Canadian Conundrums: Nationalism, Socialism, and Free Trade

...In contrast to this fascinating but ever more hobbled ideology, the proponents of the trade agreement asserted a banal, workaday, normal, adequate but inexcessive nationalism, the sort of nationalism that should be the legacy of any mature democracy without its having to think twice about it...

...There is also an additional consideration, one which was given all too little play in this leg of the debate: Canada's socialized system of healthcare financing is widely held to be not only more equitable, but more efficient, than the American—certainly it is if one takes as a measurement their relative costs as a percentage of GNP...

...In the event, he succeeded in doing so beautifully: "More important" than the state of his "knowledge' about the trade deal, declared columnist Marjorie Nichols, is the fact "that Turner believes passionately that it will wreck the country...

...Yet while Third World anti-American left-wing nationalism is prideful, assertive, and aggressive, Canada's is notoriously diffident, modest, and reserved...

...The link Turner had to forge between personal conviction and policy command was made apparent in the dismal results of a 1986 survey, and quoted in Greg Weston's election-eve biography of the Liberal leader, Reign of Error...

...Not only do Canada's socialist nationalists have difficulty taking pride in the achievements of their nation, they have trouble taking pride in the accomplishments of their ideology as well...

...Mulroney and the big business elite of Canada to dismantle the very social programs which define and mark us as the most civilized nation in the industrial world...

...From the psychological, as from the economic point of view, protective barriers may seem, on the surface, to offer a measure of security in a harsh and uncertain environment...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 21 pressure to abandon Canada's social programs and "harmonize" them with the American would issue forth from the barons of Canadian capitalism, on the grounds that the higher taxes needed to subsidize such comparatively generous programs would place Canadian firms at a competitive disadvantage...

...onsider just two instances—minor chords, really, but revealing nonetheless—of Canadian "nationalism's" recent confrontation with the trade deal: in an October editorial, Canada's Financial Post noted that a central strand in the antideal liturgy had it that, with the advent of the agreement, American capitalism would press the Canadian government to jettison a battery of Canadian social programs—and especially Canada's system of socialized medical insurance—on the grounds that such programs constitute state "subsidies" to Canadian business, and as such are likely to place American business at a competitive disadvantage...

...this refusal to admit to the possession of a soul is itself evidence of the kind of national soul we have . . . it is a wistful, reticent, self-doubting soul" (Robertson Davies...

...A "worker" canvassed in New Brunswick found a "vast improvement by Turner...

...Saul's comment typifies the major journalistic attack to which the prime minister had been subjected for some two to three years prior to the election...

...It could be a replica of Sweden, or, if you like, North Korea, Albania or Ireland, or Spain or Yugoslavia, or Cambodia or all of them...

...Ironically, then, Turner's and Broadbent's jeremiads (Broadbent: "As Canadian businessmen are already saying, medicare benefits in Canada must be reduced to meet U.S...

...On the other hand, though, after spending the next two or three pages laying the groundwork for a definition of the Canadiansoul—the soul he believes has been signed away with the trade agreement—Davies sums up its essence with the words, "Americans are precisely what we are not and what we don't want to be...

...In other words, Canada poses no threat to itself or to the world in being assertive, prideful, aggressive, because there is nothing unique or distinctive about our values...

...Andy Stark, a former assistant managing editor of TAS, is a policy advisor in the prime minister's office in Ottawa...

...A Canadian culture of independence, self-reliance, and self-confidence, however, is no longer unique: it is just like the American...

...standards, a country where you find thirty-six million without any form of health insurance whatsoever") were based on a remarkable failure to take pride in what is arguably one of the major, homegrown achievements of Canadian social democracy—a socialized system of health insurance that is not only more generous but less costly than the American...

...he had to engineer an inner intensity...

...One Montrealer canvassed declared, "I think [he's] phoney . . . I am sure he doesn't understand everything he [says...

...2 There is, as the Financial Post rightly observed, an "impossible contradiction" involved in arguing that Canada's "social programs put . . . both sides at an unfair disadvantage...

