8. Raison d’être

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It’s time we headed back. Back to the Great Lakes and the great Saint Lawrence, back South of the Ottawa Valley and the endless unrolling farmland from the federal capital down to Windsor and the frontier: the five hundred mile span of Southern Ontario, where when all is said and done this great and broad nation derives its shape and its character, some sort of character, and propagates it West around Superior over the vast and arid prairie. We’ve stayed in Quebec. We’ve tasted Newfoundland. No description of Canada could call itself complete without a discussion of these areas, the contained distinct societies without which this country would compete in the shadow of Antarctica for sheer dearth of cultural vitality. But even still these are sideshows. Stated very baldly they count for little to nothing in the face the nation presents to the outside world. Even six million Francophone Quebeckers find themselves, in the wake of two rejections of a chance for independence, as little more than a cultural curiosity on the edge of the continental picture, rendered rudderless by group indecision and embraced to the point of imprisonment by Canadian economic power. Quebec, once all powerful, is a digression. The Maritimes are a digression. When the world thinks Canada, when for that matter Canadians conceptualise Canada it is without question this Anglo core which fuels the flood of imagery: English speaking, ostensibly well-mannered, comfortably middle-class, good-humoured if in a rather simple-minded way; heavily Americanised though with the legion negatives of despised America all, somehow, conveniently removed. We have explored and will continue to explore the sometime accuracies and many fallacies of this picture. We have spent quite enough time away North and East of the Ottawa river. It is back to the South and West – it is in short back to Canada – that now we must return.

We’re coming in on our flight from St. John’s, flying from Canada’s far East over to Lake Ontario, above the thickly forested landscape of Northern Maine in the USA. Usually, even from twenty or thirty thousand feet, you can tell at a glance which of the two countries you are flying over, though admittedly not here. Here, the thickness of the natural canopy and the absence of signs of civilisation below could easily fool you into thinking that the flight is still in Canadian airspace; Maine is atypical among continental U.S. States in having swathes of remote, unpopulated landscape befitting any of the Canadian provinces. But most of the domestic flights in and out of Toronto can be counted on to penetrate U.S. airspace at some point, and if the on-board navigation maps are missing or inoperable then the mere act of looking will usually be enough to identify the country below. Away from Maine, the vast American infrastructure – the swaggering network of major national and state highways and comparatively large rural population distinguish that country in an instant from the relative emptiness North of the border. Often, on a flight straddling the endless border, the mere presence of a major, twinned highway in a particular rural region would tell me that this was a U.S. state and not a Canadian province that I was looking down upon. By any measure Canada is one of the world’s most urbanised nations with virtually its entire population concentrated in 8 major and 12-15 minor cities. In huge swathes of the country, often only one or two hours’ drive from the major metropolitan areas, there simply is no serious population to speak of. Within striking distance of Toronto, for instance, many of the lesser roads marked on the map turn out to be gravel tracks: there simply isn’t enough local traffic to justify the cost of paving them. There was no road-link across Newfoundland until the 1960s; no road at all to Labrador until the 1980s; and no complete, year-round road-link to the Northwest Territories until 2012. Moosonee, Ontario has that province’s only saltwater port, but – despite being on the same lowly latitude as Calgary – still has no road-link to the rest of the province; the primary route of the famed Trans-Canada highway meekly hugs the U.S. border and studiously avoids an exploration of the Canadian interior. There are no rail and virtually no highway links up to the critical, mineral and oil-rich lands of the subarctic and Arctic Circle. The list could go on: this is the infrastructural story of a nation with no interest in nation-building, and which has undertaken its own frontier-pushing project – the Canadian North in answer to the American West – tentatively and with that shirking, vaguely grudging Canadian caution that has held this nation in bondage from the moment of its conception.

The attitude of contemporary North Americans to the wildernesses hugging their urban belts neatly encapsulates the continent’s great psychological dichotomy: while their adventurous, inquisitive American cousins have embraced the rustic life and ideal in their millions, per capita far fewer Canadians have done so. Indeed historically, as soon as it was feasible – as soon as urban sprawl began its spread outward from the small downtown cores towards the end of the nineteenth century – Canada’s loyalist, homesteading Lloyd-Joneses couldn’t dash for the cosy comfort of the growing cities fast enough, Catherine as always clutching her skirt as she ran. She had always instinctively shirked at the risks and uncertainties – not to mention squalors and dilapidations – of the agricultural life down by the Great Lakes. The muck, work, idealism and sacrifice of the rustic existence held not the least appeal for her, and, later still, when the modern Canadian suburb sprouted beyond the city neighbourhoods in the post-war era she was in positive seventh heaven of cookie-baking complacency. Rural Canada is actual wilderness – a literal[1], metaphorical and psychological tundra that casts its shadow long over the people at its urban edges; out into which the Little Red Riding-Hoods of Oakville and Burnaby will venture only along the safest and most trodden trails. But rural America is country – real, hard-graft, populated country where the strivers, the farm-hands, the thinkers and the drinkers forge a heartland identity which the sullen small-towns of Canada are inherently incapable of matching. Countless Bostonians and New Yorkers have dreamed wistfully of a ranching life in Montana or North Dakota, or perhaps an idyllic existence among the vineyards of California or the cranberry harvesters of Wisconsin; and rural, small-town America has been and remains to this day livelier, more intelligent, more thoughtful, more ambitious and more prosperous as a result. The modern farm tractor was invented in rural America, as was the combine harvester: such innovations could never have been born in the backwoods of Canada.

That pioneering, Lewis and Clark spirit, passed down through the generations, retains a central place in the American mindset to this day. It simply does not allow for the shirking of tests of psychological endurance: adventurism and risk-taking have been infused into the core of the American identity. But you will not find many Canadians who, finance being not a problem, would retire for a new life among the wheat-producers of Saskatchewan or in the dark forests of Quebec. Indeed the closest I came to hearing such an aspiration expressed aloud was a colleague in Toronto wistfully envisaging a quaint new life for herself and her husband in Halifax, Nova Scotia, population half of one million! Others will dream of living among the mountain splendour of the Coastal Range, British Columbia, but always and only in the context of a large, touristy resort town such as Kelowna or Whistler. Take the creature-comforts of urbia away from the Canadian and you’re left with a purse-lipped worrier, in dread of the vagaries of climate and the forces of nature. Then again, for most of the born-and-raised Canadians I came across the mere idea of moving to a new city – much less a remoter area – seemed to fill them with sensations of parochial horror. They’re not just tied rigidly to the concept of the über-sedate suburb, they are in many cases irrevocably rooted to the very same cul-de-sac in which they bought their first home. The Canadian ideal, to the extent that there is one, seems to come down in the end to this: a very quiet life at whatever the very great cost. Not the cost in financial terms which when all is said and done is trivial: but rather the cost in terms of people’s constrained and limited horizons, their spiritless outlooks, lost potential and reduced life-chances.

The greedy expansion of Canadian cities been self-reinforced by the nation’s incurable addiction to easy comfort. The more sedate the suburbs become, the more desperately Canadians – the greater number of Canadians – strive to make a home in them. The small towns of the country suffer the legacy of degradation and failure: we’ve mentioned Timmins as perhaps being at the extreme end of this wedge. Pillaged and robbed of its educated, upwardly-mobile people, small-town Canada sits cantankerous, selfish, hick-ridden and suspicious of outsiders, entirely devoid of philosophical outlook or hope and aspiration. There simply is no comparison between the mini-societies of, say, Great Falls in Montana and the similarly sized Barrie, Ontario. One is hopeful, prosperous, humane and optimistic. The other is cold, backward, deprived and inward-looking. One in its way epitomises the American dream: self-reliance amid the challenging terrain, and the great rewards of unstinting endeavour. The other stands as a testament, not to what you might call the Canadian nightmare – nightmares, after all, require imagination – but instead to purpose-free Canadian dreamlessness. I’ve always been amused to overhear the sneering directed at “small-town America” by self-regarding European ignoramuses: it is in fact to Canada that they should look for wilful unworldliness and general impoverishment of the intellect – rather more pernicious ailments than the spirited work-ethic and gentle Christian kindness of the American heartland.

