art is Newfoundland comedian Rick Mercer. Beginning with This Hour Has 22 Minutes and moving on to his own Rick Mercer Report, Mercer applied to America a variation of the old Newfie joke he himself would have been acutely familiar with. He would head down to the States posing as a journalist, complete with microphone and camera crew, and ask famous and not-at-all-famous Americans about matters Canadian.

  The Canadian audience howled at the always-friendly, eager-to-please Americans earnestly responding to queries about Prime Minister Jean “Poutine,” the hockey puck on the Canadian flag, Saskatchewan seal hunts, dogs finally being allowed as house pets, rhinoceros roaming the northern hinterland, and Canada finally catching up to the rest of the world by dumping its traditional twenty-hour clock in favour of the more universal twenty-four-hour version.

  The show’s producer told The Christian Science Monitor that the brilliance of the scheme lay in the fact that it “taps into an age-old inferiority complex.” But surely it draws equally upon the superiority complex to which Canadians so readily and happily revert in the face of American ignorance. To think that a Columbia University professor would sign a petition demanding an end to the Canadian tradition of sending the elderly out onto ice floes to perish!

  Doubtless it’s funny. And yet an American network could just as plausibly have a reporter hit the streets of Canada asking people to name the capital of Wyoming or explain the electoral college. The only difference would lie in the audience numbers—Americans, lacking that deep-seated need to ridicule those ignorant of all things America, wouldn’t bother tuning in.

  Besides, they don’t know how the electoral college works either.

  PROXIMITY AND RELATIVE SIZE would argue that Canada has every right to be on permanent watch against its neighbour, but some Canadians might be surprised to know how deep that impulse runs. We were on guard, it might be said, from the moment Canada came into existence.

  In the fall of 2006, when a letter written by Sir John A. Macdonald in the year of Confederation was auctioned off, its contents demonstrated that even the first prime minister had his concerns. “I sail in four days for Canada with the act uniting all British North America in my pocket,” Macdonald wrote on April 9, 1867, to Henry Sumner Maine, an English legal expert. “A brilliant future would certainly await us were it not for those wretched Yankees who hunger & thirst for Naboth’s field.”

  The reference was biblical, suggesting stolen birthright.

  In 2004 Amy Von Heyking, who teaches education at the University of Alberta, produced a study of how America was perceived in seventy-five Canadian textbooks published throughout the twentieth century. From one end of the century to the other—with a brief reprieve in the lead-up to and duration of the Second World War—Von Heyking found an undeniable “sense of moral superiority,” at first from the conservative elite and finally from the left education establishment.

  Canadians, the professor found, “are quite self-righteous.”

  Where could such smugness originate? The French and British have long been accused of condescension, but ironically, America itself had a hand in it. Many of the Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution and its aftermath saw in Canada a second chance at preserving their values, a place where the class system they treasured would survive, at least for the short term. Their upbringing and high expectations, as well as the money many brought with them—soon to be augmented by compensation from the British government—allowed them to assume positions of political and economic influence in the remaining British colony.

  Close to a hundred thousand Loyalists fled the emerging United States, approximately half ending up in what would soon become Canada. They brought with them deeply conservative values, a distrust of revolutionary ideas, and what historian Arthur Lower called a fierce “determination to live apart” from the United States of America.

  Another point where the definition of Canadian as “not American” has some merit.

  These ambitious new members of the privileged class looked down on the new Republic, particularly those who were so determined to dispel all notions of aristocracy and class. When historian Frank Underhill called Canadians the world’s oldest and continuing anti-Americans, he must surely have been thinking of the Loyalists and all they set in motion.

  Canada’s critical superiority is also rooted in both founding nations, the French so endlessly criticized for arrogance and the English, according to Jeremy Paxman, “in the grip of a delusion that they belonged to a higher order of beings.” In The English, Paxman backs up his argument by quoting poets from Milton—“Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live”—to Ogden Nash’s little shot: “That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is.”

  Yet the Loyalists were not, as is too easily presumed, pure English. They were a diverse group—and included the black slaves of the wealthy and a couple of thousand Native allies who’d fought for the Crown during the Revolutionary Wars. Nor were the English the only British group to have a profound impact on the changing face of Canada.

