OUR CANADIAN COUSINS

...Then there was the 1985 "Shamrock Summit" at Quebec City where the pro-American Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila led Ronald and Nancy Reagan on stage to sing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling...

...French Quebeckers also recognize that the weaker Canada's central government becomes, the greater their odds of gaining political independence...

...He is similarly pleased that "unions remain stronger in Canada than in the United States," while "the influence of religion is less...

...But it was clear from long before Preston Jones is writing a doctoral dissertation in Canadian history at the University of Ottawa...

...It's not that we don't like America," a Canadian friend fibs...

...Granatstein is hopeful, moreover, for Canadian "social democracy," which, "however attenuated today, has thrived in the past and continues to struggle onward...

...So the separate colonies of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and "Canada" (roughly present day Quebec and Ontario) deemed it prudent to form a united front, and in 1867 the Dominion of Canada—consciously rejecting the American Republic's embrace of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—declared itself to stand for "peace, order, and good government...

...and thus by giving their inhabitants a country which they will be unwilling to see absorbed even into one more powerful...

...As most perceptive Americans who have spent time in Canada would agree, the psychological and temperamental gulf between the United States and its greatest trading partner is much wider than the international border...

...This public display of sucking up to Reagan," Granatstein writes, "may have been the single most demeaning moment in the entire political history of Canada's relations with the United States...

...In 1997 one poll showed that some 12 percent of British Columbians supported independence, and it is well known that a majority of French Quebeckers voted in favor of sovereignty in October 1995...

...And in 1839, well after Canadians had joined in fighting Americans in the War of 1812 to preserve their distinct society, the governor-in-chief of Britain's remaining North American colonies maintained that the only way for British America to avoid annexation by the United States was for the government to raise up "for the North American colonist some nationality of his own...

...government quietly assisted the opposition Liberal leader, Lester Pearson, which of course gave Diefen-baker's supporters and their anti-American progeny yet another reason to hate the United States...

...We have the freest institutions and most direct self-government in the world," the Canadian Methodist Magazine declared in 1880, noting further that Canada was free from many of the "social cancers" which were "empoisoning the national life of our neighbors": "polygamous Mormondom," "Ku-Klux terrorism," "Onei-da Communism," the "Illinois divorce system," and "cruel Indian massacres...

...So too does the bragging of Americans who, having spent less than a year fighting the Kaiser in the First World War, hooted that they had won that conflict, while the bloodied Canadians had been in France's trenches from the beginning...

...but his tone comes nowhere near the anti-American screeds of, say, Margaret Atwood or the late philosopher George Grant's gloomy nationalist tracts...

...We just don't want to be Americans...

...In America, in theory at any rate, blindness to racial differences is considered a virtue...

...In much of this, let it be said, the Canadians had a point...

...So Quebec's nationalists favored free trade for the same reason many English-speaking Canadians did not— namely, that it was a further blow to "Canadian identity...

...But the Canadians' tendency to pat their own backs does get tedious—as when they piously observed in October 1995 that the O. J. Simpson spectacle could never have happened in Canada, even as their own nation came within some fifty thousand votes of splitting up...

...We leave," one United Empire Loyalist wrote en route from upstate New York to the Ottawa Valley in 1773, "not because we do not see . . . that the king of England seems pernicious, ill-minded or insane, but because we do not believe . . . that we can yet cut ourselves off from Europe, from tradition, or from the past...

...It comes as no surprise that Canada's least anti-American faction is made up of Quebec nationalists, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of free trade candidates in the 1988 federal election...

...Canadians are famous for their inability to define themselves, but— as J. L. Granatstein observes in his interesting new study, Yankee Go Home?: Canadians and Anti-Americanism—polls consistently show that less than 5 percent of them favor joining the United States...

...Of the more than thirty books Granatstein has written or edited, American readers would benefit most from this one, which inevitably puts the United States in an interesting light...

...Of course, much of what Canadians take pride in these days are government programs and social philosophies most Americans reject, so there's little prospect of the United States looking to Canada for moral instruction any time soon...

...In the preface to his Yankee Go Home?, Granatstein, an eminent Canadian historian and public commentator, calls himself a lifelong "devout anti-American," and sometimes that shows...

...There is certainly much truth in this...

...In a continental market dominated by television and media dollars, there seems little way to resist the trend of Americanization," he writes...

...Recounted in this book is the familiar Canadian tale of how Pearson obliquely criticized Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy at Temple University in 1965 and how, the next day, LBJ grabbed the prime minister by his lapels and rebuked him for having come to the United States and "pissed on my rug...

...But, being Canadian, Granatstein may not be able to divine the extent to which his English-speaking compatriots, and especially his fellow Ontarians, differ from their American kin...

...that Canadians preferred to rely upon government rather than individuals or private institutions to provide them with a sense of collective purpose...

...troops fought nearly a thousand engagements with Indians...

...Not that Pearson's own relationship with official America was unendingly smooth...

...The decline of anti-Americanism surely is a recognition of the truth that Canadians are, every day, more like Americans...

...Given the British Americans' early reliance on government, it comes as no surprise that Canadians still look to politicians for reasons to live...

...by elevating these small and unimportant communities into a society having some objects of national importance...

...One irony in this list of selling points is that to a considerable measure Canada owes these differences to Americans, particularly to Vietnam-era draft dodgers, most of whom were college educated and partisans of the Left, and some of whom ended up getting tenure at Canadian universities...

...Granatstein notes with approval that this was done "in an effort to stop the melting pot bragged about in the United States from doing its work...

...But multicultural-ism is entrenched in Canada's Charter of Rights...

...One study cited by Granatstein shows that in the late 1980s many of these draft dodgers turned professors were still among Canada's most fervent anti-Americans...

...OUR CANADIAN COUSINS Anti-Americanism Up North By Preston Jones There was a moment in the nineteenth century when it seemed possible that the Yankees might, after defeating the Confederate South, try to annex British North America...

...One reason for this is that, by virtue of their French language, the nationalists do not fear American culture as much as English-speaking Canadians...

...These anti-American Americans, Granatstein says, "vigorously rejected the policies of the United States and some of its works" and they "increased the acceptability of American radicalism in Canada...

...In the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, U.S...

...And then there is Granatstein's lofty opinion that "Canadians are fortunate enough to live in God's country, the best of all places on the earth, a land graced with North America's bounty and few of the United States' worst problems...

...In his conclusion Granatstein maintains that since the North American free trade agreements of the late 1980s and early 1990s, anti-Americanism in Canada has become nearly a spent force...

...Granatstein writes that this sort of American bravado contributed mightily to the animus of John Diefenbaker, whose 1963 campaign for reelection as Canada's prime minister was fantastically anti-American—so much so that the U.S...

...Prominent in this book is the moral superiority Canadians have nurtured in their breasts from the days of the loyalists to the present...

...Surely some would be interested to know, for instance, that an event as obscure to most Americans as the Alaska boundary dispute of 1903, in which Britain sided with the increasingly powerful United States against the loyal (if somewhat peripheral) Canadian dominion, figures prominently in the Canadian nationalist's anti-American catechism...

...But the one thing that has bound the perpetually fractious Canadians together for well over a century has been their unwillingness to see their nation or their province absorbed into the United States...

...in the same period Canadians fought just ten—and most of these were with a single tribe...

...It is a truism that Canadians—from the Maritime Provinces on the Atlantic to British Columbia on the Pacific— have never shared a common national identity...