And if individualism is the most powerful attribute to arise from the American experience of pushing west, the Canadian equivalent would have to be medicare, in principle and practice its very converse.
The Greatest American might well be John Wayne, Hollywood hero and western movie star, or Ronald Reagan, actor and president. But the Greatest Canadian, according to a 2005 CBC poll, turns out to be a slim little bespectacled prairie preacher named Tommy Douglas, father of universal health care, patron saint of the social safety net.
Douglas stood first after more than 140,000 Canadians had voted, beating out, in order, Terry Fox, Pierre Trudeau, Sir Frederick Banting, David Suzuki, Lester Pearson, Don Cherry, Sir John A. Macdonald, Alexander Graham Bell, and Wayne Gretzky.
Shania Twain, Mr. Dressup, and wrestler Bret Hart all beat Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the prime minister who in 1904 predicted that “Canada will fill the twentieth century.” So the poll can hardly be said to be highly scientific. Still, voters passed over hockey heroes like Rocket Richard and military heroes like Billy Bishop to select the little Baptist minister who went on to become premier of Saskatchewan and ultimately spread his medicare gospel to the entire nation.
A man who believed a country’s greatness wasn’t measured by its heroes, its great leaders, its military victories, or its size, wealth, or literature, but “by what it does for its unfortunates.”
Seven
The Shrinking of the World
SIT OUT IN THE SUN on one of the benches that line the main street of Coutts, Alberta, and a Canadian can stare in wonder at the United States of America until the sun goes down.
There is, however, not the slightest sense that anyone living in Sweetgrass, Montana, is sitting on the other side of the fence looking back at Canada. No wonder Margaret Atwood once called this line “the world’s longest undefended one-way mirror.”
It was the end of October 2004, and The Globe and Mail had dispatched me to keep tight to the border while talking to Canadians about America and Americans about Canada. It had been a difficult three years, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks followed by a northern wave of sympathy and support for Canada’s southern neighbours, the military initiative in Afghanistan a joint effort between the two countries, and then the two going their separate ways over what to do in Iraq.
On such a bright day, the Sweetgrass Hills are spectacular in the late autumn haze that lies just beyond the razor wire and the steel gates and the high-voltage lamps that separate Alberta’s Highway 4 from Montana’s Interstate 15. On the north side of the razor wire sits the village of Coutts, population 364, and on the south side the Montana village of Sweetgrass, population about 100. Coutts, as the border crossing is best known, is a main trucking corridor for live cattle—during those times when there isn’t a mad cow scare—and a regular crossing for everything from lumber trucks to kids in search of a bar that will serve them and to sticker-plastered RVs taking prairie snowbirds south to Arizona and New Mexico and Texas for the winter.
It is said that a truck carrying goods crosses the U.S. border southbound every 2.5 seconds or so, some $1.3 billion in trade a day. A quarter of America’s exports head north, but more than three-quarters of Canada’s trade heads south, a figure that can only increase now that Canada has become America’s main energy supplier. And with Canada holding more oil reserves than any other country in the world but Saudi Arabia—some say time will prove considerably more than Saudi Arabia—and with hydrogen, solar, and wind power not likely to replace fossil fuels and carbon any time soon, it won’t matter how tight border security ultimately becomes.
The psychology of border towns is fascinating. In Sweetgrass, with its barking stray dog and tumbleweed, the people of Montana sense they’ve been pushed to extremes, as far north as they can go around here. Sweetgrass is rundown, depressed, marginalized by geography.
To those in sparkling Coutts, on the other hand, with its new lots already measured out and open for bidding, geography is what makes the place. They don’t feel pushed to the extremes; they live at the centre. This is where the funnel feeding down into the United States narrows; this place matters. The streets are paved and lined with curbs and sidewalks and trim lawns. Coutts has a school, a ballpark, even community tennis courts. The town water tower has a happy face painted on it. There are good jobs here and, given the state of the post-9/11 world, surely more work to come.
The single advantage that goes to ugly little Sweetgrass is the actual border facility itself, two-thirds of which had to be built on the American side so that its border patrol officers wouldn’t have to check their weapons on the way to the toilets.
The Canadian border guards have never been armed—a somewhat charming tradition that is quickly coming to an unfortunate end.
HOW THE BORDER CAME ABOUT is largely a story of lack of interest.
Canadians have always felt that Americans give precious little thought to this huge, empty country sitting in the top branches of North America. And many Americans would even agree. “Americans assume Canada to be bestowed as a right,” former U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson told Andrew Malcolm, “and accept this bounty, as they do air, without thought or appreciation.”
Yet, except for the fur supply, Canada’s two founding nations were never all that interested either. The King of France might have preferred Caribbean sugar islands to the cold, useless tract of land Champlain claimed, but the British weren’t much different.
