Why Does Canada Have a Queen?

The Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II, 1953-2022.

Canada has a queen because the founders of Confederation were determined to govern the country under the system that most of them had known since birth.  Indeed, under rule by either Britain or France, second born (the term I use for European colonists-First Nations Canadians I call first born, and yes, it is the truth to also say the word colonizers to mark the ruling powers sending people over in the first place), there had always been a crowned head and ruling aristocracy calling the shots back in the mother countries.  There was, of course, a marked journey toward something resembling our modern elected representatives, especially in Britain under the House of Commons (and to a lesser extent, the Burgh Commissioners in pre-Union Scotland).  By the time Canada had become a unique Dominion within the British Empire in 1867, elected representatives made up the bulk and most politically powerful elements in British government, a long struggle since the 1640's when the Crown succumbed to the political will of Parliament... or rather the House of Commons... or rather a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell.  OK, so that really happened in the 1650's, but the nuances can be tricky.

The distaste of anything monarchial or lordly in the United States did not exactly happen overnight in 1776, nor did representative government suddenly emerge there as such.  The colonies had their own constituent assemblies, albeit with voting rights limited to land-owning males.  The Founding Fathers, of course, were not openly in love with Democratic principles, despite what the national mythos might say these days.  There were exceptions in the more passionate people like Thomas Paine, and after he got a taste of France, Thomas Jefferson (which of course is a whole other story), but by and large the Fathers were Republicans (the philosophy of government, not the modern party) because they wanted power to rest in the hands of an educated electorate with an eye to the broader picture of history and the future.  They were somewhat afraid of the passion of the mob, some because of concerns of anarchy, some because of an elitism, some because of an concern over the stability of the young country.  Not all of them, in fact, wanted to throw out the concept of monarchy, at least not right away.  Blame even focused early on toward the distant elected body of the lower house of Parliament.  The King and Lords were rich, for the most part, but they held wealth passed down through generations and while greed stops nowhere, the concern was that some in the House of Commons were more concerned with fattening up their portfolios rather than engaging in discourse about how best to govern for the common good.  Sound familiar?  These days we call such corrupt politicians "shills" or in the pocket of some monied interest, and it seems that they are largely in control of things.

Of course, those with inherited wealth and titles are not above corruption, but the blame for mismanagement and disaster was harder to avoid in these cases.  Famously, the Duke of Buckingham botched a raid on France so badly that he looked like a traitor to his country!  He couldn't hide behind a defense of "well, vote me out, then".  An assassin channeled the fury of the populace and permanently ended his mistakes.  Truth be told, as much fun as it might seem to have such a pirate ship mentality take care of our political problems, well, we all decided, gradually, that representative democracy was instead the way to go.  I certainly think so.  The thinkers, politicians, economists, etc. that created new governments in the United States, Canada, and far beyond our shores did as well.  

In the United States, however, a more hands off approach would emerge from multiple sides of the political spectrum, born of the Federalism that saw its birth pangs as far back as the Magna Carta.  Initially, the Founding Fathers produced the Articles of Confederation out of a fear of how government can tyrannize private citizens and bring about an interruption of the free flow of commerce.  Capitalism was in it's young adulthood, and the colonies and Britain were the birth place of the philosophy as we have come to recognize it.  Alas, the Articles proved weak and ineffective, largely thanks to the American independent spirit.  A Constitution would emerge once independence from Britain had been secured, a largely stable document that has thus far managed to endure and act as the law of the land.

Canada was another story.  Seemingly in a continuation of "Tories" (conservatives, sort of) vs. "Whigs" (liberals, sort of), while the United States was all about keeping an eye on the wheel of the ship while letting it sail where the wind may provide opportunity (read: Whigs), Canada was dominated by a more paternalistic mentality that seemingly embraced some idealistic stability of the more controlled times of "before Capitalism", or rather mercantilism (read: Tories).  To date, this is why even conservative elements in Canada don't consider public healthcare or welfare spending to be the devil (though this is currently undergoing a bit of a challenge), whereas in the United States the "hands off" approach has tended to dominate (though this is currently undergoing a bit of a challenge).  As I noted in my last article, I've come to see this as a result of an unfinished war we have been fighting since those 1640's I talked about earlier.  The players just seem different.  Anyway, before I dive to deeply into that rabbit hole, what does any of this happen to do with Canada having (had) a queen?

Paternalism, or the concept of governing like a father.

In the United States, the hands off approach tended to form because a distrust of official class divisions, which on paper sailed away with any surviving and remaining Loyalists at the end of the American Revolution/War of Independence.  Some went back to Britain, some stayed and made the best of it, but many went to Canada.  There, over a long period of struggle that we have not really resolved, they found a an existing paternalistic society in the form of the French-Canadians, and while the English speakers largely took refuge in places like Nova Scotia or Upper Canada (now Ontario), Montreal became a famous hub of interaction of ideals and philosophies and two worlds started talking to each other.  One can easily see that while the 13 colonies had to fight to find common ground in order to survive, with South Carolina and Massachusetts miraculously finding political harmony enough to muster political will, in Canada this was taken to a whole other level.  Confederation was a difficult baby to birth, and these days hot headed elements popping out of the landscape screaming "Quebec, Alberta, etc." prove that the struggle continues.  

Some say that it only happened because we did not want to be Americans.  We were more comfortable with paternalism, that is to say the government acting as parent, specifically father, than the Founding Fathers ever were (though Hamilton had a strong attraction to it in some ways).  To a degree, we largely still are.  This is not to say we are not into elections and individual liberty!  Those are good, necessary things, reminders of the accountability government has to all of us, that it rules by the consent of the governed.  Yet we still have a crown.  We delight in being Albertans, Ontarians, Quebecois almost as much, if not more so, than being Canadian, and yet when push comes to shove, we also have a very strong sense of community, which has thus far held us together.  Americans have it too, and this is going to explain a lot about the real question here: "why does Canada still have a crown?"

Americans sort of had one.  

He was many things, but George Washington is remembered as the quiet man in the room who everyone shut up to listen to.  He inspired unity in a way that no other president has since done so, and no other figure had managed to in his own time.  He is most significantly remembered for not taking a crown, for cementing into the national identity the concept of fair elections where one does one's duty and then moves on.  He was the chairman of the board that the new country needed.  Ever since 1660, when Britain decided that it needed that chairman of the board to come back after they chopped the head off King Charles I, flirted with a failed state under Cromwell, and then was plunged into the mess that both the Founding Fathers and Fathers of Confederation never wanted to repeat, even disconnected by centuries and ocean, so far away from such a chaotic "what's next?".  

Canada decided to stick with the existing British model of political parties forming ruling coalitions in an elected lower House of Parliament.  The leader of the dominant party would be a Prime Minister, just like back in London.  Much like the President, however, the Prime Ministers would often fall short of being the figure of unity and a manifestation of the larger nation, that chairman of the board.  Not being American, having a transcontinental railroad, other elements of the defensive nationalism that Canada may fairly be labelled as having in her history, these were not good enough reasons to stick together.  Community, on the other hand, took a Canadian identity out of the hands of negative definitions and moved from I am X because not Y to we are all in this together.  Canada not only drew its inspiration of government from what had been functioning in Britain in evolving form since the 1200's (or earlier, if we consider Henry II to be the founder of our modern rule of law), but had a figurehead already in place.  Her name was Victoria.  