  “Canadians,” Ronald Bryden of the University of Toronto once said, “like to see themselves as the Scots of North America: canny, sober, frugal folk of superior education wh
o by quietly terrible Calvinist virtue will inherit the twenty-first century.” Scots ran the Hudson’s Bay Company, Scots built the railroads, Scots set up Canada’s monopolistic banking system, and Scots were at the core of the early public service. The dominant Church may well have been Roman Catholic, but the dominant creed was, indeed, Calvinism.

  Calvinism still persists in the Canadian psyche. It is found in those who say the national bird of Canada should be the grouse. It is found in the disinclination to cheer those who dare stick their heads above the fray. It is found almost daily in the newspapers—so many of them founded by Scots—when the annual stories appear slamming whatever cabinet minister has tallied up the most kilometres in government jets. No one ever seems to consider that these numbers suggest the hardest-working cabinet minister who makes the greatest effort to get about.

  When Governor General Adrienne Clarkson was quickly admitted to hospital in the summer of 2005 and fitted with a heart pacemaker, more questions were asked about whether she received priority care under Canada’s universal health care plan than about the actual state of her health. The symbolic head of state and commander-in-chief has a heart scare and Canadians want to know if she jumped the queue?

  Similarly, when Stephen Harper showed up at his first Grey Cup match—the game that supposedly represents the very unity of Canada— the questions weren’t about which team won, east or west, but about whether the leader of the Opposition, soon to become prime minister, took a freebie.

  We can be self-righteous, but sometimes we’re downright insufferable. That Canadian self-righteousness has arisen over America’s continuing debacle in Iraq, but never let it be thought that this departure in foreign policy is some aberration. The differences in opinion—and, to be fair, differences in opinion even within Canada—were far more vehement back in the 1960s, first over nuclear proliferation and then the war in Vietnam.

  The political tension was even greater in those years than in recent times. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had a massive falling out with President John Kennedy over the arming of NORAD weapons with nuclear warheads. Washington said Canada was obliged; Diefenbaker, who had earlier agreed, now refused. So virulent was the American response to this rebuff that it’s considered a major element in the downfall of Diefenbaker’s Conservative government in 1963.

  Following Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson’s minority Liberals soon clashed as well, even though they were open to nuclear warheads on the BOMARC missiles. En route to an official visit to Washington in 1965, Pearson dropped into Philadelphia long enough to deliver a speech opposing the elevated bombing in Vietnam, earning for himself an angry dressing-down from President Lyndon Johnson. So great was Johnson’s rage that he reportedly seized the Canadian prime minister by the lapels and all but lifted him off the ground, as he so often did clutching the ears of his pet beagles.

  Beyond the political world the vitriol was often even stronger—and it, too, came from both sides of the spectrum. Conservative intellectual George Grant, a Loyalist descendant, launched a full-press attack on American values in his 1965 book Lament for a Nation. Grant would go on to claim that “the American Empire” was now a fact, not a theory, and that its goal was no less than the “ferocious demolition” of other cultures by American technological imperialism. And Canada, in Grant’s eyes, was being bombarded every bit as much as Vietnam.

  A much more liberal writer of those times, Farley Mowat, claimed in a 1967 essay in Canadian Dimension magazine that the United States

  has now become the major threat to world peace and, by extension, to the survival of mankind. I am afraid that if there is a third world war—the United States will start it. I, personally, am not prepared to give any further credence to the protestations of the Government of the United States that it seeks peace in the world. I believe it seeks power—world power—and that it will use all means at its disposal, including the greatest and most destructive military machine the world has ever known, to achieve its unstated ends. Those who choose to adhere to Washington, on the principle that it is better to be on the side of the winner than the loser, are deluding themselves. It is the future which threatens us … there will be only losers.

  Few were as strident as Mowat. Bruce Hutchison was acutely aware of the differences between the two countries—he thought the Americans “far more of a nation”—but he was also a lifelong fan of the United States. He particularly deplored those periodic uprisings of Canadian nationalism that so easily devolved into knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

  Hutchison never pretended the United States was perfect. It had made mistakes and would continue to make them. Yet, he believed, it had treated Canada better than any other power had treated a vulnerable neighbour. “If we had a choice,” he asked, “what different people would we want beside us?”

