CANADA: WHERE THE ACTION ISN'T
Christopher Hitchens on a
nation living down its reputation for dullness
Vancouver, British Columbia NOT SO very many months ago, I found myself embittered by the earliness of closing time in Detroit. Does that sound like the opening of a boring story? If so, it is as nothing to the tedium of the sequel. 'Let's go,' I said dully to my hosts, `for a nightcap in another country.' Through the tunnel we went, under the Detroit river, to Windsor, Ontario. There are no scenic advantages to this method of approach, but you can score one on your listing of unwanted traveller's tales, because Detroit is the only place on the world's longest undefended frontier where you are further north by remaining in the United States. All you get, by venturing south and across, is, as I mentioned, Windsor, Ontario. And boy, was it ever shut. The resentful bar- man, when asked for an address more hospitable than the one he was busily closing, jerked a thumb and said, 'Detroit'. Michigan never looked as handsome and cosmopolitan as when I presented my British passport for inspection on the way home.
And yet, and yet. What do the following names mean to you: Saul Bellow, John Kenneth Galbraith, Donald Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Leacock, Northrop Frye, Lillian Gish, Paul Anka, Norma Shearer and Mordecai Richler? Canadians, every one. New Yorkers who risk their discs in exer- cise class will often be bending and stretch- ing to the Royal Canadian Air Force manual. Their offspring — improbable, admittedly, in these days of the narcissistic couple — will be thrilling to Superman, a creation of the Toronto cartoonist Joe Shuster. The Daily Planet, in fact, is a scale model of the Toronto Star.
A reputation, all the same, is a hard thing to live down. Robert Gottlieb, the smart New York publisher, once proposed a list of articles which a magazine would have to run if it did not desire to outlive one edition. Top of the bill was 'Canada: Friendly Giant to the North'. Worthy successors in the same series were pieces on the Law of the Sea, the North-South dialogue, the future of the Common Agri- cultural Policy and, though you can fill in your own stunner as a finale, the prospects for Arms Control and international super- vision. Compared to these offerings, a lengthy essay on 'Quebec: Which Way Bilingualism?' would be a prize.
I think that I have now itemised every idee revue about Canada. And, if I have left any of them out, readers will be too stupefied to have noticed. 'Canada is one of those subjects,' said the brightest editor in Washington, 'that more people want to write about than read about.'
Why should this be? Canada is very rich and very thinly populated. It has a frontier spirit all right, because large tracts are still not yet mapped, yet alone explored. 'Rug- gedness' is one of the excuses that Amer- ican society gives for leaving so many of its citizens outside the producing or consum- ing economy. Yet a society hardly less rugged has managed to avoid the creation of an underclass; to set some bounds to the speculator, and to admit rather more Viet- namese boat people per capita than its southern neighbour. Mediocrity is the Canadian curse-word, but the country's distaste for extremes has spared it the gruesomeness as well as the superlatives of the American extravaganza. Mordecai Richler himself admits that, when terror- ism struck Quebec 15 years ago, his fellow- citizens were obscurely proud that they, too, at last had an issue.
'British colonial subjects for centuries. Now, American colonial subjects before we had a chance to turn round.' This, from a leader of the New Democratic Party, which is the only socialist party on the North American continent that has ever, in this century, had a chance of electoral power. I could see what he meant. In living memory, John Buchan was the governor- general of this vast expanse. Now, Cana- dians set up a mighty wail because the forests and lakes (where Sir Edward Leith- en was wont to wander and brood) have become Sick Heart River. Acid rain, borne from American smokestacks, has a rodent effect on the nature and the scenery. Even the toughest Canadian Tories, restored to power after the showbiz epoch of Pierre Trudeau, are moved to tell Washington that business is business but that enough is enough. As I write, a decent-sized row is going on about the insouciant way in which the Reagan Administration has 'included' Canada in its plans for a Star Wars defence. A good slice of public opinion takes the view that this may or may not be nice of the Americans, but that they might have bloody well asked.
Like many countries living in the Amer- ican shadow, Canada has a combined superiority and inferiority complex. Cana- dians speak disdainfully of the crime, racialism and rampant mammonry to the south, and defensively about American pre-eminence in film, publishing and every form of enterprise. As Northrop Frye wrote in his Thoughts of a Great Scholar: 'Americans like to make money: Cana- dians like to audit it. I know of no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.' The model of the Canadian businessman is, indeed, more Roy Thom- son than Maxwell Aitken, but the second name does remind one that Ontario pro- duces its buccaneers too.
Taxonomising is another Canadian favourite pastime, perhaps related to the passion for accountancy. In addition to the list I mentioned earlier, did you know that Paul Erdman and Arthur Hailey, Ross Macdonald and Jack Kerouac, were or are Canadians? That William Stephenson, In- trepid himself, was a Canadian? Guy Lom- bardo, Oscar Peterson, Percy Faith, Glenn Gould, Neil Young — the world sways and croons to Canadian sounds. Fay Wray, who stole the heart of King Kong, was a Canadian. Other heart-throbs include, de- pending on your taste and gender, Gene- vieve Bujold, Mary Pickford, Raymond Burr, Christopher Plummer and Yvonne de Carlo. Canadians are never happier than when making these lists, and com- plaining that America has co-opted their stars. This explains a rather odd provision of Canadian law, which stipulates that at least 30 per cent of all musical radio programming, and at least 60 per cent of all television output, must be written or per- formed by Canadians. Attempts have been made to do the same for magazines, in order to save Maclean's from being swamp- ed by Time and Newsweek. Arbitrary and bizarre, even sinister, though this may appear, it does provide a certain domestic market and a hedge against the homogenisation of culture by American products. Canada did not have its own flag until 1965. I personally cannot tell a Canadian accent from an American one, except by the Scottish way 'out' is pronounced. And arguments about crisis of identity are bortng (as well as being yet another American im- port). Who cares that, when Prime Minis- ter Lester Pearson visited LBJ in 1965, he was called 'Mr Wilson' during the welcoM- ing speech? Does it matter that tens of thousands of visiting Americans send their postcards home with American stamps on them, thus clogging and infuriating the Canadian mail? Is it shameful that, as Mordecai Richler puts it: 'This country isn't where the action is, it's where it reverberates'? Surely not. I would rather be Clark Kent than Superman, and far rather have been John Buchan than LBJ,
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