Queen Elizabeth looks at Queen Victoria

I fully acknowledge that she has a complicated history.  She didn't, for example, support female voting, and while she was largely removed from the political process involved in colonization and atrocities like the Irish and Indian famines, she was still crowned while it was all happening.  That said, she also knew how to cool heads and tell, as Elizabeth would later put it, "grey haired old men" to think things through.  Like Elizabeth, and indeed like myself, she didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, and had a historical perspective to consider options with.

By the time she ascended to the throne in Britain, she was roughly in the same role as King Charles is today.  There were already vicious political factions vying for control, philosophical dominance, etc. by a hundred years prior to her crowning.  At the end of the day, however, your radical reformer and most stolid aristocrat alike all shut up when she would enter the room.  This is not because she was a figure of worship, but because she was, well, outside of the political realm.  Yes, much like King Charles, she lived in splendor and once she became queen, never really had to want for anything ever again, but it served as a golden cage from which she could not necessarily live her own life.  She was unelected, but she was also not making the decisions about how we ought to be governed; we had and have elections for that.  She was, and he is, however, the living reminder that those elected leaders cannot run amok and have to be accountable to us and the Constitution which is there to remind us, in paper, of accountability.  It may be bold to say so, but these days, Americans could use another Washington like that.  Alas, as he warned in his farewell address, his office got political.  A new crown is not the answer for the United States.  The selection process would be impossible, to say the least, but alas, the modern nature of the Presidential office requires an exceptional individual to serve as inspiring more than just consumer confidence.

But while the United States is best known for forging a new path, or at least trying to a new form of one, Canada looks to the future by drawing strength, and these days, more sobriety, from the past.  To quote King Charles in his first Royal speech made earlier today:

"In her life of service we saw that abiding love of tradition, together with that fearless embrace of progress, which make us great as Nations." 

He smiled a bit when he said that line, and no, it wasn't a smirk.  He said it because he was aware of his role, and hers, in wearing ermine and a jeweled crown while promoting various freedoms.  His mother, for example, was very much opposed to Apartheid in South Africa.  As early as her 1947 speech about the Commonwealth (which used, a product of its time, words we now shirk at, like "Imperial"), she was committed to leaving behind an empire and moving towards a global scale of cooperation and assistance.  The most ardent supporter of this is, well, the crown.  Many crowns in one person.  In Canada, we have 11 crowns shared by the same person, Federalism born from a Unitary state, the struggle that was the excuse for starting that fight that began in the 1640's, but turned out to be more of a power and wealth struggle egged on by religious fervor (sound familiar?).  You see, in the person of the monarch, who really lives in a manicured, arranged life, and is born to not be themselves, we have the representation of shared history, the legacy of the journey toward accountability, the rule of law, and the balance between freedom and the responsibility we have to each other.  We didn't just wake up one day and say "freedom", "elections", etc.  

The realm is not, you see, the extension of the will of the sovereign, but a community with whom the crown acts as a living embodiment of a unity over many voices and a desire to live free... together.

It's hard to go it alone.  A tyrant looks at all of us differently than just us.  That sentence can easily be at home in both the United States and Canada, no/non?

Canada still has a queen/king because we value democracy, the rule of law, political accountability, and the path to progress, rooted in a history that inspires and shows us how we got there, and how to avoid doing the same dumb stuff that took us a for a tumble or let a tyrant take control.

A Turning Point, A Remembering

Welcome back to American Voyages!  Our long absence has come to an end as I find myself once again in possession of a workable computer.

Much has been going in North America lately, events setting in motion a rather vast set of political changes.  While life will continue as normal for many, the extremes of polarity that have built up between camps of ideology and alliance grow farther and farther apart.  At this point, I could easily turn this into a political blog, but there really is no point to such a disservice.  Rather, consider that American Voyages has always been about exploration and trying to paint a picture about the context of our history.  As a radical centrist, its, well, my "thing".  I'm also something of a royalist, at least in a constitutional sense; it's amazing what an un-elected political leader can do to keep a bunch of elected political leaders at bay.  The colonials in the thirteen colonies at first felt the same way; their grievance was with a bloated Parliament and its military-industrial machine.  In fact, they even sent a petition just to George III to ask for his help in dealing with Parliament.

That said, I'm in no hurry to see a king set up, deposed, or necessarily even considered for appointment.  But there are those out there who very much are.  France, much like the United States, is currently undergoing a period of cultural introspection, brought on by a number of different factors.  Extremist populist movements are no less prevalent there, as they have been now for quite some time.  A minority within the far right of the country has been quietly calling for the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne.  This past Saturday, the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, a memorial Mass was held in Paris at the Basilica of Saint Denis, the French equivalent of Westminster Abbey.  These faces should look fairly familiar:

They were the last monarchs before the first French Revolution.  Their descendants live on, as do their supporters.  I leave it up to each person to decide whether they were right to have been killed; personally, I think they made their own fate possible, even while I think that the revolutionaries were overreaching themselves.  They tried to flee and attack their own country, just as James II did so in Britain a hundred years before them.  They made little room for compromise, or at least made it a secondary concern, much as the last Catholic king of Britain did.  This was par for the course as far as the Bourbons (and Stuarts) were concerned.  Louis XIV started the process by trying to unify his kingdom through the sheer blunt instrument of an absolute monarchy.  He definitely had his reasons: his uncle Charles I lost his head over not gaining dominance over Parliament.  The Bourbons would ensure that their majesty, wealth, and power would put the nobility in their place.  The problem was, the nobility could be kept in check by ostentatious displays of the glory of the state.  The common folk, however, saw it as an affront to their very struggle for existence.

Populism toppled a regime in France, just as it had transformed a regime in Britain, just as it would change the game in the colonies and Mexico, just as it made the first half of the 20th century a rather terrifying era to live in... just as it keeps doing to this day.  While we need not and indeed should not be slaves to historical memory, we certainly should be aware that it has a lot to teach us, inspire us with, and warn us against.

For my part, I definitely see January 21st as something of a feast day, even while I would throw my support behind Henri d'Orleans and the Orleanist line of succession rather than the Bourbon.  That day in 1793 was a day to be remembered and pondered on for anyone serious about historical memory.  That day was a day in which both the Bourbons and the New Regime failed France, failed themselves, and was a day in which the dangers of extremes became truly painful and divisive, not just here but in a new American nation.  Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, Anti-Federalists and Federalists started rallying behind supporting Republican France or divorced Mother Britain, even as they were more definable by preexisting theories of government.  People love a cause.  People love to get behind "Change we can believe in" just as much as they love to get behind "Making America great again".  Centrists like Benjamin Franklin, and later, a man very much touched by his aggravating advice, John Adams, would try to acknowledge passion even as they supported a little bit more sanity.  Mr. Adam's epitaph does not proclaim "I did for the dream of a strong central government", it reads:

"Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in 1800."

