The Canadian Identity Crisis Is Canadian Identity

Elbows Up! styles itself as a bookend to The New Romans. It even reprints some of the key contributions to the earlier book — beginning with a hokey poem by Margaret Atwood that pictures America as a nasty cowboy — to draw a line between these collective meditations on the state of  Canadian-American relations. Yet that decision exposes the book as a shallow and sentimental production. Its slighter essays, which come from marquee broadcasters and minor novelists, read like platform chats calculated to stir the affluent retirees who throng the Vancouver Writers Fest, which Hurtig currently directs.

Much of the volume registers decorous yelps of pain and anger at the sudden betrayal by an old friend — one Canadians of a certain age viewed as a lodestar of cool and a place to buy holiday properties. There are charming but forgettable musings on hockey nationalism: the evanescent rush of beating the United States on the ice. There is catastrophizing: the director Atom Egoyan imagines Trump’s invading paratroopers executing federal arts bureaucrats in their offices. There is much resentment at the domination of the culture industries by American firms, with cinema being a particular sore spot. Canadians, we are told, find it ever harder to see or read stories about themselves — a colonization of the national imagination that supposedly dulls their defenses against annexation.

The comic novelist and Jewish Montrealer Mordecai Richler labeled such musings as the “What-Is-Our-Identity business” in his essay for The New Romans. He called it “one of the few original Canadian enterprises,” along with its “spiteful subsidiary, anti-Americanism.” That business seems no more profitable now than it was then. Although some contributors to Elbows Up! muse that Trump’s fifty-first-state talk exposed Canada’s absence of a cohesive national identity, few genuinely lament this or propose what such an identity might look like.

There is, in any case, no good reason to expect that a state that began as a confederation of colonies under the oversight of a now-vanished empire would possess or need a strong or uniform sense of self — especially when one of its most populous provinces obdurately speaks French. Jessica Johnson, once head writer for the now-bankrupt Hudson’s Bay Company, points out that many of the nation’s symbols are simply the enthusiasms of leisured old stock Canadians stretched to fit what is now a much more various land. Many cannot afford the kit to play hockey — or are not interested in doing so to begin with.

The ongoing process of truth and reconciliation with indigenous peoples has made it harder for many intellectuals to celebrate Canadian nationhood or even to affirm its right to exist as a state. Canadians in Richler’s day contrasted the ethnic cleansing of the American West with the lawful way in which first the British Crown and then the Dominion of Canada had negotiated treaties with indigenous peoples.

Yet the popularization of knowledge about the residential school system, which sought to extirpate the languages and values of the indigenous and gravely harmed many of their children, has eroded that distinction. Carney has had to distance himself from his own father’s career within — and defense of — those schools. A previous liberal government announced that the state was guilty of a “cultural genocide” that was only winding down when The New Romans appeared.

The indigenous contributors to Elbows Up! grimly suggest that if their settler fellow citizens were to lose their sovereignty or their culture to thuggish foreigners, it would be no more than they themselves have already endured. The schadenfreude is understandable, though not very constructive: it certainly doesn’t generate concrete proposals to resist an American takeover, which would likely do great harm to the economic and cultural interests of First Nations.

Branch Plant Culture

Even if Canadians wanted to affirm one identity or a distinctive popular culture, it is unclear how they would do so. The veteran journalist Carol Off makes a robust case for cultural protectionism, arguing for a wholesale reversal of 1988 — the year in which America completed its cultural ascendancy over Canada. After Brian Mulroney won a decisive federal election against the Liberals, he implemented a major free-trade deal with Ronald Reagan. The dismantling of tariffs administered a shot in the arm to the Canadian economy, but it involved shredding protections for publishers and media corporations.

No federal government since then has taken substantive steps to mandate the programming of Canadian content or to prevent the buying up and amalgamation of companies such as newspaper publishers by American capitalists. Off sees a contrast with Québec, where linguistic protectionism has been so effective in fueling a distinctive culture that it has sometimes threatened the breakup of Canada itself.

But would a revived cultural protectionism strengthen Canada? Québec undoubtedly produces a good crop of writers, architects, and filmmakers, but its paranoiac leaders — many of whom obsess over the threats of Islam and English speakers to their society — are hardly an advertisement for this approach. Even if Canadians regained greater control over their screens and bookshelves, they would have to persuade the most gifted and energetic artists to stay and target a modestly sized market whose consumers don’t put cultural spending high up their list of priorities. Richler saw this in the 1960s, when he noted that if you wanted to keep in touch with what was going on, you bought American. The same holds true now, when reading Maclean’s or the Globe and Mail is a duty for civically minded Canadians rather than a pleasure.

