2. Portrait of a Shadowland

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There is a phenomenon, not uniquely Canadian per se, but Canadian enough to warrant examination here. Some may dismiss it as a manifestation of the rampant materialism prevalent in all latter-day Western societies, or instead as a mere curiosity or triviality. Yet, in its own way, it serves to illustrate the great influence brought to bear upon human behaviour by the abstract concept of the nation-state.

It is cross-border shopping, a spectacle that can be witnessed at all times of the year but which clearly peaks in the summer, and which is largely impervious to the prevailing state of the Canadian economy. It occurs when the Canadian dollar is weak; when the so-nicknamed “Loonie” dollar increases in value against the U.S. “greenback” Canadian shopping in America rockets to extraordinary levels. At such times enormous traffic jams to enter the U.S. can develop at the busier ports of entry. The large savings available on the U.S. side – approaching 50% at times – are great enough for Canadian bargain-hunters to queue patiently in their cars for up to two hours before they finally make it to the U.S. customs and immigration checkpoint. Some may be refused entry if they are deemed to be committing the unwritten offense of crossing into America too frequently. Suspicious looking entrants will be searched, or perhaps also barred from proceeding. But the vast majority are let through to make the short onward trip to their nearest shopping mecca: a vast American mall typically in Buffalo, Detroit or in the suburbs North of Seattle. And by the time they find parking spots and have climbed from their vehicles what a startling change has occurred! Hitherto respectable, mild-mannered, polite middle-class Canadians charge rasping and slobbering into the outlet-mall like people possessed. Inside, all of their innate Canadian restraints are crushed and erased by the great force of greed. They stuff, pack and gorge themselves to bursting point on American toys, televisions, laptops, cell phones, video games, watches, rings, suits, shirts, fuel, tyres, hockey sticks and goalie masts, trees and plants... anything that can be held or touched and physically transported North is on the menu for Canada’s hungry consumers. Hungry? Starving makes for a rather neat metaphor: Canadians living in the immediate vicinity of the border will often do their grocery shopping in America. Others, with longer homeward journeys to contemplate, will actually do bulk buying of milk, meat, bread and other produce.

The bulk purchase of basic foodstuffs, combined with the element of shopping frenzy I have mentioned, can at times make for a deeply unedifying spectacle. Let it be stressed before going any further that milk is generally available in Canada. It may be a few cents more expensive per litre, but you may take it on excellent authority that it does in fact exist. I say this in advance of remarking on one particular case of Canadian food frenzy that was actually filmed by an astonished American shopper in a wholesale facility just across the border from Vancouver. A double-decked pallet of fresh two-pint milk cartons was laid out on the shop floor by staff members. No sooner had this poor pallet touched the floor-tiles when seemingly out of nowhere a mob of ravenous Canadian tourists leapt onto its hump like young lions onto a stray baby elephant. So sudden and dramatic was their assault that they gave the impression they’d been squatting crouched up on higher shelves for hours on end, waiting for some food to pass them by. You could almost hear the poor milk cartons screaming their last as they were torn from the body of the pile in an all-out orgy of hunger and hate. Dust scattered and covered the air in a howling melee of feet, legs, tails, cardboard, claws, grunts, pallet and squeals. The carcass was dismembered into oblivion in under sixty seconds. Carrying as many chunks of milk-flesh as they could manage the Canadian pride then galloped off in unison, whooping and snarling as they scanned for yet more prey. American bystanders stood shell shocked and bemused around the scene of devastation, surveying the scattered hair and bones as a lone Canadian vulture circled in vain hopes of a morsel. One American man shook his head in disbelief. He had come to his local mall to buy some milk, as benign and mundane a human action as you could possibly imagine. Instead he had ended up in the middle of a safari war zone – a scene more befitting a United Nations food handout in Somalia than a safe suburban food outlet bordering a supposedly prosperous nation. Canada, he must have surmised as he wandered off in a daze, must in actuality be such a poor, starving, desperate third-world country![i]

The wider behaviours displayed in this and similar episodes are interesting. They demonstrate two things: first, as mentioned, the extent to which people are governed rigidly in personality and outlook by the type of society in which they exist – in other words, their susceptibility to the conformist pressures generated within and by their community; and secondly the extraordinary power of materialism as a driving emotional force, and moreover the frequent irrationality of this instinctual greed (the cost of travelling to and from the U.S. will often eliminate any savings made). The latter is a comment on human nature in general and thus is beyond the scope of this work. But to examine the first, let us imagine that the aforementioned milk had been laid out at a Canadian store only a few minutes’ drive to the North. Having spent many years in Canada I can state with absolute certainty that in such a scenario not one Canadian in the vicinity, not one of the same people behind the melee I’ve alluded to would have dreamt of behaving in the manner described. However great their desire for cheaply available produce, something akin to an orderly queue would have formed with individual Canadian shoppers standing respectfully back while others – who had reached the pallet first – picked no more than two cartons from the mound. A customer who secretly desired a helping of three of four cartons would refuse to assuage this need on the spot out of the simple fear of embarrassment. If necessary he would stop at another location on the way home to purchase the extra litres he needed. Canadian social decorum – littered, as we shall see, with warts, lies and hypocrisy – nonetheless exerts a powerful hold over the Anglo populace and the ethnic groups assimilated therein, and in many social situations its impact is positive and civilized. Its main weapon is indeed the humiliation of embarrassment: potent enough to deter ill-mannered behaviour even in situations where one is surrounded by people who in all likelihood will never be encountered again (logically speaking it is of course irrational to feel embarrassed in front of strangers). Yet the instant we transport these same Canadian consumers to an identical place, under identical circumstances in an identical country across an artificial human boundary, their social mores and standards are vanquished as though by light-switch. In seeking to explain this phenomenon further we stray, I suspect, deep into the waters of psychology as an academic discipline, requiring a level of expertise this author does not possess. What is clear is that here we have a startling illustration of the nation-state’s leviathan power as a concept, the manner in which the nation – “my country” – will inform, dominate and control people’s mindset, worldview and even physically-expressed behaviour. Even where the nation has no ethnic, religious or other tribal basis (as is the case with modern Canada) it persists in exerting its enormous influence, sometimes for good but more often perniciously, and almost always beyond the consciousness and comprehension of its individual human subjects.

Accepting the idea that a nation has a purpose, because any human construct must by definition have a purpose, we find it is easy, as we examine the globe, to discover an underlying justification for the existence of most of the nations on Earth. The three pillars of ethnicity, language and religion – and often a combination of some or all of the three – explain most of the managed, patrolled boundaries (in other words, the national borders) that exist and have existed throughout history. In other cases such lines of human demarcation have been provided by nature in the form of seas or mountain ranges. Where frontiers have been drawn in the absence of such rationales – or much worse in actual defiance of them, perpetual instability and periodic bloodbaths have ensued. The map of sub-Saharan Africa, configured almost entirely by the gentleman ignoramuses of Britain and France, provides in abundance the most tragic exhibits of artificially manufactured statehood. The East of Europe illuminates similar follies. Czechoslovakia was benignly created at the end of the Great War to accommodate, among others, both the Czech and Slovak ethno-linguistic groups. It would eventually experience, in the late twentieth century, a mercifully amicable divorce from the arranged marriage; a third group, the Sudeten Germans, had been savagely expelled from the young state in 1945-46. In the 1990s the internal picket-fences of Yugoslavia became, almost overnight, national perimeters within which ethnic and religious groups found themselves split and divided, living as minority or co-dominant groups in new territories, residing alongside historical enemies with whom the Yugoslav entity (or perhaps just Marshal Tito) had been the only unifying force. Unsurprisingly – and in fact quite logically – unimaginable horrors began to rage.