Isolated from his enemies and his former architect of power, Alexander Hamilton, Mr. Adams found his life to be one of a dreamer of change who ended up simply wanting others to have the freedom to dream of their own change or stability.  In the history of my country, there was Guy Carleton, the first Baron Dorchester.  You see, even while I take interest in the revival of interest in a French monarchy (and the French do love their freedom even while they idolize "kings" like Napoleon and De Gaulle, because they are as into populist excitement as much as the Americans), I already have a monarch, Queen Elizabeth.  Her predecessor George III had the wisdom to see Lord Carleton as "a sensible man" who could effectively manage newly British Canada.  He saved my culture, managed to keep Canada out of the colonial cause for independence and helped create English speaking Canada by shepherding loyalists out of the United States when the war was over.  For her part today, the Queen has served as a place for rival camps in British politics to find at least a ceremonial common ground.  In 2011, she even became the first British monarch to visit Ireland as a guest rather than a general leading troops.  She is an ironic symbol, I think, for an alternative to the personalization of politics.

But what we all have is a shared history, progressives, conservatives, moderates, Caucasians, African-Americans, Native Americans... even while we still attend rallies to see a man of powerful presence in a red hat... or stand our ground in the cold as a pipeline threatens to cross close to our native land.  In Paris, a Requiem is celebrated for a long dead king, perhaps to stir up some concept of patriotism, even as others march against this and other visions of what they deem repression.  Lately, all sides seem to be calling their opposition the oppressor.

The king is called to the scaffold yet again; this time he is embodied in no single individual.  This is in many ways the perfect time to read 1984, and not because the "other side" is your enemy personified in Big Brother.  May passion inspire us, not rule us!

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part Three, Canada Continued.

These days we tend to hear an annoying little voice calling out for Quebecois liberty.  This voice has shut up a bit ever since it might have come to its senses and realized that things could be much, much worse for the otherwise fine people of Quebec, which probably has something to do with the fact that a decent majority of her people feel that they are being treated well enough as part of a united Canada and all of them know that they have the right to not only speak French and exist as they otherwise wish throughout the nation.  More on this towards the end of the post, along with the other side, which it turns out is just as bitchy as the Francophones are over "my rights".  First, just how did we manage to get to this point, anyway?

Well, the Canada of the 1770's was a very uncertain place, full of French-speaking people expecting deportation/cultural annihilation.  French anything was certainly not in vogue back in London, to say nothing of how it was openly hated and feared in the rest of English-speaking North America.  Think about things from the American perspective, especially from the viewpoint of a backcountry Pennsylvanian or Virginian: the French were the enemy, sending those terrifying Indians to attack you for no other purpose than to either kill you outright or terrorize you into leaving your land to the beavers so they could just... profit.  That's right, they did not even want to settle down in your vacated clearing and cabin.  Maybe their allies would retake some of that property, but even they would be more than likely to return to ancient lifestyles rather than set up shop in your hard-earned dwelling.  1763 was supposed to have changed all that.  1763 was supposed to be the time where London could tell France to pack up and move on and let people freely expand into that desirable western frontier.  New colonies could even spring up along the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes, where they could connect economic opportunities with the distant Hudson's Bay Company. 

Why would the newly appointed authorities of New France, be it in Quebec or Louisiana, want anything else?

Well, for one, London wanted control.  Liberty was all well and good, but imagine how it looked from an office overlooking the Thames when confronted by the image of a set of colonies slowly growing into something far more expansive than merry old England.  If nothing else, imagine how the people in such offices viewed the revenue potential of such a vast enterprise.  Such income could easily pay for any war that these colonies would get into in the future, let alone what they had already cost the motherland in that war leading up to the victory of 1763.  Now, imagine that if the colonists got their every wish and could expand as far they wanted to across the continent.  Levying a tax on such a vast population would be difficult, and the freedom-minded people might even say no...  In fact, they already had been not even 10 years after that victory had been achieved.  More than this though, mother Britain knew that she could not indefinitely keep the winning streak she was on without a nation getting a bit overwhelmed by almost constant fighting.  She needed to keep large reserves of the American prize open as potential bargaining chips down the road.  After all, Canada was won only at the cost of turning down an even more profitable prize: Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean.  Canada was just an option, and not a trophy or a purpose, for London.

So for control, for an open hand to play, for so many things, Canada was not just given to the Americans in its entirety.  Provided that they give allegiance to a new crown, the French-Canadians could remain as they were, and this was, and has ever since been, because of the vision of one man:  Lord Guy Carleton.

Unknown artist, public domain, reference number C-002833 from the National Archives of Canada.

As I said, he is the savior of the entire concept of French-Canada, and next to George Etienne Cartier is probably the only reason that there are any French-speakers left on the continent.  He made the Quebec Act of 1774 possible, and he also saved our behinds from being taken over by the Americans during the invasion of Quebec that was one of the first strategic offensive moves of the American War for Independence and the first official take-over attempt by Americans to dominate Canada.  You would not figure Guy to be fond of anything foreign, however.

You see, Guy was Protestant, and he was Anglo-Irish, meaning that he was the product of centuries of an imperial attempt to impose English dominance over the island next door.  He was also a veteran of the Jacobite wars over in Scotland, yet another exercise in said imperialism.  By all accounts, nothing French or especially Catholic should have been in any way appealing to him to let live.  That said, we know little of his earlier conviction and personal beliefs regarding English cultural sentiments, but we do know that he was a social climber and cared very much about his military career.  Even if he was not interested in an imperialistic patriotism, he was very much interested in making the right moves.  To speak out on behalf of the conquered French-Canadians was a risky move that one would not expect of a career obsessed officer.  In the end, however, he did just that.  In the end, the Protestant Anglo-Irishman asked London to let the French-Canadians not only speak French and be Catholic, but even to judge themselves according to their own civil laws.  He also put his life on the line to defend Quebec from American attack.

Now the next part is very important.

But wait, you say, Americans of the period soon learned to love the French, especially after they would come to save the day at Yorktown and later even embrace a revolution of their own.  True, but also remember that prejudice built up over generations and hundreds of years is not something to be so easily reversed.  For anyone of British, and then by extension, American, heritage, things French were the rival at best and the enemy at worst.  When we get to language in the United States, we will also cover feelings about things Spanish, but rest assured that in Anglo-American history, both cultures were not exactly well-loved ever since the reign of Henry VIII, and yes, religion complicated matters further.  Why bring this up in a topic about language in Canada?  Well, the battleground on the topic has already existed there for much longer, and now to look at the results, we turn back to Canada.

One can pretty much be certain that loyalty was almost then guaranteed in this new Canada.  In 1775 and again in 1812, any notion of joining the crusade for freedom with the Americans was pretty much junked.  Why take chances with, at best, an unknown foreign government in the colonies, and at worst, a government that would echo the sentiments of her citizens and expunge anything French from the land?  Guy offered security and potential profit: whereas Paris once controlled the economic destiny of New France, she was now joined into a network of free-enterprise with an empire that spanned the globe.  If we consider the Quebec Act to be the political birth of Canada, then we would also have to say that the Quebecois of 1775 where positively thrilled to be Canadian, and in 1812, they pretty much confirmed that notion to curious Americans.  By 1867, when Canada came into an official existence more along the lines of what we know her to be today, French was alive and well in a Canada that had since come to also embrace English and manage to somehow not extinguish languages spoken by her native peoples.