...On the one hand, Davies voices the caveat that, over the past two years, became the all-purpose, done-to-death exculpation clause invoked by the opponents of the deal to ward off what they clearly believed to be one of the most obvious criticisms one could make of their position: our attitude, the attitude of the deal's opponents, Davies declares, is "not anti-American, it is simply pro-Canadian...

...And if the Americans abandon the socioeconomy of force and pride, we needn't remain unique and distinct any longer...

...As economist Thomas Courchene—no socialist—has pointed out, "The manner in which Canada finances certain social policies . . . bestows a very substantial advantage on Canadian industries, so that there will be no internal pressure to alter these programs...

...Free Trade Agreement, a deal that the government had painstakingly negotiated over the preceding three years and for which it was now seeking the ratification of the voters...

...Canada's weaknesses as a state are its greatest virtues...

...the fact that he emoted sufficed for an argument...

...S ocialists, of course, have theoretical problems with nationalism, and it is the peculiar way in which these problems have been hammered out in Canada that explains the paradoxes of our nationalism...

...It really is the cause of his life...

...Words and thoughts that would be perfectly acceptable on paper, perhaps even laudable, sounded pretentious and insincere when he voiced them...

...One could sum up the respective stances by saying that the typical American is . . . unthinkingly and breezily aggressive and the Canadian . . . peevishly and hesitantly defensive . . ." (Margaret Atwood...

...no reason why one could just not want to be an American, without having to be actively anti-American...

...Un-Canadianism is almost the very definition of Canadianism" (Hugh Hood...

...America's strengths as a state are its gravest flaws...

...A New Democratic M.P...

...He appears to be getting desperate, almost to the point of panic in trying to get people to oppose free trade...

...Edward McWhinney, a noted political scientist, praised Turner for "regain[ing] his personality" in the debates, and Robert Fife of the Toronto Sun exulted that Turner "found a new meaning to his life...

...for example, he repeatedly noted that Canada's social programs are not explicitly exempted by the agreement from U.S...

...George Proud, "this agreement . . . is a disguised attempt by Mr...

...On the face of it, of course, there is no reason why a meaningful difference could not exist between being anti-American, and, more plainly, being simply not American...

...In the London Spectator of May 28, 1988, the Canadian writer John Ralston Saul, a fierce critic of the trade agreement, attacked Mulroney for what Saul took to be the prime minister's "melodramatic 'tone' [of voice] which leave[s] an impression of insincerity...

...The fact that Turner had shown passion shoved the question of his credibility into irrelevance...

...He really is a new man, all because of free trade...

...In an inversion of Jamie Lamb's verdict on the prime minister's debate performance, the Toronto Sun allowed as to how, although Turner was "dishonest and wrong on many counts" he nevertheless spoke with "sincere conviction...

...a deal that in turn had been bitterly opposed not just by the leader of the opposition Liberal party, John llirner, and the leader of the socialist New Democratic party (NDP), Ed Broadbent, but—with particular vehemence—by what have long been referred to as the "nationalist" wings of Canada's academic, artistic, media, and organized-labor communities...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989...

...Turner goes on the attack, but sincerely," announced a headline in the Ottawa Citizen...

...Naturally, anyone imbued with this form of nationalism—and that, by and large, has come to mean a preponderance of those among Canada's "political and cultural elites," who describe themselves first and foremost as "nationalists"—would be opposed to a deal meant to reinforce and entrench the country's economic ties with the United States...

...Otherwise,] it could be anything...

...Canada's socialist nationalists may well have been anti-American, but—because the very idea of antipathy, strong aversion, animus, or hostility is itself so American—they couldn't be too anti-American...

...On the evidence so far you might say that we have constructed a national character by refusing to construct one . . . perhaps the refusal to admit achievement is an achievement in itself' (Bruce Hutchison...

...But ironically . . . these changes are making Canada and her future more American, involving, as they do, a greater emphasis on values such as pride in country, self-reliance, individualism, independence, and self-confidence...

...We can be strong and forceful and proud only if there is nothing unique about us (indeed we can even "replicate" other nations...

