Ketchup chips.
For me, the biggest difference is that we’re less introspective and less likely to have blind national pride. Canadians certainly tend to be a patriotic lot, but we don’t feel a need to constantly go declaring up and down the land what a great country we are or to view the rest of the world through our lens. We tend to have more respect for the views of separatists than our neighbors down South do in their neck of the woods and don’t usually declaim comments like “If you don’t love 'Murica, get the hell out!” or “It may hayve its faults, but it’s still da best dang country in da world!” We don’t indoctrinate our children by having them recite every morning at school that they pledge loyalty to the country, that God exists, that our country may not be divided, and that liberty and justice for all is an established fact in our country. We also don’t equate universal health care or other aspects of the welfare state with Communism. As everyone knows, we don’t have a collective fetish for guns. And we’re a mite more cautious before we send our troops to foreign theaters of war.
Other than that, I’d say the mean of Canadian culture differs only in small things from the mean of American culture.
Zapp’s Evil Eye potato chips get close to ketchup flavor in the US.
I just looked it up. Licensed Canadian gun ranges do allow unlicensed people to shoot guns “for fun” as long as they have identification, sign a waiver, and shoot under the watch of an experienced range officer, which is literally the exact same rules as the gun rental ranges in Vegas.
In Oklahoma, we have none of those restrictions.
Are those policies set by the gun ranges, or are they required by federal law, breach of which is a federal criminal offence?
I recall reading about an officer in the U.S. army who took advantage of an educational program in Britain (not the G.I.Bill) after WWII. The professors there told him that the U.S. mythology is that of the Wild West. Does Canada have a mythology?
I don’t know about the east, but in the Canadian west it might be “the Mounties keeping order - they always get their man”.
I has been noted that one difference between the Alaskan gold rush and the Yukon gold rush is that the Mounties were in place in the Yukon BEFORE the miners.
Legalized cannabis at the federal level.
As a Canadian historian (both “a historian who is Canadian” and “a historian who studies Canada”) I think Ulfreida is making a hugely important point that is often ignored in these discussions. The lack of plantation slavery, largely a feature of geography, also meant the Canadian colonial economy developed in a different way, and that impelled different political and social relations as well. Although, I would also say measuring US/Canadian differences are tricky, given each country has very different regional economies, etc. within it. For example, it is a cliche, but with some truth, to note that Alberta’s governments and social climate has more in common with Texas than the west coast. So it’s in part a question of which part of Canada are you comparing with which part of the US, and federal elections in both countries don’t help with those comparisons.
I agree with Ulfreida and Kropotkin. I would add two other broad differences: an evolutionary, peaceful, political tradition instead of a revolutionary, military one, and a founding based on accommodation of two languages / two cultures / two religions. Those two factors are of considerable importance, in my opinion.
On the first point, I think a lot of American individualism, militarism, and gun culture flows from the revolutionary tradition. Americans won their freedom by armed revolution, and started an entirely new constitutional and legal system from July 4, 1776. Suspicion of government and the emphasis on armed force, both for the military and for the individual, are part of Americans’ founding ethos, both politically and culturally. As I said once to a law class at Rutgers, Americans have that revolutionary break, legally, constitutionally and politically.
Canadians don’t have that. We didn’t need to go through a revolution to get our independence. In fact, we lost out from military solutions: French-Canadians lost the military fight, and the initial settlers in New Brunswick and Ontario were fleeing from the revolution. They were political refugees, who lost out from the US revolution. Both of those experiences entered into Canada’s political culture, for a suspicion of military solutions.
As well, pre-Confederation, Canadians felt they already had freedoms, guaranteed by the British system of constitutionalism. And that is how Confederation came about: through the peaceful political processes of the three original provinces, using the constitutional traditions that British North Americans had inherited from Britain. There were no guns involved in Confederation (except of course the military forces needed to repel the Fenian invasion from the US in 1866, which helped convince waverers of the need for Confederation, as a matter of self-defence). I once saw a truck driving by during the debates on gun control here, with a bumper sticker that said “My freedom wasn’t won with a registered gun.” My reaction was, “It wasn’t won with a gun at all.”
Revolution and the military were never part of our political tradition. Just as one easy example: if you look at the list of powers of Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution, about a third of them relate to the military. If you look at s. 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which lists the powers of the federal Parliament, only 1 out of the 30 heads of powers relates to the military. The US Constitution reflects the military and revolutionary origins of the US; the Canadian Constitution reflects the peaceful constitutional evolution. Plus, of course, no 2nd Amendment, and no 3rd Amendment. The US Constitution clearly came out of a revolutionary armed conflict; the Canadian Constitution did not. And in my opinion, that is a fundamental difference between the two countries, and still is important today.
For example, when Americans talk about the possibility of a state trying to secede, in my experience they always approach it from a military perspective, at least initially. After all, the Civil War was fought on that basis. In Canada, it’s a legal and political issue, one that goes to the courts (eg Reference re Secession of Quebec) and is dealt with by referendums and legislation, like the ‘‘Clarity Act’’. I remember that when one politician hinted that there might be a military solution to the Quebec issue, he was treated as if he had farted in front of the Queen.
The other point is that our Constitution is based on linguistic, religious and ethnic accommodations, in a way that the US Constitution is not. Our Constitution was expressly designed to protect different linguistic / ethnic / religious groups. There is no similar constitutional ethos in the US Constitution, which is unitary in its political ideology.
