Taking Canada Seriously

Abstract

Canada has less impact in the world than many of its citizens think it should have. It is a founding member of the United Nations with an excellent history as a victorious ally in two World Wars and the cold war. It is, with six traditional great powers, a member of the economic G-7, widely admired as a place to live, and the only serious country, when cost of living and tax levels are taken into account, with a standard of living reasonably close to that of the United States. Canadians tend to feel keenly that Canada is on the verge of becoming a country of the first rank but is not widely perceived to be so. To be at the forefront of a large group of secondary powers such as the Scandinavians and the Dutch and even the Australians is something of an underachievement for a wealthy nation of 30 million people.It seems to me the key to being stronger in the world can be found in two related areas. First, the ambiguity about the political viability of the country and its institutions must end. Second, we must create a society more able to contain and reward its greatest talents if we are to put a stop to 150 years of brain- and talent-drain to the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. At the risk of over-simplifying, the frustration of Canadians, which persists despite the country's undoubted success by most criteria, rests on two facts: that there is little real distinction between English-speaking Canadians and Americans from states bordering Canada and that the only obvious distinctive characteristic of Canada compared with the northern United States is the French Canadians, who in their collective heart are rather ambiguous about Canada. Most are not separatist but most seem to wish to keep the threat of separation alive.Under Prime Ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the federal government attempted to deal with both the identity question and the Quebec problem by massive and intrusive spending, an endless sequence of regimental social programmes, and the propagation of a culture of official fiscal compassion designed to impress fractious French Canadians with the value of federalism and to define Canada vis-a-vis the United States by its more generous (that is, extravagant) social programmes. That policy failed in its objectives and was overwhelmingly unaffordable. At the end of the Trudeau era, Canada was the only country in the world besides North Korea to have outlawed private medicine, and current political wisdom blames successor governments for the health care disaster created twenty years ago.Foreign policy under Trudeau was largely devoted to the complementary objectives of maintaining an adequately civil relationship with the United States while seeking every opportunity to differ with its official policy, particularly during the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and the first half of that of Ronald Reagan. The prolonged effort of the Trudeau administration to decrease Canada's economic reliance on trade with the United States was a total failure as the percentage of the country's gross national product and of its overall foreign trade devoted to trade with the United States steadily increased. The spectacle of Canada's longest serving postwar prime minister and his wife gambolling admiringly with Fidel Castro, even shouting 'Viva Fidel' within earshot of the prison where Armando Valladares and many other political prisoners of the Stalinist Cuban regime were held, was degrading.In general while remaining in the Western alliance and avoiding anything that would bring down upon the country the unsustainable wrath of the American government, the Trudeau government steadily staked out, as a matter of course, positions more deferential to the USSR and its satellites; the Chinese, the Vietnamese, and Latin American communists; and the more demonstrative anti-Israeli Arabs than those of the United States. In foreign aid, Canada made a particular virtue of apolitical assistance, even when the beneficiaries -- Sandinistas, Tupemaros, Castro, and other residents of history's dustbin -- were officially antagonistic to what we might broadly call Western values. …