Canada: The New Nationalism

Abraham Rotstein

From Foreign Affairs, October 1976

Article preview: first 500 of 9,431 words total.

Summary:  For as long as most people can remember, a glance out of the corner of one's eye to the upper half of North America would bring warm reassurance that things were moving quietly and gracefully somewhere in the world. Alphonse and Gaston could invariably be heard out there bowing and scraping, and toasting their long undefended border. Today, official devotees of this stately two-step are still meeting and greeting, but few take the old shuffle at face value. Instead, private conversations in directors' board rooms, in expensive lunch clubs, in government cafeterias and in faculty lounges have a distinctly worried and wary undertone.

Abraham Rotstein teaches in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto and is one of the editors of Getting It Back, A Program for Canadian Independence, sponsored by the Committee for an Independent Canada.

For as long as most people can remember, a glance out of the corner of one's eye to the upper half of North America would bring warm reassurance that things were moving quietly and gracefully somewhere in the world. Alphonse and Gaston could invariably be heard out there bowing and scraping, and toasting their long undefended border. Today, official devotees of this stately two-step are still meeting and greeting, but few take the old shuffle at face value. Instead, private conversations in directors' board rooms, in expensive lunch clubs, in government cafeterias and in faculty lounges have a distinctly worried and wary undertone.

These are not merely the nervous Nellies (American-style), or the bleeding hearts (Canadian-style). Bad consciences do exist about this overdeveloped and one-sided intimacy that has grown up between the two countries, but that, as everyone knows, is not the stuff of politics. It is not conscience and sentiment which are beginning to interfere with the work-a-day world of gas and oil and the purchase and sale of branch plants, but a new and distinct phase of Canadian nationalism.

Despite recent appearances, this nationalism is still frail and, considering the circumstances, a belated arrival on the political scene. The editor of an eminent American publication put the crucial question in a recent visit. "Why," he wanted to know, "is there so little nationalism in Canada?" It was clear that he knew the background very well. On the economic side, 58 percent of the manufacturing sector is in foreign hands as are 61 of the largest 102 corporations in the manufacturing, resources and utility fields. Seventy-five percent of the capital employed in our oil and natural gas industry is foreign controlled and 52 percent of the trade union movement takes orders of one sort or another from American head offices.

On the cultural side the situation is no better. About half of the university professors in the humanities and social sciences are non-Canadian. Foreign magazines account for 85 percent of the total magazine circulation; Canada still does not have its own national news weekly; foreign books (those not authored by Canadians) form 83 percent of book sales, and 71 percent of the publishing industry is foreign-controlled; 96 percent of the films in Canadian cinemas are foreign, as are much of television, plays, art-and on and on it goes. In Canada, we may still own the cupboard, but little of the contents.

"Foreign," of course, means mainly American (about four-fifths) in every case. What one Canadian economist, Bruce Wilkinson, stated about Canada's intense trade concentration with the United States, can be applied to the economic and cultural situation as a whole: "Canada's position resembles more closely that of a less-developed nation than that of other developed countries."

But statistics alone do not tell the story about the quality of everyday life. It would be a mistake to evoke the image of Canada as a seething colony struggling to break loose. Canada bears rather the signs of a successful lobotomy ...

End of preview: first 500 of 9,431 words total.