How to learn to love Uncle Sam
Or, lessons on our national day on how to feel Canadian without the loonie, Mounties, frigid temperatures, SARS or Mike Myers
RICHARD GWYN Jul. 1, 2003. Toronto Star
Most people around the world are governed by, and are affected by and are bossed about by, two governments. One government is their own. The other is in Washington.
About the only exceptions are those people who live in poor countries that are of no interest to the new imperialists in Washington. The lives of these forgotten ones are determined instead by their national dictator and by their local warlords (and also, and indeed probably more so, by their entrenched customs and culture and history).
Almost all of us around the world thus are a new kind of colonials. Because of the U.S.' emergence as a global hegemon, all the struggles that have been made to achieve national independence, many of them heroic, have been turned back upon themselves, not entirely so of course, but substantively so in many countries.
It makes little difference whether people live in small countries, like Ireland or Singapore say, or in medium-sized ones such as Canada or Spain, or in large powerful ones like Russia and China. Compared to the U.S., all are in the geo-strategic minor leagues.
Nor does it matter much in which corner of the world people live since there are few patches of land that are now out of reach of U.S. political, diplomatic, financial, economic and cultural power, let alone of its cruise missiles.
Our own governments still matter. But they all spend a good deal of their time looking over their shoulders to see what edicts and diktats and fatwas may emerge from Washington.
For almost everyone, this condition is exasperating. For a great many it is infuriating, unacceptable, humiliating. At best, the Americans are constantly in everyone else's face. At worst, the U.S.' national interests become the interests of all other governments — or are rejected by this or that state at a cost to itself and to its people.
The steep decline in American popularity (according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the U.S.' "unfavourable" rating in Canada is now 34 per cent) can be explained by anger at, and concern about, its specific policies, from rejection of the Kyoto environmental accord to the invasion of Iraq without U.N. approval.
Even if all its policies were benign, though, the U.S.' popularity wouldn't soar back to its levels of a few years back. Today, the U.S. is both global policeman and global nanny. It's the big guy, the know-it-all, whom everyone wants to see taken down a peg.
The sheer fact of the U.S.' unchallengeable power, and of the global pervasiveness of that power explains — entirely aside from what the U.S. may actually do here or there — a good deal of the now widespread anti-Americanism. As novelist Salman Rushdie has shrewdly pointed out, anti-Americanism has become an ideology in its own right, an organizing principle that substitutes for all the other ideologies that, since the end of the Cold War, have all lost all credibility (Islamic extremism as the sole, and lethal, exception to this rule of the collapse of collective beliefs).
From the perspective of Canadians as we look around on Canada Day and wonder where we should go next, there is one clear and overpowering characteristic about this condition of universal colonialism and of a struggle just about everywhere for national autonomy and identity in the face of the intrusiveness of American power.
This characteristic is that everything now happening around the world is completely familiar to us Canadians.
Struggling for autonomy and identity has been our condition for years — more than half a century back to World War II when the U.S. replaced Britain as the dominant colonial power over us. (Before that, we struggled to emerge from the shadow of Britain.)
There's nothing about today's version of universal colonialism — a form of qualified sovereignty, and of dependency upon another country — that Canadians haven't experienced, haven't coped with, and haven't fought both against the outsider and among ourselves.
Thus, it isn't merely the case the people all over the world have become colonials again. They've also all become, in a certain sense, Canadians.
They — Europeans, Asians, Africans — are all now trying to do what we've been trying to do for decades: At one and the same time extract the maximum benefit from the nature of their relationship with the U.S., and to do this at a minimum cost to their national values and interests, and their national independence.
Where most of the world now is, we've already been. We've something to teach others, therefore. We possess trade secrets that now are in widespread demand, or that should be because, if we've figured out how to survive while inside the cage of the 800-pound gorilla, then other countries, more distant, speaking different languages, with different histories and without the overwhelming commonalities that shape all who live in North America, they ought to be able to learn something from our high-wire tricks, feints and cross-border arguments.