Back in 1960, Canadian historian W.L. Morton gave a series of lectures at the University of Wisconsin on Canada’s historical value and importance to its only neighbour. Morton talked about the War of Independence and how, after such a gruelling and unsatisfactory experience, the British were simply looking for peace at whatever cost. Ben Franklin, speaking for the American side, proposed that Britain hand over virtually all its possessions on the continent, including Newfoundland and the territory belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Britain didn’t even appear to get upset by the proposal, and “Canada” continued on only because George III was keen to give some refuge to the Loyalists and perhaps maintain some sort of what Morton called a “strategic check” on this new republic springing up in the former colonies. In a moment that would have forever changed the makeup of North America, negotiator John Jay of New York proposed that the U.S. border run along the 45th parallel all the way from Maine and the top of his state to the Pacific.
Had Jay won out, this day would have found me sitting somewhere in a field in the heart of Alberta, not on a park bench in a border town that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Jay’s suggestion would have given Canada a slice of Maine, a portion of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, and Oregon, and most of North Dakota, Montana, and Washington. The United States would have ended up with that area along the north shore of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario to which so many Loyalists had fled—as well as what would one day become Toronto and Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe all the way up to cottage country.
It’s certainly something to think about. Had the 45th line won the day, there might not even be a Golden Horseshoe. In The Canadian Identity, Morton goes so far as to speculate that if this border had been accepted, “Canada” would have picked up so much fertile western land that, if settled and populated, it could have “spelled continental supremacy.”
Had John Jay’s proposal taken the day, Canada would now be to the United States what the United States is to Canada. And I might be sitting on this bench wondering why Americans have all this angst about who they are. Why? Why? Why?
There but for the stroke of a quill….
Britain, given the choice and eager to give some comfort to the Loyalists, went with the water lines of the upper St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes then out along the 49th parallel—the very line that separates Coutts from Sweetgrass—to the Pacific Ocean. And so, in choosing the higher ground, as it were, Britain destined Canada to be “the country of the northern economy.”
In other words, diminished.
John Ralston Saul has called Britain and France Canada’s “indifferent mothers.” When key treaties were to be signed both had shown more interest in rum-producing islands than the fur-producing colony to the north. In Reflections of a Siamese Twin Saul offers a litany of British disinterest throughout history, from failing to back Canada on the inland fisheries in the 1870s to betraying it on the Alaska Panhandle in 1903. A commission had been struck to decide the Alaska/Canada dispute, but the recommendations it was leaning toward so outraged the Canadians on the panel that they pronounced them a “grotesque travesty of justice” and refused to sign.
The lone Brit on the panel, Lord Alverstone, would have the deciding vote. He went with the United States.
From then on, says Saul, Britain’s only interest in Canada was to have it pick up a share of the military burden and financial debt brought on by the two World Wars. Once Canada demonstrated its independence during the Suez Crisis thanks to Lester Pearson’s negotiations, Britain became rather dismissive of Canada as too soft, too “wet,” and a bit of a whiner on the world stage.
As for the North American stage, once those boundaries had been set, proximity and relative size had their predictable impact. The United States of America was so large, so populated, so wealthy, so powerful, and so determined that little Canada, despite an even larger land mass, couldn’t help being caught up in the whirlpool that was America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Early on, Stephen Leacock had noted “a sort of underlying fear that Canada is getting a little too close to the United States. It is the same sort of apprehension as is felt on a respectable family farm when the daughter of the family is going out too much with the hired hand. The idea is that you can’t tell what might happen.”
SITTING HERE catching a little autumn sun in Coutts, it’s impossible not to be struck by the amount of trade heading south. No wonder Hugh MacLennan once suggested that Canada had become “a colony of a sort unknown to the history of Europe or Asia.” It is a relationship that can be described only as unique.
Americans, however, seem blissfully unaware of the volume of traffic that passes through dozens of crossings like Coutts and Sweetgrass. Speaking to reporters before an upcoming conference on North American free trade in the spring of 2006, President George W. Bush talked about the impressive “half-billion” dollar annual trade between the two countries. He wasn’t even close—the real figure is a half-trillion dollars.
The trucks seem to roll endlessly through the border crossing, the traffic heading south on this day several times heavier than the traffic heading north. There aren’t many cars, the dollars far closer to par than they have been in years, cross-border shopping no longer the story it was in the 1980s, and the partiers staying home thanks to dropping drinking ages and changing liquor laws.
“It’s changed a lot,” says Kerv Thiessen, an easygoing, grinning Coutts councillor and businessman. Thiessen can recall a time when “there’d be fifteen hundred over there on a weekend—’cause Alberta had no booze on Sunday.”
Thiessen is a great admirer of the American way of life. It appeals to his own cowboy instincts: a respect for the individual, an instinct to stand up for what you think is right and whatever you think is wrong. Canadians, he finds, keep too much to themselves, are too accommodating for their own good. “We have no guts in this country,” he tells me as the sun heads for the Rockies. “No courage at all. We put up with all those regulations. It’s crazy. A kid falls off his bike and the next thing you know everyone has to wear a helmet. I tell you we have no courage.”
