Canada’s National Identity at Heart of Today’s Election : Analysis

TORONTO — For years, hardly anyone ever talked Canadian politics at Toronto dinner parties, not even during election time. The subject was shunned not because it was prickly or divisive or explosive. It just seemed so boring.

Now, on the eve of today’s parliamentary elections, hardly anyone is talking about anything else at dinner parties or anywhere else. The election--centering on the single issue of free trade with the United States--has touched the deepest anxiety and ambivalence of Canadians about their identity as a people.

The election may settle very little about free trade. But it surely has caused many Canadians to ponder their own place in North America and what makes them different from the people of the United States. That kind of self-analysis could leave deep and unexpected traces on the national mood.

Former Prime Minister John Turner, the leader of the Liberal Party, has tried hardest to stir Canadian nationalism during the campaign with his incessant attacks on the free trade agreement.

“We often joke about our American friends saluting their flag,” Turner told a political rally in Hamilton on Friday night. “Well, we ought to salute our flag more often.”

Yet this kind of talk may turn off more nationalism than it stirs up. Many Canadians feel proud that, unlike Americans, they do not trumpet who they are and what they stand for. That, in their view, is the truest Canadian hallmark.

“I have always felt that Canadian identity is non-identity,” said a Toronto doctor. “If you have to think about it, you’ve lost it.” The comment may seem like a puzzling conceit, but it is actually a profound description of an important aspect of Canadian identity.

Canadians--who belong to a nation that began as a French colony, united and created its institutions as a British colony and has prospered as an independent nation open to many immigrants--know less about who they are than about who they are not. The debate over the free trade agreement has made it clear that many feel fervently that they are not American and do not want to be.

Fretting over the United States is not new. “Coping with the fact of the U.S.A. is and always has been an essential ingredient of being Canadian,” the late John Holmes, a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto, once said. “It has formed us, just as being an island formed Britain.”

Free Trade Confusion

There is much confusion about the fate of free trade. The latest polls indicate that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his Progressive Conservative Party could win the most seats in the House of Commons but fall short of the 148 needed for a majority to ratify the U.S.-Canadian free trade agreement.

Even if he wins a majority of the seats, according to the polls, he would do so with little more than 40% of the popular vote. That, if accurate, would mean that an overwhelming majority of Canadians prefer the two parties--Turner’s Liberals and socialist Edward Broadbent’s New Democrats--that oppose the free trade agreement.

In short, if Mulroney, as he has pledged, uses his parliamentary majority to ratify the agreement swiftly, he will have to do so in the face of a mounting national will.

Identity is so perplexing an issue in Canada that many Canadians, in the heat of the current debate, insist that what really defines their country and makes it distinct from the United States are its social programs. Canada, according to this view, is different because it believes that governments must care about people and help them. This idea is prevalent because so many opponents of free trade contend that the agreement could encourage American corporations to demand curtailment of Canadian social programs.

Marked Differences

Yet the two countries differ a great deal about far more than health and other social programs. Canadians, with distinct history and government institutions, live in an orderly, unflashy, self-deprecating society of great civility. There is little crime, violence and racial tension. There are more homicides in a couple of weeks in Los Angeles than in a whole year in Toronto.

Understanding Canadian identity demands a look at many sides. The French speakers of Quebec, who make up a quarter of Canada’s 25.5 million people, feel more secure about their relationship with the United States than they do about their relationship with the rest of Canada. They feel less danger from being swamped culturally by the Americans than by the English-speaking Canadians.

For years, in fact, Quebec separatists believed that the separate cultural identity of Quebec could be preserved far better in a loose North American association than it could in the Canadian confederation. The separatist movement has been dormant for some time now, but its influence is reflected in the popularity of the free trade agreement in Quebec polls.

The Quebec Problem

The problem of identity is compounded for English-speaking Canadians by their refusal, by and large, to accept the existence of Quebec as a vital element that distinguishes Canada from most other countries. An English-speaking Canadian television interviewer once challenged an American to come up with one single thing that made Canada different from the United States. When the American replied, “One-quarter of your people speak French,” the Canadian dismissed the reply. “Oh, that,” he said.

Two currents have long dominated English Canadian thinking about the United States. One, obviously reflected in the trade agreement, is the feeling that Canadians should feel secure enough to fight for a place in the larger North American economy. Many of these Canadians do not believe they will lose identity in the process and, in any case, do not seem disturbed if some of it dwindles.

Canadians who have tried to penetrate the North American market have often succeeded, and they have done so in far more than business. Two of America’s best-known television anchors, for example, Peter Jennings of ABC and Robert MacNeil of PBS, are Canadian. And most Canadians remember that Mary Pickford--”America’s Sweetheart” in silent movie days--came from Toronto.

Ontario Industrialists Active

In line with this attitude, Ontario industrialists have launched a massive and costly drive in the closing days of the electoral campaign to persuade their workers and the public to support free trade. Although the businessmen maintain that their plea is nonpartisan, the only way a voter can heed them is by voting for Mulroney.

The second current is Canadian nationalism, which usually takes the form of a low-keyed but determined feeling that some kind of barrier must be maintained to protect the Canadian economy and culture from increasing U.S. influence. The free trade debate has revealed that far more Canadians believe in this than had been suspected.

In trying to make up their minds about free trade, Canadians are finding that many of Canada’s best-known writers, artists and actors--the people most concerned about Canadian culture--are bitterly divided on the issue. Novelists Mordecai Richler and Morley Callaghan, for example, support the agreement, while novelists Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood denounce it.

The problem is complicated further by the conviction of many western Canadians that all of the tariffs set up over the years had less to do with protecting the culture and identity of Canada than with protecting Ontario industrialists from American competition at the expense of westerners forced to pay dearly for goods that they could have bought cheaply in the United States. Stanley Meisler, of The Times’ Washington Bureau, is on assignment in Canada.