It is from the middle of the troposphere that a country as vast as Canada can best be viewed, provided the weather is clear. Probably the best domestic flight from which to take it in is that from Toronto to Vancouver, on a crisp Autumnal day, booked into a window seat placed far back from the wing. You fly over the cultivated and partially forested lands of Southern Ontario, reddening deciduous competing with steadfast evergreen; out over the shimmering Great Lakes and then over the wooded Northernmost edge of the mid-Western states. Then back into Canada and the endless wheat fields of Saskatchewan and Alberta with their small and shrivelling patches of original prairie, where once upon a time buffalo would have grazed and roamed in unimaginable numbers. And finally, very suddenly and without any topographical ceremony or warning, the Rockies. The strictly demarcated borderland between the plains and the range is a startling thing to behold from a great height: on the right-hand side of your window view, heading West on the starboard side, the smiling yellow of Prairie Canada’s edge; to the left, creeping into view with the flights onward progress, the Alpine splendour of snow-caps and blue-grey rock, deep-green valleys and turquoise Mountain lakes. But even more magnificent and illuminating are the views possible from the intercontinental flights out of Europe towards Alberta or British Columbia. The flight-path to Canada’s West scythes across the midriff of Greenland, then over Baffin Bay with its iceberg convoys atop water a deep and deadly arctic blue, and sheets of ice forming and colonising out from the coasts. Then the enormous island of the same name – Baffin – presents its naked, frozen white cliffs by way of welcome to Canadian soil and airspace, though still many hours from your destination and in many cases perhaps little more than half way through your flight. At the height of the short Northern autumn – the best time to look down on this landscape – the snow and ice are still sufficiently retreated to expose the bare rock of the unending tundra. The dark-brown, dark-grey rocky montage is at first take uniformly unappealing from a great height, and yet as the scene unfolds – as you proceed further South over the subarctic archipelagos and into the Northern extremity of the mainland, this foliage-free wilderness – this wasteland to end all wastelands – strikes you with the magnificence of its sheer scope and the wonder of its alien character. Not a patch of green – of life or growth or renewal, is anywhere in sight; even death itself has been rendered redundant. Just a lunar landscape of utterly barren wasteland, never even raped having never even sprouted, bare hills and shiny mountains and empty valleys and deep indentations; and lakes. Hundreds and thousands of lakes small, medium and large; far too innumerable, surely, to have all been assigned names. Craters – or at least crater-like formations: baffling bullet-wounds poked viciously into the ground, some hopefully the result of meteorite strikes over the millennia – though virtually all, much more prosaically, natural formations of the undulating land. The scars of glaciers past and the glistening decoration of glaciers present. And those outposts of static ice and frozen snow that with rugged Northern stubbornness refused to melt and bow before the twenty hour sun of the summer just gone.

One, two hours looking down on this otherworld, drifting steadily along at a cruising ground-speed of five hundred miles an hour. Every so often your eyes fix on one particular spot. Alongside a moderate hill, perhaps; or the middle of a dry and shallow valley. Moderate? Shallow? Certainly – from a vantage point five miles above the surface of the Earth. But what if you were to walk there, if it were somehow within the power of the pilot to beam you down to the surface at that very location? There would not be the smallest possibility of you surviving beyond a few days – at any time of year. Hunger would render you immobile within hours. If one of those fresh-water rivers or lakes were more than a two hour’s hike away, dehydration would do the job even faster. Possibly averting the horror of such slow, suffering deaths would be the mercy of polar bears: if you were terribly lucky you would be attacked, killed and eaten by one in fairly short order, though I imagine the probability of meeting one at all would be very minimal. Even with plentiful food, somehow, and a decent water supply the great and terrible malignancy of loneliness would drive many to insanity and consequent death by crazed misadventure in time. And who would ever locate you, dead or alive? The infrastructure of homo sapiens has simply never extended to these parts, and in this age of unyielding urban growth and consolidation it likely never will. Even with a truckload of flares you would not stand the slightest chance of drawing attention to yourself: there is literally no person around to whose attention you may call. There is no cellular phone signal. No hunting shacks or Coast-Guard huts. No wandering hunting-parties either: in the vast Canadian North it is man who is the endangered species, the always small population of indigenous Inuit peoples having by now largely joined urban humanity and forgotten most of the skills and intuitions that over millennia have allowed them to thrive in the polar climate. Even the Ranulph Fienneses of this world – the most rugged, experienced adventurers and explorers known to the human race – would not dream for an instant of entering this wilderness without months if not years of prior planning and arranging for food supplies, climactic conditions, medical emergencies and evacuation scenarios. Not a single Canadian, virtually to a man, will go to this place, ever. Yet the misnamed “arctic” or “far North” has somehow infused itself into Canadians’ national psyche; it is their Australian outback or Russian Siberia, a physically devoid but figuratively integral part of the national story with its alleged igloos, iconic wildlife, arctic sleighs and imagined frontier living. It is an image – chief among the picture-postcards of the nation they like to sell to outsiders while going to great lengths to avoid any personal actualisation of the ideal.

The Arctic is a place of Canadians’ collective mind and that, they have been quite content, is precisely where it can stay. But unfortunately for the shrugging unpatriots of the Great White North, Arctic geopolitics – and specifically the matter of the Northwest Passage – have come very much to the fore in international affairs in years recent to the time of writing, and thus have elbowed their way to the top of Canada’s domestic and foreign policy agendas, calling to attention issues the Canadian people, as ever, would much sooner wish away. Foremost among these matters is the unresolved question of Canadian sovereignty over its huge Arctic and subarctic territories – that is, sovereignty both as something recognised and accepted by the international community and, much more tellingly, in terms of Ottawa’s very ability to protect and enforce it. If the polar ice-caps continue a long-term trend of retreat – as climate scientists, the gods of our secular age, prophesy – then huge, mineral-rich tracts of land and sea in the Canadian arctic will become economically accessible for the very first time. Now it would, you would think, be inconceivable that any foreign power would overtly challenge Canadian control over, say, parts of Ellesmere Island or Victoria or Somerset Islands – although when vital natural resources are suspected of hiding in abundance under barren and remote lumps of rock, nothing can be ruled out. The government of Denmark lays claim to Hans Island in Baffin Bay, for example. But it is really in (and under) the territorial waters off her Arctic lands that Canada will face the greatest challenge. There, Canadian sovereignty has been directly challenged by foreign governments for decades, and most notably by the dreaded United States of America which on occasion (most controversially in 1985) has actually sent vessels into “Canadian” waters in the Arctic without requesting advance permission from the Canadian government. American ambassadors in Ottawa have repeatedly and at times loudly asserted their country’s rejection of Canadian claims to all of its Arctic waters. With the American colossus engaging in such throat-clearing and manoeuvring on the Arctic issue, the Canadian government has come to develop a deep lack of confidence in even such basic geopolitical facts such as what does or does not constitute its own territory. This in itself is a fascinating thing to behold: from the early part of this century the nation’s leaders have begun parroting incessantly about the need to “assert Canadian sovereignty over the North” – and by “the North” they do not mean disputed lands in Alaska or Svalbard or parts of Danish Greenland, they mean Canada’s North, that what should indisputably be their own country. In 2006 Prime Minister Stephen Harper undertook the cumbersome and expensive trip up to Alert, Nunavut, an isolated signals facility on Ellesmere Island and mankind’s northernmost permanent settlement. That trip, it was made clear, was undertaken to promote Canadian interests and claims in the region, which of course is directly analogous to the President of the United States travelling to Fairbanks to leave international observers in no doubt about America’s hold on Alaska, or the premier of Russia making a bellicose statement about his nation’s control of Siberia. The mere fact of Harper’s government feeling the need to undertake such a mission demonstrates that the confidence of the Canadian people in the concept of Canada itself begins to wither and fade North of the sixtieth parallel as much as it does close to the U.S. border.[i]

The Northwest Passage represents the most immediate concern in this regard. Vital parts of this natural waterway, snaking through the archipelago of Arctic Canada to provide an alternative route between the Pacific and the Atlantic, are considered by Ottawa to form an integral part of Canadian territorial waters through which foreign vessels may proceed only under the sufferance of the Canadian government. Most of the international community, as mentioned the U.S. included, rejects this position and considers the passage to be an international strait through which any vessel, of any country, may sail under the protection of international maritime law. For the bulk of Canadian history the issue has been moot: these waters have of course been frozen for most of each year to the extent that voyages the length of the passage have been all but impossible. But now, as these Arctic waters thaw with the shrinking ice-cap and become navigable for longer and longer periods of the year, the ability of Canada to enforce its will in the region threatens to be very publicly exposed as non-existent. In protection of their own ships and trading and exploration interests the U.S. Navy and the Russian fleet are not likely to be deterred by their toytown Canadian counterpart; neither, for that matter, would the not easily dismissed fleetlets of Denmark and Norway – the other nations with claims in the Arctic Circle. And so the ships of the world will sail through Canadian waters; grey bureaucrats in Ottawa, with zest for life, will send diplomatic notes in protest; and in face of this national humiliation the Canadian people will be forced to reflect. Over the decades, indeed over the centuries they have had the opportunity to put into place even a modest infrastructure of permanent settlements, highway links, military bases and – most crucially – summer ports up in the remotest parts of their own country, an infrastructure which by now would have served as a solid basis for the viable defence of their economic and territorial interests. The costs would have been great though for a nation as wealthy as theirs certainly not prohibitive. The logistical challenges would have been tremendous though not (for a truly pioneering, truly nation-building people) impossible. Admittedly the long term national and fiscal benefits may not have been obvious at the time, but even accepting that point, a fundamental tenet of espoused nationhood remains unfulfilled: is it not in the very essence of nation-building to expand over the full geographical range, to stand and set foot in all corners of the land and proclaim in no uncertain terms that this, forever, is ours? If a manufactured colonial creation such as Canada has not bothered to raise her standard in huge swathes of her supposed own territory; has not been concerned to chart, survey, and develop her territory to the very limit of its natural boundaries; if she has chosen through complacency and sheer laziness to leave vast tracts of her own land even now effectively unexplored, can she and her people really cry foul as other, hungrier eyes are increasingly being cast in the direction of her more mineral-rich regions?

