True Patriot Love

32 short thoughts about a country I love

Canada voted yesterday, and for the first time in a very long time the dominant theme of the election was Canadian nationalism—which is burgeoning despite the fact that the very idea of Canadian nationalism is more than a little quixotic. After all, the country doesn’t even have a day to celebrate its independence; Canada Day is the day that Britain reorganized its North American colonies into a single Dominion.

“Nationalism” is, in many ways, antithetical to Canada’s very structure. It’s one of the most decentralized countries in the world, with vast powers reserved to the provincial level, to the degree that until Trump went on his tariff rampage its inter-provincial trade barriers were often higher than the barriers to trade with the United States. Culturally as well, Canada’s national identity is bound up with not having a national identity. Its second-largest province—Quebec—is officially a distinct society, with its own immigration policy and language laws that actively discriminate against the country’s linguistic majority. In the 21st century, though, Anglo Canada went further, actively embracing a broad multiculturalism rooted in mass immigration, in the wake of which “bi-nationalism” may be an obsolete descriptor of the country’s status quo.

Canada is vast, but mostly empty, and while that’s far from unheard of (Russia is mostly empty, Australia is mostly empty, Egypt is mostly empty), there are not many other countries whose population clusters so close to the border that they look like a suburb of their neighbor. If you look at a map of North American population density, you can barely tell that Canada exists as a country distinct from the United States at all:

That map is courtesy of Adam Tooze, whose recent post does an excellent job of detailing all the ways in which Canada is kind of a questionable proposition economically-speaking. When President Trump says that Canada “doesn’t make sense” as a country, he’s saying something that I suspect a lot of Americans believe, and Canadians fear, even if they wouldn’t be so rude or so hopeless as to say it.

But nationalism isn’t about making sense; it’s about defiance. German nationalism first emerged as a reaction to Napoleon’s invasion. Polish nationalism arose after Prussia, Russian and Austria dismembered the country entirely. Irish nationalism burgeoned after the island had been depopulated by famine and emigration and the British Empire was at its height of power and prestige. Jewish nationalism aimed to restore nationality to a people that had been scattered from its ancestral homeland for two thousand years.

So Canada may not make sense. Maybe that’s reason enough for it to defiantly continue to exist.

Spite isn’t enough to nurture a healthy feeling of national pride, though. Orwell distinguished between patriotism, which is a healthy love of one’s own, and nationalism, which is an ideology of competition, one that demands that you identify with a group and rank that group first (or, in the case of negative nationalism—such as anti-Americanism—identify against a group and rank it last). Nationalism fetishizes difference in a way that leads inevitably to a demand for homogenization around that supposed difference, and thereby corrupts whatever was distinctively lovable about a people or place to begin with.

So in the spirit of appreciation, I thought I’d take the opportunity to list a few of the things I love about Canada—and that strike me as distinctively Canadian, that might not survive if Canada ceased to be its own thing.

Let’s start at the beginning:

1. They beat us in our first war.

2. Then they beat us a second time. Frankly, if we hadn’t kept invading them, Canada might have drifted into joining the United States long ago. There’s a lesson there that Americans seem singularly incapable of learning. Perhaps I’m glad Canada continues to exist as a separate country out of the naive hope that we might yet learn it.

3. Maybe we never learn the lesson because you never hear Canadians brag about it. Go to Mexico City, and you can see the monument to the heroes of the Mexican-American War, a war in which the United States was the aggressor and which Mexico lost. That defeat was a foundational event in Mexican history. Canada’s early identity, similarly, was forged by wars with the United States, wars in which we were the aggressor. Canada recognizes those events, and honors its heroes and its fallen. But there’s virtually no chauvinism involved in the way they are remembered.

4. Nor do you hear much bragging about their involvement in World War II, which Canada entered voluntarily at a time when it was not at all clear that the United States would ever enter or that the war could be won. Canada made an outsized contribution to the war for a country of its small size and remoteness from the center of conflict. Yet for all I can tell, national mythologizing on the subject is almost nugatory. That’s really extraordinary when you stop to think about it.

5. They still wear poppies on Remembrance Day, though. By some estimates, a majority of the country does. Americans have pretty much given that up. Of course, you might say the poppies are a Commonwealth thing, but they did originate with a Canadian poem, and in Canada they’ve always felt distinctively Canadian.

