By Gwendolyn Owens
Special to the Sentinel
March 13, 2005
MONTREAL — There was a joke making the rounds here a few years ago that went like this:
Question: What’s a Canadian?
Answer: An American with a health-care card and no gun. The way Canadians view the United States is a much more complicated matter — roughly analogous to how one might view a rich, overbearing cousin.
Canada sits on the United States’ northern border with a population roughly twice that of Florida, but with a culture and mentality that melds together Europe and the United States.
Having lived in Canada since 1991, I spend a lot of time explaining the differences and similarities to my neighbors here and to friends at home. My professor husband and I moved our family to France for the 2003-04 academic year, and one byproduct was a new perspective on the differences and similarities of the United States, Canada and Europe.
Canada looks more like the United States than it does Europe. Cities in Canada often resemble those to the south that date from the same era: Montreal looks a lot like New York; Toronto looks Midwestern, almost like Chicago. Vancouver, British Columbiais a lot like Seattle, and Calgary, an energy center in the West, has been compared to Dallas with snow.
Everywhere the roads are filled with fast-driving Canadians, largely in trucks and sport utility vehicles, far larger and less energy efficient than those peppy little European cars.
However, in every one of those big cars will be a person with a health-care card entitling him or her to government-paid health care from the doctor of his or her choice. Canada, like European countries, is facing tough choices about how to manage the spiraling costs.
The system itself is a matter of pride. In Quebec, where they are discussing user fees, a friend told me that though she would have no problem financially paying a fee, she resents the idea because that’s not what health care should be about.
The greatest Canadian
Just how dear this system is to Canadian hearts was brought out last fall when the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the public television of Canada, held a contest for the greatest Canadian. Tommy Douglas (1904-86), the “father” of the Canadian Health Care Act, won.
Though the belief in a public-health system unites Canadians, it is a nation that is often described not as a melting pot of immigrants, but a patchwork. New Canadians are expected to learn French or English — preferably both — but they are encouraged not to forget their roots, their customs and their language; they don’t have to give up their other citizenship.
For business, it is a positive attribute; you can find people who speak the language to help you to do business in just about any part of the world.
A union of many nations
It also makes for wonderful ethnic food as immigrants open businesses, not just to cater to people looking for exotic food, but for people from their own community who want to eat just like they did at home in, for example, India, Morocco or Peru. It is as if the country is a kind of union of many nations, not unlike the new European Union or a small United Nations.
When it comes to sports, Canadians love their homegrown sport, hockey, but they also love the American sports of football, basketball and baseball, even if the Montreal Expos had few real fans left in the end.
The wardrobe malfunction of last year’s Super Bowl, seen by millions of Canadians as well as Americans, was not a big story; the story was the U.S. outrage about the malfunction.
In the subway in downtown Montreal is a billboard advertising a DVD with a photograph showing a dancer in a similar state of undress as Janet Jackson, and no one seems to mind or even notice, although in some more conservative parts of the country, it might raise some eyebrows.
Canadians eat fast food like their southern neighbors do, but the concept of a private college or university for students getting a college degree does not really exist in Canada.
Labor unions are stronger here than across the border — just ask Wal-Mart, which is trying to close a store outside Montreal in which the employees voted to unionize, and is facing unionization, which Wal-Mart regards as a threat, in several other Quebec stores.
Country without a revolution
What’s at the root of Canada’s position as a middle ground? Canada never had a revolution or broke forcibly away from Great Britain as did the United States. It became a confederation in 1867, but it was not until 1982 that Canada got its own constitution with its own powerful version of the Bill of Rights, called the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
This is not a country made up of rebels, which is most likely where the jokes come about Canadians being law-abiding. Quebec was allowed by the conquering English in 1759 to stay French-speaking, and while tension has risen and fallen through the years about the place of French in Canadian life, the decision in the first place to let French colonists keep their language now seems very Canadian: It was a decision, while political on the part of Great Britain, that allowed for the beginnings of acceptable differences, the patchwork model.
Geography has had a lot of influence on how Canada works. In a country so vast with relatively few people, delivery of services is a more complex problem. So the government, on the provincial and federal level, has always had a more visible hand in setting up and providing for citizens far afield from one another.
In bed with an elephant
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau described living next to the United States as being like sleeping in the same bed as an elephant: You cannot avoid knowing that the elephant is there, even if the elephant is being very quiet.
So to give Canadian artists, singers, writers, publishers, et cetera, a chance to be heard and seen, the Canadian government supports the arts in Canada and promotes including Canadian content with rules governing the number of cable channels that must be offered with Canadian content and how many songs an hour on the pop stations should be Canadian.
About 35 percent of the music on the radio and 60 percent of the programs on television are required to be Canadian, but there are no such rules for movies in theaters. However, the Canadian government provides generous tax credits to Canadian film producers to encourage the homegrown film industry.
Americans still welcome
In discussions since 2001, the question of whether Americans are being singled out for bad treatment abroad usually comes up. Our experience, in Canada and Europe, has been positive; outside the United States, American foreign policy is often seen as misguided or downright wrong, but individual Americans still welcome visitors to Canada, France and the other places we have visited in the past year.
Are Americans ready to be as welcoming to people from abroad? Many people we met in Europe were planning to visit North America — not the United States, only Canada — just because they were not sure how they would be treated. They felt comfortable about coming to Canada; it was not as different, not as far a trip metaphorically as the United States.
Originally from Baltimore, Gwendolyn Owens is a writer and historian of American art who lives in Montreal.