But then, of course, we are brought back as always to some fundamentals: whose far North will it rightfully be in any case – whose North is it now? The righteous force of globalism, the gradual movement towards the united human state, daily chips away at antiquated notions of borders, fences, “territories” and the backward tribal impulses of distinct groups making lunatic claims to “ownership” of given parts of our shared planet. In a technological age of easy mass migration and a single human language, English, the very idea of national sovereignty – the very idea of national anything – is dying before our eyes slowly yet so steadily, so blatantly and so obviously that most people are incapable of noticing it. And moving forward, as the first fleets of foreign shipping book unhindered passage through Canadian lands, stopping perhaps for a little mineral extraction or oil exploration along the way, the Canadian people will rue to find that it will be then, as it is even now, far too late for them to forge a discovery of their very own country or, for that matter, of the concept of patriotism.

Our intercontinental flight continues, creeping ever Southward on a West-leaning trajectory. We traverse the Tree Line, and the tundra gives way to the boreal forest that blankets the midriff of this vast country. Thinning, initially, like an aging man’s scalp, but soon forming a deep green canopy so thick it’s all the sunlight can do to poke through to the ground below. This is the land of the brown grizzly rather than the white polar, of the timber wolf and the big chested moose; of the trappers and hunters who according to another of the nation’s folklores stalk, aim, kill and live here in rugged, off-the-land expression of some vague, unformulated Canadian paradigm. In reality the sound of gunshot must be extremely rare and many of the trees below will have never even seen a human being wandering among their neighbours or resting at the base of their trunks. It is a startling fact to consider that there must be innumerable spots and locations in Canada’s North where not a single human being has stood throughout the entire history of the species, the Inuit and First Nations peoples having never been anything like numerous enough to have conquered and explored all parts of the upper continent.

We continue along, floating on the air, the now endless vista of evergreen conifer giving the viewer a strange sensation of timelessness. How can time be said to exist in a place where nothing ever changes? Humanity’s imperial conquest of nature, the planet’s own virulent cancer, has yet to spread and do its work in these remote lands – though not, increasingly, for lack of trying: for unexpectedly and very suddenly the canopy breaks, the forest stops dead, and your dreamlike state cascades away as a great and tremendous scar on the face of the Earth starts drifting into view. Enormous, filthy, dusty and thirsty, an immense rape of the land which has felled and upturned ancient forest for a huge mining project which utterly dwarfs the nearby town of Fort McMurray, now also visible – its roofs glistening in the sun at the site’s far corner. This is but one mine of the so-named “tar-sands”, Canada’s primary source of crude oil, a tremendous boost to the Alberta economy, the greatest hope of the Canadian dollar and the bane of environmentalists domestic and foreign alike. The entire scene is certainly hideous, though how else could the process of petroleum extraction possibly look? From my bird’s eye view it presents as a vast, artificial, dystopian desert of sand, muck and industry; with vast gravel roads linking numerous digging sites and linking mysterious so-called “tailing” ponds of extraction by-product – epitomes of oily, tarry sickness and pollution; networks of corpulent pipes running the length and breadth of the disaster; construction-site equipment and yellow, earth-moving machines and vehicles so huge they are easily discernible from cruising altitude; then great swathes of sandy, tree-robbed earth left stranded and desolate with a view to future site expansion. Present this horrible overview to the head of Greenpeace and the poor man would probably hang himself in the business-class lavatory. Canada’s tar-sands fire at the environment through a double barrel: in the first they obviously serve to feed man’s insatiable thirst for gasoline, a carbon-based fuel; secondly, this form of oil extraction is in itself one of the dirtiest and least efficient, sending bountiful quantities of pollutants high into the atmosphere and draining the land of the enormous quantities of water – fresh water – required for use in the mining process. And yet for all that, for all the filth and wheeze, this is one of those sights which cannot but engender that particular sensation of genius – the feeling of sheer awe that comes simply through the virtue of something being both man-made and of enormous scale, and of having a great and controversial purpose no matter how dastardly or unedifying the spectacle. The mining operation at Fort McMurray must be significantly larger than most of the world’s cities in terms of land area occupied. Simply as a statement on the lengths to which men will go – the decades of planning and designing and thinking and digging, just the unending reserves of patience, persistence and determination expended to secure existing standards of living and enhanced future prospects, efforts of such physical enormity and complexity stand testament to the sinister greatness of industrial mankind. For all the problems of our crumbling, self-satisfied Western civilisation we still know a material boon when we see it and will – even in our current decadent state – slave for decades to see it through to fruition. Even a fleeting view of the oil-sands impresses one with the enduring power of humanity as a striving, marching, achieving force, and furthermore – considering the conditions in which the oil sands workers must operate – the vital importance of adversity as one of the greatest powers driving the onward progress of the species.

But McMurray and its mines are soon behind us. We’re on the final leg of our journey, on this occasion into Calgary International, though even with only an hour or two remaining the landscape still has two last rolls of the dice, albeit familiar ones seen and enjoyed on previous excursions. The forest gives way below Edmonton and once again the golden wealth of Prairie Canada shimmers and shines in the afternoon sun. Field after field of wheat and other crops; a milder, gentler assault on the land though an assault nonetheless, spreading all the way South to Montana and far beyond, and penetrating deep into Calgary’s suburban commuting belt. As we close in for final approach, a glance to the right gives the foothills of, again, the Rockies, with the signature snow-caps further to the West; the Alpine upheaval hugging Calgary’s flank and providing a stunning backdrop to the pristine, glassy skyline. More or less out of nowhere, as is its wont, urban Canada has suddenly emerged. Strange fantasies about being lost in the wilderness are vanquished by the concrete certainty of a million other beings in close proximity, though a deep sense of isolation is every bit as possible here as it would be on any lonely subarctic adventure. As the aircraft finally hits terra firma and taxis over to its arrival gate you cannot but be struck anew by the startling variety and grandeur of the lands presented before you, as dishes on a tray, over the preceding few hours. From the white and cliff of the frozen near-polar to the alien and lunar of the far, far tundra; from the deep green mystery of the Canadian Shield’s canopy to the bread and feed of the gentle yellow prairie; from the coast, bash and thunder of the New Found Land to the Alps of the West from God’s own hand this, Canada, from top to bottom, from North to South and from East to West is without question one magnificent country: from a distance. The critical missing ingredient is cohesion, the fact that even as I employ the term in its conventional meaning this notion of Canada as a “country” in any sense beyond the geographical or merely administrative seems doubtful at best. I refer to cohesion at a “street” or social level – Canadians as a people with a unity, a sense of belonging, a common national purpose and a sense of shared destiny; cohesion in the shape of patriotism – the selfless concern for the welfare of one’s own people. All of this is absent North of forty-nine, authentic blood-and-bones nationhood still-born before it could ever take a breath. The world and its mother knows by now of the English-French divide and the schism it rips through the heart, if such there be, of this society; but outsiders’ ignorance of the wider and deeper malaise – the loose gummed, slacked jawed vitamin deficiency of Canadian facelessness, is almost total. Having lived for many years among Canadians and being, in law, now one of them myself, the obvious question presents itself. I say “obvious” though admittedly it is really only so from the standpoint of the curious immigrant, less so to one born and raised in Canada or, conversely, to someone with no experience whatever of the country. The question is this: what in the end does it actually mean to be a Canadian? What is the point of labelling oneself “Canadian” beyond gaining the administrative privileges of citizenship and suffrage? When these people present themselves to outsiders as “Canadians” exactly what statement are they making about themselves beyond an unfounded claim to have nicer than average manners, or to make some dreary protestation against an accusation of being American?

Now of course the challenge of national distinction is hardly one that can be thrown at the feet of Canadians alone – at a certain level what, in the final analysis, does it mean to be identified with any country? With Portugal or Tonga or Malawi? The wider question of the relevance of such antiquities as nation-states, national borders, national-ism and national-anything in our globalising age is enormous and complicated and beyond the scope of this work, though we have made some tentative, toe-dipping explorations of the subject – and will make some more further on. But first I must give a direct and truthful answer to my own question: that being that by now in this twenty-first century, with loyalism dead, the crown all but buried and the French a world apart, it means of course precisely nothing to be a Canadian, any more than it means something to be Arizonan or Ohioan or Tasmanian, or to hail from the Home County suburbs outside of London in England. If it is a statement on anything it is one on nothing more than geographical accident of birth – which side of that pointless continental boundary a particular person was born on. But what is really important, however, is not what one such as myself – in the end, still an outsider – will say in answer to the Canadian conundrum, it is the alibis that Canadians themselves will strain to create as they seek to justify, to themselves as well as to others, the very point of their having a country of their own.