Accommodation and compromise are baked into Canadians’ political DNA. It has not always been perfect, not by a long shot, but when you have a country based on the idea that there are two different linguistic/religious/ethnic groups, and you build those accommodations into your Constitution, it results in a political culture that is different from one that is based on a unitary model (E pluribus unum, just as an example). And that recognition of two different cultures in turn makes it easier to accommodate other cultures. Again, not perfect by a long shot, but our political emphasis on compromise and accommodation means that when another group is working for greater political authority, such as First Nations, they can point to the existing accommodations in the Canadian Constitution and argue that they have a similar claim to be accommodated in the political structure.
After all, the Supreme Court of Canada has held that respect for minorities is a foundational principle of the Constitution. There is no similar constitutional principle in the US constitutional tradition.
An excellent and very eloquent post, @Northern_Piper. I agree with every word, and I think it expresses the distinctions extremely well.
Donald Trump being elected was an odd anomaly, too. I mean, the claim a Trump couldn’t be elected mayor of Toronto is kinda blown to pieces when, in fact, a colossal clown was elected mayor of Toronto so recently that Jimmy Kimmel still misses him. The fact Ford cared about some people and Trump doesn’t is attempting to retroactively save the point, but it’s still wrong. Trumps can be elected here if the circumstances are right, and we’d be silly to think otherwise.
That said, the most obvious difference between tow the two countries - and I say this as a person who
s spent a lot of time in both - is something not yet mentioned; fear. Americans are a very brave, industrious, literate and hilariously funny people, but they’re very fearful. They are constantly in fear about things to an extent Canadians are not. It’s quite palpable; they are afraid of crime, foreigners, each other, economic ruin, governmental overreach, governmental underreach, the world, and everything, to a degree of urgency I don’t see here at all. Watching TV news there is almost surreal, it distills the fear into a 22-minute performance art.
kropotkin’s comment about geography made me think of another one: a reliance on government that was absent in the US.
In the US, geography favoured individualised western expansion, once settlers were past the Appalachians. The “rugged individualist” setting out with family, gun and bible, etc., riding in carts and prairie schooners. Each generation of settlers moved west, started settlements, put down roots; then the next generation did the same; and so on.
Geography in Canada did not permit that. The Canadian Shield, north of Lake Superior, was a thousand miles of rock. You can’t farm it. That sort of generational gradual settlement that was a feature in the US just couldn’t happen.
The only way that settlement of the Canadian North-West was possible was by government action. The federal government paid the CPR Co. to build the railway to the Pacific, insisting that it go over the Shield in an all-Canadian route. Without the government incentives, the CPR could not have been built. That’s how settlers reached the north-west, not by riding on horses or prairie schooners. And when the settlers reached the North-West, the North-West Mounted Police were already there to keep the peace, before the settlers came. They didn’t have to band together and elect their local sheriffs. Overall, that produced a different attitude to government.
(Note, of course, that the north-west settlement was not a uniformly good thing, especially for the Indigenous peoples. That’s another topic.)
American TV news is in the basis of fearmongering. That’s what gets ratings. But is that sufficient reason to believe that Americans themselves are particularly fearful?
A group of academics does an annual survey on “fears of Americans.” Their 2019 study shows that at least half of Americans are “afraid” or “very afraid” of eighteen different topics, including:
- Corrupt government officials: 77%
- Pollution of oceans, rivers, and lakes: 68%
- People I love becoming seriously ill: 67% (note: this study was done before the COVID-19 pandemic)
- Pollution of drinking water: 65%
- People I love dying: 63%
- Air pollution: 60%
- Cyber-terrorism: 59%
- Extinction of plant and animal species: 59%
- Global Warming and Climate Change: 57%
- Not having enough money for the future: 56%
- Economic/financial collapse: 55%
- High medical bills: 53%
- Corporate tracking of personal data: 52%
- The U.S. will be involved in another world war: 52%
- Terrorist attack: 51%
- Becoming seriously ill: 51%
- Government tracking of personal data: 50%
- Identity theft: 50%
Just how afraid are they? To what extent do those fears affect their everyday lives? The study doesn’t say, but that does seem like a whole lot of things to feel afraid of.
Canadians would look at this, smirk, and assume they would do much better. But my guess is that apart from medical bills the fears and numbers would not be so different. There is a crisis crisis - purveyors of schlock who see value in delivering a steady stream of overhyped threats, who need to be called to account.
I think it is worth noting that in 1869-70 and in 1885, the military was used to put down Métis resistance to settlement and the taking of traditional land by the Canadian government. In both cases the military was led by commanding officers who had extensive service in putting down Indigenous resistance in various parts of the British empire, including the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857.
One reason for the relatively more peaceful Canadian “frontier” was cost. The US spent about $20,000,000 a year fighting its Indian wars in the 19th century. That was more than the entire Canadian federal budget.
Agreed. But also, there were the numbered Treaties, and the principle of the Royal Proclamation, which had been rejected by the Americans: only the government could negotiate with Indigenous peoples for land surrenders, and no settlement could occur until that was done. That was a different model than the US, and it was the disgraceful failure by the federal government to live up to the Treaties in the 1870s and 1880s which led to the North-West Rebellion.
Nonetheless, it was a different model of government: it was the responsibility of the federal government to deal with Indigenous peoples, and no settlement until that occurred.
It’s an interesting point that the Royal Proclamation, which was one of the casus belli for the American Revolution, is protected by the Constitution of Canada.
I would argue that the numbers on the various pollution questions, and global warming, are artificially inflated because of the media’s constant “yellow journalism” on those issues. The common saying is “If it bleeds, it leads” – it would possibly be more accurate to replace “bleeds” with “incites fear.” (Remember the breathless hype in the early 1990s about acid rain?)
I have nothing to add right now, but I do want to thank @Northern_Piper for his insightful comments on our respective constitutions and history. Nicely stated, NP!