As I have rambled on a bit in this post, we will continue down this track, which does get a bit bumpy, next post.

Language In North America

This has been a long time in coming, but now seemed like a good time to discuss the matter of language on our fair continent.  First, a few key points:

1. The United States of America does not have an official language.  There are practical and historical reasons for this, which we will get into.  The state of New Mexico actually has two official languages, English and Spanish.

2.  Nearly a quarter of the people on this continent do not speak English as a first language, BUT:

3.  Many people in Mexico learn English, and as a second language, rather than as a foreign language, the most popular choice for which is French.  In my own experiences in Morelos, Guerrero, The Federal District, Chihuahua, and Baja California, I found that every person I ran into either spoke English or knew someone who did.

4.  English is not going anywhere, stop worrying.  People in China, which trumps our three countries in population all together, are learning it despite clearly being in a position where they now have the commercial and political clout to tell us to speak Mandarin and Cantonese. 

Feel better?

5.  Many of the founding fathers spoke multiple languages and considered a working knowledge of Latin and Greek to be an essential mark of a gentleman's intellectual prowess. 

6.  In present times, several hundred thousand people in the United States and Canada do not speak English, French, or Spanish as a first language, if at all, in daily use, and they have been speaking these tongues before speakers of those three tongues ever arrived on our shores. 

7.  Many if not most consumer products will have an instruction or warning label in our three predominant languages.  In Canada this is required by law; everything thus has French and English on the label.  In the United States, this is promoted by private businesses and often features multiple choices beyond even the big three.

8.  Of all the current political topics on the table, language is the one issue that seems to raise the ire in even the most politically apathetic people.  I have lost count of how many times I have been threatened with bodily harm just for speaking with someone in Spanish, or, heaven forbid, French.  

So let's start with those bold, declarative statements for now.  I want to be careful about how I introduce such a topic without causing panic (and why yes, immigration will also be on the table, probably next week) and to promote the fact that these posts, and this blog, is not attempting to be the grand avatar of some horrid political agenda.  Rather, I hope to bring some clarity to otherwise cloudy places of knowledge for you guys/you all/y'all.  I'm going to go slowly on this one, and break it down into digestible portions of history, politics, maps, etc.  Oh, expect maps.  Expect many maps.  I like maps.  Let's start with this one:

Source cited in image.  As we can see, Maine is clearly the coolest state to live in.  Not that I am biased or anything.

A nice map we have here.  Yes, we do see a lot of Spanish, but remember, this is a map with a title that should disarm hostile opposition.  In each and every one of those counties, excepting maybe some in the hinterlands and present political frontiers, English is the main event spoken outside of the home, and is definitely available even there.

Happy Fourth

To anyone reading this, remind everyone you meet of the significance of this day and how it means more than just a chance to sleep in and gorge on grilled meats later.   The sad truth is that more people in France than here know what July 4th means.  Heck, they even sent us a statue because of it!

Yes, that is Lady Liberty herself seen through the trees of Battery Park off of State Street, all the way down at the bottom tip of Manhattan.  This is a nice view of a French statue seen through Willow Oaks (Quercus Phellos) and London Planetrees (Plantanus x Acerifolia), a lovely reminder of our European, Colonial, and Native roots.  The park has a great website where one can see a plant database, including a bloom time monitor, for everything that grows in this nice green space.  It can be found here.  The Battery also features an urban farm!

Enjoy the day, and remember to get historical as much as relaxed.

Damn Foreigners And Their Donuts

My apologies, but the internet has been shaky for me at best these last few days.  I intended to finally post on some big issues, namely immigration and language, but if the cogs and wheels inside this modern typing machine can't bother to move properly until later in the evening when my brain is spent, well... it's not as if immigration and language will stop being issues in North America tomorrow or the next day anyway.  In any event, for those of us wondering what particular group will be the topic of discussion, that would be the Spanish speaking peoples to the south of us.  While I am loathe to give a preview of a post that I have no plans on getting to on a holiday weekend, my readers can probably figure out where a bilingual French-Canadian ex-pat will stand on the issues.

Hint:  The United States has no official language, and this peculiarity is kept in place by people on both the political right and left of this country, and has been kept so by such people since its founding.  Just as French speakers in Canada tell the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada, however, English probably is not going to go anywhere.  On the topic of culture, even though Mexican-American and Puerto Rican kids enjoy copious amounts of their traditional cuisine at home, most of the ones that I know make a grand charge to the nearest McDonald's whenever they can get the chance to, just like any other American kid.  Amazing.  No, no, don't be alarmist and think that this blog is going to turn into some political podium for the encouragement of opening the flood gates to foreigners who want to take away our apple pie and soak up welfare funds, and on the other side don't think that I am totally against the American concept of assimilation.  That's the amazing thing about the United States of America!  This country takes the world and (gasp) tries to make it work together.  Yes, it tends to get turned into something else in the name of opportunistic capitalism, but more often than not this is worthy of a laugh in and of itself.

In that line of thinking, and considering that we are now just that much closer to July 4th, take a look at this amazing scene in southern Ohio:

The fabled city of Portsmouth, Ohio.

That's right, those hills in the background are actually Kentucky, and that is indeed a Tim Horton's which has made an advance on behalf of Canada this far south.  I was in complete shock when I saw one this far from the maple frontier, hitherto thinking that they were only to be found within two counties' distance of the Canadian border.  Before I go ahead saying "assimilate this" and having y'all shake in your boots, be aware that as with all things imported into this country, even Tim's is not immune to Americanization: you can get a coffee in a dangerously large, totally patriotic extra extra extra large mug. 

July 1st From The Other Side

I love the United States of America.  I love it for its sheer humanity; great dreams and noble intentions coupled with ambitions of imperial dominance set in mind to gain the most glittering crown avarice could ever offer.  I love it for its achievements in human progress which it has come to increasingly display alongside a realistic look at a rather barbaric past of slavery, slaughter, reckless greed, and xenophobia.  I love how the best and worst of humanity are found and acknowledged without pretense here.  Sure, some history books and some pundits gloss over the issues and sugar coat an incredible history.  This, however, is by and large a country wherein memorials to genocide stand out every bit as public as the temples to liberty erected in various capitals both state and Washington alike.  The United States of America, you see, is very human.  I would dare so much as to say that no other country in the world is so unabashedly human. 

I never have left her for very long.  Oh sure, my heart has longed to return to where it thinks it belongs across the northern border.  My sense of adventure and imagination has even called me to Mexico.  Both places are wonderful, quite different bookends to the North American collection.  Canada has, until the last forty years anyway, been a country of diffident conservatism borne from a defensive nationalism.  Mexico, in contrast, again except for the most recent decades, has been a country of reckless liberalism borne from a confused sense of national identity.  The United States of America though?  The United States has had ALL of this about it, with every element of the political battlefield making a mark in the war zone.  The allure of freedom to make a mark in the fight in whatever way one chooses is, well, intoxicating.  The greatest thoughts and ideas come from people looking for action!  And yet...