Introspection is a power denied the Canadian people. The society they’ve constructed over a century and a half has been predicated on unthinking aversion to Americanism and lazy subservience to power. It is not a solid basis for any kind of culture, much less one promoting thought or independent study, or national self-examination or the serious recording and passing down of tradition and history. Far from it – Canadians’ ignorance of their own country’s history is gaping and in its way actually quite impressive. Few middle-class, seemingly educated Canadians could tell you, for instance, the name of the Prime Minister who led their country through the Second World War. A reasonable minority could probably name the nation’s inaugural head of government, though far fewer the first head of state, and many more wouldn’t know the difference between the two. Similarly the year of Confederation itself would be borderline, somewhere between uncommon knowledge and unsolved mystery, as would the identity of the town where the process (of Canada’s birth) got underway in 1864. Indeed it is dispiriting to consider that hundreds of high-school children in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island are likely also ignorant of the identity of the town where the modern Canadian entity was born: even the most seminal moments in the national story are not immune from the quicksand drag of deadly ignorance. Unaware of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham prior to reading this book? Don’t worry – at a conservative estimate ninety-five percent of the Canadian people were right there with you. As for the passing of the Statute of Westminster, the moment at which Canada like all other dominions of the British Empire became a de facto sovereign nation-state, I’d be willing to wager there are professors of history at the University of Toronto who’ve never heard of it.

History is the step by step record of a nation’s societal development and political evolution. Almost invariably written over the ages by buglers, brigands, exploiters and victors, inherent to history are quite naturally the biases of omission and exaggeration. From the latter (and to an extent also the former) comes the spectre and the glory of national myth – of rambunctious or swashbuckling genius, alleged tremendous courage and imagined spotless virtue. Typically national myth is personified in the form of heroes or heroines like Joan of Arc or Winston Churchill, or Ned Kelly or James Bowie and so on. (I speak of myths born of history – not the King Arthur variety rooted entirely in fiction). The presence of a collective mythology – a national story – relies on the foundation of basic agreed facts, such as the facts that Mr. Churchill did actually live, did serve as British Prime Minister and did indeed defeat Mr. Hitler in a tremendous armed conflict. That the English will almost to a man insist on depicting Mr. Churchill as something other than the blood-lusting savage and war-criminal the man undoubtedly was is not actually the issue. The point is that this desire to propagate patriotic stories – truths, lies, exaggerations and all – can only be symptomatic of a thriving national culture and vibrant sense of collective identity. It drives the passing down through the generations of the story of the nation’s past, however questionable the accuracy may sometimes be, and with it – crucially – an explanation for the state of the country’s present. That there are not even Canadian myths speaks brutally to the fact of the Canadian non-culture, and in this way the absence of a widely acknowledged Canadian national story militates very directly against the objective existence of a prevailing “Canadian” reality. It takes us back to what on God’s green Earth the point of being a Canadian actually is. I pressed a friend of many years’ standing on just this central question.

“For me, Canadian means...” he paused, frowning and spreading his palms wide as he strained for an answer while staring into some meaningless television programme.

“Yes?”

“It means that... it means that I believe in things... it means, you know...”

He was clearly struggling, but I needed to hear more. He believed, as a Canadian, in “things”?

“Go on,” I said patiently, “Being a Canadian means that you believe in what things?” After another pause he finally came up with something:

“Healthcare.” He nodded vigorously as he spoke, to affirm back to himself the supposed intellectual force of his own answer. “I believe in Canadian healthcare. Healthcare for everyone. That’s a Canadian ideal. That’s why we’re separate.”

Now this response, while clearly nonsensical, is far from unusual. In fact I can truthfully state that some variant on the theme of government-run “healthcare” was the single commonest answer I received when challenging Canadians to define at least some facets of their national identity. A clear majority, so challenged, would revert instinctively to such matters of mere political policy to, in their words, “distinguish” the fact of their country’s existence – and by this they did not mean Canada as distinguished from Greece, Yemen or Tonga; they meant, of course, from the wicked United States. South of the border – as no Canadian will ever fail to remind you – the healthcare system as administered by government is restricted to senior citizens or the most desperately poor, leaving the majority of Americans to fend for themselves under a system of private medical insurance that millions, as has been well documented, cannot afford. The tens of millions of medically “uninsured” in the U.S. are those who are financially struggling while not being quite impoverished enough to meet the strict eligibility criteria for Medicaid and other U.S. government programs. But in the kindly, humane, unfailingly virtuous land to the North, all are covered under a taxpayer financed healthcare fund that turns not a woman nor a child away from its hospital entrances, ever. On the contrary, so the story goes, the infectious and the contagious; the smelly, starving infirm and the wheezing homeless diseased are positively embraced at the door the moment they stagger in! Group-hugged by the underpaid medical staff and ubiquitous redneck security guards, all straining to put on a show of forced, synthesised Canadian humanity! This is Canada they implore, here we look out for everyone, here you’re safe and here you’re cared for because here – the unstated logic goes – because here we’re simply better, kinder people; superior human beings.

Aside from the crude bigotry that invariably lurks beneath trumpeted measures of national superiority, even (and perhaps especially) seemingly benign measures, the absurd manner in which Canadians will leap onto the “healthcare” bandwagon to embrace X-rays, urine tests, prostate exams and colorectal surgery as a substitute fervent nationalism is indicative of a deeper cultural malaise. It leaves the ideal of Canada, it seems to me, stationed in a strange and rather unflattering place. America smiles at Miss Liberty, England beholds St. Paul’s, France reveres at the Louvre, even Australia re-shines the Opera House, but Canada? Canada is parked somewhere between the outpatient clinic and the terminal ward, hardly emblematic of a patriotic, confident, forward-thinking people, secure in the heritage of a well grounded nation. In any event in the early part of this twenty-first century this great cross-border policy difference has begun to fade, with creeping privatisation of health provision in Canada becoming more and more obvious, and significant moves towards greater government involvement in the sector being implemented amid controversy in the USA. Alas for Canada’s sickness-management patriots, continental convergence on healthcare policy threatens to dilute and ultimately eliminate their main (and for some last) stand in defence of the indefensible.

Prior to the post-War developments in public healthcare, English-Canadians still had the apron strings of the mother-country to cling to. A social night out was biscuits and tea, the national anthem was God Save the King, William Lloyd-Jones kept thinkers in line, the flag of the nation was a British Red Ensign. For all its repression of spirit and the intellect, the old imperial Canada did at least have a tangible, fixed identity to cling to, and was comfortable with the reactionary colonial mentality that it more or less mandated. But the years moved on, a post-war generation came of age and even Canada’s rigid, purse-lipped milieu could not escape the radicalism of the sixties – albeit a mild, rather befuddled Anglo-Canadian variant of said radicalism. Amid great controversy Prime Minister Lester Pearson tore down the Red Ensign, original dominion flag of Canada, the British colours lodged Australian-style in the top-left, and replaced it with the modern Maple Leaf standard, something ostensibly more “Canadian” in character. Then in 1968 Trudeau swept into power on a campaign that consisted most prominently of his hurtling his own self into swimming pools full of virile young women. He brought with him the modern liberal’s disdain for sacrifice, contempt for tradition, disdain for history and – as discussed at length – intolerance for dissent. The ghastly old order was in some part gone, though its forces of mental stultification and restrictive small-mindedness would have more than enough power to see them through even this new era of Trudeauesque frivolousness and triviality.