In the stable and prosperous West, settled and by now comfortably decadent, you will find in various places a third category of nation-causation to go alongside tribal imperative or topographical mandate: and that is plain anomalous. Viewed objectively, and the development of the European Union notwithstanding, there is absolutely no reason why the modern post-war republic of Austria should in fact have formed something other than a German Land (State), alongside Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and the rest. There is nothing ethnically or even culturally to distinguish the two countries. The linguistic differences, the variations of the German language, are no more marked than the regional variations seen within Germany itself. The two nations have shared no modern antagonisms and, on the contrary, fought alongside each other in the First World War, albeit Austria within the framework of a larger and more diverse empire. Infamously, the country offered little resistance to unity with Nazi Germany, indeed large numbers of Austrians actively supported the Anschluss which brought it about. Why do we have two separate nations? Understand that I expressly exclude “historical reasons” or “accident of history” as explanations. They can undoubtedly explain the effect – the separation – but hardly serve to justify its continued enforcement. (Indeed if history is one of the excuses humans use to fence themselves off into separate, rival national entities – countries – then therein lies a strong argument for teaching of this discipline in schools to cease forthwith). Over many months living in Vienna I would challenge my hosts to differentiate their country from its large cousin to the North. The answers I received, invariably after several minutes of furrow-browed concentration, ranged from “Opera” (the mere existence of it) to the relative greatness of Austrian beer; or more often the imagined facts of the Austrian people being somehow friendlier, having a stronger sense of humour and a better work-life balance than their German counterparts. These latter observations struck me sharply as being the reverse of the truth: among the many people I met and worked alongside in Vienna, the most laid-back and gregarious were invariably German expatriates.

Nonetheless this type of national distinction, or attempted national distinction – that based on slight to minute behavioural differences – seems to be the primary means whereby the people of peripheral, accidental nations seek to define themselves. In very young countries with their near total lack of cultural identity or sense of historical grounding, this symptom is greatly exacerbated. Among the New World’s questionable borders the foremost adheres in large part to the line of latitude running at forty nine degrees north of the equator – the 49^th parallel separating Western Canada from the Western United States. Further to the East this border obeys the strictures of the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence river; then briefly the 45^th parallel before tumbling along various ridges and mountain ranges over to the Atlantic coast. Most of the border between Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory is delineated by the 121st West meridian. These utterly arbitrary lines combine to form the longest border between any two nations in the World at roughly 5,500 miles or 8,900 kilometres in length. Further emphasizing that slight behavioural differences can make a border in the minds of men, the existence of this barrier is in large part justified for English-speaking Canadians by the perceived existence, on their side of the fence, of a set of social norms which they have lumped together under the general heading of “politeness”. The word should not be considered narrowly in this context: Canadians imply through their use of the term “politeness” a set of behavioural norms extending far beyond the mere pleases and thank-yous of low-level social interaction. They suggest, quite openly and in an unusually strange Canadian way quite brazenly, a society rendered distinct from America through the cushions of a gentleness, a civility, a kindness and a decency which the lesser mortals to the uncouth South could never hope to match. Directly implied in turn are a greater prevalence of thoughtfulness and, by extension, superiority of average intelligence. The platform of politeness – Canadian civility – ranks highly among the many tools Canadians employ in their unending struggle to justify the separation of their country from the American behemoth. Yet as soon as you arrive in any of Canada’s major centres, as soon as you alight and begin to explore the towns and the streets and the parks and the blocks, it does not take long for a certain insincerity to become apparent.

It certainly did not take long in Toronto, Ontario, my first Canadian city. In the financial district at the heart of downtown, a few months into my new immigrant life, I glanced seven floors down from my office vantage point to see a suited man collapsed on the street below. He lay there, shaking violently on the ground as his civilised compatriots marched coldly on by. A police officer was approaching the scene from across the street, mumbling into his radio and walking towards the victim in the most slovenly and reluctant manner I have ever seen. That a human being, a fellow creature, was in the midst of a serious medical emergency clearly made for the most dreadful imposition on the officer’s valuable idle time and closed, selfish comfort. A female passer-by, also in office attire, looked briefly down on the prostrate man and shook her head in disgust – she, at least, was one of the few people in the locality to actually grace the unfortunate victim with an acknowledging glance. Everyone else marched on past, facial expressions neutral and eyes focused rigidly ahead as though passing through a customs checkpoint with a bag full of contraband. The officer finally reached the patient and stood over him, feet apart, grunting more instructions into his lapel and looking around with an expression of the most abject distaste and disgruntlement. For all the world his demeanour was that of a man whose hitherto well trained dog had just deposited something disgusting onto the carpet. He remained in that position, and his face in that state, for the three or four minutes that it took for the paramedics to arrive. He made no effort, in the meantime, to comfort or in any way communicate with the prone office worker.

Though I couldn’t have appreciated it at the time, I can say looking back that the whole ghastly scene epitomised the severely disjointed nature of Toronto, the forward-trench vanguard of Canadian society, disjointed to the point where in many respects it fails to function as a cohesive unit at all. This is perhaps most in evidence in the realisation of Canada’s multi-cultural ideal that the city likes to flaunt to the outside world. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the Federal Government adopted (as a new means of forging an excuse for Canada) something called a “cultural mosaic” to distinguish the nation from the “melting pot” of American fame. This amounted to a stringently orthodox brand of multiculturalism, whereby immigrant groups from non-European backgrounds would be actively encouraged to maintain and propagate their separate, non-Western cultural identities. Canada would thus form a “mosaic” of separate peoples, a sort of permanently tranquil United Nations in microcosm, the tongue-hanging envy of a deprived outside world. Such a vision, the thinking went, would run in sharp contrast to America’s comparatively “forced” assimilation of newcomers into the United States. It would appear inherently ludicrous in its attempt to build a cohesive Canadian identity by encouraging new arrivals to be anything except Canadian, and while the ability of government to actually implement such a dream as policy was and is self-evidently limited, the metaphor of the cultural mosaic nonetheless serves to reflect and amplify the essential anonymity of Canadian society. After all, what is a mosaic if it is not a more or less random collection of patterns, colours and shades that while in concert may form a superficially pretty image, in day-to-day reality have little or nothing to do with each other?

As you walk the streets of downtown Toronto you in fact do see the ethnicities mix within the prevailing milieu of polite, cold banality. Not so obvious is the extent to which they are segregated in their suburban dormitories. Markham, to Toronto’s North-East, is predominantly Han Chinese. Ethnic minorities in total account for over 70% of its population. In Brampton, to Toronto’s North West, visible ethnic minorities account for two-thirds of the population; yet the suburb of Halton Hills to Brampton’s immediate West is well over 90% white. Oakville to the South (and to Toronto’s West) weighs in at over 80% white; Burlington’s population is over 90% of European-origin.[ii] Everyone, it would seem, knows their place; racial minorities are clustered in very specific corners of the cultural mosaic and dare not trespass into others. It is a demographic situation which serves to illuminate the essentially purposeless nature of the Canadian community. In this country of blue-ribbon standard political correctness a voluntary Apartheid such as this should of course be unthinkable, but then while Canadians will pay occasional lip service to nation-building visions, rarely if ever do they intend to actively pursue them. What must be diagnosed – and it took several years living in Toronto for me to fully appreciate this point – is that in considering any form of diversity, be it diversity of race or culture or religion, of socio-economic status; diversity of opinion as we shall discuss at length, of fashion; even of hobby or spare-time pursuit it is not that Canadians are tolerant, it is much more that they tolerate – a none too subtle distinction the great significance of which is utterly lost on them. To be tolerant is to be generous and open-minded; to merely tolerate is backward, repressed and weakly dishonest. I emphasize that the polite segregation of the major suburbs merely reflects and certainly does not cause the underlying phenomenon which is that of Canadian anonymity – perhaps better described as the Canadian personal exclusivity: the closed, private, cliquish, selfish nature of the place.