Something can be said for the place of peace across the northern border.  Maybe there is something to stepping back and taking a look at so many great thoughts and ideas from outside the fishbowl in a state of sobriety.  (Take a look at any post in this blog labeled "Canada" to find out more).  Maybe there is something to a country that, if not for the War of 1812, could have very easily been a part of its southern neighbor and in many ways today does not stand so distant from her in many ways.  There has to be something about Canada in and of itself that makes Canadians want to proudly be what they are, even an expat like myself.  I could probably drone on and on about what such things would be, but I keep finding that as time goes on, learning what it is to be Canadian, or American, or Mexican, well, it keeps unfolding in a truly North American voyage of discovery. 

Canada is a land of the present world still very much connected to a much colder past of thousands of feet of ice.  No political pun intended. 

Canada is a place of incredible wild and scenic landscapes that have managed to remain outside the realm of the salesman or the government clerk, being at once both accessible and inaccessible by the people.  Again, no pun here.

Canada has deserts, prairies, forests, mountains, lakes, tundra, and even rainforests, a diversity just like the United States but with a lot less in the way of pure extremes.  Definitely not a pun in sight, keep moving folks.

Canada is my country, a house that I respect and love from the distance of the louder and interesting house next door.  That said, this is also my country, and when I speak of a view from houses to other houses, I really mean it.  See, I have had problems for some time now in distinguishing one side of the river from the other:

Looking north into Lake Huron from atop the Blue Water Bridge.  On this side is Sarnia, Ontario, and the "far" shore is Port Huron, Michigan.  Except for the lack of Harvey's in Port Huron, they are pretty damn similar. 

The first born used the rivers as highways, not borders.  My French ancestors did pretty much the same thing (they figured mountains made for better borders).  Then the English came along, and you know how they are about the whole liberty equating to property thing.  The Americans are even more keen on it!  Is this what makes Canada Canada and the United States the United States?  Property?  I mean sure, philosophy has a lot to do with it, as does perspective, but I find the differences there to be a matter of degree rather than even sides of a coin.  Maybe one day this bridge will still have a toll booth, but that will be the only stop sign on it.  Maybe then we will know what the meaning of things like July 1st and July 4th really are, understood in a context of a political history but not still mired in it.

At least this July 1st, in 2013, I can say with a bit more confidence than I could on a July 1st, 2002 after a certain September 11th, 2001, that July 1st is not so alien from July 4th.  A sensitive topic, to be sure.  But American Voyages is all about putting sensitive business aside and taking a look at the blood and guts of the continent.  Here's a crazy idea then, how about either tomorrow or the 3rd, you know, just in time for the 4th, we take a look at two things that both of these countries have quite the history with: language and immigration.  Maybe then we can see what these days mean to a lot of people.    

A Border Between Friends: Different Priorities.

In the last post on our current topic of discerning a political-cultural divide between Canada and the United States we visited some primal history regarding the development of a modern notion of liberty in our nations. We opened and returned to a concept of liberty that the political forces of the late eighteenth century were familiar with, one that was intimately bound to the power tied to capitalism (or more specifically, capital).  We also ended on a note of something far more simple and familiar for most of us: the desire to live a life unmolested by those who would seek to impose either economic or religious views on people.

Many of the first Colonists or Habitants were probably primarily after a better existence away from all the conflicts over in Europe.  As colonial Canada and the United States grew in size and economic import, however, men of political ambition followed the early colonists and freedom seekers and tried to create little dominions of their own across the sea.  Likewise, any who came over to read the Bible in peace and quiet found some religious reformers and revolutionaries take the same boat and try to start little religious battles that were clearly making life difficult enough over in Britain and even France.

In the end, the religious and economic revolution was forced out of France by a Louis XVI obsessed with eliminating the resistance of Le Fronde; the country was made forcibly Roman Catholic with conservative and slightly Jansenistic agendas.  In Britain Catholicism was instead ousted, and any particular Protestant factionalism shelved in the face of pursuing economic power for the nation and thus for the individuals of the nation (which was clearly tired of religious-inspired civil war).  The battle cry of Liberty thus was suppressed in France for some time, and embraced in Britain, until in the last half of the eighteenth century, when parlors in France became occupied with nothing other than the talk of freedom.  Likewise, talk of Liberty was popular in Britain even after the outbreak of violence in France during the Revolution, but the talk became far more pressing over in the colonies where new waves of taxation were awakening some very old debates.  Liberty for the reason of economic or personal freedom was starting to become an international affair.

So what was it like for everyone, including and especially the ordinary people?

In the thirteen colonies, Liberty meant not having your property infringed upon, especially in the form of taxation or the quartering of soldiers meant to enforce said taxation.  Liberty also meant being able to freely exploit the land, especially the opportunities awaiting beyond the Appalachians which Westminster was otherwise eager to reserve to the First Born of the continent.  Liberty meant being able to defend one's land against encroachment from any hostile party, First Born, British, or even someone from another colony.

In Canada, Liberty meant being able to speak French, remain Catholic if so desired, and preserve a culture while also enjoying the benefits of English law and British developments in representative democracy which had all but been suppressed in France.  After the Loyalists arrived, it meant holding on to hearth and home, just as it did back in the colonies, but not under threat from Britain and King George... under threat instead from intolerant Yankees.  When free land was offered to Americans interested in resettlement, passions became a little less hostile, but the American invading forces in 1812 were seen as no less hostile by such transplanted Americans who actually enjoyed the stability and, yep, lack of government offered by the ruling British.  Here we start to see the beginning of what the negative definition of Canadian identity: being North American and not American.  When the American threat died down, the Loyalists turned their attention to the French-Canadians, who stared back at them from across the Ottawa River, sometimes even from across the street, as my Franco-Ontarien ancestors did.

The English and French wanted protection from each other, in something of a cultural personality battle, even as some loud-mouth, but minority, factions do to this day.  Liberty started to mean "I have rights as a province".  What rights were focused on, exactly?  Language.  Religion.  Education.  Business was, and in my opinion still is, secondary to the debates of cultural freedom.  This is probably why Canada, while decidedly a capitalist nation, has shown only minor aversion to socialistic intervention by the government, in great contrast to the United States where the opposite has been a point of much political drama in the past decade.

In the United States, of course, the states also wanted protection from one another, but this was largely out of economic issues, most notably the issue of slavery.  While cultural debates have always raged on in American political warfare, notably in the realm of civil rights, the power of the Federal government to mess with what the states are allowed to say goes in regards to property has always been the leading force behind helping to define Liberty.  Why?  The United States had long shared a broad common culture, even as immigrants would later pour into the country and regional cultural identity differences were apparent even before the Revolution.  And what of those immigrants?

Canada has had just as many, in proportion of course, as the United States.  The end of the nineteenth century saw all sorts of nationalities pour into both countries, usually for the general reason of seeking a better life and escaping political garbage back in the mother country.  Both countries proved exceptionally capable to absorbing the entire world into a melting pot, but this is the key point of departure:

In Canada, the differences were not considered crucial in deciding how to make someone a Canadian.

In the United States, the differences were considered crucial in deciding how to make someone an American.

