What's Canadian?
- It's big cold empty country. When there are trees, the
trees go on for a thousand miles. Where there are prairies,
the prairies go on for a thousand miles. It can be thirty
below in Winnipeg through much of December, all of January
and February, and part of March--and the wind blows from
the north the whole time. But: Canada is primarily an urban
country, out of contact with those vast landscapes. By far
the vast majority of Canadians live together in cities,
huddled together in tightly packed places dropped down in
the middle of the vast empty landscapes, trying to keep
warm together. Northrop Frye talks about Canadians as possessed
of a "garrison mentality": we are so frightened
by the oppressive vastness and threatening dangerousness
of our natural landscape that we build walls against it,
and hide behind the walls, in fortified garrisons of the
mind. We see the natural world as something that's out to
get us. Americans look at a big empty space and say, "Hey,
great, let's get busy and conquer it and turn it into a
city." Canadians look at a big empty space and say
"I'm frightened, so let's get together and build a
wall and hide ourselves from the big ugly natural world
before it gets us and does us in."
- As a variation on this, Margaret Atwood once developed
a theory of Canadians as, basically and eternally, victims.
The world is cold and big and bleak and out to get us, and
we are little and weak. We internalize this, Atwood suggests,
and believe that everyone and everything is out to get us.
We see ourselves as victims, little people in the control
of vast forces. We tend to be depressed about it all, and
unconvinced of our general ability to control anything or
anyone. We never get to the last of the victim stages Atwood
outlines: to refuse to become victims, and become creative
non-victims.
- Politically and economically, we don't actually in fact
control all that much of anything (I speak here as a good
Canadian victim). Almost all Canadian business is owned
by people outside the country, non-Canadians--most of them
Americans or American-based multi-national corporations.
We sit, a tiny nation of about thirty million, perched over
the top of a huge nation of three hundred million, slowly
being engulfed. We speak proudly of the world's longest
undefended border, but we know in our hearts it's not defended
because it couldn't possibly be--if the Americans wanted
just to take over completely, they could do it in about
an hour and a half (and we believe they wouldn't ever want
to anyway--see below, re losers and the lack of desirability
of Canada as a country to live in or be from). We are totally
dominated and overwhelmed by the USA. We wear the same clothes
as Americans, and eat the same food, purchased in the same
fast food franchises, and we read the same magazines and
we watch the same TV shows at the same time as Americans
watch them (but with ads for specifically Canadian Burger
Kings replacing the American ads, so that we know we're
really at home). Canadian bookstores are filled with thousands
of American books, published in the USA and imported without
duties, and a very few higher-priced Canadian ones--higher
prices because of the small print runs that eventuate from
the fact that most Canadians would rather read American
books. I suspect all this is why John Gough, viewing us
from the distance of Australia, can't tell the difference
between Canadians and Americans--we often have the same
trouble ourselves, worry about it a lot, and insist to the
point of shrillness that we are NOT American. As a result,
a good definition of Canadians is exactly that: "NOT
American." We know we are NOT American, for sure--we're
just not exactly sure how, but we know it will turn out
to be something very important if we can just figure out
what it is. And that's a defining quality of the way we
talk about ourselves-we try to establish ways in which we
are NOT American, or we just proclaim that we are NOT American
as we eat our Big Macs and watch our Disney movies. We insist
on a difference we can't define--and this of course makes
us very different from Americans, who don't have to worry
about any of this at all, and who know absolutely that Canadians
are exactly like them.
- One of the ways we are NOT American is that we are a people
who act like Americans but who are in fact outside the borders
of America. We tend to be critical about or to claim distance
from the American lifestyle we more or less share--we are
somehow outsiders on the inside of American values--able
to criticize the lifestyle because we know it so well from
lived experience but also know we are distant from what
we live, that it represents someone else's values we have
somehow acceded to but are not willing to accept as our
own. This makes us peculiarly objective about the life we
live and share with Americans. Our great writers tend to
be critics like Northrop Frye and satirists like Margaret
Atwood. Our major import to the US seems to be satirical
sketch comics and satirical stand-up comics--and books written
for children. We're especially good at writing for children,
I think, because we have the same outsider-on-the-inside
relationship to mainstream American values as many children
and especially teenagers have to the values of their more
powerful elders. Canadian can write well about children
because Canadians of all ages tend to think as rebellious
children in relation to Americans.
- A little question of history. Mordecai Richler (a Canadian
satirical novelist and satirical children's novelist) once
suggested that what defines Canadians is the fact that we're
all, quite literally, losers--and we've never gotten over
the fact. Nobody actually actively chose to live here because
they really liked the idea. The natives, who were always
here, didn't choose to have the European-dominated country
of Canada imposed on top of them--but they lost battles,
and so became Canadians. Losers. The French in Quebec are
Canadians because the British defeated them back in the
eighteenth century (and they sure don't like that fact these
days). Losers, right? The British-based population of Canada
consists of two major groups: United Empire Loyalists, the
people in the American colonies who sided with Britain in
the war of independence and lost, and so had to flee to
Ontario and the Maritimes; and immigrants from England,
most obviously people who were doing poorly there, losers
at the game of life who decided to set out and try again
somewhere else. Losers all again. Throughout this century,
people who have immigrated to Canada have tended to be people
who have lost elsewhere--lost wars, lost land, etc. Losers
yet again. My own ancestors came here because of pogroms
in Eastern Europe that destroyed their homes--and would
have preferred to go to the US but they couldn't get in,
so they settled for Canada, poor losers. We Canadians aren't
patriotic because we really only settle for being here,
all of us, rather than being delighted by it--and we love
to whine about it. Losers for sure, eh?
- But it's not all bad. Since we think of ourselves as losers
and victims, we tend to be relatively unaggressive and self-involved,
and relatively civil towards others. We are a communal people,
far more than we are a collection of independent individuals.
We tend to be social democrats in our politics rather than
republicans. We don't like people carrying guns around.
We tend to be nice and thoughtful and sensitive to the needs
of others, because we know what it's like to be a victim.