6. Canadian-ness is in a way all about that double-distinction. English is the lingua franca of our era, but the language is bound up with the dual legacies of the British Empire and the American Century, two enormous and conflicting cultural forces pressing down on the the entire English-speaking world, and therefore on the entire world. Canada is founded on an ambivalent relationship to both. I feel like that’s an inherently valuable fact.

7. I see that fact play out in the place that my wife and I make annual pilgrimage to, the Stratford Festival. Yes, I know: it’s the ultimate stogy old institution. So what? It’s the largest repertory theater in North America, and it has done more than probably any other single institution on this continent to keep the art of verse acting alive. And, precisely because it is Canadian, it can be classical without associating that classicism with a political project of any note. It can actually be a language theater before being a national theater or an ideological theater. (Not that it always has done so—but it can!)

8. And if it weren’t for Stratford, we wouldn’t have Slings and Arrows.

9. Speaking of which, it’s thanks to Slings and Arrows that I’m aware of the unique talent of Don McKellar, in particular his bonkers Odd Couple-meets-Twilight Zone series, Twitch City.

10. Canada can also be credited with an outsized influence on American comedy. That’s partly just a reflection of the relative size of the American and Canadian markets; great Canadian talent tends to move south, while great American talent tends to stay put. But I don’t think it’s just that. There’s something about the oblique perspective that is foundational to humor. Remove Black, Jewish and Canadian comedians from the lists, and how much would be left?

11. Unlike most Black and many Jewish comedians, White Canadians generally can pass. Not Norm Macdonald, who was both one of the greatest of all time and off-kilter in a way that was inimitably Canadian without ever being kitsch.

12. Not that there’s anything wrong with Canadian kitsch. The Red Green Show is brilliant.

13. Ah heck, kitsch doesn’t have to be brilliant. Men With Brooms isn’t. It’s product, but recognizably made by product-oriented humans from a particular place, not an A.I. from nowhere.

14. And sometimes, you go through kitsch and come out the other side into a whole other kind of sincerity. What other country could make a heartwarming musical about 9-11?

15. What about Canadian writers whom it is particularly hard to imagine existing if there were no Canada? They aren’t hard to find. Take Alice Munro, for example, who is as rooted in Huron County as William Faulkner was in Yoknapatawpha.

16. Ditto for Robertson Davies and his fictional Salterton and Deptford.

17. Without Mordechai Richler, we’d never know what American Jewish literary genius would look like if it weren’t American.

18. Ditto for Leonard Cohen.

19. I’ve moved without even noticing it from Anglo Canada to Quebec, home of the continent’s only walled city north of Mexico, a nation within a nation, conquered yet never assimilated. America’s equivalent experience is with the Confederacy; it’s said that if you imagine Canada without Quebec and America without the Old South, the remains of the two countries would be culturally and politically almost identical. The South’s claims to distinction and difference are so bound up with race and the legacy of slavery, though, that certain kinds of arguments simply can’t be debated in an American context without those issues rearing their heads. So I think there’s great value to Canada as a different example of how to accommodate difference.

20. I’m not nearly as well-versed in the French literature of Canada, but Michel Tremblay seems like reason enough to preserve a distinct society.

21. Ditto for Jesus of Montreal, a truly great film that would never have come into being either in America or France, only in Quebec.

22. And what about the city of Montreal itself? Tennessee Williams famously said that there were only three real cities in America: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everything else, he said, is Cleveland. Given that track record, and the declining “reality” of all three of America’s certified “real” cities I’m glad that another undeniably “real” city is still out of our clutches.

23. Of course, Cleveland is in fact a real place. So is Toronto; so is Vancouver. It’s kind of funny, though, how in this century the latter two cities have, thanks in part to tax breaks and the Canadian dollar, stood in for much of America in film and television. Does that mean they aren’t real, and so can stand in for anywhere? Or does it mean America isn’t real, and anywhere can stand in for us? Is Canada making itself more American in order to play us on TV? Or are we becoming more Canadian so we can match what we see there?

24. Speaking of a sense of place: whenever people talk about Canada, they talk about the landscape, and for good reason. I’m not sure I can make a coherent argument that Canada needs to remain a separate country because of Tofino or Jasper National Park or the Bay of Fundy. It’s not like America doesn’t have plenty of beautiful scenery, and it’s not like Canada has kept all its natural wonders pristine. (Have you been to Niagara Falls recently?) But at this particular moment in time, I feel quite glad that quite a bit of natural beauty on this continent isn’t in American hands.