Nowhere is this more exemplified than in what is the nation’s greatest city in terms of population and economic output. Toronto’s wealth is given expression in its skyline, by any standards a tremendous sight when glimpsed from various key vantage points throughout the city – not least inbound on the Gardiner Expressway, or looking West over the empty Don Valley from Broadview Avenue, or most especially on a ferry trip in from the Toronto Islands on Lake Ontario back towards the downtown jetty. Somehow the towering skyscrapers of the nation’s financial capital are bestowed an aesthetic genius in concert they could never hope to attain in isolation. I will go further and, likely opening myself to accusations of wild exaggeration, will nonetheless suggest that under clear conditions and from the right location Toronto’s skyline must count as one of the great man-made sights of the contemporary World. A blue winter sky as a backdrop accentuates the beautiful Napoleon red of Scotia Bank’s tower and shining marble white of First Canadian Place. The distinctive tapered crowns of the BCE towers complete an exhilarating picture to shame the City of London and put Wall Street, architecturally if nothing else, in the shade. Immediately to the West of the financial district sits the curvaceous sweep of the Skydome Arena and finally, atop, the iconic CN Tower – for many years one of mankind’s tallest habitable structures and startling testament to an unflustered ambition and depth of imagination that lurk in the shadows of Canadian mediocrity, ready to blossom when the rare chance is given. It’s a skyline that doubles as its own metaphor for the nation: as you cruise further along the Gardiner and close in on the financial district, the hitherto stunning view gives way rapidly and smoothly to a more austere reality on the ground. A glass and concrete jungle of residential condominium after condominium after identikit, colourless, characterless glass-box condominium; they separate the financial district from the lakefront and are all telling monuments to the rabbit-eyed fear of individualism that in the final analysis does predominate Canadian architecture as it does any other field.

The foot of the banking towers is the heart of downtown, slightly to the North of this endless new condoland. It is not, alas, a beating heart. As you leave your car in one of the numerous underground lots and start your walking tour of Wellington St, then York St, King St, Adelaide and Richmond streets the breathtaking view of the skyline from afar, though enjoyed only a matter of ten minutes past, is banished to distant memory. You are wandering a clean, grey, shopless wilderness, sidestepping the clutches of homeless sleeping over the kerbside air-vents. Uninformed visitors may take some time to realise that the shops are actually beneath their feet in the PATH – the city’s sprawling underground walkway which in their most exalted moments Torontonians will actually call an “underground city”. In reality it is merely a series of tunnelled links between the basements of the office blocks, with food courts, clothes boutiques and newsagents decorating the walkways. Ostensibly constructed to shield white-collar workers from the winter weather (Toronto’s climate is one of the mildest in Canada), the PATH has the additional benefit of keeping the bustle and spirit of human commerce out of sight and out of mind – the way Torontonians prefer. As you wander the resultant concrete desert at street level it is not merely the dearth of commerce that gives you an uneasy feeling; nor is that the city’s much vaunted cleanliness turns out to be the forced white sterility of the dental surgery rather than the spirited effort of a vibrant community. It is that over time you begin to see these things as indicative of the atmosphere of listless, impersonal disinterest that hangs over the city. I recall that after some years living in Toronto I began to find myself genuinely pining for the sight of graffiti or an upturned garbage can on the premise that some form of character or expression is greatly superior to none. The push and thrust of true urban vibrancy is absent, to put it mildly; office workers walk with an energy-sapped Canadian anaemia, making great efforts to avoid eye contact with other pedestrians lest they be forced into acts of human warmth or, God forbid, kindness. Significantly this is a trait that pervades even the livelier areas of the city – chiefly Yorkville, Queen St. West, Dundas Square, Danforth Avenue and High Park. Even there in the fashionable bars and restaurants Canadians’ pathological fear of human interaction makes for a parochial, tightly closed atmosphere even amid the backdrop of sophisticated urbia. Endless clutches of cosseted, cozy little cliques, friends from high-school or the same outlying town, all closed to the outside world and – cuddling couples apart – barely conversant even among their own number. It makes for an unsettling and, in time, maddening dichotomy: in the end – you find yourself asking – what is the point of large scale human settlement in the absence of at least something approaching community and a shared identity? Economic activity and nothing else, presumably: Toronto as a purely functional concept, like a vast office of endless cubicles, or a oversized outdoor shopping mall.

The episode of the collapsed businessman served to crystallise some discomforting impressions I’d been gleaning ever since my arrival into the country a few weeks earlier; the gradually creeping realisation that some basic ingredient of warm humanity seemed to be deficient among so many of the locals I was dealing with. I had come quickly to learn, for instance, that what had passed for a standard and far from overbearing form of gregariousness – in other words, simple friendliness – in my home city of Dublin was not appreciated in Toronto. In cafes, at news-stands, in museums, restaurants or anywhere there was an orderly queue people balked and boggled at mild remarks on generalities such as the weather, the headlines on unused newspapers or the fortunes of local sports teams. On several occasions people instinctively reacted as though I were a potential attacker – tightening their arms close to their bodies and adopting the fight-or-flight facial expression of adrenaline fuelled fear. Explainable in the rough and tumble New York City of the 1980s, perhaps, but in ultra-safe Toronto with its negligible crime levels? Hotel staff, I noticed, would also struggle to repress this seemingly indigenous instinct for half a second before their customer-service training would kick-in to have them engage a guest in chatter, haltingly, rather like an unreliable car engine stuttering into motion. Employees of the municipal transportation system were positively gruff, regarding reasonable queries from a confused newcomer as some kind of personal affront – as an intellectual and physiological burden neither their job description nor trade union had ever prepared them for. At the first house-party I was invited to attend, I was bemused to see everyone standing around in cold little groups and making little to no attempt to mix and interact with strangers even as the alcohol flowed and bonhomie increased. An Englishman who had moved to the city some years earlier explained it to me thus:

“It’s not that the people here are unfriendly,” he mused, “it’s just that they want to respect your personal space, that’s all.”

As time wore on this struck me as a forgiving analysis to say the very least. This “personal space” was something being demanded rather than respected, a mentality the implications of which are precisely the opposite of those he suggested. In that office where I had secured my first Canadian job, my colleagues would closet themselves away in small, shared cubicles and go for weeks if not months on end without exchanging so much as a salutation with anyone outside of their immediate work-teams. This in the ostensibly dynamic, interactive, “fast-paced” environment of a firm in the cut-throat world of high-technology.

Eventually you come to see that very far removed from the thriving, striving anthills of London, New York or Tokyo is this archetypal Canadian city, which quite ludicrously imagines itself to sit among the world’s great metropolises. For all the undoubted failings of those other places there is nonetheless a sense of unity and purpose that is palpable as you walk their crowded streets; a distinct sense of people striving away in the name of some unstated common goal, of being busily and positively engaged in the general advancement of society and their economy. In Toronto this sensation, the exhilaration of massed human endeavour, is entirely absent. As you explore its impersonal, character-free streets the city and its inhabitants come across as akin to a vast archipelago of two million atolls, dots in the ocean unquestionably connected but still, somehow, stubbornly alone; made stubbornly alone by the great force of so-called Canadian reserve: human beings in wholehearted agreement to not give the slightest damn about each other.