The politics writer David Moscrop makes the point that if Canadians decide to cut themselves off from American culture it would be a rather tragic act of self-harm: his fine, ruminative essay explores his lifelong fascination with the architecture and food of the American cities he is now rather glumly refusing to visit.

All the pencil chewing about what Canada is or was fails to see the United States particularly clearly. It features here primarily as a heartless suitor that has betrayed the passions invested in it, or else as an avenging angel that is going to make Canada pay for its distinctive failings. One of the few contributors to challenge this narcissism is the novelist Omar El Akkad, a Canadian citizen who grew up in Qatar but has spent most of his life in Oregon.

He argues that it is tempting but wrong for Canadians to see Americans as themselves — or as their imagined antitype — or to expect fair treatment from them. The “nakedly transactional way” in which the United States is flexing its leverage over Canada, supposedly its “closest friend,” is simply the “same way it treats the vast majority of nations on this earth.” The rulers of Qatar could tell Canada that this is a liberating insight, which opens up a rational rather than sentimental relationship with the United States.

Such an approach would not fuss over filtering cultural products to assess how Canadian they are, but would focus on taking back control of the country’s economic sovereignty. The contributors to The New Romans state the essence of national independence more bluntly than their modern descendants. They wrote at a time when hefty political figures were still trying to introduce a meaningful program of economic nationalism: in 1963, Lester Pearson’s minister of finance Walter Gordon announced taxes on the sale of shares in Canadian companies and the payment of dividends to nonresidents. The measures failed.

The burly environmentalist Farley Mowat wrote — coarsely enough — in The New Romans that supposedly moral and democratic Canada was now a “helot” or “serf, no more than that . . . and Massa lives away down south.” Postwar administrations like Pearson’s had completed the “sellout” of Canadian assets and companies to American investors. In doing so, they had earned only the “deep contempt” of the Americans: “and a wise slave knows that a contemptuous master is more to be feared, in the long run, than an angry one.” Mowat mused that instead of owning a share of their country, ambitious Canadians would have to settle for working “in the service of the Business God” as “valuable and trusted slaves.”

Of Blame and Belonging

The editors of Elbows Up! must appreciate that there is no easy way to break with this serfdom: after all, the storied imprint McClelland & Stewart, with which their book appears, is now a division of Penguin Random House Canada, which is itself a division of a parent company headquartered at New York. Successive Liberal and Conservative administrations reluctantly subsumed the Canadian to the American economy because they despaired of finding other ways to advance productivity and growth — and could find no other trading partners as attractive as the United States, a huge and geographically contiguous market whose rulers readily paid the overheads of defending their continent.

The monumental difficulties involved in changing this pattern should temper judgments on Carney’s record. His government is commendably modest in promising to do no more than doubling the country’s exports to non-American countries in the next decade. Even this plan involves wishful thinking: Carney talks of becoming a trading and strategic partner of Europe, a gambit that already failed under both Pierre and Justin Trudeau. Fear of American reactions and Canada’s habitual deference to Western liberal orthodoxy have so far distanced the more tempting prospect of ramping up mutually beneficial trade with China, whose policymakers are, in turn, wary of Canadian alignment with Washington.

Elbows Up! works better as an illustration of Canada’s preoccupation with the United States than an exit from it. It fails to articulate the ways in which that obsession might become a moral snare. There is an obvious case for reducing its exposure to the United States: sovereign countries should want to control their economic destinies. But it is not enough to shrink from another country as unclean; you need to say what principles you affirm in general and are willing to defend. This entails a process of reflection that should lead Canadians to expand their moral vision to the world, rather than just creeping away from the forty-ninth parallel.

Margaret Laurence’s contribution to The New Romans is a model of what that sensibility could be. Reproduced in Elbows Up!, it puts its genteel patriotism to shame. Laurence, who had lived in Africa before becoming a novelist, shared what now seems like the intuitive internationalism of her generation. She writes a public letter to Mrs Joe Bass, an African American woman from Detroit whose son had been shot by the police. It broods on her loss and on the grief of the North Vietnamese women whose children were burned to death by American napalm. Who was responsible for these disasters? The reality was that racism and imperialism were not narrowly American pathologies. “I am a North American . . . I cannot say them. It is forced upon me to say us. Perhaps you know who the enemy is — and perhaps it is I.”