America Lite: Is That Our Future? (… I hear the Canadians plaintively wail.)

Not like them. It's how we've defined ourselves for generations. Quieter, less violent, more caring, not as arrogant. Different. Better. Everything Americans are, we aren't. It is the thing, along with the lint, that we have found at the very centre of ourselves — the only chartable discovery in our seemingly endless search for a national identity.

Sure, not everyone in Canada thinks that way, but enough of us to make Rick Mercer rich (or, since he works for the CBC, comfortable), and reward pretty much anyone else — you can trace the line all the way back to Judge Haliburton, the creator of Sam Slick — who has been able to pander to our insecurities. The bogeyman south of the border has been reliable fodder for turgid academic treatises, earnest literary paeans, electoral crusades, even informative magazine articles.

We whinge when America ignores us. We bellow with rage when they pay too much attention. Last week, it was a national fit of pique over the musings of an obscure columnist for a far-right magazine. "Wimps!" is the banner emblazoned across a photo of Mounties on the cover of the National Review. In his article, Jonah Goldberg takes Canadians to task for their reflexive anti-Americanism: "the massive spine-bending chip" we have on our shoulders when it comes to our cousins to the south. By the end of the week, he had already received more than 700 angry e-mail messages from Canadians complaining about a piece that most of them can't possibly have read — the story isn't available on the Net, and apart from the editorial board of the National Post, few people in this country actually subscribe to the magazine. Sort of proves his point, doesn't it?

Goldberg's piece is filled with cheap shots ("a northern Puerto Rico with an EU sensibility") and errors — he gets, of all things, the name of the Canadian Alliance wrong — but wipe away the flecks of spittle and there are some legitimate points. The air of moral superiority that Canadians like to cloak themselves in — especially when it comes to criticizing U.S. policy — is getting harder and harder to justify, he argues. "Canada is a country that wills ends, but isn't willing to commit the means to create those ends," Goldberg told Maclean's. We now rank near the bottom of G8 and NATO nations when it comes to defence spending, and spend next to nothing on foreign aid, he points out. "You can't talk about how you want to make the world a safer place, then sit on your hands."

But it's the things Goldberg and other observers are saying about the eroding basis for our nationalism that should really give us pause for thought. "You define Canadian culture as Mounties, health care and a beer commercial — that's not what a serious, normal country does," he says. "Face it. Canadians are extremely similar to Americans. Your anger is so heightened, because the differences are so small."

The National Review calls us wimps It has always been easy for the rest of the world to write us off as "kind of" Americans. We have common roots, most of us speak the same language, our popular cultures overlap. And in turn, it has always been relatively simple for us to point to the substantive distinctions between the two nations: cleaner streets, less violent crime, better access to health care, no capital punishment, more players in the NHL.

Over the last two decades, however, those once indelible lines have started to fade. Today, 85 per cent of Canadians still believe our quality of life is superior to that of our American neighbours, but take a long look around. Gunplay on the streets of our major cities is no longer a rarity. Homelessness is a national crisis. Food banks are a permanent fixture in communities across the country. Free trade has made the border (at least for goods) practically a thing of the past. Eatons and Front Page Challenge have been replaced by the Gap and American Idol. Our foreign policies are almost indistinguishable. Culturally, commercially, politically, Canada and the United States are closer than ever. And if we're going to persist in branding ourselves in opposition to the Yanks, we'd better be careful that truth-in-advertising laws don't force us to start using the label "America Lite."

Quote:

University of Toronto political scientist Stephen Clarkson says the type of nationalism that flourished in Canada in the 1960s and '70s is all but dead. "The issues are pretty much the same, but the debate is non-existent." Economically, Canadians seemed to have surrendered once free trade became a reality. Culturally, the success of our musicians, actors and novelists, both nationally and internationally, seems to have soothed our fears of assimilation. "There's no crisis to respond to," Clarkson says. In his latest book, Uncle Sam and Us, he writes that the question isn't whether Canada will survive — no politician in America wants to upset the apple cart by adding millions of socialized-medicine-loving, gun-hating northerners to the mix — but what type of country will we become? Canada has already proven that it can fill a positive role in the new globalized order by playing midwife to efforts to forgive Third World debt and ban land mines, he says. Now Canadians have to decide if that's the type of country they still favour.
But frankly, it's not an issue that is consuming us. Matthew Mendelsohn, the director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archives at Queen's University, says the trends in public thought are so contradictory that it's sometimes hard to tell whether we're sophisticated or naive. "It's like we believe we can have our cake and eat it too," he says. "That we can be closer to the U.S. on issues of defence and security, have closer economic ties, but that we can still symbolically object to American policy around the world and maintain a distinct societal organization."
Canadians, especially young Canadians, are voting less, and fewer and fewer of us belong to a political party. Our patriotism is real, says Mendelsohn, but it hasn't yet translated into an economic platform or a political agenda. And in the absence of elected leaders who are presenting a vision that the public is willing to buy into, we find our national sustenance in the frothy, feel-good symbolism that Don Cherry and Molson hawk. "We have become a people who, without a trace of irony, love to yell about how modest they are," says Mendelsohn. Screaming our virtues from the rooftops? Strange, but that sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing we used to object so strongly to about Americans. And if that's the case, maybe it's time to start hating ourselves.

In other words, they've become northern noodges.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.