Stop for a moment, before drawing conclusions about both countries, however.  Take a look at something very simple in both places, the concept of official language.  Canada has two.  The United States does not even have one, at least not one ever officially declared.  Canada features petty fights over both tongues.  The United States features a general acceptance that English is the way to go and gets into absolutely huge and dramatic patriotic stand-offs over the matter despite, you know, not having declared English the official language.  Citizens have to take an English test, but an interpreter and a lot of assistance in the process are provided for the newly minted American.  In Canada, this is less the case, and you need to do English or French (unless you happen to be in the far north and want to do Cree or something).  Confused at the irony yet?

And what about the general concept of a melting pot?  In the United States, there is little strange about a Black family sitting down for a spaghetti dinner and not having it mentioned that they are eating Italian food, or everyone in town going nuts on St. Patrick's Day despite being in no way Irish whatsoever.  In Canada, half the town might still be throwing an Orangeman's parade!  Go to Wegman's supermarket in Buffalo and find a huge variety of groceries celebrating every known culture on earth with a Christmas display featuring everything from Mexican goodies to Polish-American toasting wafers.  Go to Loblaws over in Niagara Falls, Ontario and notice prominent displays of traditional British cuisine and a Christmas display featuring those annoying Victorian Christmas crackers that my Mom insists are necessities.  Head over to Quebec and find a different world entirely.  Head out into the prairie provinces and find Ukrainian and Icelandic stuff.  First Born influences are also everywhere.  Multi-culturalism is assured, but the individual influences are very obvious.

This is not to say that you can't find tons of different cultural treasures in Canada, especially in places like Toronto (one of the best places to get a curry outside of India is either in London or Toronto) its just that... well the differences will be highlighted, even as they are diluted in the States.  In Canada, cultural differences are viewed as the purpose behind Liberty, and are given anointed protection even as they cause tension here and there.

We certainly have a different emphasis on democracy, to say the least.  But this is not where the differences end.  Again, we return to perspective.  The history of democratic struggle in the United States has always been one of assertive action, sometimes to the point of raw aggression.  In Canada, political freedoms have gradually evolved, with social action being taken defensively.  Political freedoms in Canada have come about  in a parallel history of development with the United States, sometimes even in reaction or as an alternative.  Again, the Canadian mentality is about the democratic experiment looking at the broader portrait of historical awareness, even perhaps into the fishbowl that is British, American, and French democratic evolution.  The American mentality is about the front line of the struggle, an experiment always in a state of flux and even survival.

This is, of course, all opinion and the viewpoint of this French-Irish-Canadian-American looking at his two nations with the perspective of an expatriate looking at both host and home nation from a standpoint straddling the border.  I remain a Canadian citizen because of perspective, even as I continue to live in the United States because of intense fascination.  If ever the two nations were united...

And what of that?  Could they be?  Definitely, and yet not without some pain and difficulty.  We already share a lot in common.  At the same time, we also hold on to a history of "get off my lawn":

The Isaac Brock monument on the site of the Battle of Queenston Heights, overlooking New York across the Niagara Gorge.  This is probably the most poignant reminder that a border still exists between two otherwise peaceful friends.

Yet we also have a history of being allies and building the way to having the longest undefended border in the world.  Signs leading up to border access points on both sides of the line declare not that a checkpoint is coming up, but that there will soon be a bridge to the other country.

Not too far from that monument are multiple bridges manned by immigration officials more concerned with how much duty-free alcohol you have in your car than with how you intend to spend your time in their country.  Above, pointed at the New York side, is the Rainbow Bridge, along with the American Falls of Niagara Falls.  

When you cross over, you will probably see a McDonald's on both sides, you drive on the same side of the road, and you just feel like you are on the other side of a river... and yet it always feels a little bit different, units of distance measurement aside.

Why We Are Not One Country: Historical and Ideological Ancient History.

What is liberty?

Is liberty being allowed to do what you want, to believe what you want free of all coercion?  Is liberty being able to take small pleasures in life, is it about making your own way in life without someone else telling you what to do?

For English speakers in the early and mid eighteenth century, liberty was perhaps all of these things, but above all else it was about being able to own property and not having someone else take it away from you or do anything to it without your consent.  Freedom of religion was also important, to be sure, but it was a sideshow to what truly mattered: power.  That's right, I just linked the two concepts, and the property owners of the time certainly did in mentality if not in direct word.  Perhaps this is a dangerous concept to be illustrating in such words considering as how I am defining the differences between Canadian and American mentalities, as per our last post over two weeks ago:

Defining A Border: Why Are We Not One Country?

The truth of the matter, though, is that world politics are defined by power struggles as much if not more so than by ideological crusades; a world of military forces, cults of personality, etc. means that even the noblest of goals is going to continue to be fought over for some time.  While the human race has taken great strides toward progress by diplomacy and moral force, the fact remains that not all of us are interested in such paths.  The story of how the modern world and our two nations came about illustrate this all too well.  This story is a long one that takes us back to the plagues of the fourteenth century, when the New World was not much more than Nordic legend, at least over in Europe.

By the time the illnesses had run their course, many countries in Europe lost over half their population.  Farms started going untended, market places started breaking down, feudalism looked to be a memory.  Lords were in desperate need of workers to keep their estates running, the labor side of which was finding that they could make demands for a better life if the management wanted to keep things running.  Heirs, even lowly commoners, found themselves in possession of multiple lots and belongings as entire generations would leave only one or two males left in large families.  Some of them turned to trades and business, others to controlling the land as their former noble superiors had done for thousands of years of human history, but all of them found that they now had power unlike anything that had been imagined before.  In Britain, the House of Commons slowly grew in importance.

By the seventeenth century, that house, along with its upper counterpart of Lords, was able to turn the course of history by overthrowing a king.  While that particular revolution soon became overwhelmed by religious zeal, its main issue was never truly forgotten: power did not ultimately rest in the hands of one individual who was claiming sovereignty based on some assumption that human power rested in religious excuse (namely the divine right of kings).  The main issue, of course, was taxation.  You know, money, personal freedom to properly use money and individual economic value.  Some people would take this to the extreme in the next century and try to rid the world of anything other than the currency of economics, relegating religion and morals to the realm of either usefulness or menace.  A very classic line to sum all this up comes from one such "enlightenment" thinker who wrote much in the way of history (particularly focused on Rome), Edward Gibbons:

“The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”

At the same time there were people still interested in the concept of freedom itself.  Some still clamored for religious freedom, as many do today even in North America.  Some wanted to be able to just keep a small home with ground to grow things in.  Some just wanted to be able to move about freely and not be tied down to any settlement.  Some just wanted to be left alone.  As wars over the power to control these things heated up not only in the British Isles but also in France, these sorts found themselves heading across the ocean to the vast unexplored wilderness of North America.  In 1607, Englishmen came to make this sort of thing happen in Virginia, and a year later Frenchmen did the same in Quebec.  The early years were extremely difficult, especially in the brutal northern climate that the French encountered, and settlement remained largely defensive and frontier-like for some time.  Furthermore, except for the landing in 1620 that would start up the world of New England, these ventures were also meant to be commercial experiments.  Virginia had tobacco potential, and Quebec had fur.  The foundations of two nations were little else than trading posts to begin with:

Part of reconstructed and surviving Jamestown.  Like Quebec and Tadoussac, little of the primal origins of Jamestown remains intact, owing both to development and historic disasters.  The place is definitely worth a visit, as with any historic site, because one gets to experience, with all the senses, the conditions and landscape that the people of history did.  Compared to England and France, wilderness North America was a rough affair for European ideas of comfort.

