Reluctant Relatives

...Meanwhile, they have become increasingly self-conscious and angry— though, as Lipset shows, a good deal more similar to English-speaking Canadians than they used to be...

...But do they really want to be Canadians...

...True, Canada has no common interests, no common history and no common culture—not even truly nationwide political parties—but it does have a guiding principle: "multiculturalism...

...Today, as Lipset notes, it is Canada's intellectuals and Leftists who denounce our no doubt imperfect country "as a crude, vulgar, materialist, individualist, technologically oriented society, one unconcerned with high culture, community, the spiritual aspects of life, the decent things...

...Most of them want their homeland to be distinct from English Canada, not independent from it...

...Every ethnic group has the right to reserve [sic] and develop its own culture and values within the Canadian context...

...The national "superior inferiority complex" (Malcolm's term), they contend, is not the sole basis of their unity...

...Quebec upholds a somewhat different ideal, "biculturalism": the assertion of ahistorically separate French society possessing its own language, religion and legal system...

...O God, grant me mediocrity and comfort" is the national prayer, claims Robertson Davies...

...Canada is not—not to the proposition that all men are created equal or to any other national creed...

...Yet all these regions and their "natural American neighbors, argued Andrew Malcolm in his fine book The Canadians, are divided solely "by artificial political boundaries...

...Still, Lipset argues, "Canada is clearly handling the strains of a multicultural society better than the United States" handles them...

...The percentage would rise if it ever did, so we may eventually have to decide what to do in these circumstances...

...A very recent poll has 17 per cent of the people in the prairie provinces wanting their region to become independent or to join the United States should Quebec go its own way...

...Thus "two nations, not one, came out of the American Revolution...

...Above the 49th parallel, the state is seen as an ally against the cold, the desolation, and the Americans...

...This sort of nonsense calls to mind classical anti-Semitism, although to be fair, the insistence of the Canadians on being different seems a bit Jewish...

...The great refusal must therefore constantly be reaffirmed for the federation to survive...

...The United States, as Bertrand Russell said, is dedicated to a proposition...

...But Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has been pushing them closer to our kind of conservatism, especially on free trade...

...If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania," says Margaret Atwood, "that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia...

...Perhaps not...

...Notwithstanding these respective obsessions, Canada resembles the United States more than any other nation, and vice versa, as Lipset correctly insists...

...Nevertheless, the Parti Québécois (PQ), despite losing both a 1980 referendum on its proposal to make Quebec a sovereign state and then the 1985 provincial elections, is enjoying a revival...

...By 1989 half of its residents, manyof them nonwhite, had been born abroad, yet it has never suffered the violence and hatred now destroying American cities...

...It is that part of British North America that did not support the Revolution...

...From the Atlantic provinces (connected through the fishing industry with New England) to British Columbia (where the loggers share the interests and outlook of their counterparts in our Pacific Northwest) the "regional solitudes" of Canada seem to be tied more intimately to the adjoining parts of our country than to one another...

...We suppose that they resemble us more than they actually do...

...The huge, harsh landmass these northerners inhabit is far less responsive to individual enterprise than the domesticated, hospitable real estate of their pushy, and vastly more numerous, southern cousins...

...Our Founding Fathers sought to divide, share and separate the powers of the state and to give us inalienable rights against it...

...At the end of World War II Toronto was mostly Protestant, native-born and Anglo-Saxon...

...Lipset's "central argument" is that these attitudes— not modes of production or geography —have been the pre-eminent influence upon the development of both countries...

...Disunity, you might say, became a kind of negative unity...

...On this question, there is no escaping geography...

...Our people care more about equality of opportunity, theirs about equality of result...

...Because of their different starting points, they had two different mentalities, two different value systems...

...Their "great refusal" gave what eventually became Canada its first substantial English-speaking population...

...Yet Americans, as the historian J. Bartlett Brebner once put it, "are benevolently ignorant about Canada," while Canadians, by contrast, "aremalevolently well-informed about the United States...

...In parts of the west, the second tongue is Chinese or Ukrainian, whatever Quebecers may wish to believe...

...They, however, seize enthusiastically upon every difference, large and small, because a sense of being North American but not American holds Canada together, if anything does...

...Our revolutionary society consecrated itself to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...The same realities that have promoted big government have also promoted big business (ownership is more concentrated in Canada) and big labor (a considerably larger proportion of the labor force is organized...

...Biculturalism is not...

...Multiculturalism may be working, in Canada, if nowhere else...

...As compared with Americans, Canadians have always been more deferential, more hierarchical, more traditional in every way...

...They are less aggressive, less optimistic, less bold...

...Canada attaches no great importance to its founders, who in any case merely copied the Westminster model, which in theory gave Parliament almost unlimited power...

...And what shall we do if another "distinct society," Puerto Rico, requests statehood, confronting us with the possibility of a 21 st-century American Quebec...

...Reviewed by Roger Draper Contributor, "New York Review of Books" It is our single most important trade partner...

...Neurotic self-doubt, which among English Canadians manifests itself as anti-Americanism, takes the form of linguistic intolerance among French Canadians...

...Its counterrevolutionary alter ego was content to seek "peace, order, and good government...

...There is Ontario patriotism, Quebec patriotism, or Western patriotism," said a French Canadian politician and journalist in 1907, "but there is no Canadian patriotism...

...Enormous distances and physical barriers isolate regions that vary in culture (including language and ethnic roots), geography, climate, and politics...

...In the past it was the Conservatives, the inheritors of the Tory-loyalist tradition, who incarnated the antiAmerican and protectionist instinct...

...Alas, the plausibility of Quebec's claim to unique status has been eroded by the arrival in Canada of large numbers of Asians, blacks and Eastern Europeans...

...It remains outofpower, but thenervous Liberals who replaced it are trying to appease nationalist opinion by persecuting shopkeepers for committing the crime of posting signs in English...

...It has the second-highest level of direct investment in our economy of any nation on earth, as well as the world's second-highest gross domestic product per capita...

...At its end, 50,000 Toryloyalist Americans moved across the border...

...As Seymour Martin Lipset shows in his thoughtful new book, Canada "is a residual country...

...The similarities, like the differences, are rooted in the values of a commonwealth founded by men and women who prized religious liberty and representative institutions no less than Americans did, although they did not themselves wish to be Americans...

...The threat to national unity, Lipset rightly suggests, is worst when cultural and linguistic boundaries overlap provincial ones—i.e., in Quebec...

...He has a point...

...If IwereaCanadian, I might say more prudent...

...In generation after generation, Canada's national identity has been just strong enough to let it soldier on and just weak enough to inspire constant misgivings about the value of doing so...

...But he concedes that separating these factors is in practice almost impossible...

...The example of Canada is scarcely encouraging...

...When a Liberal government proposed the 1971 Multicultural Art, it announced "that cultural pluralism is the very essence of Canadian identity...

...Three generations later, it was much the same: According to a 1980 poll, except for Ontarians, a majority see themselves less as citizens of Canada than of its constituent parts...