Prior to the 1960s and the conscious break from the nation’s past, Canadians were undoubtedly and for that matter proudly and authentically distinct from their Southern cousins. Now it seems that they require laws to be passed to help propagate what is left of their identity. The Canada Health Act (CHA), passed in 1984, was the culmination of decades’ of federal-provincial wrangling over the financing of the provinces’ healthcare systems. Contrary to a belief almost universally held among Canadians, the Canada Health Act is not the legislative foundation of public, universal-access healthcare in Canada – it merely outlines the conditions of the Federal Government’s contribution to the provincial governments’ autonomous healthcare systems. Yet this fundamental misconception about the Canada Health Act is so pervasive and so powerful that this prosaic piece of legalese has attained something close to biblical status in the country. The manner in which the average Canadian will cling to the CHA and instantly and unthinkingly bristle at even the remotest suggestion of healthcare reform – at calls for a more honest discussion about the role of privately financed care, for instance – is interesting and in its way very telling. It is quite clear that sensitivities much deeper and much baser than the socio-political are being pricked, and when the CHA is considered in its exalted, quasi-cultural context, this kind of response makes perfect sense. The passage of this bill may in retrospect be said to have attained a significance that in their very wildest dreams its proposers and supporters could never have imagined, and that even today the Canadians who worship this legislation cannot comprehend. This was not just a healthcare law: this was embryonic surrogate nationhood. From the 1980s on, with the Canadian constitution repatriated and the connection to Britain finally and irrevocably severed, the Canada Health Act has for millions of people become as the very title-deed to Canada itself. When you challenge the CHA, you are to all intents and purposes querying the very essence of the nation. I repeat since it is worth repeating: “healthcare” was the single most common answer I received when challenging English Canadians to provide a distinguishing facet of their nationality. Anyone who doubts the veracity of my claim should consider an 2012 Ipsos-Reid poll on national identity, in which a staggering 53% of Canadian respondents chose to define Canadian identity by “the fact that Canada has free healthcare”.[ii] Now in many respects a public healthcare system for all is an admirable attainment in its own right. But what of this imagined link to patriotism? Just what is inherently Canadian about public health provision? Just about every government on Earth, and certainly all but one in the first world, provides a universal-access healthcare system as part of its social infrastructure, and Canada was a long way from being the first nation to institute such a policy. The perfectly obvious answer is that what is inherently “Canadian” about healthcare is the entirely spurious and infantile point of its being somehow “not American”. It serves as a prop, allowing this country to position itself in shining distinction to the Great Satan and this puerile picture of the uncouth behemoth to the South kicking its impoverished sick out of opulent private hospitals and squeezing its middle class dry with extortionate, stock-market pleasing insurance premiums. When you strip the phenomenon of Canadian healthcare-patriotism down to its bare bones, it serves as simply another way for Canadians to introduce their country as not-the-United States – in other words, to own up to the fact that they do not in any real sense have a country at all. And as we sit here now in the early twenty first century with continental convergence in the arena of healthcare policy a clear prospect, a very awkward question is posed: what alibi will Canadians fall back upon next to explain their existence to the outside world and, even more importantly, to each other?

I suppose I should pause at this point, since it occurs to me that this entire train of thought could be utterly baffling to many readers. Can it really be the case (a Russian, a Fijian or a Martian might say) that an entire people seek to define their very presence on the world map by the social policies of their recent governments? Is it conceivable that a peoples’ collective sense of themselves could actually be that shallow? The ghastly answer is yes, it could, and like all tin-pot tribalisms the yelping bugle of Canadian disease-treatment blasts cheerfully away impervious to some hard realities. The first, at a very practical level, is that every day long caravans of Canadian citizens cross into the U.S. to pay cash for health services rather than endure the lengthy waiting times made inevitable by their own public system. The second point is much the more important as it goes to the very core of the real malaise, that of Canadian un-society: exactly what sort of people, it must be asked, trumpet their alleged prowess in sickness management as their crowning collective achievement and defining national characteristic? Is this the mindset of a people confident in the global future and their own role in it, or does paint a caricature of a rather different country? One of fretful middle-class couples in their fifties, huddled on sofas in thankful relief to not have some dastardly illness and hoping against hope that they don’t ever contract one? Religiously attending weekly check-ups with their taxpayer-funded doctors, pleadingly seeking assurance that they are not close to some horrible death or other? An obsession with healthcare is an obsession with disease – it amounts in the end to an excessive preoccupation with death. This is hardly a platform upon which lives are going to be lived to their full potential, being instead indicative of a society that places a greater emphasis on pessimism than it does on optimism. Americans, in stark contrast, will hotly debate issues like public healthcare and have done so for decades, but have never and could never shrink to the point of seeing medicine, the artificial elongation of unhappy lives, as an expression of their nationhood – as a central component of their national ideal – of the so-called “American Dream” and its aspiration of success through personal sacrifice. The American people simply do not go through life on the perennial assumption that the roof is about to cave in. And when it does cave in as from time to time it must, they are better prepared as individuals for the gruelling task of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and starting afresh. The greater heights and the deeper depths of the American economic model have at least fashioned a people hardier and tougher of the mind, and so better prepared than their Canadian counterparts for the no-holds-barred competition of the unfolding one-world marketplace.

Canadians cross the border to shop, Canadians cross the border to holiday, Canadians cross the border for outpatient services. And I am struck by the thought that a large number of the Canadians who travel South, for whatever reason, never return home: in the period from 1960 to 2013 just under 1.3 million Canadians were granted Permanent Resident immigration status in the USA.[iii] This figure excludes those who moved to the U.S. on temporary work or student visas, often staying for years in the process; it does not count foreign-citizen residents of Canada who decided to forsake their new Canadian life for a bigger, better, happier American one; it obviously ignores the not insignificant number of Canadians who simply moved to the U.S. illegally; and finally it stands for comparative purposes against a Canadian population that over that same period averaged a mere 26 million people.[iv] This has been little short of a southbound stampede out of the country. An orderly, respectable Canadian stampede – but a stampede nonetheless, and who can really blame the exiles from the North? In Canada, over time, one comes to feel constrained by a force that extends beyond mere risk-aversion and spills over into some form of psychological imprisonment. Canadian reserve – Canadian caution as strangely manifested through the handkerchief-clutching healthcare snivel serves only to counter the free-thinking exuberance of cleverer, more creative people. Just how many film makers, playwrights, philosophers, innovators and plain hard workers would choose a mental and spiritual East Germany over the freedom and potential of the West? North of forty-nine you don’t just encounter fear of disease or fear of failure, you’ll meet fear of the new, fear of change, fear of expression, fear of idea, even fear of success. Fear of bad-mannered, impolite, ostentatious, show-off success. Can it really sustainable for much longer, the Canadian mindset? Can it really be sustained as the clock ticks down on national frontiers and the cosy little certainties they call into being? As Canada is to be flung wide open and laid fully bare before the howling winds of great global change? Economically the country will be prosperous enough to see it through this storm – it has enough natural wealth and undiscovered mineral to more or less maintain its existing standard of living. At the very least Canada should continue to provide secure employment for most of its children. The wages will be stagnant and may even decline in real terms as earnings level out globally under the mandates of trans-national economic liberty and the unrestricted free movement of capital, goods and the peoples of the world. The economic gap between wealthy and impoverished nations will start to close, as it has already started to close, as the very construct of the nation-state decays back into the soil. Certainly the territory now known as Canada will face its economic challenges – as will all parts of the First World – though these should certainly be surmountable depending on the pace and thrust of the revolution. But the point is that the cultural impact will be immense. The terrible Canadian reserve, that dread of thought, and all that fraudulent formality and hateful prissiness will all of them be sucked out and away by the hurricane of globalisation. Dreaded philosophy will roar on in; and with it debate, hot-blooded passion and idea and unrestrained, unembarrassed freedom of expression and decisiveness of action. The country will become richer, and harder-working. The literature of the land will lose its parochial self-congratulation and horrendous restriction of vocabulary. The sciences and the arts will begin to prosper. Society will be harder and harsher but happier. All in all a devastating blow for the concept of Canada: though what a release, in the end, for the Canadian people.

We’ve digressed, though usefully, and now the interrogation must resume. What does it mean to be a Canadian? The heated lamp must shine again onto the sweaty forehead of the quivering suspect. Laconic, mild-mannered, if he comes from the middle class then probably also prim. So many of them are so dreadfully, so maddeningly prim; unsmiling, cold, self-centred; these are traits widespread though not universal in the country. Eyebrows high and thoughtless. Facial expression set to moderately blank, as always; when is the last time a serious thought rippled across its edifice? Gentle of manner and, throughout the interview – that ghastly word again – polite. All in all seemingly a harmless creature. To those unfamiliar with this person and the millions just like him, our treatment of the man may seem unduly harsh. Utterly unwarranted, even. Cruel. Surely, the world may say, surely Canadians are nice people? Isn’t Canada the nicest country in the world? Aren’t they the North Americans who are not Americans – who don’t bomb foreign countries and who say “please” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome”? For what more could you possibly ask? I was actually in Canada, they’ll say. I’ve been there. I went skiing near Vancouver, went up the CN Tower in Toronto and practiced my French in the cafes of Montreal. All the waitresses smiled. Everyone seemed laid back. Even the homeless people seemed nice for goodness sake. So why are you picking on this man, this stolid representative of that fine nation’s Anglo majority? What has he ever done to you? What has he ever done to anyone?

The straight answer is that he’s done nothing. This, I’m afraid, is the root of the whole problem. By this I do not mean that “he’s done nothing wrong”, I mean that he’s done, well, nothing. He’s imagined nothing. Philosophised on nothing. Considered nothing. He lives for nothing, stands for nothing, believes in anything, swallows everything; in all probability he’s never risked so much as a fingernail in the pursuit of his own betterment. Whether he’s blue collar or white, the straightforward class system of the supposed New World, makes no difference here. Either he dropped out of high-school and went to work in a paper mill, or an automotive factory, or on the Canadian Pacific railway; or he majored in finance at the University of Toronto and found a safe little cubicle amid the brokers and bankers of Bay Street. Failing that he took a nondescript humanities course at York and ended up advising the Liberal Party of Ontario on youth and environmental policy. He is not a bad person. He’s not an especially good person, either: true virtue is impossible in the absence of character. “Canadian” he calls himself, and administratively speaking I suppose it’s true. We’ve seen his passport. We’ve inspected his Social Insurance Number, his OHIP card, his driver’s licence and his birth certificate. His bona fides are impeccable. Toronto born, Canadian raised, he’s driven to the U.S. a few times but apart from that has never travelled abroad. Unquestionably and without doubt a Canadian – a paper Canadian, but what is an actual Canadian? What does one of these people actually amount to in flesh and blood? What is it that separates them from the whole of the outside world – from, it must be asked, the United States of America? Our quarry shifts in his seat and folds his arms in that hugging manner characteristic of defensiveness. He’s about to say something substantial – you can always tell since, alas, it’s a rare event – something that by his standards at least would count as weighty, daring and portentous:

“Moderation,” he says finally. “Moderation. A Canadian is fundamentally a moderate. We’re a restrained people and we don’t go in for the extreme brands of politics you see down in the States.”

