Canada is Not America North

"The apartment a floor above the great loft party."

"America Jr."

"Some stupid place that puts tiny maple leaves over their corporate icons to remind themselves of how dependent they are on us while maintaining a superficial culture of superiority."

If you imagined these were all cute little snide remarks about how Canada relates to the United States, you would be dead on.  One does not need to watch South Park to know that the neighbor to the north has been maligned for years by some Americans, or at best taken as a joke.  Politicians in Washington have alternated between using Canada as a photo-op for international relations and bashing Canada as a terrorist school/socialist nightmare.  The sentiments of condescension toward the folks of the north is nothing new, nor entirely American; the British sometimes saw us as the consolation prize for their efforts in building a trans-Atlantic empire while the French sold us out entirely.  Thankfully, the majority of people who interact with Canada on more than a surface level find her an interesting part of the world, and most Buffalonians and Detroiters will admit that things are not exactly the same across the bridge.

That said, Canadians and Americans share much in common.  We have a shared history of both the first and second born of our continent, we share similar values in regards to an idealistic democracy, and we both tend to view the McDonald's down the street not as some bastion of American capitalistic domination over the world but just as the golden arches down the road that serves things that are not good for you.  We both strongly favor English as a means of communication, even as we have a great many people that speak French or Spanish as well.

But we are different.  The people who live on the left of the river below are not the same as the people who live on the right side.  Lewiston and Queenston might not be as different as Brownsville and Matamoros, but the lack of a linguistic gap and a large economic disparity is not all that goes into dividing neighbors.

Ontario on the left, New York on the right, looking north toward the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario from atop the Niagara Escarpment.  A boundary very much storied in war and separation   

As a Londoner once pointed out to me nearly a decade ago, at the height of tension during the war on terror, the differences of nationals lie not in cultural attachments, but in mentality.

I am breaking up this post into a series over the next week, mainly because it took a lot out of me to write, and because some very political messages might better be communicated and received when broken down a bit more.  What you will not see are diatribes about who did what to whom.  What you will see are ideas offered by a Canadian very much interested in and passionate about the United States and her history, one who has lived in the United States for quite some time now.