...Canada's weaknesses as a state are its greatest virtues . . . we [Canadians] pride ourselves on our ironic modesty" (George Woodcock...

...No wonder, then, that the predebateconsensus—in the words of the Montreal Daily News—was that Turner "had to get passionate about his subject...

...Seymour Martin Lipset put the point more precisely when he recently called attention to the effects of a new nationalism north of the border, one which has produced a more radical literature...

...this seems especially so when one considers that the only other "issue" that might have profoundly influenced the voters' behavior en masse—the personalities of the two main protagonists, Mulroney and Turner, as they were conveyed through the media—did not, for much of the campaign, go in the prime minister's favor...

...Or rather, Turner and Broadbent based their forebodings on a calculated refusal to acknowledge what they might have plausibly claimed as a victory scored by Canadian social democracy in reconciling equity and efficiency, in order to retain the opportunity to excoriate Canadian capitalism for being prepared—through the instrument of the trade deal—to sacrifice equity for efficiency...

...They suggest that only when Canadians come to see themselves, and indeed the very idea of nationalism, through American eyes, will their neurosis dissipate...

...In the words of Liberal M.P...

...the U.S.," Lewis proclaimed during the campaign, "trivializes everything...

...Yet part of what Davies understands by Americanism, he tells us in the course of his essay, is a tendency to see "one's political and moral views as superior to all others...

...And in the second place, Horowitz wrote, "Canadian socialists are nationalists because they are socialists...

...or "big business is trying to buy this election...

...Imagine a Committee on Un-Canadian activities...

...As with Davies, opponent after opponent of the agreement rushed to assure Canadians that they were not anti-American, merely pro-Canadian, knowing that to have disclosed an unalloyed hostility would itself have been seen as too American...

...The heavy weight of the American republic will be . . . against us," Turner warned in the debate, as we try to "protect our social programs" from their "definition of subsidies...

...The trade debate presented that nationalism, often so intractable at the best of times, with an unprecedented array of complications...

...the fact that he cared meant that he was right...

...When was the last time big business spoke out in favor of a deal with such unanimity...

...Horowitz offered such reassurance on two grounds: First, he acknowledged, while as a general proposition "nationalism has bathed the world in blood," Canadians need not fear the consequences of their own nationalism, for there is no unique set of Canadian values which is to be . . . imposed on [others] by forceful persuasion...

...This is an exceedingly circumscribed nationalism, to say the least...

...In fact Canadians find Canadians in slightly bad taste...

...Mulroney and Turner went into thedebates with conspicuously different—in fact, diametrically obverse—handicaps...

...And second, he took to discussing the text of the deal entirely out of its context...

...Here, the central events were two three-hour debates between the party leaders, the first in French and the second in English, held on October 24 and 25...

...On other occasions, though, the foes of the agreement contended that any "America's strengths as a state are its gravest flaws...

...2Only a mentality imbued with Canada's peculiar form of apologetic nationalism would leave open the possibility that there might be a more civilized nation in the nonindustrial world...

...Nor was it sufficient for him to lose the election...

...It needn't be uniquely Canadian as long as it isn't a copy of the United States...

...The difficulty that the association of strong enmity with things American poses for those Canadians—socialists or not—whose nationalism is rooted in anti-Americanism is revealed in the election postmortem written for the January Harper's by Robertson Davies: "Signing Away Canada's Soul: Culture, Identity and the Free Trade Agreement...

...unique not just, as one would suppose, in content, but also in form...

...The language here is revealing: Turner's dishonesty was overcome by his sincerity...

...The election results were thus in no small measure a rebuke to this kind of nationalism, even as they heralded the emergence of a new, less trammeled variety...

...This "nationalism'!---which has for so long dominated Canadian intellectual life, and which so determined the course of the campaign—is utterly unique the world over...

...First, he attempted to unmask the crude, pecuniary interests lying behind the deal...

...countervail—which is true—but only because the GATT Subsidies Code exempts them, and the trade agreement itself was concluded pursuant to—really, just a large codicil of—GATT's Article Twenty-Four...

