SlantyNet Welcome Guest | Login or Register

after the election, when some americans started fetishizing canada, i decided to submit a piece about it to salon.com. but then right before i was about to send it to them, they ran this rather crappier article on a similar topic. bastards! as a hail mary, i decided to submit it to the nytimes op-ed page. they didn’t run it, but i’m not so disappointed by that, since they apparently get 1,000 submissions a week.

anyway, since the timeliness of this article has clearly passed, i thought i might as well post it here at slanty, that great institution of online journalism.

Canada’s Red Provinces and Blue Provinces

In my country the politics are so cantankerous, and the cultures so diverse and frequently in disagreement with each other, that it’s amazing that the country hasn’t splintered apart yet. In fact – it nearly has, and on more than one occasion.

(continued in comments)

In the rural areas are the blue collar workers: farmers, loggers, and factory workers. More than in the rest of the country, they are conservative: they are gun owners, church-goers, and opposed to gay marriage and abortion. They value their close-knit communities and feel resentment toward urbanites, who they suspect think of them as
hicks. In the cities, you’ll find professional workers, immigrants, and gay and lesbian communities. They are mostly liberals and include the so-called cultural elite. Often, they think that those people out there in the country, with their small town and religious values, are out of step with modern ideas.

The differences are there at the larger scales, too. In the eastern half of the country are the major population and financial centers – the economic heartland. This is where you’ll find the nation’s capital and the majority of the universities. Out in the less-populated west, people carry feelings of alienation and antipathy toward easterners, who they regard as self-important elitists.

And of course there is language: English and French, the two founding cultures, living together like two friendly but easily antagonized roommates.

This country is of course Canada, but if not for the matter of bilinguialism one might easily mistake it for the US. Potential blue state refugees, distraught from the election, should take note: in the liberal utopia they perceive to exist to the north, we have something very similar to a red state-blue state schism.

This is not to say that Canada isn’t different. The compassionate social programs and less aggressive foreign policy that liberals aspire to have in the US are real. What is interesting is that these things exist despite a political and cultural climate that is often as polarized as America’s.

If you want to understand how inclusive policies are possible in the face of such differences, I suspect that the answer is the result of our very different national identities.

America’s history is full of symbolic figures and heroic narratives: George Washington, the Revolutionary War, Abraham Lincoln, the Boston Tea Party, the Civil War, JFK, the civil rights movement. The list is endless.

In contrast, Canada has few such symbols around which to build a compelling mythology. Our history is one of slow evolution, of negotiation and compromise.

The British North America Act of 1867 made Canada a country, but England retained the option of legislative control. This was removed by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but it wasn’t until the British North America Act of 1949 that Canada could amend its own constitution. Disagreements between Quebec and the rest of Canada over constitutional powers delayed Canada from creating a constitution that was separate from England until 1982, but only after a clause was included that gave Quebec the possibility of opting out entirely.

Slow, gradual change. And not very exciting. Even the Quebec separatist movement, which has lead to some of our most tumultuous moments in history, culminated in two relatively calm, non-violent referendums, though by Canadian standards they were certainly exciting.

But this struggle of dealing with the issue of Quebec sovereignty, which continues today, has given Canada one of its defining characteristics: multiculturalism. Though not as strongly symbolic as, say, the Boston Tea Party, in the end it is probably more powerful. The characteristics necessary for multiculturalism – open discourse, mutual respect, and compromise – are those which we have honed over 137 years not because we are more virtuous, as US liberals are inclined to think, but out of necessity for survival as a country.

Multiculturalism was made an official federal policy in 1971, with the statement that “We believe that cultural pluralism is the very essense of Canadian identity.” In the decades since, immigration to Canada has been strong. In Toronto, 44 percent of the population was born outside Canada. In Vancouver, it is 37 percent. As a policy, multiculturalism in Canada has certainly been successful.

But in the US, the idea of making a pluralistic national identity an official policy would be anathema. There has never been the need. America has a strong identity, and a compelling one at that. It is the powerful leader, striding the world, guided by morality and manifest destiny. It is epitomized by the Texas cowboy, surveying the land, looking to the horizon.

But like all myths, this one is static. Even though America has greatly changed over the course of its history, the myths that have guided its evolution have changed little. The current split between red states and blue states may in fact not be a recent blip due to specific disagreements over foreign policy, gay marriage, abortion, or any wedge issue pushed by either Democrats or Republicans. Rather, it may be the inevitable result of a national identity that views pluralism and internationalism as a weakness, even unpatriotic.

As an example, homosexuals in America, seeking the same rights as the rest of the population, fought for and won marriage rights in Massachusetts. Evangelical christians saw this court ruling not as a civil rights movement, but as a personal threat to their morals and communities. In turn, they sucessfully barred gay marriage in 11 states. In turn again, homosexuals saw this as a personal attack on them.