A uncaring society would be one thing. Said society not having the decency to acknowledge its selfishness would be something else. But the mass of its people actually going to great lengths to deceive themselves about their collective scar – actually conjuring into existence an alternative reality which is the exact opposite of the truth must be the ultimate in galling hypocrisy. If Canadians wore their disdain for the well-being of others on their sleeves, the honesty of their position would be something to laud at least. Instead the patent amorality in plain view is greatly accentuated by the heavy veil constructed in vain attempt to disguise it. Canadians, so we are told, are “polite”. They usually say “please” and almost always say “thank you”. As a special treat they may hold open the door for you. They speak in a quiet, understated manner that exudes a certain type of colloquial formality. They almost never raise their voices, not even on the very rare occasions they’re angry, upset or exercised about something. In public places they act with commendable restraint even in pressured situations: on the mass transit systems of Canada’s major cities there is no pushing and shoving to board crowded rush-hour trains, for example. They do not need to be told to silence their cell phones in movie theatres or libraries. They’ll go to considerable lengths to avoid confrontation of any sort, employing an all-things-to-all-men brand of diplomacy which, for its frequently showcased spinelessness and moral cowardice does go a long way towards explaining the nation’s low levels of violent behaviour. Not for a moment do I doubt that those Torontonians walking past the man in distress possessed the most exquisite manners. Indeed at a certain level the way in which they were leaving him to his fate was actually quite civilised – since he was partially blocking the sidewalk they would walk in a gentle arc around him, neither missing a step nor altering their pace, nor betraying any outward sign of consternation at the situation before them. They were leaving him to die in agony, no doubt, but they were doing so in an ordered and highly respectable way. At least they were being polite about it – except that this, of course, is at the nub of the whole issue: Canadians’ idea of decorum as a substitute for decency. In the Anglo-Canadian community, politeness is a stand-in for virtue and good manners replace human kindness; at times even morality itself is imagined into existence by gentleness of tone and civility of poise. The point of the entire charade seems to be that in societal and behavioural terms the wallpaper is much more important the wall. That it certainly is not, and that the immense self-delusion Canadians undergo in this regard is itself the root cause of the widespread selfishness I describe, are thoughts that simply never occur to them.

Toronto’s essential froideur is not something that has gone unremarked upon by some of its more illustrious visitors. In his biography of Ernest Hemingway, who lived in the city from September 1923 to January 1924, Jeffrey Meyers notes the view of the city and its inhabitants provided by a well known English painter:

Wyndham Lewis, who was marooned in Toronto twenty years later, during World War Two, gave a brilliantly bitter description of the “sanctimonious icebox.” The city reminded Lewis of Archangel or Murmansk, had barren bookstores ... seemed to contain the “dumbest English-speaking population anywhere” and needed at least two million Jews to bring it to life. He particularly despised the asphyxiating godliness of the Presbyterians and Methodists who ... forced him to grovel “before the ugly teetotal Baal[1] set-up in these parts by the most parochial nationette on earth.”

Meyers adds

As he [Lewis] told a cosmopolitan friend: “If New York is brutal and Babylonian, in this place it is as if some one were sitting on your chest – having taken care to gag you first”[iii]

Hemingway himself deplored his Canadian experience, and raged bitterly against Toronto’s puritanism, prudishness, social piety and overwhelming intellectual stultification in a series of letters to his literary friends; “the fistulaed asshole of the father of seven among Nations” being perhaps his most memorable quote on the country.[iv] Such rhetorical blasts aside, Wyndham Lewis’ epitaph the “sanctimonious icebox” is sharply evocative for any outsider who has lived in Toronto for any significant period. Presbyterianism and Methodism are of course gone, swept aside by the baby boomers at some point in the mid 1960s. But the sanctimony remains, if anything more egregious than ever. The unpleasant fact is that Anglo-Canadians in general, and Torontonians in particular, are convinced beyond help that they are the international exemplars of human decency and virtue. Decency, as mentioned, has in and by Canadian society been substituted for by decorum; the cancer of so-called Canadian “politeness” has buried itself into the nation’s psyche so deeply that it has become an end in its own right, in the process completely usurping authentic kindness in behaviour and action. Politeness as a synonym for virtue, and since Canadian society is inherently polite, it follows in the subconscious collective mind that Canadian people must be inherently good. The result is a unique form of self-centered, understated obnoxiousness. How could it possibly not be? Once inherent goodness has been deemed achieved by any society, where is the need to continue to strive for it, or to propagate it down to the young? Why should a Torontonian show kindness to a stranger? Why should he or she help an elderly lady across the road, or visit a lonely neighbour, become involved in a local charity or come to the aid of someone in distress? To do so would be spurious, a wholly unnecessary addendum to the prevailing milieu of collective inborn wonderfulness. It would be spurious to the point of actually seeming quite strange: what is so disconcerting about Toronto society in particular is the extent to which such examples of generosity are actually seen by local people as baffling and even threatening. Now (to pursue one of my examples further) if you were to offer aid to an elderly pedestrian on the streets of London or New York or many other cities, your motives could be questioned on the grounds of illicit or criminal intent. The sheer volume and long-history of street crime in such places will quite naturally lead to degrees of defensiveness and wariness in initial responses to dealings with strangers. But what would be the explanation for such instinctive suspicion in Toronto, where common assault in public places is all but unheard of? The explanation is very simple: it is that in Canadian society overt expressions of decency are so rare as to trouble the very psyche of the populace, human beings having a deep-seated fear of that which is simply unknown. Where decency is imagined into existence, it is crushed and erased from reality.

The problem with attempting to construct a humane society on such a fraudulent foundation is that before long it must begin to fail even on its own terms. Soon the charade will start to show signs of a slow-motion collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy. Having created a pseudo-culture of which so-called politeness doubles as both the facade and the very substance, Canadians have inevitably arrived at a place where superficiality is predominant in the day to day interactions of community and the workplace. Canadians use nice manners because they feel that they have to, not because they really want to. The pleases, the thank yous, the if-you-don’t-minds and all the other platitudes of decorum are used so much and so constantly that they have long since ceased to have even a shred of authenticity; Canadian politeness has been devalued to the point of being an almost worthless currency. I recall for instance the immigration officer I dealt with the night of my first arrival into the country. She examined my paperwork – composed chiefly of the huge, A3-sized document that the residency visa was printed on in those days – typed some details into her computer before looking up at me and intoning:

“Welcome to Canada.”

Her face remained as blank and as cold as an unmarked gravestone. Her lips stayed thin, bloodless and closed; her eyes stony and lifeless. She had employed a classically bureaucratic, perfunctory tone completely devoid of warmth, emphasis or authenticity. I was caught completely off guard by the strange dichotomy between the kindness of her words and the almost inhuman sterility of her delivery. I was still pondering this disconnect when it occurred to me that she was holding her gaze in steadfast expectation of my response.

“Er, thank you...?” I said – almost queried – hesitantly.

She came back instantly:

“You’re welcome!”

This riposte she chirped at a high pitch, not unlike a budgerigar, while bizarrely managing to remain unsmiling and rigidly robot-faced. In my then relative youth and inexperience this was an interaction quite unlike what I was used to back in Europe. I had simply never been involved in a conversation where the spoken word seemed so physiologically divorced from its human speaker. This incident was of course very minor in itself and would have left my mind quickly had I not over time come to see how typical it was of the peculiar variant of alleged social decorum to which my new country was exposing me – that is, in short, a fake variant. A fraud. A complete put-on. Cold, self-centred people simply pretending to be nice under the god-awful duress of societal pressure.

I was especially struck by the excessive and pained use of “you’re welcome” prevalent among staff in my favourite chain of coffee shops. As I thanked them for my post-lunch latte they would vocalize this platitude with the same instantaneous automation as had the immigration official, only this time with the added bonus of a transparently forced marketing-type smile – an excessively wide grin showcasing pristine adolescent teeth, the eyes as ever remaining strangely unmoved. At times they would acknowledge the end of our transaction with absurd levels of manufactured emphasis:

“Oh, you’re so welcome sir!”