But before much time had passed, and people were making lives for themselves so far away from problems back home, people started arriving looking for something other than a piece of the game.  People started putting down foundations for homes and experiencing something that was just as appealing as a fight for freedom: a quiet life.  Many people who have come to call this continent home have done so not for reasons of power or belief, or both, but because they wanted something a little bit better than the possibility of having everything destroyed on an annual basis.  Come by tomorrow as we conclude this series and see how this quiet life developed just a little bit differently in the United States and Canada, to see what impact politics did have on everyday life.

Defining A Border: Why Are We Not One Country?

I was once involved in an interesting debate with an Irish professor of international relations.  This was at the University of London back in 2003, right after Iraq had been invaded by the American alliance, a time when the entire city was abuzz with discussions about the directions being taken in the war on terror, large-scale Muslim immigration to western Europe, and how the United States should now be viewed in the eyes of the rest of the world.  The talking always turned back to nationalism, and the professor and I had a historical sensitivity to the question; an Irishman teaching politics in the capital of the British Commonwealth/Empire was discussing what nationhood meant with a Canadian who had then been living in the United States for roughly a decade.

The crowds outside wanted to focus their anger for having Britain dragged into yet another battle in a conflict that was really getting ugly and being engaged on in a global scale.  They blamed the capitalistic giant across the sea, the United States of Imperialistic Christian Conservatism, and they burned her flag on Parliament square.  They were people of diverse nationalities and cultures, people that would just as soon raise a fist against each other but found common ground in their hatreds for a place they had never been to or had really come to understand.  Iranians, Cubans, Egyptians, Somalians, and so many others were burning a flag and even announcing that their national identity, in an adopted immigrant country no less, was about not being American.  The next day, we asked ourselves what we saw, and how it related to our sense of nationality.

For an Irishman, the answer was relatively simple.  Ireland has a different culture, pace of existence, religious foundation, and even landmass from the rest of Britain.  Her people speak in a different accent, if they even speak the same language that they do in the Sceptered Isle.  For a Canadian, the answer was a bit more complex.  We do share a common landmass with the United States, divided by an extremely straight artificial border for the most part.  Our indigenous peoples existed as the same nations on both sides of this line, except around Lake Ontario.  We both have the same fanatical love of hockey and baseball, we both (believe it or not) generally speak the same language in similar inflections and accents.  And yet...

We don't think alike.  Canadians by and large tolerate democracy with greater government oversight.  Americans generally deplore any level of government oversight, and certainly hate taxes, and yes, this goes for both the left and right, even if the execution does not end up being the same!  Canadians, now and in the past, are all about settlement.  Americans, now and in the past, like expanding all sorts of things, from the size of buildings and drinking cups to the settlement of frontiers both natural and man-made.  In Canada, one is more likely to hear a gun called a weapon.  In the United States, one is more likely to hear a gun being debated in the nomenclature of a tool.  In Canada, the struggle to define a national language has largely been settled in a divided country becoming a country of two national base cultures in recognition, even as the French portion grows smaller.  In the United States, the same struggle has long been quieted in the recognition of a single language (albeit one never actually given official status) both out of cultural pride and simplicity among a nation that would otherwise be a jumble of tongues, even as the Spanish minority grows larger.

Canadians were content to await the recognition of freedoms which had long been practically lived in if not codified.  Americans were unable to accept any alternative other than such a codification, even if the price was war and civil unrest.  Canadians would and do debate the nature of liberty.  Americans know liberty comes at a price, and that while debate can help realize what must be fought for, someone has to lead the charge.  Now this is not to say that Canadians have not crusaded for civil rights, no, quite the opposite!  This is not to say that Americans have never debated rather than come to a stand over issues, no, that is why this nation has such an immense legal tradition and a complex history of political theory.   As it was noted so many times in the nineteenth century, however, the United States of America is the great experiment in modern democracy, an experiment that Britain handed over to the colonies when she had to fight against a French powerhouse that was proclaiming herself to have the same role over in Europe (and we all know how that went for them in the first few decades).  Think of it this way:  The United States is like the fishbowl in which the world watches to see how civil liberty develops.  Canada has the front row seat, maybe even being the second fishbowl right next door.

I say this because in that talk with the professor I concluded that Canadian nationalism really started by us being... not American.  Oh yes, there is that distinct French flavor there, but even by the late 1700's the habitants of the St. Lawrence valley were not thinking in the same terms as the Parisians were, but were embracing a concept of parliamentary representation and coming to cherish things like religious liberty.  Educated men in Montreal were reading the same sort of things that Bostonians were, and the English-speaking leadership was getting nervous.  As it turns out, these educated people were historically-minded enough to know that they had it good under the ruling powers, and that together with the influx of Loyalists, were looking into the fishbowl while seeing where the water came from in the first place.  Canadians saw how the United States was developing, and they learned important lessons from her, and developed accordingly into a parallel but slightly different democracy.

Perhaps the most vivid way to see how this is the case would be a look at the unfolding of subsidiarity in both nations.  These days, Federalism can be an ugly word in both countries, and the desire to have a central government in service to local governments forged our two political systems, even as we both found ourselves really in need of unity in order to not be torn apart at conception.  The thirteen colonies had to "hang together, or surely all hand separately .  The diverse provinces of Canada had to make a stand as one body so as to not be swallowed whole by the Yankee to the south.   In both nations, no one wanted to give more power than they had to to the state or province next door.  In both nations, however, the emphasis on what was important to the states and the provinces rested on different foundations.

English liberty, after all, came first as a question of religion, only to be followed by a second question regarding individual property rights.

In Canada, the first question became the focus of what was truly important to the provinces, whereas in the United States, the second question ultimately took precedence.

Yes, I know we all come to the blog not to hear me rant but to see my pictures.  Here we have Wall Street, the modern heart of the "second question".  Interestingly enough, that is a TD Ameritrade building right there.  TD, of course, is Toronto Dominion.  Here again we see integration on economic and cultural levels, even as two different flags continue to fly on the northern part of our continent. 

This, of course, would be a very important part as to why we are not one country, a look at where our mentalities are truly focused.  We see that we define ourselves in part by not being something else.  Come by next post as we take a closer look at just how this happened, and what it means for us today.  

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.

Resurget Cineribus

It Shall Arise From The Ashes

Detroit once burned to the ground, much like her rival Chicago.  In 1805, after a rather difficult first century of changing political hands twice and being under the perpetual threat of invasion from Canada (come on, you can laugh), the mostly French-Canadian inhabitants of the city found themselves having to start over from scratch.  Thus we have the motto of the city: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus.  While the dominant culture of the city would then change into a melting pot of both internal and external immigrants much like New York, the heart of her founding people would remain in a resilient population that would turn adversity into reason for existence.  How?

A precarious existence next to Upper Canada turned into a port of entry and departure.