  Nearly four decades after Vietnam and with Iraq now the point of departure, my Globe and Mail colleague Rex Murphy rather nicely summed up the Canadian manner of keeping an eye on all matters American. “We are on a jealous watch up here,” Murphy said. Canadians examine every interaction between their country and the U.S. with almost fanatical rigour “lest some portion of our statehood, our way of life and identity, be diminished, obscured or even obliterated.”

  And while the far Canadian left, he argued, fuels itself on contempt for everything from President George W. Bush to the exceptional reach of American pop culture, the far Canadian right—Murphy included the Conservative Party—fairly worships American capitalism and fuels its dreams on the heroes of American republicanism.

  “In the middle,” Murphy offered, “there is the sane appreciation of the Americans as neighbours and allies, and a reasonable admiration for their undeniable achievements and goodwill. This is coupled with a cautious recoil from the excesses of their sometimes unhinged and shameless culture, even as we mimic its more vapid splendours (witness Canadian Idol or the “Canadian” edition of Entertainment Tonight) or even export a few of that culture’s grossest Canadian exponents: Céline Dion, Tom Green.

  “Whatever the Americans do, and sometimes whatever they do not do, as it refers to us, is put to a scrutiny and analysis of rabbinical finesse. “They haunt us continually.”

  AND JUST MAYBE it’s our calling to haunt them continually.

  What if Canada is America’s Jiminy Cricket? What if little Canada’s proximity to such a domineering personality is considered a great opportunity? A Jiminy Cricket conscience that pops up on the giant’s one shoulder just about every time a chip appears on the other.

  Perhaps this giant, so sure in its aggression, sometimes has trouble knowing what’s right and what’s not, what’s true and what’s not. And there Canada sits, speaking up periodically in a small, squeaky voice.

  What if Canada’s role—whether or not America likes it, whether or not a great many Canadians care for it—is to serve as a frequent scolder of paths already taken and a sincere if somewhat annoying little reminder of alternative routes that could still be taken?

  After all, Canadians have what author Douglas Coupland calls an “almost universal editorial-page need to make disapproving clucks.” They cluck about all manner of things in conversation, their work, their neighbourhood, their community—but with particular zest about the behaviour and excesses of the United States of America.

  Not all Americans, incidentally, see this as necessarily a bad thing. At a Washington conference hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Canada Institute in late 2006, former U.S. undersecretary of commerce and international trade Grant Aldonas seemed to say he actually missed Canada’s nagging and nattering.

  Canada, Aldonas told the conference, had such an enviable reputation for cooperation, for honesty, for openness, that it held the United States to a higher standard—which could only be good for the U.S. When Canada is on its game, Aldonas said, it “always requires the United States to play the game at a higher level. And that has been missing, honestly, in our relationship.” Unfortunately, he suggested, recent histor
y had produced a “lack of an articulation of Canada’s purpose, both in the world economy and in foreign affairs.”

  As another senior American bureaucrat asked my Globe and Mail colleague John Ibbitson at the same gathering: “Where has Canada gone?”

  He wouldn’t find much disagreement in some Ottawa circles, especially in foreign affairs. What the country desperately needs, says Paul Heinbecker, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, is “a wake up call”; it has to do much more to carry its own weight in this world, from security to the environment. And once woken up, it can again speak up with authority.

  And here, in one of nature’s more curious symbiotic relationships, is where Canada’s Jiminy Cricket volunteer work comes into play. While Canada’s well-known inferiority complex makes it hypersensitive to all things American, its lesser-known superiority complex makes it incapable of keeping its mouth shut.

  The squeaky voice off to the side? That’s Canada.

  Eight

  Missing, Minor, Middling, or Moral World Power?

  IT COULD HAVE been worse.

  Flatulence might have been the image Canada presented to the world. And sexual confusion. And self-mutilation.

  Mercifully, The Economist passed on the beaver back in September 2003 when it threw a moose in sunglasses on its cover and declared Canada a “cool” country with its act together.