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Canadian WE vs American ME: A Curmudgeon's OpEd

pam-menegakis-Qp4VpgQ7-KM-unsplash-2 | Pam Menegakis
pam-menegakis-Qp4VpgQ7-KM-unsplash-2 | Pam Menegakis
mark-x-u0jSADAIKsU-unsplash | Unsplash
mark-x-u0jSADAIKsU-unsplash | Unsplash

I have been long fascinated by Canada’s relationship to the U.S., the differences between us and the root cause of those differences. We enjoy our visits to the Chautauqua Institution in New York, a place unmatched in the world for intellectual and artistic inspiration.

The BIG difference, of course, was the American Revolution, when the Americans rejected the British Monarch and we did not. In fact, Canada was inundated with Americans who wanted to continue their allegiance to the British Crown. The bi-product of that in the U.S. was certainly an independence, a sense of adventure and a degree of chaos in setting up an independent nation, the United States of America.

Interpretations of Americans, were never more uncomplimentary as when the expression The Ugly American took hold mid twentieth century. But as much as Americans displayed a certain bravado, a swagger perhaps, a tendency to ignore or feel superior to other countries born out of their great achievements and wealth, we know that they are a generous and very creative people driven to succeed. Horatio Alger-like but in most respects, they are friendly, respectful and industrious, strong family people and more religious than we are.

Ironically Canada is more small "c" conservative and less big "C" conservative. The authors of Fire & Ice, a Canadian book on demographics, said that Massachusetts was to the right of Alberta. Yes, we are indeed more liberal. If we were Americans, we would mostly be Democrats.

We were very fond of FDR, JFK and Obama. Yet, my father was travelling in Ohio on the day FDR died. He was in a bar, late afternoon, when someone walked in and exclaimed, “The old bastard’s dead, the drinks are on the house!” No one knocked his block off, as they used to say.

America is still divided, more or less down the middle and Ohio is still a Republican stronghold. Nothing has changed.

But there is more to this than the revolution and industrial might. It has to do with how we have organized our governments and, perhaps more directly, how we have organized our police. I think much of this both informs and is revealed by how we and they opened the West.

America is a quilt, some of it beautiful, of independent, very diverse and occasionally chaotic states, loosely held by a federal government built on compromise. Often reluctant states were lured to the center by promises of pseudo-equality that define the very impasse that has the country in knots today. Two Senators from each state, for example, which tends to favour a knee-jerk reaction in small states to change as might be generated by larger centers of population in larger states in the country. This is reflected in the counter-productive Electoral College that put Trump in the White House instead of Clinton, who had garnered three million more votes.

The confusion goes deeper. Criminal codes in the U.S. are driven by the states. There is a federal code often at odds with the states. In Canada, the reverse is true. The criminal code is consistent coast to coast. No matter where you are in Canada the laws, excepting local ordinances, are the same and here lies a key to our differences.

When the west was opened in the U.S., there would be local marshals, selected by a variety of means, not always propitious, that were local law enforcement. They had no national clout so laws were often made by whoever could draw a gun faster and shoot straighter. You might call this untoward but then it has been championed in the culture through legend, books and movies to create heroes, sometimes naughty, of those who won with the gun from Jesse James to John Gotti. The worship of the gun, supported by the ridiculous and costly misinterpretation of the 2nd amendment, has its roots in this, in the idea of individual independence as the last stand after state independence falls under the might of the big, bad federal government…could happen anytime. These same conflicts are rampant in the U.S. today.

In Canada, the more powerful federal government dissolved the Dominion police and formed the North-West Mounted Police, in the 1870s to bring order to the opening of the west. Later, dubbed “Royal” by Edward the 7th, the “Mounties” are one of the most respected Police services in the world.

Studies at Wilfred Laurier University point out that in the U.S. the term is Police Force where, in Canada it is Police Service, a very different connotation and one with teeth. For in America there are SIX TIMES as many lethal police shootings as there are in Canada. The gun in America is meant to be used, as evidence by four times the homicides and two times the aggravated assaults over Canada. These number adjusted for population differences. Further inefficiencies come from the U.S. having a total of 18,000 policing agencies to Canada’s 245. Unwieldy.

While guns are essentially holstered where COVID-19 is concerned, the weaknesses in the system are on full display. Trump’s federal government has responsibility, which it has shirked at virtually every turn, while the states scramble and compete with each other for the barest of essentials. Governors try to stay clear of Trump’s enemies list, while Trump slithers along the fence top ready to blame whoever he can whenever he can.

One wag put it well. “Trump will take credit for what the governors do well and blame them for whatever he does wrong”.

These differences are the basis for America’s rejection of a truly national health-care-for-all program, for their incredible income disparity, for very high levels of poverty all based on a nation of MEs. Canada has handled this crisis with aplomb and little fanfare. Again, Americans infected and Americans dead far outstrip the numbers in Canada.

We are a WE nation and WE have much to be thankful for.