Hang on a second, I would think to myself as I left the counter, what do you mean you’re so welcome!? You didn’t do me a favour by making me that coffee, you merely provided services in return for the payment I rendered! Is it not rather a case of you being welcome for the privilege of my business!? This kind of thing serves to highlight a new dimension to the problem of Canadian alleged manners: namely the distortion of basic protocol – the sheer absence of logic – noticeable in at least some such interactions. Where else in the world are you told that you’re very welcome after you have just parted with a sum of your own money? I reiterate that viewed purely in isolation these are trivialities – minor complaints about ultimately inconsequential dealings. But this is a nation which chooses to place, or at least claims to place such an enormously high premium on respectability of interpersonal behaviour. As we have mentioned, for many among Canada’s Anglo majority it is actually a defining national characteristic – it is one of the primary means they employ to distinguish themselves from their American cousins. Suddenly Canadian politeness ceases to be a small matter and morphs instead into a national raison d’être – one of the major reasons proffered for Canada’s very existence. It is something worth expounding in detail and through example, not least when years of experience living among its practitioners tell you that something is inherently wrong; that on close examination the foundations of the wall are weak, and that the wall itself is but a thin veneer fronting an altogether shoddier construction. And it’s a construction that casts its shadow long over all areas of Canadian life: not just in the serving and hospitality sectors do these behaviours have to be endured – otherwise it could all be explained away by the standard corporate requirements of customer relations and public image. In the workplace, on the street, at community events, among neighbours, roommates, friends, even among members of their own family Canadians will go to excruciating lengths to keep the game of shallow decency alive.

All in all the impression given is of a society fighting a constant rearguard action against monsters of savagery it fears may be lurking beneath the surface. The fraud’s most negative effect is that of de-personalisation, a universality of behavioural pattern that simply does not exist in comparable societies. So shocked are Anglo-Canadians when someone veers away from the approved course of acceptable mannerism – such is the disapproving, silent intensity of their closed, pursed lips and collective subtle cringe that few are willing to offend the established order of soft voice and mild expression and, it follows, dread of expression because this is an order that demands at all costs no offense. No offense to anyone, to anything or to anywhere no matter how reasonable, rational or warranted. That offense is the deepest affront to politeness would appear to be basic common sense until you come to realize just how broadly, how fanatically not to say pathologically Canadians will define “offense”. This almost overtly totalitarian side-effect of the Canadian manner is something we shall explore fully in time. The point now is to identify the dogma’s overall impact for what it is: with the usual caveats and exceptions it is nothing less than the evisceration of the Canadian individual as an individual. At times, the general atmosphere of mental sloth this creates can be positively creepy. Stultification of the soul hangs over urban Canada as a cold, grey fog; dulling the vision, retarding ambition, diluting personality, discouraging character and generally undermining the essentials of hope: the extraordinary volume of mental-health cases who stagger gibbering and ranting through the cities of this country comes, in the end, as no surprise to one who has observed its society at close quarters.

Any brand of conformity strikes a discordant note at a visceral level, and a conformity of self-righteousness and fake decency even more so. To be de-individualised in such a way, as Canadians are, is in point of fact to be less human: it is a state of affairs approaching the point where one’s humanity struggles to be defined in any way beyond the merely scientific and biological. Often, you simply don’t know quite where you stand with a Canadian. Precisely what does that blankness of expression hide? That rigidly neutral set of the eyes peering down at you as you’ve just won the gentle competition for the last seat in the subway carriage. Anger? Spite? Amusement? Indifference? Weariness? There’s simply no telling with some of these people. They’ll politely refuse help to a homeless man and the homeless man will politely thank them anyway, the mutual hatred and loathing being banished for an instant from their shared imagination. It is very much there in reality, of course, but Canadians will insist on pretending. What does that work colleague really think of you? Not the one you work closely with on a daily basis and whom you’ve come to know well over a period of months or years. I mean that more distant co-worker with whom you interact only occasionally. As they pass you by in the corridor they may acknowledge you with a brief blank glance since it’s very impolite, after all, to fail to acknowledge someone. But what do they really think of you? Are they jealous of your relative success or admiring of it? Do they enjoy your failings or regret them? Do they respect you or dislike you? Are they simply shy? Indeed, are they thinking at all – does that blank face actually reflect the state of their inner soul at that very instant? Even when you do have to deal with them, at a meeting for instance, they maintain that Canadian reserve, psychologically standing ten feet back lest – god forbid – some meaningful human contact threaten to break out. It’s all so utterly divorced from the norms of human interplay you’ll experience anywhere else! In America you know you stand pretty quickly. If they can’t stomach the sight of you you’ll know about it soon enough. If you fit in you fit in, and they’ll welcome you into their social groupings without hesitation – none of Canada’s prim and pretty cliques exist down there. The British, specifically the working-class English, are even starker – giving the maximal vent to their preferences and bugbears permissible within the bounds of a (still) civilised society. The unpleasantness that invariably results from time to time is not the point. The point is that an emotionless society simply is not authentic and at times does not even seem real. At times walking the streets and corridors of Anglo Canada I felt like a participant in some sort of over done television commercial, a Truman Show or Brave New World of unreal cheeriness and shallowness of thought. In the end such a place doesn’t even feel right. It feels “right” in neither the aesthetic nor moral senses of the word: Canadian politeness and reserve in concert represent the gentle removal, piece by piece, of the human spirit – and its steady transplant by loveless bland and passionless chatter.

In seeking to understand the origins of the Canadian malaise – the Canadian meander – we must place ourselves back around 1775 and at a geographical point North of the thirteen American colonies instigating violent rebellion against British rule. In Nova Scotia or, perhaps, in the vast colonial Province of Quebec, stretching from Labrador all the way down across modern-day Ontario, over to Illinois and encompassing the whole of the lower Great Lakes. These are two of the forgotten four, the colonies to the North of New England that for various reasons did not rebel against the authority of the crown and King George III, and so as memories were destined to disappear under a blanket of American revolutionary cliché: the sobriquet “thirteen colonies” gaining such a resonance that today many outsiders believe that there were only thirteen colonies, in total, all acting in unison against the tyrannies of Britain. In fact both Quebec and Nova Scotia had strong domestic reasons to avoid the revolution: their populations were sharply divided between British Protestant and French Catholic, for one thing. The latter group would have had strong historical and contemporary reasons for fighting the British Crown; though conversely the austere Protestantism of the nascent American States would have repelled many of the more fervent Catholics. Complicated and bloody internecine strife could have ensued in either or both territories had the fires of revolution been lit, though in the event there was barely a spark. As the American Revolutionary War progressed ethnic-French Acadians in Nova Scotia were politically and materially compensated by the British for past wrongs, so securing through bribery their non-participation in the rebellion. In addition St John’s Island (now Prince Edward Island) and Newfoundland were too distant, and as islands too susceptible to the power of the Royal Navy, to play any significant part; revolutionary sentiment was moot, and so minimal to nil in both.

That Canada became the paper bag into which these disparate, disregarded scraps of the American revolution were eventually thrown is thus obvious in the geopolitical sense. It is in these places that we find the genesis not only of Canada itself, but more tellingly of the actual Canadian condition. While “Canadian” revolutionaries drifted Southward to join the fight, some American (“United Empire”) loyalists drifted North both during and after the war to live by their espoused loyalty to Britain. It is in the glaring absence of a counter-revolutionary spirit that the seeds of Canadian complacency were sown. South of Nova Scotia, down the long Atlantic coast from modern-day Maine to Georgia a vision for the hitherto unthinkable, the free-born nation on the American seaboard, burned brightly in the heart of the frontier soul. Articulated by the genius of Madison, Washington, Hamilton et al this ideal had power enough to sweep along a sufficient portion of the colonial populace – though certainly not all and probably not even a majority. It is the presence of the ideal which is significant. From the heat and fire of the new nationalist fervour came the immediate, practical concerns of day to day patriotism. Washington’s military. Hamilton’s American economy, demanding free-trade between the new states, but protection for his country’s budding manufacturing base against the market-flooding vultures of old Europe. From that industrial and engineering prowess a new national infrastructure of turnpikes, canals and of ports – the tangible, on the ground realisation of the national ideal itself. Nationalism, for which read tribalism, is far and away the most powerful of the human collective-emotions. With its acknowledged sensations of collective greatness and its implied disdain for the whole of the outside world, this force alone can drive a people to collective achievement just as easily as it can to war, death and destruction. Nationalism and the fear of Europe drove the new country; made America, a few short years from her birth, a thriving, industrious, building, spreading, sprouting success story in the early dawn of the nineteenth century. Central to the new American identity was the revolutionary concept of democracy, an idea viewed with skirt-clutching horror in the still loyal (Canadian) colonies. In the budding metropolises of Boston, Philadelphia and later New York, this culture of political freedom directly influenced and enhanced the intellectual milieu. The free and unrepressed exchange of thought and idea propelled onward the march of American scientific and industrial achievement to scale tremendous heights in relatively short periods. Now of course comparisons between the energetic new America and ancient Europe are irrelevant for obvious reasons: feudalism, tribalism, religion, war, scarcity and land shortage self-evidently kept Europe ablaze and Europeans amok. The sheer spaciousness, the physical sensation of being freer and in consequence safer, richer and happier clearly gave Americans a huge advantage with respect to measures of economic and societal progress. The really fascinating question is why the energy of the new republic was so glaringly absent in the nascent Canada. Since linguistic and cultural separation clearly kept the French-speaking peoples apart from the new United States as much as from Canadian loyalists it is to this English-speaking Canadian population – the Anglo-Canada in embryo – that the question really applies.