25. A profound sense of place married to an equally profound sense of unreality is central to the aesthetic of Guy Maddin. He’s known as the Canadian David Lynch, but his sensibility is quite different and, to my mind, indelibly Canadian.

26. That goes in spades for Matthew Rankin, prairie absurdist to Maddin’s prairie surrealist. Name me another country that would produce this wonderful movie:

    There’s something quintessentially Canadian about the very idea of imagining one’s country’s transformation in this way, becoming fused with an entirely different place and culture and even language, and yet still remaining in some sense itself, because there is something about it that is universal.

27. Mass immigration is the unspoken background to Rankin’s film. In this century, Canada has conducted an even more dramatic experiment with immigration than the United States has—though, in true Canadian fashion, a far more orderly one. As of the last Canadian census, nearly a quarter of Canadians were foreign-born, and the percentage has undoubtedly risen since then. I don’t think all the cultural and political choices Canada has made to accommodate that influx have been wise, nor do I think it has adequately reckoned with the interaction of mass immigration with the country’s seemingly endless housing bubble to produce a record low fertility rate. The Conservatives’ populist turn didn’t come out of nowhere. But I have a strange confidence that Canadian cosmopolitanism is both strong and deep-rooted, and so I’m cautiously optimistic that the pressure of a threat from America might be precisely what helps Canada move on from self-flagellation and denial to practical consensus-building, and forge something like an enduring cosmopolitan patriotism. That would be a most welcome development in our populist age.

28. I have mixed feelings about Canadian political institutions. I’m inclined to appreciate their weak Senate and their strong provincial governments, as well as the fact that their head of government is a prime minister accountable to parliament rather than a president accountable to nobody. I am less enamored of their overweening Supreme Court, and the country’s comfort with authoritarian liberalism—which, to be fair, is not so advanced as it is in Europe. (Canada does seem to me to have struck a more sensible balance on firearms ownership than either fanatically restrictive Britain or the gun-crazy United States.) But regardless of the details, I’m glad Canada has a different political system than we do if only because it could (if we ever paid attention to it) demonstrate to Americans the possibility of doing things differently.

29. My wife won’t let me end this list without mentioning Canadian cuisine: poutine and butter tarts and Nanaimo bars and Montreal smoked meat and so forth. I would say that this stuff would likely survive assimilation into the American Borg—hey, Tim Hortons has crossed the border already, and there’s a Montreal-style deli right here in Brooklyn. But American regional cuisines have become quite successfully commodified even as they die out in the wild. Let’s not take the risk with Saskatoon pie.

30. In fact, let’s not take that risk with anything. You know, I’ve been focusing on what makes Canada distinctive, but America’s own distinctive predilection for absorption depends on other countries, other cultures having something distinctive to export. I noted earlier that Canada’s outsized influence on American comedy was partly due to the sheer scale of the American market and partly due to how an inside/outside perspective is good for comedy. But that’s not the whole story either. Why, among the handful of top-ranked directors of global blockbuster films who are genuine auteurs in the sense of making films that are distinctively their own and not dominated by corporate interests, do we find two Canadians (James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve), one Britisher of Irish and American ancestry (Christopher Nolan), and one New Zealander (Peter Jackson)? America may be the global imperial center (for now, anyway), but we need the periphery. Which means we need the periphery to be the periphery, not be absorbed into the center.

31. There’s a longstanding cliché that the most boring headline imaginable is “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” And Canada’s election could reasonably be described as a victory for boring centrism. But this was no boring victory. Only months ago it looked like the long-ruling Liberal Party would be nearly wiped out, with populist-inflected Conservatives firmly seizing the reins of power. Thanks in large part to Trump, the Liberals under Mark Carney have retained control of the government, and the Conservative leader was not only defeated but lost his seat in Parliament. With right-wing populism on the rise across the globe, Canada has given at least a modest mandate to a leader charting a different course, one who has already seen the need not only to resist but to change. And yet . . . these momentous events next door aren’t even the top story this morning in The New York Times.
    
    For some reason, that’s another reason I’m glad Canada is there.

32. Glenn Gould. Just for the sake of the allusion in the subhed. And for the humming, an only-in-Canada eccentricity if I ever saw one.