David Polansky: Canadians should want to remain distinct

Far from making Canada less like the United States, multiculturalism only Americanises the country further.

(Revellers gathered at the Toronto Raptors’ 2019 NBA championship parade.)

Canada’s recent loss to the United States in the Olympic gold medal game for men’s ice hockey prompted some surprisingly nationalistic responses, for Canada. One in particular that made the rounds and is representative was: “I’d rather be a Canadian with a silver than an American with a gold.”

In some ways, this is a perfectly natural patriotic sentiment: we prefer our country not because it is necessarily the “best,” but because it is ours. After all, you wouldn’t think to exchange your kid for someone else’s just because theirs won the spelling bee and yours did not.

And yet there is something curiously defensive about this expression as well. Part of this is surely due to some of Donald Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric, in conjunction with tariffs, which are obnoxious in their own right. Even so, a good many in the Canadian media are perceiving threats beyond what the evidence warrants.

But one suspects that part of it is also reflexive opposition in light of just how much Canadian culture, and not only Canadian culture, has become Americanised over the past several decades. This has led some commentators to effectively cut the Gordian Knot and insist that Canada is, for all intents and purposes, American — that it is, in the immortal words of The Simpsons, basically just “America Junior”. Speaking as an American living in Canada, that rare and strange breed, I think this goes too far.

As every Canadian knows, and a handful of Americans know, the two countries (or rather, one young country and one proto-country) clashed directly in the War of 1812, and nobody supposes this to have been a civil conflict. Indeed, it was an expression of the divergence between two different experiences of European settlement of North America. One of these consciously sought independence, while the other remained an extension of it, even as both continued that project of settlement.

Its Cajun offshoot notwithstanding, Francophone Canada, of course, has no analogue in the United States. Meanwhile, Anglophone Canada represented a curious and relatively novel development: it maintained genteel British customs in the context of continental expansion rather than an imperial venture. It is not incidental that the most prestigious Shakespearean festival in North America is held in Stratford, Ontario, just as it is not incidental that Victoria, British Columbia, does not resemble any city in the American Pacific Northwest.

Canada’s national experience has admittedly had a certain ambiguity to it: on the one hand accommodating the more distinctive national character of much of its Francophone population; on the other, featuring a certain continuity with its British heritage as a Commonwealth country. Nonetheless, while this has not historically made for robust expressions of national identity, it also does not really resemble the American national experience either.

Perhaps ironically, it is the formal embrace of multiculturalism, going beyond any developments in U.S. law, even in the post-civil rights era, that has produced the strongest convergence between the two countries. For what is the United States but the nation of immigrants par excellence? Thus, it was common to see people celebrating the Toronto Raptors’ NBA championship victory in 2019 as a demonstration of the country’s newfound multicultural identity, with little awareness of how much this represented, in practice, a kind of Americanisation.

It’s true that there have been various attempts, both philosophical and popular, to stake out a Canadian version of multiculturalism that goes beyond the American one, and one can identify fine distinctions between them. And yet, by default, this process has pulled Canada away from its own distinct historical legacy, and the reality is that the rapid mixing of cultures tends to produce a monoculture, and America retains the single greatest influence on global monoculture, though this is admittedly changing.

In any case, this cultural convergence produces its own kind of national anxiety. The belief that Canada is simply an extension of the United States is the flip side of the reliance upon anti-Americanism to define a Canadian national identity. In both cases, America is the true subject. And it may be that the relationship between the two countries is, in some sense, dialectical: the more obsessively Canadians focus on the turbulence of American politics, the more they neglect to attend to the problems in their own country. As those grow increasingly severe, they are compelled to focus even more relentlessly on U.S. pathologies to distract themselves, and around and around we go.

Of course, no country can simply ignore its neighbour, especially when it’s the global hegemon. But recovering a genuine sense of Canada’s own history would go a long way toward ameliorating some of the unhealthy resentment that pervades a good deal of Canadian media.

Ultimately, the lives of nations, like the lives of people, are not fixed or predetermined. Canada could, after all, continue to become more like the United States, although I do not think that is a desirable scenario for either country. Conversely, it could find itself aligning more with Europe, as some seem to wish, though I think this is even less desirable.

To repeat, both Americanisation and reflexive anti-Americanism are the result of Canadians’ failure to seriously engage with their own national history. In her magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West reflects upon the importance of national legacies:

“What would England be like if it had not its immense Valhalla of kings and heroes, if it had not its Elizabethan and its Victorian ages, its thousands of incidents which come up in the mind, simple as icons and as miraculous in their suggestion that what England has been it can be again, now and forever? What would the United States be like if it had not those reservoirs of triumphant will-power, the historical facts of the War of Independence, of the giant American statesmen, and of the pioneering progress into the West, which every American citizen has at his mental command and into which he can plunge for revivification at any minute?”

I think this holds no less true for Canada, mild as its cultural assertions tend to be. Whether its own heroic history and distinctive landscapes can be reinterpreted as fruitful sources of national identity will be a matter of decision for its citizens going forward.

David Polansky has been published in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. Read more from him at Strange Frequencies.