The initial answer is the sheer absence of a competing vision. Versus the American vision of a free-born republican democracy lay the constrained complacency of the colonial status quo. British loyalism in North America represented the huddled repression of agrarian aristocracy. The fact of its being the prevailing orthodoxy did alone preclude the vitality and vibrancy of a revolutionary movement. As the party of the century got underway, as the masked ball of American progress began, colonial Canada stood outside in the snowy winter night, glaring sullenly in at the brightly lit festivities. Rather than strive for a country of her own, rather than engage in the positive, active enterprise of nation building herself, she chose instead to snipe and moralize at the new America with the all the baseless arrogance of empty, empty ignorance. This passive mentality, the inherent negativity of being “definitely not them” versus “proudly us”, sewed the early seeds of Canadian malaise; that no vision is not the same as a competing vision is a lesson English Canada, even now, has yet to assimilate.

On the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, somewhat dubiously celebrated among Canadians a victory over U.S. expansionism, local historian Doug Saunders provided an articulate critique of his own country’s still-birth. The conflict was fought between the young America and Great Britain over numerous issues, among them the kidnapping of American seaman for forced service in the Royal Navy for the Napoleonic Wars, as well as various trade disputes. It featured numerous American invasions of the British territory that would eventually become Canada, all of them ultimately repelled. (British troops famously stormed Washington and burned the White House in retaliation for damage wrought by U.S. forces). But writing about his direct ancestors in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Saunders bemoaned the psychological effects of the conflict on the Canadian loyalist population:

Like most Upper Canadian Tories in those days, Catherine and William believed that, in the years after the 1815 Treaty of Ghent [which ended the war], Canada's U.S.-born majority had become potential traitors ... such concepts as democracy, public education, religious freedom, church-state separation and industrial capitalism were dangerous Americanisms to be kept at bay.[v]

It may surprise some readers to learn that Upper Canada, the then British colony now part of Ontario, had an American-born majority in the early nineteenth century. In reality only a minority were actively pro-British Americans, the aforementioned United Empire Loyalist refugees from the new republic who have gained a near mythic status in Canadian history and folklore. Rather, most were general migrants simply seeking out Ontario’s prime potential farmland as part of the general westward expansion. In any event by the War of 1812 the American Revolution was a fading memory, and for many of these erstwhile immigrants into Canada – and their descendants – the passion of British Loyalty, if it had existed in the first place, was beginning to be doused by the economic success of the new United States. Doubtless many among their number took to looking South and wondering exactly why Canada was being kept apart from that vibrant, prosperous young republic. Inevitably, British born and direct British-descendant settlers – the fiercely loyal, dyed-in-the-wool English, Scottish and Protestant-Irish royalists came to view with deep suspicion the large American population living among them. In consequence the colonial Canadian authorities pursued an immigration policy geared towards the attraction of loyal British subjects rather than the all out pursuit of the most hardworking, enterprising immigrants from throughout Europe. That there was obviously a degree of overlap between the two categories still left the region lagging behind: non-British migrants of ambition, education, drive and energy were in no doubt on which side of the new border their true destiny lay. Saunders again:

While the United States flourished, colonial Canada became a paranoid, insular place, with a sparse population and an economy limited to resources – a condition that would poison its growth for almost a century and leave an even longer legacy of choked-off development. Catherine and William Lloyd-Jones were the quintessential new Canadians of the post-1812 era ... fiercely loyal to the Crown and to the colonial administration, however tawdry and corrupt it might be, and almost genetically opposed to anything from south of the border, however beneficial it might be. ... Canadians decided to abandon the fast-expanding North American culture and then retreat into an agrarian, colonial netherworld for a century. ... we had successfully secured our border – and then, for a century after, used it to keep the sunlight out. Two centuries later, we are still feeling the effects.

Saunders also re-quotes contemporary physician John Howison who from his Canadian farm would look over the border at New York State and reflect that there

"bustle, improvement and animation fill every street; here dullness, decay and apathy discourage enterprise and repress exertion."

The modern Canadian state came into being in 1867. But her repressed, restrained, risk-averse character had been moulded into shape many decades before. The American Revolutionary War was the point of separation in all respects, not just the obviously political and territorial. From the moment of conception Canada was the weaker of the siblings, destined to live in the shadow of a stronger richer twin.

To this day the world votes with its feet. It is the dearest wish of every immigrant in America to become a successful American. It is the dearest wish of every immigrant in Canada to become successful – quite possibly by moving on to America. Within the continent itself the pattern of human movement is stark: despite coming from a country with only a ninth of America’s population, the Canadian citizens living south of the border are multiple the number of Americans who have moved to Canada. For its undoubted flaws and failings, the United States offers clarity of purpose based on an unambiguous proposition: that of a minimalist social framework, at least as provided by the state, allowing for the maximum reach of human potential possible within a first world economy and the basic standard of infrastructure this demands. That this view of society must create a certain well of material human misery, more than under alternative systems, is beyond dispute. But whether one accepts or rejects the American dream of hard work for just reward is entirely beside the point. The point is that there is no Canadian dream, and there never has been.

Thus was born the Canadian drift, not so much an onward march as a cautious sneak, accepting change and innovation only once tried and tested to the full elsewhere, usually America; shrinking from opinion, idea, expression and freedom. This psychological backwardness remains in evidence today. Canadian caution has proved genetic, being passed down from generation to generation; the nation's small share of continental immigrants assimilating in full, to the extent that one can assimilate a non-culture, the repressed character of their hosts. The lottery-win of bountiful natural resources has provided the wealth; the sheer effortlessness of this gain depleting even further the spirit and ambition of the Canadian people.

From the heart of the continent there emanates a force, an all-embracing parental grip reaching up from the South to the North. It drags, pushes and manipulates Canada and the Canadian character, and exerts near total influence over the Canadian psyche. It is a force of magnitude enough to be a fate: Canada could no more escape her American destiny than the Moon could drive away from the Earth; and it is of course the United States, it is of course the sheer presence of that vast empire, the enormity of its gravitational pull, its arrogance and its imprudence, its hubris and its greed, that loom so large over Canadian society, the Canadian people, Canadian everything. America is the trumpeting elephant in the quiet Canadian tearoom.

The physical facts of the unequal partnership are obvious. While the precise figure has varied over time, in the region of seventy-five percent of Canadian goods exports go to the United States.[vi] Total exports South amount to over one-fifth of Canadian GDP.[vii] In 2012 U.S. foreign direct investment into Canada amounted to more than half the total from all countries, equating to an additional one-sixth of Canadian national income.[viii] Add the revenues generated “domestically” in Canada by U.S. owned companies. Diane Francis’ calculations for 2011 suggest that these amounted to at least ten percent of Canadian GDP for that year.[ix] We approach roughly half the Canadian economy depending on the overall trading relationship with the U.S., give or take, pick your year. While the implications for Canadian independence and national sovereignty are self-evidently enormous, here I would like to draw attention, briefly, to some of the less remarked upon aspects of the two countries’ enormous degree of economic integration.

