People blaming the sophomoric comments by Trump about Canada for the defeat of the Progressive Conservatives are badly missing the point. Canada has always had an identity crisis, being defined almost entirely by what it is not, the USA. Ninety percent of Canadians live with a hundred miles of the US border. (800,000 Canadians are permanent residents of the US, my sainted mother at one time being in their number, although her native country was always Newfoundland as far as she was concerned.) They are attracted and repelled by the Colossus of the South. If Alberta secedes from Canada, and I give that a forty percent possibility, it will begin a process that likely will end with several successor States to Canada, some of whom will be requesting admission to the Union. This is an issue that has been coming for decades before Trump came on the political scene.
For the record, …if you’re concerned about someone saying “a boot”, …you’ve talked to waaaaay too many North Dakotans.
I’m a Nebraskan. I’m an American.
Peace-keeping…rarely works. Society either does policing… or many suffer crime.
Assimilation in the real-world…happens. It’s not the Borg of Star Trek.
I suggest you avoid that diversity business like the plague.
..Most who promote that hate your guts as much as they hate mine.
For your sake, …God save the King.
For my sake, …God Bless America.
Aaah Canada – my commiserations. You are much like Australia. A gluten for punishment. Our federal elections are this weekend. Please pray for Australia. ✝️🙏
Have visited many Provinces, and Albertans are Americans. It’s hard to explain. They just are..
While what you say is true, Trump’s baffling and gratuitous 51st state takes galvanized the Liberal vote. Sure, the Tories surged, too. But the Liberals were on the way to a wipeout.
I expect The PM With Three Passports will do enough to keep confederation’s baling wire unity intact for the nonce.
The last time I was in Canada to visit Ste. Anne’s basilica in 1973, the Canadians charged Americans 10% more for everything. Pay backs are a —–.
Modern Canada has nothing to unite it beyond “we are not the United States.” They have a rich history in agriculture, mining, etc. but all of these professions are embarrassments to moderns. They can’t exactly create an identity out of “we were a holding of the crown for a long time, but one that they didn’t respect very much.”
The problem has gotten worse with the massive increase in immigration, which their politicians defended by saying that a guy fresh off the plane is Canadian as someone with generations of family there, because there is no Canadian culture. And they probably would have kept doing that had President Trump not forced them to try to resurrect some form of Canadian nationalism for cheap votes.
But there really is nothing defining them as a separate culture beyond “we are not the United States.” This is why they often are more deranged against Donald Trump than anyone in America; if they don’t obsess against him, what else do they have?
Now there are many Canadians, especially in agricultural areas, who do not think this way. But they do not really have a Canadian identity so much as an Albertan identity, an identity of being part of western Ontario, etc.
We will take Alberta. And give them Maine.
I suspect the problem with Canada in the first instance was that discussion of the accomplishments of Anglophone Canada was hampered by courtesies which had to be paid to Quebec. Conjoining the two under one political architecture was a mistake. Quebec’s self-understanding was animating by vigorous Catholic commitment. The abrupt evaporation of Quebec’s Catholic culture generated a vacuum which was filled by an addled political separatism. Quebec was remarkably otiose about building institutions which would allow for independent living but vigorous about contriving petty ways to piss on its Anglophone minority. Federal politicians were given to gestures of deference to Quebec which had no practical utility but irritated the rest of the country.
==
The project of much of the Canadian political class since 1968 has been one familiar to other western publics: actively denigrating those who founded the country and worked to make it thrive. Conjoined to that have been escalating immigration flows which have in the last 10 years reached madcap levels. Heritage Canadians ought to have a neuralgic reaction to the project of turfing them out of their own country, but they hardly react.
“there is no Canadian culture”
Fun fact: the “Great White North” segments on SCTV back in the 1980s, featuring beer swilling brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie, were originally created as a parody of a Canadian TV regulation requiring certain shows to have a minimum amount of “identifiably Canadian” cultural content. The show became a hit on both sides of the border and a touchstone of the very Canadian culture it was supposed to be satirizing.
ut there really is nothing defining them as a separate culture beyond “we are not the United States.”
==
Not true in 1960.
[…] Political Analysis, Punditry, and News:Long Live Free Alberta – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at the American […]
Canada has a culture. Canada is maple leaf trees, Maple leaf syrup, ice hockey, Quebecois nationalism and Catholicism, Indigenous traditions, the great outdoors, grizzly bears, the moose, the beaver, ice and snow, Niagara Falls, vast expanse of woodland forests…the Canadian accent – owt and abowt (out and about)…
I imagine the differences between Canada and the USA are parallel to that of Australia and New Zealand. Neither wants to be called the other. Each has their own history, politics and tradition.
Canada had a culture once: they were British! You could see it in their flag and their national anthem which proudly proclaimed Britain’s conquest of New France:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxOhk4Lk9aE
The Loyalists from America helped make this culture, and loyalty to the home land was an emotional component for which they had gone into exile.
The mistake the Canucks made was to attempt to graft a completely alien culture onto their nation. All concerned would have been much happier if Quebec had become a separate dominion in 1867, as Newfoundland did in 1907.
Yes Quebec should be left to be Quebec. The quintessential Quebecois of what I know is tough, feisty, stubborn and ready to fight. And that’s not a bad thing. Very different to their British counterparts. As with everything, mass immigration dilutes things.
Trump on the news saying Canada should be the USA 51st State. That’s a whole lotta land and angry ice hockey fans. 😂