In Canada, where gay marriage is legal in seven out of 10 provinces, public opinion is closer than you might think: only 54 percent support gay marriage. Despite the close numbers, the issue has been much less divisive. Though many disagree with gay marriage, very few perceive it to be a personal threat to their way of life. Even in Alberta, the reddest of our red provinces, public opposition has been tepid. Over the years of dealing with bilingualism, First Nations (a uniquely Canadian term to describe the diversity of aboriginal groups) land treaties, and immigration from around the globe, Canadians have learned that acknowledging the rights of one group does not necessarily result in the diminishment of rights by another.

In this light, Canadian social programs such as universal health care, year-long maternity benefits, old age pension, and public education may not be the result of the fact that we are more liberal, but the outgrowth of a historical conditioning to see shades of grey in-between the black and white.

In the end, any resolution of the red state-blue state split will require serious introspection and openness to change. While some Americans may scoff at the idea of multiculturalism, they are merely living in denial. America is in fact more multicultural than Canada: 25 percent of America is non-white, versus 13 percent in Canada. America is homosexual and heterosexual, secular and evangelical, pro-life and pro-choice, urban and rural, liberal and conservative. While those on both sides believe these differences to be intractable, Canada and other nations have proven that they are not. If America is to continue to exist as a single country, it must face up to its own diversity. There is simply no alternative.

- 30 -

I would do anything for love but I won’t do that.

Marine is given the choice between losing his ring finger or losing his ring. Chooses to lose the finger. Loses the ring anyway.

You’ve read too much Don Quixote, my boy.

Protesting in the streets didn’t work to stop the war in Iraq from happening or to speed the end of the war. In fact much of the political activism has had little effect on the monkey. Why? Well in my personal opinion these activities were beyond the reach*** of the arm chair politician. However,
I have hope that this will bring them into the game because pictures are easier to understand them those big words.

Yes I am hoping that having images of soldiers getting mutilated and widows going on welfare is going bring the arm chair politician into the game. Or at the very least humiliate people like Rummie and the Monkey.

Ciao
Wolf

***As in too stupid to be able to read. And yes, them and their couches should be burned and the earth salted so nothing will grow back.

I guess for those who take medications due to mental illness, sometimes going off of them can be a gamble itself. So according to the recent findings on medications for Parkinson’s, maybe wanting to go off the drugs is a side effect?

Its a fair question, isn’t it?

This year, with parts of Slanty in pregnancy mode, we’re hoping that New Years Eve will be a little quieter, a little bit more mature, a little bit more restrained.

Then again, we’re used to having our hopes dashed, and we’re hoping that you’ll dash ‘em in grand style. (grin)

Blondie and I would like to invite you all to Slanty New Years 2005 at our house. It’s a Friday night, so even for the most pessimistic, you should have a number of days before Monday to recover. For those of you working the weekend, I’m sorry, I’ve been there and done that. (I just told work to call me if I was more that half an hour late…)

We’ll have some nibblies on hand, but other than that you’re on your own.

If you know us, its an open invite. Please feel free to invite anybody that will be a good time. RSVP by responding to this thread.

And update the database, and the links, etc.

If you saw my setup at home, though, you’d understand why it hasn’t been done yet, as my computer is sitting in my entertainment unit. To work at the computer, I have to pull up a chair and balance the keyboard on my lap and you don’t WANNA know where the mouse goes.

So, long story short, I’m behind on a lot of things.

Like pointing out, that like a phoenix from the ashes, Crackerjap is back. I’ll be doing what I can to point our Crackerjap pointer back to them.

Good to know that marriage hasn’t got ya down, boys.

Jesusland is where you want to raise a family

I’m sure that SlantyBard could weigh in with a medical opinion, but someone seems to have figured out why TinTin never aged.

Methods

We conducted an exhaustive assessment of this young reporter’s stories in order to find incidents of significant neurotrauma. The first author (A.C., 5 years old) looked through all of the books along with the second author (L.O.C., 7 years old), who knows how to read and count higher than 10. A.C. was responsible for identifying pictures in which Tintin “tombait dans les pommes” (literally, “fell into the apples,” i.e., “lost consciousness”). This procedure had to be re-evaluated after 2 books because of the obvious lack of “apples” in Tintin’s adventures. For each incident, we identified the cause of the trauma, the length of loss of consciousness (calculated by the number of frames before Tintin returns to normal activity) and the apparent severity of the trauma (indicated by the number of objects [e.g., stars, candles] revolving above Tintin’s head). A Spearman correlation test was performed between the last 2 items.