This is another of the answers you will most often hear. In a way it neatly parallels the excuse for Canada’s dearth of public discourse as peddled by John Cruickshank and countless others; it also represents a straightforward widening of the unending cross-border Medicare comparison into more general political considerations – always always always within the narrow continental framework. As a standalone point we can dismiss it on the basis of observations already made. When nobody in the non-existent national discussion ever plucks up the courage to actually say anything, we all are moderates now! Political moderation just falls into place by default, like cold air in a warm room. Its only effect is to reinforce the intellectual permafrost of Canadian thought. Nonetheless this attempt to justify an international border by mere differences in political emphasis is striking. Understand that I refer not to separation of political ideology, but to simple differences of emphasis in precisely the same “liberal”, “left” or “conservative” ideologies. The divide between communism and capitalism necessitated an Iron Curtain; the extent to which a Canadian Tory or a U.S. Republican would lower the tax burden doesn’t warrant so much as a handbag search in a customs shack. The Canadian may congratulate himself on being more “moderate” than his U.S. counterpart, but he is not distinguished in this respect from the Democrat in Dallas being more moderately to the left than the radical protestor on the streets of San Francisco. But “moderation” in this context does not necessarily have a political connotation – far from it in fact: Canadians, taken as a whole, are as apolitical a people as you could possibly hope to meet. More generally it is employed to suggest that “we the Canadian people” are mild in mannerism and general disposition as well as in any ideological or political sense. Moderation of tone, of diction, of body-language, of facial expression and overall demeanour – this is the self-description of the modern Canadian nationalist. It ties closely into the self-congratulation of alleged Canadian politeness, with its unstated implication that other groups have much to learn from the country when it comes to personal behavioural standards. In this way the inherent decency of Canadian man and Canadian woman amounts, once again, to an actually rather sinister allegation when followed through to its logical end. Just as in the incessant parroting about universal healthcare, when stripped right down it suggests quite directly that Canadians consider themselves distinct from their American cousins through the simple fact of their happening to be a superior class of people, with enhanced standards of individual morality, greater familiarity with the concept of decorum and – it seems to me implied – a deeper knowledge of personal hygiene to boot.

Aside from the dividing line of nationality, there are the other demarcations of human prejudice with which we are all familiar – ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status etc.; I list them here only to point out that no classification of bigotry can claim to be less morally squalid than any other. What is significant, though – and what is uniquely Canadian in this regard – is the never stated, block-headed notion that immoderate statements cease to be venomous if they are stated in a moderate way. The Canadian will march from now to the end of time believing that, for instance, drivel to the tune of “we’re just nicer people than the Americans are” is something other than basely prejudicial through the virtue of their imparting such words in civilised undertones concurrent with suitably restrained arm and hand motions. In contrast the American venting similar imbecilities about the people of Mexico can typically be counted on to do so in a rasping, nasal, embittered and overtly hateful fashion. He makes next to no attempt to conceal his bigotry, thus at least doing us the courtesy of opening himself up to disapprobation and thorough cross-examination. With the nieces and nephews of honest Uncle Sam you know precisely where you stand, with the bloodless automatons of moderate Canadian mush you can dally with malignancy and never even know it. The concession we can make to this form of Canadian “moderation” (that is, moderation of behaviour rather than of ideology) is this: to return to our overarching thread we are forced to accept that yes, differences of emphasis in given behavioural patterns – that is slight differences in what could generally be termed “the culture” can, just, explain the presence of a patrolled, semi-closed international frontier. But it’s a close run thing in this instance, and made all the more marginal by the dubious veracity of these rumours of Canadian inherent virtue.

In cases such as this, of a smaller nation dwarfed by a neighbouring colossus, much if not all of such prejudicial silliness is born of a straightforward inferiority complex. Self-knowledge of weakness often manifests in compensatory shows of imagined strength, usually with the chest-puffed stridency of the proverbial undersized Napoleon. The inferiority complex actually has the trappings of a superiority complex at first glance. In addition to the conventional wisdom of Canadians being more moral people than their American cousins, we also learn that Canadians are “better educated”, “more intelligent”, “more worldly”, “more widely travelled”, “classier” and generally more “sophisticated” in some vague, ill-defined way. The truth or otherwise of these assertions is not the point. The point is in Canadians feeling the need to make these boasts in the first place – to dream into reality the nationalist life-preservers of difference and distinction and with them barrier and division; to justify, to themselves, that line forty-nine however few the straws there are to clutch. Inevitably you will come across intelligent, adult Canadians resorting to extremes of superficiality in their quest to separate themselves from the enemy to the South. The alleged superiority of Canadian lager, the special talents of the nation’s ice hockey commentators, the lower probability of one being savagely murdered, a Canadian connection to the invention of basketball, national snow-clearing prowess, lower air temperatures even metric speed limits will find themselves dragged out, dusted down and employed in all earnestness to fly the flag for the non-American state. Once loyal to Britain, now loyal to ball-games and beer. But even this trivial pursuit stands as an improvement over those who can say nothing, the countless Canadians – possibly a majority – who are left literally speechless as they seek to put into words their almost genetic idea that not-being-American is an adequate rationale for a separate nation-state in the twenty first century. In a Calgary restaurant an articulate, well educated woman in her late twenties was asked what in theory could prevent Canada pursuing a measure of political unity with the United States. Instantly she raised a clenched pair of fists as though in defence against physical assault, bared her teeth and stared into the distance with an expression of great patriotic ferocity. It was the kind of expression I could imagine Genghis Khan wearing as he might have surveyed, ahead of a battle, the hapless enemy arranged before him: a peculiar mixture of tribal hatred, fearsome blood-lust and the eager anticipation of tremendous violence. It was a physiological response of an intensity not often seen in her countrymen and women, and was, I presumed, going to be backed up by a powerful, erudite contribution outlining with force and clarity why such a ludicrous proposal could never get off the ground. Alas, though inevitably, I was to be disappointed:

“No, that’s impossible!” she shrieked. “We’re Canadian up here! This is Canada!”

Indeed, but surveying the situation contemporarily, why are there two separate countries? What does it actually mean, to you, to be a Canadian?

“It means that...” – short pause – “It means that I am Canadian!”

Her shriek was reaching a higher pitch. Still she stared over my shoulder, her fists clenched tighter, her teeth positively glowering at the non-existent, never to be identified enemy she and her people were straining to fight against. There was a longer pause. That facial expression tightened still further – becoming almost fascist in its triumphalist rage.

“We’re Canadian” she repeated, now in a reverential undertone – Canada as some sort of mystical entity demanding worship and deference while requiring no more explanation than God, ghosts or the colour of the wind. “Up here we have a whole, separate country. We’re not Americans. We. Are. Like... Canadian!”

She dropped her fists and redirected her stare to me, replete with an air of final victory. Was I now expected to grovel for leniency in the terms of my surrender? In this short exchange she had spoken without thinking and argued without reasoning while oblivious to her oblivion – and therein, I reflected, some definition of Canada does probably lie. Like the country she was trying to defend the poor girl had plenty of words but was lost for a thought: Canadian because she’s Canadian because she’s Canadian; she is, because she is, because she darn well is. To our intelligent but constrained young woman should go the final word on this, an orphan nation’s impossible quest to find a home of its own.

