♥ Every now and then English newspapers break out into a discussion of the "Americanization of Canada" - based on a sort of underlying fear that Canada is getting a
little too close to the United States. It is the same sort of apprehension as is felt on a
respectable farm when the daughter of the family is going out too much with the hired man. The idea
is that you cant tell what may happen.
♥ In the case of Canada, the danger symptoms are supposed to be that Canada is "flooded" with American newspapers, "deluged" with American broadcasts, "permeated" with American ideas; that American tourists cross the border in an unending stream, and Canadian tourists go back with them like a receding tide; that education is almost indistinguishable as carried on at Harvard or at Toronto. All these things, and a hundred more, are produced as terrible portents.
♥ In other words, a relationship which should stand as a bright example for less fortunate nations, as a hope for distracted Europe, is turned against Canada as a mark of under - patriotism and lack of national spirit.
♥ To my mind, the situation is exactly the other way. If Canada is being Americanized, then what England needs is to be Frenchified, and what France needs is to be Anglicized - and both of them to be Germanized. If then one might take the resulting amalgamation and Italianize it a little, and even give it a touch of Czechoslovak shellac rubbed on with a piece of old Russian Soviet, the world would be on the way to peace on earth.
♥ That the Canada - U.S. relationship should end in a political union is just a forgotten dream. Long ago, of course, things were different. When the Loyalists from the United States came to British North America in 1784 - 90, future union was a natural idea. Even in the War of 1812 some of the settlers of Upper Canada were only half - minded about the British flag.
♥ Later, the relative poverty and stagnation of Canada contrasted with the onrush of civilization in the United States - the hip - hurrah of the roaring Forties with canals building, cities rising, forests falling - a vociferous age, shouting with conscious potentiality. No wonder that many merchants of Montreal signed a petition for annexation in 1849, or that many farmers of Upper Canada - of Massachusetts and Virginia stock - would have taken annexation gladly if it came with peace and honour. The Maritime Provinces, too were close to the United States: they sold their fish in Boston and bought their education at Harvard, though they kept their souls in Scotland.
♥ But history has left all that behind. When the curtain that had concealed the vast resources of the Canadian North - west was drawn aside, there rose the vision of a Commonwealth as wide as a continent. The whistle of the locomotive was heard in the Rockies. Canada began to fill the west. It reached out to pluck the Maritimes from the commercial embrace of the United States. It saw a new idea in the Union Jack; not subservience to England, but single sovereignty across a continent. People with such a vision before them do not amalgamate with anything. Canada has firmly embraced its own political ideal and means to keep it.
♥ The political destinies of America and Canada lie apart but our social and cultural relations are close. We read a flood of American newspapers because to us an American newspaper is today's, and an English paper belongs to the week before last.
♥ The cities of America and Canada lie side by side. We read the news over one, another's shoulders. More than that, a lot of our news is common property. If the barometer falls to a new low in Montana, we have to watch out. If a farmer is reported frozen in Kansas, we may lose a couple up near Sudbury. If the Ohio floods Cincinnati, it is likely that the Grand River will flood Galt, Ont. We have to watch the American newspapers.
♥ Hordes of Canadians spend Easter in New York, and rough - looking, rich Americans flock to fish in the Gastineau.
♥ And more then that - for those are things on the surface - our language and culture run close together. Let us make no pretence to talk the best English, because everyone knows that that is spoken only by the Scotch - or even to talk good English. But at any rate, Canadians and Americans talk the same kind of bad English, and a common language is a powerful bond. A lot of our customs in Ontario came with the Loyalists and are with us still - our school system, our local government, our Thanksgiving Day, our New Year calls, our logging bees and spelling bees.
♥ The international good will that exists between Canada and the United States is what all the world must achieve, or perish. With war so devastatingly mechanized, it is universal peace or nothing - and world amity can never be brought about treaties and sanctions, but only through unity of ideas, of interest, of understanding.
♥ In past history, such unity did not matter. Men out of arms reach could not hurt one another. A little nation in a valley sat snug: a people on an island lived in peace; a castle gathered in it's brood like chickens. But all this is gone. An island is nothing. Men must unite or die; and the only hope for their union in what would be academically called "the interpretation of culture". In other words, nations have got to know each other.
♥ Now Canadians and the Americans know each other. That places the Canadians as a sort of halfway element between the Americans and the British people - creates as it were the nucleus of a world union: not in a sense of an alliance to menace the world, but as a first area of solidarity from which it may spread abroad. In this alliance, we Canadians have the lesser part. But in the great arch of British - American solidarity we are the keystone. Don't shake us out !