In the first place there is the striking fact that the successful, multinational Canadian corporations that have existed over the years – the Nortels, the RIMs and so on – have invariably oriented their product, marketing and pricing strategies almost exclusively towards the U.S. consumer. Their domestic Canadian market has been simply too small, by comparison, to be relevant; strongly performing, ambitious Canadian companies have the potential to do more business in the state of California alone than in the whole of their own country. Canadian corporations may actually launch their latest and greatest products and services in the U.S. in advance of allowing their Canadian compatriots access to such treats. The Canadian consumer can thus be left, even by his own countrymen, on a sort of scrap heap of mild contempt and afterthought. Then there is the economically skewed positioning of the international border, leaving as it does well over 90 percent of North American GDP on the U.S. side. This puts Canadian firms at a major logistical disadvantage compared to their U.S. rivals. Both are targeting the fifty-state market, but the Canadians must move their products and people through a bureaucratic maze of U.S. customs and immigration controls, a gauntlet made all the more complicated post-2001 by the occasionally real but largely imagined concerns over “security”. Ostensibly to ease the movement South of Canadian goods and services, Washington has insisted on its Homeland Security and other officials being allowed to operate on Canadian soil at ferry ports, airports and cargo terminals – much to the chagrin of nationalist minded Canadian commentators. Indeed the periodic act of loosening or tightening border entry controls has proved politically lucrative for American policy as applied to Canada: such is the dependence of Canadians on cross-border trade that the Federal Government in Ottawa can ill-afford to resist Washington’s demand for concessions on just about any area the Americans choose. Emphasizing again that cross-border security is more a pretext than a genuine issue, numerous treaties signed between the two countries since 2001 have dramatically increased something called “information sharing” between agencies of the two governments: in practice, Canada providing to the U.S. authorities more access than ever before to Canadian citizens’ personal histories, travel habits, medical records and records of even the most minor brushes with the law. Canadian foreign policy is permanently constrained by the American noose: the price of Canadian non-participation in the 2003 Iraq War was the increased and extended presence of Canadian troops in the parallel and even more ludicrous campaign in Afghanistan. In a more enduring policy-arena Canada has always faced pressure for failing to participate in the U.S. embargo of Communist-run Cuba, and at most stages has at the very least sought to downplay its relationship with the island’s regime, keeping then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro at arm’s length and, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau aside, usually declining the highest-level meetings with the Havana government. The military, a central component of foreign policy, similarly has become entangled by the American octopus: the Canadian armed forces are functionally little more than a somewhat-less-equipped appendage of the Pentagon’s own vast resources. The very idea of Canada undertaking any sort of military operation independently has long since ceased to be feasible or even thinkable. Since the Second World War the country has participated in military adventures only under U.S. or U.S.-led (NATO or UN) flags, including Korea in the 1950s, the attempted pacification of Somalia in 1992, and the Balkans in the mid to late 1990s. Ottawa has of course chosen to stay out of numerous American wars, most significantly Vietnam – but then again so did Luxembourg and Swaziland. As an overt expression of national independence, staying out of distant, foreign conflicts is a trivially bureaucratic accomplishment – a skipped mortgage payment or a missed business lunch. Independent, positive action is the true measure: in 1982 Britain militarily reoccupied the Falkland Islands in the face of strong American resistance. Canada could not possibly have done the same. A glaring opportunity was missed in 1994 when genocidal conflict erupted in Rwanda. For all her post-Suez pretentions to a leading peace-keeping, peace-enforcing role, Canada followed America’s lead by meekly staying away: the immense psychological challenge of acting without Big Brother’s acquiescence being starkly impossible to meet.

Back on home turf numerous other encroachments on Canadian sovereignty stand out, and would probably cause an uproar among patriotic Canadians if any of them deigned to notice. For instance, try as a Canadian citizen resisting extradition from your own country to the United States. Then take note of the extent to which U.S. authorities will take a nosy interest in activities pursued in Canada by Canadian citizens. This was partially the case in the Chicago trial of media-magnate Conrad Black in 2007. A primary piece of evidence offered by the US District Attorney was CCTV footage of Black hiding and destroying evidence in his Toronto office – and offense which should surely have been beyond the U.S. prosecutor’s jurisdiction. Less well known is the case of Canadian businessman James Sabzali, who in 2002 was convicted by an American court on numerous counts of violating the U.S. trade-embargo against Cuba. While some of the charges he faced related to offenses allegedly committed during the time he was living in Philadelphia, seven counts actually pertained to “crimes” committed during his former life in Hamilton, Ontario. Canadian law, of course, entirely permits trade with Cuba. Nonetheless, the spectacle of a Canadian citizen obeying Canadian law on Canadian territory was obnoxious to American prosecutors, who proceeded with those additional charges regardless.[x] Interviewed by journalists of the Canadian Press news agency, assistant U.S. attorney Joseph Poluka sneered, “you're not allowed to violate the laws of this country just because you live outside it. You need to educate your Canadian audience.”

Protesting against the Sabzali case, the Canadian government sent something called a “diplomatic note” to Washington in the manner of a squirming, obsequious eunuch who just knows he’s going to be kicked in the balls he doesn’t even have. It would have been fascinating to witness the reaction to such a communication once it had reached the U.S. State Department. I imagine that for senior U.S. officials the mere existence of Canada as an entirely separate, entirely sovereign nation-state is a concept that rather like male pregnancy grips them in fleeting, facially-contorted frissons of bewilderment. The idea of the vaguely defined Canadian entity actually attempting to assert national rights must have baffled them still further. Whether American hubris in this regard is rooted in the imperialist arrogance of 1812 or the later Monroe Doctrine, or whether it stems from a genuinely innate inability to view Canada as a truly “foreign” country, is left to the reader to judge. Likely it comes from a combination of both. Canada, after all, looks like America. Canadians speak like Americans, live in spacious American-inspired suburbs and work in American-style skyscrapered cities. They drive U.S. model cars, follow and participate in major league American sports and eat American fast-foods. Canadians shop in America, and shop in American stores while shopping in Canada. Just like millions of their Yankee cousins Canadians winter in Florida and weekend in New York. They watch American movies, act in American movies, make American movies. Canadians infest the American workplace, utterly indistinguishable from the similarly expatriate workers of neighbouring states. Under the circumstances can even well-informed, worldly American elites be blamed for not breaching such an enormous psychological barrier between day-to-day perception and geopolitical reality? In the late 1960s Prime Minister Trudeau famously told American journalists that “living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an Elephant”. The implied Canadian mouse, he was suggesting, lies awake waiting for the giant to roll over. The Elephant knows about the mouse, of course – but that still leaves a large mental gap to acknowledging and interacting with the rodent, still less than on the terms of an equal.

The physical, measurable power of American gravity propagates and reinforces Canada’s lapdog status on the North American continent. But the behavioural (dare I say even “cultural”) differences that also play a large role in creating this dynamic are unknown to many outsiders, and thus are worth exploring.

A friend, a Toronto-based employee in the Canadian office of a U.S. corporation, would often tell me of the occasions when his American colleagues would come north for quarterly meetings with their Canadian colleagues. He would tell me that his boss, by all accounts a typically Torontonian personality-free zone, would look forward with deep dread to these cross-border meetings, since they would invariably descend into an international arm-wrestling contest of petty pride and infantile, patriotic posing. Just about every item on the agenda – even the most trivial matters – risked being the subject of nagging quarrels conducted solely along national lines. But what was so striking and galling for my acquaintance was the fact that at the close of almost every such argument those on the American side of the negotiating table would succeed in getting their own way. This, crucially, would be in spite of that fact that his boss, as the senior executive for the Eastern Canada and North Eastern United States regions actually out-ranked all of the U.S. personnel present at these meetings. In theory his decisions should have been final and irrevocable, but in practice the very opposite was true. According to my eyewitness the Americans would succeed in imposing their will on their Canadian superiors through what he termed “force of personality”, though he had great difficulty articulating exactly what he meant by this. When I pressed him repeatedly he eventually came up with an interesting word to summarise the behaviour and mannerisms of his American colleagues: “They’re more... expressive...” he recalled hesitantly a day or so after one such corporate tussle, “they wave their arms around and have much more to say than Canadians. And they make more facial expressions.” He paused, then sighed: “Canadians just don’t like arguing, I guess.”