As the wounds of 1812 slowly began to heal through the 19th century, trade began to grow between the two banks of the river.  Western Ontarians were, and are, a far more agrarian folk than their brethren to the east of the Niagara Escarpment.  Michigan would later include a strong agricultural base, mostly in fruits and vegetables, in its diverse economic portfolio, but its emergence out of frontier life came at a comparatively slower rate than neighboring Ohio and Indiana.  People came to Michigan, after all, to harvest timber or trap beaver.  You came to Michigan for the one last piece of the frontier lifestyle that could still be found east of the Mississippi.  If your family followed, they would most likely set up camp in the more serene domesticity of the rich croplands of the true Midwest, not some off-the-beaten path place that would not even become a state until 1837.  That said, a lot of people did come to Detroit, all 46,000 of them by the time tempers flared at Fort Sumter.  They needed food, and what they could not provide for themselves they could find across the way.  Position was everything, after all.

Position was how Chicago grew from a backwater fort into one of the greatest cities in the world.  Chicago was a transportation hub, a gateway between east and west.  One would get off the boat in New York, sure, but if one wanted to move deeper into the land, one ended up with countless native born Americans before a great menu of destinations awaiting them at this gateway.  Despite the open nature of the continent, nearly all travel somehow centered on the great bottleneck there.  Traffic still does; multiple interstates get their start in the city, leading in a great radial pattern to all points except due east into the drink of Lake Michigan.  The great northern transcontinental roads and railways all stop here, and some of the success that New York achieved as the premier port of the United States was in the fact that Chicago was at the other end of a passage to the west, be it by canal and lakes or rail.

Chicago never had the benefit of being next to Canada, however, and certainly not the benefit of being a mere three hours and change away from Toronto, with a bit more of a double investment getting one to Montreal and thus the ocean.  Or, if one was feeling overly patriotic, one could still take the Empire route through Buffalo and onto New York.  Yes, Detroit had, and has, the distinct advantage of also being a transportation hub, and then one on international scale.  Detroit could serve as the staging point for more than just settlement expansion and agricultural commodities trading.  Detroit could serve, rightly so, as the center of a Great Lakes powerhouse of natural resources both arboreal and mineral.  Chicago was the doorstep to the west, sure, but Detroit was right at the center of everything industrial east of the Mississippi.  If ever there can be declared a true capital to the Great Lakes, it is the city right at the middle of them.  Of course, back then raw materials for industry were all the rage, and this included people themselves, some free, many not so free.

Detroit was for many the last place they would experience of an American existence.  Detroit was the last frightful stop for escaping slaves heading to safety in Canada through the Underground Railroad.

The thing was, some of these slaves would one day return, and Detroit became more than just a gateway.  Many other people would come in their wake, from many different lands and cultures.  They would come because of racial tolerance and freedom, not in spite of it.  They still do today; Detroit has one of the most diverse immigrant populations outside of the major port cities of New York and Los Angeles.  Freedom, a reasonable cost of living, good living conditions, excellent paying jobs in a number of fields, all of these and more attracted people to a city that truly encapsulated the American dream far more than the crowded slums of packed New York or even great gateway Chicago.

The new Underground Railroad works the same way.

Immigrants finding tough restrictions, discrimination, and economic difficulties in the United States have been increasingly turning toward Canada as an alternative destination nation.  Now, as then, many make a life for themselves there only to find that they still want to make a go for it, largely because of relatives who have done so, in the United States.  Detroit actually turns out to be one of the first places that springs to mind for making this happen.  How do I know?  Personal experience.  Having spent time in various INS offices, I can assure my readers that the two most diverse waiting rooms I have been to were in Detroit and New York.  In a rather sterile and tranquil modern version of Ellis Island, voices from around the world crowd daily into the immigration offices on Jefferson ave. in Detroit.  To most Americans, Detroit might symbolize decay and corruption, but to people from the rest of the world it symbolizes diversity and opportunity.  When I lived over in London in 2003, most of the people I met in that extremely cosmopolitan world city saw Detroit as a point of racial and national encounter.  Violent, perhaps at times, but for the most part a different view of the country and continent at large.

To these same people, a place like New York was more of a melting pot where cultural assimilation and absorption takes place.  Everyone picks up the habits and customs and tastes of everyone else and the country is enriched the more so even while the newcomers also become more American.  In Detroit, the process is a bit slower, and differences become far more apparent.  The movie 8 Mile was often pointed out to me as an artistic representation of this encounter between different worlds.  In reality, 8 Mile road is very much the boundary between the suburban and urban worlds here, and as the movie illustrated all too well, it can be a very messy border indeed.  As noted, though, encounters do not necessarily mean confrontation, just more so a lot of transmission without dilution.  Case in point, we have amazing musical talent here that has benefited from cultural fault-lines.  We also have the most diverse regional cuisine in, well, North America.  If you wanted to, you could gorge on a day of restaurant binges and get stuffed full of authentic Mexican, Italian-American, Polish, Arabic, Greek, Soul, and even Coney Island food.  Best of all, poutine has recently made a dramatic entrance here, and this gets us back to one of our two main events.

What is Detroit good for?  Being plain exciting and having what is possibly the most potential of any city in North America.  If we can rely more so on the strengths of our racial differences than the bigotry that can exist between them, we can easily, along with what I envision to be our ideal sister city of Toronto, become one of the new prime destination cities of the country.  Recent plans to reintroduce efficient high-speed rail service to the United States incorporates Chicago as the primary central hub of connections, one of which is as the terminus of a corridor stretching to Montreal, through Detroit and Toronto, the true lifeblood of this circuit.  We already have a second major international crossing on the way to help facilitate commercial traffic, and Canada already has the high speed lines built on their end.  We also have the wealth here to reinvigorate what treasures do remain in our city, which we see in the next post on what Detroit has to offer to the world.

For now, we have soul, and we sure do have hope.

The best way to illustrate this post would be an early morning shot of the city, taken just as the sun is making its way up.  We sure do have a tree-filled city!

We have this virtue not in the memory of a glorious past or in spite of rampant corruption and decay, but because of an energy which never did get dissipated during so many rough times, it just got either redirected or channeled into different values for a different age.  Again, come by next post to see what we have accomplished.

And oh yes, I am a proud Michontarian, a word I predict will have a much wider usage in the coming decades.

Wednesday Post: Once Upon a Time in Philadelphia

Some men met, argued over things, sweated out hot temperatures without air conditioning and while wearing heavy suits, and then magically found a consensus and told Britain that they were pretty much all about making their own destiny from here on out.  They also managed to stand still long enough to be painted!  Enjoy the sweltering day, and remember that you do have air conditioning and are probably not wearing a suit in the heat, at least not with a cravat and tight breeches, at any rate.

Public Domain, but the painting is by John Trumbull and can be found in the United States Capitol Rotunda.

On the Fine Art of Appreciating the Neighbo(u)r

This came across my path when I was wandering the internet for the latest news from the Canadian embassy to the United States (and the other way around).  While not exactly new, it is a fine bit by Mr. Brokaw regarding what Canada can and should mean to Americans.  I figure I can let the clip do the talking.



Of particular note would be the mention of, ahem, what Canada did for the United States during 9-11 and afterwards, despite accusations to the contrary of actually helping the terrorists take down the World Trade Center.  Canada remains the largest trading partner of the United States, and is far, far more than just something to be mocked in a South Park movie.  This is an excellent gem!  Now if only he would do a similar one for Mexico...