...And this is precisely the kind of reading to which Mulroney fell victim in the aftermath of the debate: Jamie Lamb of the Vancouver Sun wrote that the prime minister's "biggest problem was . . . his voice...

...So compelling are those terms that they have colored the epigrams of national self-definition authored by Canada's most prominent writers, even those who are not socialists: • "Americans worship success, Canadians find it in slightly bad taste...

...You can't...

...it draws upon a reality of contemporary democratic politics, whereby "little things"—tone of voice, style of podium, mode of travel—have somehow become the text through which we read the innermost facts of a public man's character...

...took offense at the term, but, as it turned out, it wasn't the use of the word "alien" to describe Canada that bothered him—that word, after all, betokens a respectable distance between the two countries—it was the word "power...

...As Edgar Z. Friedenberg said in his book Deference to Authority: The Case of Canada (1980), "While many Canadians doubtless feel that [the columnist] Heather Robertson, [who once] tonfess[ed] to a desireto toss a hand grenade into every American camper I pass on the highway,' herself exceeded the bounds of good taste, they might also argue that her comment simply demonstrated the degree to which the unfortunate woman, like so many of her compatriots, had succumbed to American influence already...

...Stephen Lewis, Canada's former ambassador to the UN., notably called the society in which he had lived in diplomatic luxury for the preceding four years "punitive" and "vindictive...

...And this, in turn, is the case simply because, 'Members of the Liberal party have often made fun of the term "Progressive Conservative" for what they take to be its oxymoronic quality...

...O r, consider a second example of the tortured condition of Canadian socialist nationalism as displayed in the trade debate: Canada's socialist nationalists may well have been anti-American, but—because the very idea of antipathy, strong aversion, animus, or hostility is itself so American—they couldn't be too anti-American...

...when, however, in the weeks following the debates, the two main protagonists took the gloves off, the Canadian press decried the onset of "American-style campaign tactics...

...This is not to say that every one of the deal's opponents managed to hide the depth of his anti-Americanism...

...Until these barriers are gone, the exhilaration that can come from a true sense of maturity will remain beyond our nation's reach...

...By the end of the series, the Canadians' play had become vastly more imaginative, skilled and elegant—more Russian—while the Soviets had become more determined, aggressive, and individual: more Canadian...

...for at the heart of the failure of the anti-free trade forces was the enduring problem of Canada's ideology of left-wing nationalism...

...thus to be too violently anti-American would be too—well—American...

...In the end, though, Turner succumbed to suspicions about his motives and sincerity four years in the making, suspicions that one night of surpassing passion could not dispel, suspicions reinforced by postdebate Conservativeads that—according to a just-released review of the campaign by a tripartite committee of pundits, Gerald Caplan, Michael Kirby, and Hugh Segal—astutely went after "not the substance of Turner's statement[s] on free trade, but his trustworthiness . ." Consequently, in the final weeks of the campaign, Turner shifted ground and reverted to a two-pronged strategy...

...his recovery of personality was a victory—and these were compliments...

...According to Weston, poll respondents found Turner patently "insincere" even when talking about his personal life and "frantic in his approach to get people to believe him," results that are not surprising considering that the Liberal leader routinely referred to Parliament as "bullshit theatre" and announced that he had adopted "sovereignty" as the keystone of his campaign because "it sells well in the sticks...

...Yet Horowitz has here captured, albeit in a purposefully arch way, the 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 only terms on which socialists can in theory be nationalists in Canada, and the terms on which most of those who call themselves "nationalists" in Canada are in fact socialists...

...We must also recognize them, however, as unmistakable confessions of weakness...

...A s scores—perhaps hundreds—of Americans now know, Canadians went to the polls on November 21 of last year and re-elected the Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.' The central—in fact, the only—campaign issue was the proposed Canada-U.S...

...For even a magazine as genteel as the New Yorker had this to say of the 1987 Canadian-Soviet hockey final for the Canada Cup: "The two teams in their interaction simply lifted the game itself to an entirely new level...

...while in those other countries pride, assertiveness, and aggressiveness are seen as attributes of nationalism, in Canada they are seen as attributes of Americanism...