This last observation was more astute, and far more significant, than my friend realised. Over several years living in English Canada I became intimately familiar with my hosts’ deep aversion to stridently expressed opinion, and greater aversion to the closely related phenomenon of verbal discord. This deep-rooted fear, and the creepily Canadian form of voluntary totalitarianism it creates is something we shall explore in detail later. For now, the pertinent point is that Americans in contrast show not the slightest fear of dissent, or to be more accurate no fear in the expression of dissent and this, coupled with the relative exuberance of body language my friend perceptively noticed, gives them a powerful advantage in any confrontation with their prim Northern neighbours. I personally witnessed the relative arm-flailing, finger jabbing, desk slapping and torso twisting manner of Americans when dealing with U.S. client-companies on numerous software projects, but it is crucial to bear in mind that in the immediate circumstances of heated discussion most people do not notice these things while nonetheless being subconsciously heavily influenced by them. If the Canadians at the table would stop to observe and consider the physical histrionics they would instantly recognise their objective irrelevance to the subject at hand. It is beyond the capacity of some to analyze human behavioural patterns as such behaviours are actually occurring.

Then there is the fact of the freer, more vibrant exchange of thoughts and ideas in the American cultural and academic milieu having the effect of boosting the standard of English spoken South of the border. Now North American English is in general a degenerative bastardization of the old-world original, but it’s a disease which is at a much more advanced stage on the Canadian side of the fence. The dreary reality of Canadians being simply less practiced at thinking aloud – pondering, discussing, debating, philosophizing – causes the cancer of intellectual slovenliness to grow deeper and spread faster in their case, reducing even further the quality of the output produced on the rare occasions they decide to open their mouths. There’s been no Canadian Norman Mailer for instance, with his power of verbal articulation, his precision of rhetoric, clarity of analysis and ruthless willingness to observe, criticize and deconstruct his own country. In even mildly combative human interaction, the armoury of superior communication will be almost impossible to overcome. This, psychologically, is probably the most significant factor driving the outcome of any cross-border interpersonal squabble.

At the political and diplomatic level, at high-level governmental meetings where trans-national issues of great significance are in play, we can only imagine what the ramifications have been. No doubt, in advance of numerous such conferences, a Langley-produced analysis of Canadian mores and mannerisms has been made available to U.S. delegations to leave American officials in no doubt that pushing Canada around works, quite literally. In 1965 Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, a Nobel-Peace Prize laureate and statesman of some renown following his central role in resolving the Suez crisis a decade earlier, visited the United States and in a speech at Temple University called on the U.S. administration to call a temporary halt to its bombing campaign in Vietnam. A day later, as he entered for a Camp David meeting with President Lyndon Baines Johnson the hot and bothered Texan grabbed Pearson by the lapels and roared “Don’t you come into my living room and piss on my rug!” Notwithstanding the fact that Johnson’s anger was entirely justified (the Canadian economy under Pearson was reaping considerable benefits from the war in South East Asia) would the American President have dared treat, say, his British counterpart in such a manner? Or the French, West German or Soviet Premiers? Much more to the point would any such leader have responded the way Pearson did – calmly soothing Johnson’s ire and proceeding with the meeting as planned, sycophantic and grovelling like a kicked, starved dog? Or would they instead have chosen to maintain their dignity, their personal pride and their national pride by storming out of the meeting vowing not to return in the absence of a fulsome apology? The answer is of course clear, but then the fact of Americans both respecting strength and despising weakness is a lesson their Canadian cousins, almost but not quite alone, have entirely failed to grasp. Having been bludgeoned into submission in Maryland, Pearson never crossed Johnson again – on Vietnam or any other issue. The rubbery constitution of Canada’s spine likewise can not have gone unnoticed among U.S. officials.

Such interactions, at all levels of society, summarize the chief among Canada’s many dilemmas: the dilemma of the country being so trodden on by the American mammoth, and so weakly complicit in her humiliation, that in a way her own very existence becomes worth questioning. But even the tangible, observable facets of American dominance can seem to fade when compared to a more spiritual consideration, that driven by the way in which Canada is perceived overseas, and the impact of this perception on Canadians’ own ability to define themselves. It is a simple fact that Canada is always being considered in relation to America; to emphasize: Canada is never not being compared to America. Whenever the country is under discussion, being in any way measured, observed or evaluated in speech or in thought; whether such musings are by distant foreigners who’ve never set foot in the country or aged old denizens who’ve never even left, all such ponderings are invariably made in contradistinction to the United States whether the speaker is aware of it or not. Think about it. When you refer to Canadians as “nice” you unthinkingly mean “nicer than Americans”. When you chirp about Canada being “safe” you mean “safer than the United States”. When Canada’s public healthcare system has been singled out for fawning, uncritical praise this has only been to draw a distinction with the failings real and imagined of the healthcare system South of the border. The Canadian political scene is never discussed abroad (and only occasionally at home); when it is, it is typically to draw some fatuous, favourable distinction with America’s perpetual Donkey and Elephant race. The value of the Canadian dollar is quoted relative to, and only relative to, the value of that other dollar. All matters pertaining to Canada’s economy and material standard of living can quite simply never be discussed in an exclusively national sense: the spectre of America looms large and all encompassing, even the poor old Canadian weather can’t escape its claws – the northern climate existing solely, it would appear, to provide the Anglo locals at least one way of distinguishing themselves from their identical twins. And so we can see that to be dominated in a physical, tangible sense is one thing; but to be actually imprisoned psychologically in this way is far the greater evil. For a people to be deprived in such a manner of a truly independent sense of identity is for them to be deprived of autonomous collective thought, the very essence of communal being. West and South of the Ottawa river, from Cornwall in Ontario to the Pacific Coast, how can such a territory explain its own separate existence? Canadians can never escape America simply by refusing to go there: for theirs is a country eviscerated of soul, among the nations of the world a person without a face.

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[1] god

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[i] Facebook page calls for American-only hours at U.S. Costco, CBC News, 12^th August 2012 (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/facebook-page-calls-for-american-only-hours-at-u-s-costco-1.1165291, retrieved 5^th August 2014)

[ii] Census 2011: National Household Survey, Statistics Canada (statscan.gc.ca)

[iii] Hemingway: A Biography (Meyers, Jeffrey) Chapter 5 (European Reporter 1922-1923), section VII

[iv] The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 2, 1923-1925 (Spanier, DeFazio, Trogdon; editors). Letters to Ezra Pound 6-8th Sep, 13^th Oct, 9^th Dec 1923; Sylvia Beach 6^th Nov 1923; Edmund Wilson 11^th Nov, 25^th Nov 1923

[v] Doug Saunders, My ancestors and the worst thing that has ever happened to this country, Globe and Mail, 16^th June 2012

[vi] 2013. Source: Statistics Canada (statscan.gc.ca), Canadian International Merchandise Trade Database

[vii] 2013 GDP figure: Statistics Canada “Canada: Economic and financial data” as at Q4/13. Total exports must add service exports - source Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 376-0036 “International transactions in services, by  selected countries” (2011 figure for United States, receipts)

[viii] Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada. (Government department - international.gc.ca) “Foreign Direct Investment Statistics” for 2012

[ix] Diane Francis, Merger of the Century (HarperCollins Canada, 2013) Introduction, 10^th paragraph

[x] Canadian convicted of trading with Cuba, BBC News Online, 4^th April 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1910284.stm, retrieved 4^th August 2014)

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