One trick we've developed, surely, and that others can learn from, is never to stand still in one place. During the years of Brian Mulroney, we cozied up to the United States. Mulroney paid a steep political price for this supposed, "selling out." But he also gave us the cross-border free trade agreement that Canadians now widely approve of and that is recognized almost universally as critical to our economic success.
Under Jean Chrétien, we've widened the cross-border distance and, on the specific issue of our standing aside from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, we prised the gap further apart than ever in our modern diplomatic history.
Earlier confrontations, over Cuba and Vietnam, for example, did not involve, as Iraq did, an issue that Americans, both the public at large and the administration, regarded as a matter of vital national importance.
Chrétien, though keeps insisting (somewhat against the evidence) that on specifics, Canada-U.S. relations are actually better than they were in the mid-1980s.
Anyway, it's generally assumed that incoming prime minister Paul Martin will make improved cross-border relations a major objective of his new government.
Another tactic we've developed is never to lower our guard, but also to keep changing that guard. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian nationalism became a major force in national life, catalyzing such policies as the Foreign Investment Review Agency and the National Energy Program. This movement came close to defeating the Mulroney government in the free trade-dominated election of 1988.
Today, that kind of nationalism is largely passé here. It's reappeared, though, in the form of the anti-globalization movement — mostly, in fact, an anti-American movement — within which Canadians, like the author, Naomi Klein, play a leading part, around the world as much as in Canada.
Henry Kissinger, the great American foreign policy guru, said it all when he observed in his memoir that in their dealings with Washington, successive Canadian governments had operated with "great skill" within "the small margin of manoeuvre" left to them in-between the opposed forces of Canadian public opinion and American national interests.
One constant theme in the endless tugging and pulling and advancing and retreating that constitutes Canada-U.S. relations is the fear, repeatedly expressed by nationalists here, that even if we survive, we are inexorably losing our identity and our distinctiveness.
One worrying factor that's constantly cited is the dominance of American culture in everything from movies to TV to popular entertainment.
No less worrying is that with more than 85 per cent of our exports now going south, our margin of manoeuvre to follow different foreign policies has never been narrower.
Those concerns seem sound. But they may be misconceived. The available evidence suggests the exact opposite is happening.
In his recently-published book Fire And Ice, Pollster Michael Adams looks at the survey data and concludes that, "the two countries that share so much are in fact headed in two significantly different trajectories in terms of the basic socio-cultural values that motivate their populations."
In short, Canadians are becoming more Canadian — essentially social democrat — while Americans are becoming more neo-conservative.
Moreover, the ascendancy of American power and simultaneous increase in Canada's cross-border economic dependency, doesn't at all appear to have limited our policy manoeuvring room.
The Chrétien government's decision not to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq is the most dramatic and most important of all current cross-border policy differences.
But it's by no means the only one. Just this year, three major legislative decisions in Ottawa have widened the cross-border differences — those to decriminalize marijuana, to legalize same-sex marriages and to radically reduce the role of corporations in the funding of elections.
As well, Canada is now following significantly different economic policies than the U.S. on such issues as tax cuts (far less reliance on them here to stimulate economic growth) and budget balances (here, in the black; there, deep in the red).
Since it's un-Canadian to brag, the degree to which we seem to have figured out how to do things our way when we care about them while going with the U.S.' flow when it's to our advantage (as on free trade) or is a necessary hostage to good relations (joining in the U.S.' anti-missile system), hasn't been widely recognized. But it's a fact, to a quite remarkable extent given that we not only are next-door to an 800-pound gorilla, but in many aspects of our national life are actually inside its cage.
Whether our ways are better or worse than those of our neighbours, and "cousins," is neither here nor there. The point is that they are our ways, and that we keep doing them and that we can probably teach others some tricks if only they'd have the sense to ask.
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