CANADIAN RHAPSODY

The Great White North's Unlikely Progressivism

VISITING TORONTO RECENTLY, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida extolled Canada for
resembling the United States. "If I were blindfolded and landed in Toronto
and didn't have to go through customs, I wouldn't know I was in a foreign
country," Bush noted. Evidently, the governor hasn't been paying attention
to the press coverage Canada has recently been getting in the United
States, which has focused on how the two nations are rapidly diverging
politically and culturally.

Whereas the United States has been moving to the right over the last few
years, Canada has become increasingly progressive. Earlier this year,
two-thirds of Canadians supported Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien's
decision to sit out the Iraq war. And polls show that roughly 55 to 60
percent are lining up behind the governing Liberal Party's push to pass
federal laws legalizing same-sex marriage and relaxing marijuana
restrictions. To the chagrin of US drug czar John Walters, some Canadian
localities are going even further: Vancouver, for example, plans to open up
North America's first police-free "safe injection sites" where heroin
addicts can inject themselves using free, clean needles under the
supervision of a nurse.

To American conservatives, Canada is going to pot in more ways than one.
The right-wing political columnist Pat Buchanan denounced America's largest
trading partner as "Soviet Canuckistan." But to some American leftists,
Canada is a progressive mecca. The superiority of Canada, with its generous
social welfare programs and comparatively low rate of gun violence (despite
widespread gun ownership), formed the subtext of Michael Moore's
Oscar-winning film "Bowling for Columbine." Ralph Nader, in a mildly goofy
1992 book called "Canada Firsts," extolled worthy Canadian achievements
from universal health care to the "first rotary snowplow and snowblower."

Yet for those who live in Canada or know its history, the idea that it is
some kind of progressive paradise seems not quite right. The truth is, for
most of its history, Canada has been a much more conservative nation than
the United States-if conservatism is associated with the maintenance of
social order and moderation. What's more, in adopting liberal laws in
recent years, many Canadians thought they were simply following a path
pioneered by their Yankee neighbors, only to find their country denounced
as anti-American.

For Seymour Martin Lipset, the dean of comparative political scientists,
the differences date back to 1776. "The United States is the country of the
revolution, Canada of the counterrevolution," Lipset noted in "Continental
Divide," a 1990 study of the two countries.

According to Lipset, the American revolution imprinted the United States
with a "classically liberal" tradition that emphasized "distrust of the
state, egalitarianism, and populism-reinforced by a voluntaristic and
congregational religious tradition." Canada, by contrast, was "Tory and
conservative in the British and European sense-accepting of the need for a
strong state, for respect for authority, for deference-and endorsed by
hierarchically organized religions that supported and were supported by the
state."

The differences between the two countries are captured in their founding
documents. As Canadian textbooks often note, Canadian politicians
deliberately avoided the eloquence found in the Declaration of
Independence, which ringingly celebrates "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness." Instead, Canada's much more prosaic bedrock document, the
British North America Act of 1867, promises "peace, order, and good
government."

Paradoxically, however, Canada's Tory inheritance made it easier for a
welfare state to develop in the mid-20th century. Whereas American
progressives have always had to fight against their country's distrust of
big government, Canadian reformers worked within a polity that extolled the
centralized state. Canadians achieved universal health care in 1968. As the
novelist Robertson Davies once quipped, Canada, which still retains
Elizabeth II as its queen, was a contradictory beast: "a socialist monarchy."

The phrase "Red Tory," devised by political scientists in the 1960s,
captured the curious fact that members of Canada's putatively right-wing
party (the Progressive Conservatives) were sometimes willing to borrow
ideas and policies from the left. Among Canadian intellectuals as well,
there has been a strong tendency to combine socialist-style economic
policies with an enthusiasm for traditional elite culture. This Red Tory
tendency has no real parallels in the United States, although a few
eccentric figures such as the diplomat George Kennan and the novelist
Norman Mailer have flirted with such ideas.

Despite its stronger social safety net, midcentury Canada remained
culturally a much more conservative country than its neighbor to the south.
In many parts of the country, notably in predominately Catholic Quebec, the
education system was controlled by various tradition-minded religious
authorities. As late as 1946 the Canadian government banned the importation
of books by Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Zola, and James Joyce because of
their supposedly obscene content.

But Pierre Trudeau, the hip prime minister who governed from 1968 to 1984
(except for a 9-month interim period), embodied the new libertarianism of
his era. Trudeau rescinded sodomy laws in the late 1960s and eased rules
governing access to abortion, but his most far-reaching achievement was
enshrining a Charter of Rights and Freedoms within the Canadian
Constitution in 1982. Deferential Canadians now began challenging laws that
had been based on traditional morality.

In his recent Canadian bestseller "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada,
and the Myth of Converging Values," the pollster Michael Adams (himself
influenced by the Red Tory tradition) notes that just as Canadians were
adopting a progressive, American-style "rights" consciousness, the United
States was putting its own rights revolution on ice.

He certainly cites some eye-opening statistics. In a 2000 poll, 24 percent
of Canadians believe men are naturally superior to women, as against 38
percent of Americans- a gap that has been increasing over the last few decades.

Such differences are partly explained by religious differences between the
two countries. According to census data, evangelical Protestantism, with
its emphasis on personal salvation and adherence to old-fashioned morality,
is the religion of more than 40 percent of the American population
(including the president) but only 11 percent of Canadians. Canadians are
only half as likely to go to church, and when they do they worship as Roman
Catholics (who make up half of all Canadian Christians) or as members of
mainline Protestant denominations such as the Anglicans.

Canada's changing demographics have also shaped its cultural outlook. Since
the 1960s, the country has had a generous immigration policy, so that today
18 percent of Canadians are foreign-born, as against 11 percent of
Americans. The infusion of new people from China, Jamaica, and elsewhere,
together with the longstanding need for French-English compromise, has
fueled an official commitment to multiculturalism.

Yet for Adams, the newfound strength of social liberalism in Canada doesn't
represent a complete break from the past. "A climate of 'peace, order, and
good government' allows people. . . to self-actualize," he said in an
interview. "As you assert your personal autonomy, you do it in Canada in
the context of a kinder, gentler social welfare state and a country with a
history of compromise." (In describing Canada's social liberalism, Adams
characterizes the country as "one huge Massachusetts.") As with the earlier
rise of the welfare state, Canada's current wave of progressive law making
is built on a conservative worldview-albeit a type of sober-minded
conservatism that has few parallels in an ever more radically right-wing
America.