The smaller the stakes, with multiple apologies to Kissinger, the deeper the hatreds with which the fight will be fought. The Canadian dilemma does not, I think, amount to an existential crisis – not least because a crisis by its very nature is something diagnosed brutally, faced determinedly and where possible tackled ruthlessly – traits the Canadian character is trained to shrink from. It is instead an existential drift – a malaise of identity so stubborn, so unfathomable and so incurable that in many respects the best course of action is just to grin and giggle and act as if it just isn’t there. Thus is the question relegated to the level of the frivolous or irrelevant, in turn directly (and at first glance irrationally) leading to considerable bitterness on the rare occasions it comes up for discussion. It is a strange facet of our nature that when people subconsciously know a contentious issue to be ultimately unimportant but cannot for whatever reason accept the fact of this unimportance, they will almost invariably be moved to great anger whenever discussion of said issue reignites. The anger is in a way cathartic: by generating these passions they are compensating for the disconcerting inanity of the underlying issue. It is for most a people a very unsettling thing to have to seriously consider: is there, in the final analysis, a point to this country? Does Canada as a concept actually matter? By which I mean: if the U.S.-Canadian border were to disappear tomorrow and the nation found itself subsumed into the great empire to the South, could it be argued in all honestly that the lives of Canadians would change in any serious way? Exactly how would such a “revolutionary” change manifest itself? Taxes would be collected by the IRS rather than the CRA. The interest rate would be set in Washington; the Canadian economy is largely integrated into America’s in any case. The Queen’s head would disappear from the banknotes. These changes would in the end seem administrative and even superficial. Economically, some may argue, the “American way” of social organisation could be inimical to alleged “Canadian values”: the poor might get poorer and the rich might get richer under the comparative brutality of the American economic system. But it is current at the time of writing that the reach and extent of redistributive economic policies in both nations have been converging from around 2010 on, with (as stated) greater moves towards universal healthcare in the U.S. and tentative tightening of welfare provision in historically more statist Canada. Even that fundamental point of concern would in the end not amount to much. The metric system of weights and measures would go, though only temporarily – only pending belated American adoption of the undisputed global standard. The few pillars of Canadian identity, and regional identity, would be unmoved. Hockey would still be ice-hockey and the Leafs would still be losing. The Quebecois, being stubborn, would still be French. Maritimers would still have an accent. Snow would still be white. The fundamentally North American character of Canada would if anything be culturally enhanced; It certainly could not be threatened. Even Canadian polite – dear, ghastly, creepy, fraudulent old Canadian polite would still thrive and succeed for a time, though only for a time: thank the lord it would disappear in the end, having being slowly worn down and out by American decency and authenticity. And so the stark and threatening truth is that no, in the end the idea of Canada does not matter in the least and in his or her heart every Canadian knows it. And when the concept is examined aloud in the only context in which it realistically can be examined – that is Canada as related to the United States – it comes as no surprise that with the grit and ferocity of the man on borrowed time, hackles will be raised and emotions will be heightened.

The 1988 federal general election stands out in modern Canadian history for a campaign dominated by a substantive issue. In a comfortable country like this it is asking a lot to expect that a deep ideological fissure will scythe through the body politic, separating fundamentally opposing worldviews on the nature of society and the role and nature of the state. Instead party politics in Canada has long since been reduced to a bland spectacle of competing managerial teams squabbling over the petty details of day to day civil administration. Canada is of course hardly unique in this respect; many nations are infected with a mainstream party politics of wholly careerist, non-ideological groups straining to find minor differences on trifling issues between themselves and their supposed opponents. Given Canadians’ largely realised post-war consensus of unending growth and unyielding stability it is hardly surprising that this malaise reached their country in advance of any other nation. There simply has not been that much for political elites to disagree on. Even the ongoing question of Quebec’s constitutional status is in federal politics relegated to the level of sloganeering: whether and when referenda on the province’s future within Canada are held depends solely on the provincial political situation in Quebec, and not that in Canada as a whole. And so when the leaders of the major parties have lined up for televised debates during national election campaigns, there has been little for them to do beyond complaining or boasting about moderate fluctuations in employment and healthcare statistics, and trading mild Canadian jibes. But the 1988 election was different. It hinged almost entirely on the question of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA, later NAFTA) signed some months earlier by Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Decried by opponents as Canada’s death sentence, hailed by its supporters as the nation’s second coming, the free trade debate gripped the country and provided an almost unique opportunity to witness the Canadian people divided and exercised along ideological lines. The FTA’s opponents argued that the agreement’s move towards greater economic integration with America would lead to the wholesale takeover of Canadian corporations by their U.S. rivals, give Washington near-unfettered access to Canada’s vast natural resources, threaten the nation’s healthcare and social programs, and all but eliminate Ottawa’s already constrained level of fiscal independence. This was countered by optimistic (and in the event largely justified) predictions that many Canadian companies would thrive and succeed in the vast and now more accessible U.S. market. In the English-language television debate Mulroney faced his Liberal counterpart and free-trade opponent John Turner. After two hours of wholly forgettable vapourings on domestic non-matters, Turner, speaking with great and uncharacteristic passion, finally got his chance to confront Mulroney on arguably the most significant political development in Canadian history.

“by allowing national treatment of Americans in Canada, without any screening limits on investment, he [Mulroney] has allowed Americans to capture our industry, capture the future of high-tech and information in this country, services industries ... and the Americans can’t believe their good luck! No wonder the Senate of the United States passed this deal in one day! No wonder the House of Representatives passed it in one day! No wonder President Reagan said that this is the fulfilment of the American Dream. We gave away our energy, we gave away our investment, we sold out our supply management and agriculture and we’ve left hundreds of thousands of workers vulnerable...”

Mulroney, utterly lacking Turner’s fire and patriotic fervour, blandly opined that employment prospects for Canadians overall would improve, while acknowledging that certain sectors could be hit by the removal of trade barriers and the influx of hitherto restricted American competition. After getting sidetracked on the semantics of the debate’s organisation, Turner found his passion again and thundered away at Mulroney on some specifics of the free-trade deal (the emphasis is Turner’s):

“I think the Canadian people have a right to know: why, when your primary objective was to get unfettered and secure access into the American market, we didn’t get it? Why you didn’t put clauses in to protect our social programs in this negotiation that we’ll have on the definition of ‘subsidies’ – where the heavyweight of the American Republic will be put in against us. Why did that not happen? Why also did we get a situation where we surrendered our entire energy policy to the United States – something they’ve been trying to achieve since 1956 under the Paley Commission? Why did we abandon our farmers? Why did we open our capital markets so that a Canadian bank can be bought up and we don’t have reciprocal rights into the American market at all! Why did you remove any ability to control the Canadian ownership of our business? These are questions Canadians deserve to have an answer to, and we have not had an opportunity in six hours to deal with them in the way that would make you come out of your shell!”

Mulroney, still with the air of a man debating stamp collecting techniques or the state of the weather, protested at length that he had in fact answered these questions in previous debates, such as that in the three-hour French language debate held the night before. His irretrievably detached manner led Turner to ratchet up his rhetoric, and emotion, to a new level:

“I think the issues happen to be so important for the future of Canada. I happen to believe that you’ve sold us out! I happen to believe that once you enter – once any nation…”

Mulroney, finally roused to animation, raised his voice in anger and, shouting, interrupted:

“Mr. Turner, just one second. You do not have a monopoly on patriotism, and I resent the fact that you’re implication that only you are a Canadian! I want to tell you that I come from a Canadian family, and I love Canada. And that’s why I did it – to promote prosperity, and don’t you impugn my motives!”

Turner: “Once any country yields its economic levers, once a country yields its interests…”

Mulroney (over-talking): “Don’t you impugn my motives, or anyone else’s!”

Turner: “Once a country yields its energy…”

Mulroney: “We have not done it!”

Turner: “Once a country yields its agriculture…”

“Wrong again!”

“Once a country opens itself up to a subsidy war with the United States in terms of definition…”

“Wrong again!”

“… then the political ability of this country to sustain [sic] the influence of the United States – to remain as an independent nation, that is lost forever – and that is the issue of this election.”

Lowering the temperature, perhaps intentionally, Mulroney relied on nostalgia rather than facts to defend his position by waxing lyrical about his ancestor's early settlement and “nation-building” efforts in rural Quebec. He then continued:

“I today sir, as a Canadian, believe genuinely in what I am doing. I believe it is right for Canada; I believe that in my own, modest way I am nation building, because I believe this [the agreement] benefits Canada, and I love Canada.”

Turner acknowledged Mulroney’s and his own (rather more tenuous) roots in the country, then delivered his highly emotive pièce de résistance:

“We build a country East and West and North; we built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For a hundred and twenty years we’ve done it!”

His voice perceptibly quivering:

“With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that; thrown us into the North-South influence of the United States – and will reduce us I am sure to a colony of the United States because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow.”

One signature of the pen. The image is simple, powerful and guaranteed to strike at the heart of every border-clinging Canadian: their country, Canada the Great White North, being signed casually away by a complacent Prime Minister utterly oblivious to the sheer enormity of what he is doing. The roaring American juggernaut barrelling over the horizon, coming to obliterate all that is civilised, easy and deferential. The small, cosy Canadian economy being gobbled up in a heartbeat by the uncouth republican monster. Turner’s contribution, and moreover the heartfelt nature of its delivery, boosted a flagging Liberal election campaign, albeit temporarily, and remains one of the best known public exchanges in the history of Canadian politics. Reinforcing his point was a memorable Liberal campaign advertisement on television which depicted a Canadian official poring over a pencilled outline of the continent, watching as his American counterpart used an eraser to remove the border and unify the two countries. Thrown by the intensity of Turner’s delivery the Prime Minister, responding, tried lamely to take refuge behind an administrative clause of the agreement:

“Mr. Turner, with a document that’s cancellable on six months’ notice? Be serious. Be serious!”