Thiessen respects Americans, works with them, sells to them, applauds their all-business attitude, but he doesn’t think of himself as one. He is Canadian, even if sitting only a few yards—in his case, metres—from the globe’s most powerful nation and dealing with that reality every single day of his life. “Americans are the best neighbours in the world,” he says, “but that doesn’t make them a relation or a friend.”
The exact relationship has always been a puzzle. Robert Thompson, leader of the Social Credit Party, in the 1960s once informed the House of Commons that “The Americans are our best friends—whether we like it or not.”
Those “best friends” are separated by a 5061-kilometre line that is still often referred to as the world’s longest undefended border. It’s only so in places these days, but they’re sufficient in number to convince certain Americans that a special fence be erected to reduce the chances of Canadian-located or even Canadian-born terrorists slipping over to do damage.
In the days following 9/11 the CIA’s former head of counterintelligence, Vincent Cannistraro, noted that CIA and FBI intelligence “appear to have tracked maybe five of these people to Canada.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that Canada might be “a haven” for such terrorists. And much was made of a previous incident where a man at Port Angeles, Washington—a small border crossing not unlike the one at Coutts—tried to enter the United States carrying explosives he intended to use on Los Angeles International Airport. Canada was suddenly extremely suspect.
The popular myth among Americans that the 9/11 hijackers slipped over the border from Canada isn’t likely to die any time soon, even though none had ever set foot here.
Ronald Reagan once called the border “a meeting place between great and true friends,” and that pretty much describes how it was viewed right from Canada’s birth in 1867 up until that unforgettable September morning.
In 1923, shortly before his untimely death, President Warren G. Harding dropped in on Vancouver at the end of a cruise to Alaska. He spoke to a large crowd gathered at Stanley Park—not far from the 49th parallel—and said that Canadians and Americans hardly need a border, for they “think the same thoughts … live the same lives [and] cherish the same aspirations.
“No grim-faced fortifications mark our frontiers,” he told the gathering, “no stealthy spies lurk in our tranquil border hamlets.… Only humble mileposts mark the inviolable boundary line.”
Fifty thousand Canadians cheered his every word.
THE BORDER CROSSINGS are no longer “only humble mileposts.” They grow tighter every day—the Canadians beginning to arm themselves, the Americans now demanding passports for anyone wishing to travel to the United States. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost’s neighbour keeps telling him in “Mending Wall,” but Frost, somewhat like Canada, is never quite convinced. Who says? he wants to know. Why?
… Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence …
And yet there are times when the “good neighbour” theory holds wonderfully true, no matter what the state of the fence that has grown from Harding’s humble mileposts to the razor wire that runs between Coutts and Sweetgrass.
No American ally was more involved than Canada when the order came to shut down the airways after the second airliner had gone into the Twin Towers. More than thirty thousand airline passengers found refuge and welcome in Canada—and yet it seemed to count for nothing. When the president took to the airwaves a few days later to thank those nations that had come to America’s aid in its time of need, Canada wasn’t even on the list.
Canadians poured out their sympathetic grief on Parliament Hill as they gathered for the first National Day of Mourning since 1967, when Governor General Georges Vanier had died in office. They came to listen to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien say, rather appropriately, “Words fail us.” Eighty thousand came to lay floral tributes, release balloons, and sing both national anthems.
“You have a symbol before you,” Chrétien told U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci as a north wind rattled the lowered flag over the Peace Tower. “A people united in outrage, in grief, in compassion and resolve.”
He quoted from Martin Luther King Jr., who once said that in difficult times it is not the words of the enemy that one tends to remember, but the silence of your frie
nds. “There will be no silence from Canada,” the prime minister said, his words echoing off the office buildings on the south side of Wellington Street. “Our friendship has no limit.”
It seemed, at that point, as if it did not. Shortly after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, I travelled across both Canada and the United States to talk to everyday citizens about the effect of these stunning attacks on their lives. It was in some ways a stark reminder of the differences between the two countries—yet in other ways a reminder of the similarities.
When you travel you can’t help noticing the endless disparities, even the most basic ones. Better roads in America; better coffee in Canada. No sidewalks in America; people walking everywhere in Canada. When I eat in Canada I think about appetizers and dessert; when I eat in America I stick to the main course—and even that’s so large the server will offer to put what can’t be finished in a Styrofoam suitcase so that I can work on it later in my hotel room.
In America they turn the homes of past presidents into shrines; in Canada they have to take up public collections to clean up the neglected graves of former prime ministers.
Talk radio in Canada is the CBC, which many in the country find too left for their liking. Talk radio in the United States is from the far right, National Public Radio the exception that proves the rule. What’s particularly notable about American talk radio is the constant refrain about how insufferably liberal the media is. Evidently they don’t listen to themselves—but that, of course, is an affliction on both sides of the border.
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