...I don't think Turner could answer a question in the Commons...

...Nowhere was this identification of strong antipathy with Americanism so evident as in the media coverage of the two debates: Several newspapers took pride in the fact that the relatively civilized and issues-oriented tone of the Canadian debates managed to distinguish them from the characteristically American assaults on personality that were thought to have dominated the U.S...

...In the words of the MacDonald Royal Commission on the Canadian economy (which issued its final report just as preliminary negotiations for the agreement got underway in 1985): The day of the apologetic Canadian is gone, and there is no reason to suppose that our present confidence will be undermined by an arrangement designed only to secure a continuing exchange of goods and services with the United States...

...In other words, if there were no danger of its becoming aggressive, competitive, and prideful, Canada needn't remain unique and distinct, for in such a situation, Americanism would no longer be dangerous...

...An independent, prideful, self-reliant, self-confident Canadian culture is unique and distinct—by definition...

...During the Michael Deaver trial, which was widely publicized in Canada, legal counsel repeatedly referred to the Canadian government—one of Deaver's clients—as an "alien power...

...In saying so, Lewis in fact trivialized himself in the Canadian debate—not by the depth of his commitment to socialism, but by the virulence of his anti-Americanism...

...it should thus be borne in mind that at the time of Canada's Confederation, the faction that was to become the Liberal party went by the name of the "Clear Grits...

...presidential encounters...

...The ironies of Canadian left-wing nationalism do, though, have their redeeming flip side...

...While the prime minister's "style," and not the substance of his record and platform, became the portal through which the media chose to view his sincerity, Turner concluded—and was helped by the press to do so—that his ability to cultivate a trumpeted, manifested sincerity would be taken for mastery of the substance of the issues at hand, and not for what it actually was—pure stylization...

...while a certain type of weakness itself becomes a mark of uniqueness...

...T hus, if Canadian socialist nation- ' alists traditionally have had difficulty taking pride in Canada because pride itself is un-Canadian, the trade debate presented them with a new hardship: many of them felt they had to dull the edge of the anti-Americanism on which they based their definition of the Canadian character, hence blurring their vision of Canada's "uniqueness and distinctiveness"--because invidiousness itself is too American...

...If there were, then our nationalism would be truly dangerous—chauvinistic, racist, doctrinal...

...I don't think he could make any relation to what he [says...

...This audacious, breathtaking, almost virtuosic combination of the traditionally incompatible approaches of crude reductionism and blithe acontextualism in textual interpretation would have landed Turner a tenured chair in political theory at any major university on the continent, but it wasn't sufficient for him to save the election...

...For the last twenty-five years, what is commonly called Canadian "cultural and economic nationalism" has been torn by a love of strength, confidence, and assertiveness as long as they remain in the adjectival mode, but an aversion to them as soon as they slip into the form of nouns...

...True, like many Third World nationalisms, the creed that goes by the name of nationalism in Canada is predominantly left wing, and like them, it is left wing in large measure because it is rooted in anti-Americanism...

...It is the nationalism underlying this statement that Canadians endorsed on November 21...

...Imagine a Canadian Dream which implied that everybody in the world ought to share it...

...his desperation represented an improvement...

...Turner thundered...

...In afamous 1967 manifesto addressed to Canadian socialists'On the Fear of Nationalism"—the University of Toronto political scientist Gad Horowitz attempted to reassure his audience that in Canada nationalism is the friend, not the enemy, of socialism...

...If the United States were socialist, then we would be continentalists at this moment...

...indeed he had to display a sincerity so emphatic that it would either marginalize or compensate for any misstatements (and there were many) he would make on the substance of his topic...

...If our strength becomes too excessive, the thinking goes, we begin to lose our distinctiveness...

...For ten days to two weeks immediately following the debate, the prime minister fell victim to the syndrome that style, not substance, is now the preferred measure of political sincerity, while Turner capitalized on the fact that a vaunted, sentimentalized, melodramatized sincerity is taken as either a sign or a substitute for substance, and not for what it really is—namely, pure stylization...