Mulroney suggests that exiting a free-trade treaty with Washington would be an administrative inconvenience, like cancelling a car lease or switching to a new phone provider. The politest thing that can be said of him coming out of this exchange is that he could not have entirely comprehended the trade agreement he had just negotiated. Assuming this to be highly unlikely – as we must – then we are indeed forced to impugn his motives, at least in attempting to conceal from the Canadian people the full ramifications of the FTA.

And what are these ramifications? Well first we must set some terms of reference, and get some agreement on what, in general terms, a free trade agreement actually amounts to. Simply put it is an international pact in which the participating states aim to increase their level of economic interaction through the reduction of tariffs and other trade restrictions. It very obviously allows for the easier movement of tangible goods across frontiers through the reduction or removal of customs duties and other customs restrictions. But much more than that it includes the freer movement of capital flows in and out of the country, thereby allowing for foreign investment and ownership of indigenous businesses or even national assets. Opposition to the FTA within Canada focused heavily on natural resources, and played to the nightmare prospect of control of Canadian timber, oil, gas and even water being transferred to Washington over cigar-chomping business lunches. The subliminal image was of Canada being bought up one clump of forest at a time by the limitless dollars of American corporations and the U.S. Federal Reserve. It enflamed nationalist passions to even greater heights (and deeper depths), but still the fundamental point about free trade was missed. It is this: how is such an agreement to be policed? If either Canada or the USA were to dispute some action by the other country as being in violation of the treaty, and if no bilateral resolution were forthcoming, then how would such a dispute be resolved? Who would be the final arbiter? In this specific case, NAFTA allows for the convening of quasi-judicial “NAFTA panels” consisting of experts from each country in order to arrive at a decision. The European Union – by far the purest and most advanced expression of free trade in the world today – has well established legal mechanisms for the enforcement of its internal treaties and laws. The vital point is that the management of any free trade zone must call into existence supra-national bodies, organs that dictate down their decisions and mandates to member countries. Hence under a “free trade” agreement of any significance the power of national governments is reduced, and so the very concept of the nation-state itself is assaulted. Challenge a set of people to define what makes a “country” – in effect ask them to define the very word – and the responses you will get would be varied and in many cases complex. But a recurring theme in the answers will be that of national liberty: a “country”, by definition, is politically independent. And if this independence is reduced as under free trade arrangements it must be, then the “country” is, by most understandings of the term, less of a country.

Once such a treaty is in place and operational, commercial pressures for its expansion will be brought to bear almost immediately. Corporations whose line of business is not covered by initial free trade provisions will lobby hard to have their interests included in treaty revisions and expansions. The European Union owes its origins in large part to a tentative coal and steel pact reached between West Germany, France, Italy and the low countries in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 1973 the new European Economic Community (EEC) formalised the zone’s expanding areas of interest and added three new member states. Naturally where German, French, British, Spanish and Italian companies were competing in an open cross-border market in virtually every area of economic activity, a growing body of supranational EEC regulation was required to prevent, for example, distorting national subsidies of domestic industries, and to ensure coherence of standards and practices in areas as diverse as labour law, general taxation and environmental policy. Again, the free-trade area must by definition be policed from above the participating national governments – the arrangement could not possibly function otherwise. The 1992 Treaty of Maastricht replaced “Economic Community” with “Union” in the organisation’s name, a honest acknowledgement of the truth that where economic integration goes, political unity must follow, just as Turner argued; in addition to the creation of an almost entirely barrier free single market, Maastricht formally brought hitherto purely national matters such as justice and foreign affairs under the EU’s umbrella and fast-tracked the continent towards adoption of the logical last step in any truly “free” trade zone: a single international currency. Decades of advancement in the European project have bequeathed the EU an executive with a head of government, a consolidated fiscal policy through the levers of money supply and the interest rate as governed by the European Central Bank in most member states, a foreign policy, an embryonic defence policy to parallel (or perhaps usurp) NATO and a legal system that sits atop the supreme courts of individual nations. The European Union has a de-facto single citizenship with absolute freedom of permanent settlement for any EU citizen in any EU state. It has a patrolled and controlled single border – the Schengen Area – encompassing most member nations and, among them, entirely eliminating internal border controls. And all this is quite apart from the staggering level of EU involvement in the day to day internal governance of its constituent countries: laws governing domestic fisheries and agricultural policies stand out, but even ostensibly lesser matters such as (to name but a tiny few) food packaging, toy manufacturing standards, industrial waste, household waste and even traffic speed limits have found themselves subject to EU regulation. Overall, estimates of the amount of domestic legislation passed by national parliaments in direct compliance with EU diktats run as high as eighty per-cent. Remember that this level of EU interference in, say, Portugal’s internal governance would have originated in a well-meaning desire to ensure the smooth and (above all) fair management of a free-trade area. But the very nature of government, the very nature of power, is gravitational: almost through the sheer fact of its existing will it suck new roles and responsibilities under its umbrella of influence as administrators and bureaucrats seek to elongate their careers and dramatically enhance their statuses. Thus does our free trade zone turn gradually but very steadily into a new level of government – in effect, into a super-state: in truth a political nation-state entirely of its own accord.

Incidentally, I refer to the EU’s origins as a “free trade area”. Europe is now much more than that: it is in fact a unified trading bloc. Not only is near-absolute free-trade enforced within the EU’s borders, member states are actually prohibited from negotiating autonomous trade deals with non-European nations. France, for example, could no more sign a trade-expansion or tariff-reduction treaty with China than Massachusetts could with Argentina. Last but by no means least the European Union, as per the terms of the 2009 treaty of Lisbon, now has legal personality. It can, in law, negotiate international agreements and sign international conventions as a legally autonomous party, just as the United States, Brazil, Japan and any other independent nation can.

In that TV debate with John Turner, Prime Minister Mulroney dismissed the FTA as merely a “commercial document”.

All the above considered, any pretence among the general populace that the EU does not in itself constitute a nation or a “country” would, you would think, have been abandoned long ago. Except that it hasn’t. Indeed even now I find myself hesitating to refer to the European Union as a “country” since I appreciate that many if not most readers will consider my usage of the word in this context strange to say the very least, if not entirely inappropriate or even illiterate. What does their probable response tell us? What does it present a commentary on? Little I suppose, beyond what we know already about the immense power of ancient, visceral tribal loyalties and their cast-iron imperviousness to cold, hard fact; that, and the immeasurable potency of gradualism as a force effecting widespread acceptance of revolutionary change. Probably decades hence German and Italian holidaymakers will be trading gentle insults about the virtues of each other’s countries, each blind to the fact that even as I write they unquestionably are the same country.

Of course the enduring separation of language and, with it, culture helps keep delusions of traditional nationhood alive among the people of Europe. But back in the Ottawa television studio on that frosty night in October 1988 John Turner, instinctively, knew that the artificial economic barrier between the United States and Canada was in truth the only thing keep the two peoples separate. A barrier of legal and legalistic nuance, slightly diverging taxation rates and subtleties of bureaucratic approach; a barrier put in place by persons blind to the fact that the manner of day to day governance is a by-product of the nation, not a nation’s raison d’être. Canada as an excuse for its own government is about as sensible as the building of a new house being justified by the need to support a roof; though in marked contrast to Mulroney the Liberal leader must be credited for the clarity of his analysis if not for the completeness of his logic. Unlike a large majority of his countrymen, then as well as now, he understood the tremendous implications of such a treaty for a country like Canada: that in the absence of trade barriers between his country and the United States – that is to say, in the encroaching absence of a separate economic entity – then the already tenuous justifications for Canada’s very existence shrivel to almost nil. It was this deep-rooted instinct that fuelled the emotive nature of his contribution, and the ferocity of much of the anti-free trade rhetoric that predominated the 1988 election campaign.

During that campaign, at the very height of his political career, Mr. Turner very obviously could not pursue his line of reasoning down a logical and obvious route: namely, an honest appraisal as to why Canada should be spared the apparent horrors of an American dominated North-South axis. And in this regard the very bald truth is that like virtually all of his countrymen – just like our fiercely patriotic but entirely incoherent friend in that Calgary restaurant, Mr. John Napier Wyndham Turner, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, would have struggled to provide an answer.

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[1] in part literal

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[i] National Report: Arctic Defence, Toronto Star, 19^th August 2006

[ii] Americans (64%) less likely than Canadians (77%) to Believe War of 1812 had Significant Outcomes, Important to formation [of] National Identity, but still more likely to Commemorate War; Ipsos Reid poll, release date 13^th Feb 2012

[iii] Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status by Region and Selected Country of Last Residence: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2013; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2013; Lawful Permanent Residents, Table 2

[iv] Statistics Canada CANSIM Tables 075-0001 “Historical statistics, estimated population and immigrant arrivals” & 051-0001 “Estimates of population, by age group and sex for July 1, Canada, provinces and territories”

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