A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
O CANADA!
WHO STANDS ON GUARD FOR THEE?
Good fences make
good neighbors, wrote Robert Frost. It was a fine
poem, but he was dead wrong. The best of
neighbors can hardly tell where the yard of one
begins and the yard of the other ends.
Canada is the
perfect neighbor. With them we share the world's
largest undefended border--longest both in terms
of geography and endurance.
Canada is polite,
tidy, generous, and friendly. If they are
occasionally a bit put out by the brawling and
boisterous colossus to the south, they don't make
too much of a fuss about it.
Canada is also in
danger of not being Canada too much longer.
You'd never know
that by the American media or everyday
conversation stateside. Americans are
world-renowned for their total indifference to
politics beyond their borders, but Canada is a
particularly tragic subject for our collective
neglect. When the United States sneezes the rest
of the hemisphere catches the flu, but you'd
think that Canada's bout with cancer would at
least cause our collective brow to furrow.
But the neighbors
who draw your attention are the ones who annoy
and/or fascinate you. You aren't likely to pay
much notice to the people on one side with the
immaculate rosebushes and the bright children who
make sure their lawn gets mowed every week.
You're probably preoccupied with the neighbors on
the other side who are always throwing wild
parties and midnight shouting matches and leaving
their stuff in your yard--the exotic and strange
folks who are either having more fun than you or
are more miserable than you...or possibly both.
When the tidy
neighbor with the rosebushes gets a divorce, you
stand out in the street with your other neighbors
and say, "Who knew?"
About this
divorce...for those of you who really
don't get out much, Canada is in essence two
nations held together within one country. One
nation, like ours, speaks English and is the
colonial daughter of Great Britain (although they
inherited more of Mum's wardrobe than we did).
The smaller nation
speaks French and is descended from the Gallic
outpost called Quebec which was conquered in the
mid-eighteenth century by Britain and
subsequently subsumed into the fledgling Dominion
of Canada.
The Quebecois have
the classic Francophonic phobia of
English-speaking peoples, with the twist that
they have been ruled by an English-speaking
people for two centuries now. The smoldering
resentment that has grown from that situation has
led them to increasingly agitate for (by turns)
autonomy, recognition as a distinct and equal
society, and independence.
With each
concession they have wrung from the magnanimous
and irenic Canadian government comes more of a
counter-resentment from the English-speaking
majority outside the borders of
Quebec--especially those forced to deal with a
bilingual country thousands of miles from any
sizeable population of Francophones.
Slowly,
inexorably, the two nations grow apart. Quebec
has had three referenda on independence, each one
coming closer to a majority. In the last
referendum, held last year, the French-speaking
majority voted for the Bloc Quebecois party and
their platform of secession. Only the monolithic
"no" vote of the English-speaking
minority of southern and western Quebec saved the
day for Canada. The Bloc has vowed to stage
another referendum within the next few years, and
it is problematic whether the country will
survive another one. This is because the exodus
of Anglophones continues apace from Quebec;
hemmed in by the animosity of the Francophonic
majority and the oppressive language laws
designed to promote French, English-speaking
Quebeckers continue to leave the
province--reducing their ability to veto
secession at the ballot box.
Making things
worse is the fact that the country is politically
truncated. There is only one national political
party, the Liberals (who are currently in power
in Parliament). Every other party is a regional
one; in the poverty-stricken Maritime provinces
along the Atlantic coast, the vote is divided
between the Liberals and the left-leaning New
Democratic and Progressive Conservative parties;
Quebec has a Bloc Quebecois majority and a
Liberal minority; Ontario, Canada's industrial
heartland and by far the most populous of the
Anglophonic provinces, is totally in the hands of
the Liberal party; and the western provinces are
dominated by the Canadian version of the
Republican Party, the free-trade and
devolutionistic Reform Party. The latter preys on
the fact that westerners resent the domination of
Canadian political life by gargantuan,
big-government-minded Ontario.
The country cannot
survive regional fracturing, but such fracturing
seems both inevitable and irreparable at this
point. While there are regional political
distinctives in the United States--clearly,
voting patterns and sensibilities are far
different in the American South than they are in
the Northeast--the situation is exacerbated in
Canada, where nearly everyone in the country
lives within 200 miles of the American border.
That leaves a thin, narrow stretch of populated
country where people are much more likely to have
an affinity for the lifestyle of folks just
across the border than they are for their
countrymen thousands of miles to the east or
west. The entrepreneurial, ecological,
independent-minded residents of Vancouver are
recognizable to Seattleites, while the statist,
union-strong Rust Belters of the Ontario factory
towns bear a close resemblance to the urban
ethnics of Detroit and Buffalo across the rivers.
But neither Vancouver nor Windsor sees much
resemblance anymore in each other.
The favorite
pastime of Canadians (apart from hockey, that is)
has always been a sort of low-key griping about
the United States and its callous insensitivity
to Canada. It was usually well-deserved. The fact
that we laughed it off, when we noticed it at
all, says much about our attitude towards
Canadians--they are so much like us culturally
that it is sometimes hard for us to tell the
difference between them and us. To assert their
own identity, Canadians have become masters of
cultural hairsplitting and a rather ineffective
self-promotion. They don't like the idea of being
our little brother, but our cultural and economic
bear-hug is really just our way of showing them
how much we like them. We like them because we
see them as part of the family.
But conversations
with Canadians nowadays show less of that
sensible Canadian nature and more of a rather
jittery and paranoid streak easily explained by
their national crisis. An offhand statement of
macho bluster by Bill Clinton about a fishing
dispute off the British Columbia coast becomes a
national call to arms in Canada as they see a
distinct military threat by the current
administration in Washington (as if any American
would take seriously a president's saber-rattling
in the direction of Canada). And there are dark
hints about American lobbyist/saboteurs who issue
threats in the corridors of power in Ottawa to
make members of Parliament vote Washington's way.
All of this would be laughable if the mood wasn't
so bad in the Great White North.
Perhaps it is time
for Americans to take more than passing notice of
Canada and its current crisis. Good neighbors
remain good neighbors only as long as their house
is in order. And you don't know what you have in
a good neighbor until he's gone.
E-Mail Captain Spaulding.
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
Hooray
For Me #7-- Princess Diana
Hooray
For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
Hooray
For Me #9-- Mother Teresa
Hooray
For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash
Hooray
For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?
Hooray
For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks
