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My Country

What differences are there between Canadians and Americans? This question often arouses strong emotions when citizens from these two nations get together. What ideas do you have about this? Which of these countries do you know better? Why? Pierre Berton, one of Canada's leading writers and broadcasters (for both TV and radio), gives his thoughts on the subject in the following excerpts (sections) from his essay "My Country."

To a stranger, the land must seem endless. A herring gull, winging its way from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, will travel as far as the distance from London to Baghdad. It is the vastness that startles the imagination of all who visit my country.

Contrary to universal belief, we do not live in snow-covered cabins far from civilization. Most of us are hived in cities that do not seem, at first glance, to differ greatly from those to the south of us. The observant visitor, however, will note some differences. We are not a homogeneous people, and the variety of Our national makeup is, I believe, more pronounced than it is in the melting pot to the south. A newcomer in the United States quickly learns to cover up his or her origins and become an American. A newcomer to Canada manages to retain something of the culture and customs of his or her ethnic background.

Traditionally the stranger has thought of Canada as a mountainous, snow-swept land of Indians and Eskimos. It comes as a surprise to many to learn that there are hundreds of thousands of us who have never seen an Eskimo, and some who have not even seen an Indian or a mountain. Most of us, as I have said, are city folk.

Certainly it can get very cold in Canada. Few non-Canadians understand that it can also get very hot. In the Yukon, where I was born and raised, I have worked in tropical conditions cutting survey lines through a junglelike growth. The eastern cities swelter in the humidity of July and August, and people actually die each year from the heat. Honolulu, for instance, has never known the high temperatures of Montreal. In Victoria, roses bloom on Christmas Day. But, of course, we Canadians also know what it is like to be cold. In 1947, when the thermometer dropped to minus 65 degrees Celsius at a place called Snag in the Yukon, it was so cold that a bucket of water tossed into the air fell to the ground as ice.

Where temperature is concerned we are a country of extremes; and yet, as a people, we tend toward moderation and even conservatism. Non-Canadians tend to lump us together with our American neighbors, but we are not really like the Americans. Our temperament, our social attitudes, Our environment, and Our history make us a different kind of North American. Though these differences may not be easy for the newcomer to understand, they are very real to us.

First, there is the matter of Our history It has been called dull, by which it is generally meant that it is not very bloody. Certainly we have no strong tradition of violence in our first century as an independent nation. We are, after all, the only people in all the Americas who did not separate violently from Europe. We have had three or four small uprisings but nothing that could be called a revolution or a civil war. No matter what the movies tell you, we had no wild west and no wild Indians. Personal weaponry is not our style; No Canadian feels he has a God-given right to carry a gun.

There are several reasons for this bloodlessness. First, there was the presence of those people who refused to fight against England during the American Revolution and who came, instead, to Canada, at great personal sacrifice. The influence of these United Empire Loyalists (my ancestor, Peter Berton, was one) has been great. Together with that other influential group, the Scots, who controlled the banks, railways, and educational institutions, they have helped give us our reputation as a conservative and cautious people. It is no accident that Canadians have the highest rate of bank and insurance savings in the world. To a large extent it has been the American businessmen who have taken the financial risks in my country—and that explains why so much of Canada's manufacturing, industry and natural resources are owned or controlled by Americans.

We were slow to give up our colonial ties to England. While the Americans chose freedom (and sometimes, on the frontier, anarchy) we chose order. Our lawmen are appointed from above, not elected from below. The idea of choosing town marshals and county sheriffs by vote to keep the peace with guns never fitted into the Canadian scheme of things. Instead, in the first days of our new nationhood, we invented the North West Mounted Police, who did not depend on votes to stay in power. The Canadian symbol of the Mountie, neat and clean in his scarlet coat, contrasts with the American symbol of the shaggy lawman in his open shirt and gunbelt. The two differing social attitudes persist to this day. In the United States the settlers moved across the continent before the law—hence the "wild" west. In Canada the law came first; settlement followed. Drinking saloons were unknown on the Canadian prairies. So were gambling halls, gunmen, and Indian massacres.

Outward displays of emotion are not part of the Canadian style. In spite of what I have written about heat waves. we are after all a northern people. We do not live in the street as southern races do. We are an interior people in more ways than one. The Americans are far more outgoing than we are. One reason for this, l think, is the very real presence of nature in our lives. Although it is true that we are city folk, most of us live within a few hours' drive of the wilderness. We escape to the woods whenever we can. No Canadian city is far removed from those mysterious and silent places which can have such an effect on the human soul.

There is another aspect of my country that makes it unique in the Americas, and that is our bilingual and bicultural makeup. (Canada has two official languages, English and French, and in its largest province a majority of the inhabitants speak the latter almost exclusively.) It gives us a picturesque quality of course, and that is certainly a tourist asset: Visitors are intrigued by the "foreignness" of Quebec City with its twisting streets and its French-style cooking. But there is also a disturbing regional tension. Quebec has become a nation within a nation, and the separatist movement is powerful there. French Canada's resistance to English Canada's cultural and economic pressure can be seen as similar to English Canada's resistance to the same kind of pressure from the United States. This helps to explain why many English-speaking Canadians who call themselves nationalists are strong supporters of special rights for the province of Quebec.

This is not to suggest that Canadians are anti-American. If anything, the opposite is true. We watch American television programs. We read American magazines and the American best-selling novels. We tend to prefer American-made cars over the European and Asian products. We welcome hundreds of thousands of American tourists to our country every year and don't complain much when they tell us that we're exactly the same as they are.

Of course, we're not the same. But the visitor may be pardoned for thinking so when he or she first crosses the border. The buildings in our cities are designed in the international styles. The brand names in the supermarkets are all familiar. The chicken palaces, hot dog stands, gas stations, and motels that line our superhighways are American-franchised operations. It is only after several days that the newcomer begins to sense a difference. He cannot put his finger on that difference, but then, neither can many of my countrymen. The only thing we are really sure of is that we are not Americans.

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