COMMENT
Canada: a U.S. perspective
By ALAN M. FIELD
July 12, 2010
Not long ago, I stumbled across a grisly, fascinating article in Time’s U.S. edition. The four-page piece described in detail “a bizarre gang” of Christian fundamentalist narcotraffickers in Mexico who routinely massacre policemen, leaving their severed, blindfolded heads on the street as warnings to their enemies.
These sorts of grisly accounts from Mexico have become commonplace in the U.S. press of late. Mention Mexico in the U.S. and the words ‘chaos,’ ‘kidnapping’ and ‘mass murder’ come quickly to mind, courtesy of the global press.
And then it hit me: There wasn’t a word about Canada in that issue of Time. There almost never is. The only mention of Canada I’ve seen recently in the U.S. was a whimsical reference on MSNBC, the cable news channel, to two offbeat Canadian political parties: The Marijuana Party and the Work Less Party.
Few bilateral relationships are as lopsided as the one that binds Canada and the United States. North of the border, many Canadians are obsessed with the latest news from the U.S. South of the border, however, almost no one – except expatriate Canadians – pays much attention to what goes on in Canada. (Except, perhaps, for the news from the National Hockey League.)
Not even U.S. editors who pride themselves on their worldliness seem to be aware that Canada is the largest trading partner of the U.S., not to mention a wealthy market of some 34 million consumers. While there’s probably not a single Canadian who can’t name the current U.S. president, the overwhelming number of Americans couldn’t recognize Prime Minister Stephen Harper if he were standing next to them in a crowded room.
I plead guilty of making just that sort of mistake, many years ago, when I met prime minister Joe Clark at a press reception in Tokyo, Japan, and chatted with him for five minutes before realizing who he was.
It’s not just Americans who don’t pay much attention to Canada. Two years ago, I found myself in the lobby of a lavish German hotel at the precise moment when Prime Minister Harper arrived for an important meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel. No one in the hotel seemed to recognize Mr. Harper.
Why is Canada so invisible? And what are the consequences of its invisibility for Canada and the U.S.? And are those consequences uniformly bad?
Like Gresham’s law about bad money, the first (unwritten) law of news is that bad news drives out good news. The worse the news, the bigger the headline needs to be. (Remove those severed heads, and that story about Mexico in Time might have been much shorter.) No one ever got rich or famous reporting from countries whose populations are largely law-abiding, honest and reliable. Not just from Canada, but from other countries that rarely produce bad news, such as Sweden, New Zealand or Costa Rica.
In the news business, fame and attention go where the bad news is – the really bad news. That means the Middle East (e.g., the Israel-Arab conflict, the Iraq War), Latin America (e.g., unreliable dictatorships in Central and South America; drug dealers in Colombia and Mexico) and Southeast Asia (e.g., brutal wars in Vietnam and Cambodia).
Two different kinds of countries provide bad news: Those countries that are too strong (e.g., China today; the former USSR) – thus threatening their neighbours; and those countries that are too weak, and thus unstable (e.g., Colombia, Mexico, Rwanda, Iran, Sudan).
From a U.S. point of view, Canada fits into neither category. It is neither too rich nor too large to threaten U.S. security. Nor is Canada’s political democracy particularly unstable; its political dilemmas have never attracted much attention except when Quebec seemed on the verge of becoming independent, years ago.
As for its economy, Canada has even outperformed the U.S. economy in recent years by avoiding the excessive risk-taking that became so popular on Wall Street.
Sometimes, a country goes from being too weak to too strong, or moves in the opposite direction, thus remaining on the radar screen of the U.S. media despite its evolution. Until the 1990s, China attracted lots of attention in the U.S. only because of its weakness: its huge population hungry for foreign resources; its unstable government defiantly anti-capitalist, and its huge military seemed bent on conquering foreign territory. (Not really, perhaps, but so it seemed.)
More recently, China has moved into another category, attracting attention for precisely the opposite reasons: its growing economic strength. Its competitiveness now seems to threaten the prosperity of the U.S. and Canada for completely different reasons. Conversely, Japan – which for decades attracted attention in the U.S. because of its economic strength – has largely disappeared from U.S. headlines because it no longer seems strong enough to threaten the U.S. Caught in the middle – neither too weak nor too strong – Japan is barely visible in the U.S. media.
Where does this leave Canada? Also neither too strong nor too weak to threaten the U.S., Canada doesn’t qualify as a genuine source of concern for Americans, except perhaps for fans of the U.S. Olympic hockey team, perennially concerned (for good reason) about the Canadian Olympic team. Peaceful, reliable and law-abiding, Canada can be safely ignored – and so it has been for decades.
The contrast with Mexico, our other mutual partner in NAFTA, is dramatic. Canada can’t compete with Mexico for the attention of U.S. readers and TV viewers. Mexico offers an abundance of negative, highly visual stereotypes, easily enabling U.S. media to ignore the enormous progress Mexico has made in its economic development in recent decades.
Rather than relate the latest news about such burgeoning Mexican industries as cement, steel and autos, the U.S. press focuses on negative stereotypes such as gangs of Mexican drug traffickers, and hordes of impoverished undocumented workers fleeing across the Rio Grande to the U.S.
As for Canada, it has hardly any negative stereotypes to offer readers, except, perhaps, its freezing winter weather. Even in that respect, Canada’s worst winter weather can hardly out-shock the worst news from Alaska, so it does not make headlines.
On the contrary, many Americans who have travelled in Canada insist on perpetuating positive stereotypes about Canada that may strike some Canadians as too cheerful – including tales of a healthcare system that tends beautifully to the needs of everyone, and streets that are entirely free of crime.
Surely, Canada would be more visible if it were more exotic. Among Canadian provinces, only Quebec has a clearly defined cultural image, rooted in its French heritage. Yet Quebec, while charming, is so obviously unthreatening, it does not attract much attention south of the border. Only on those occasions, as during the 1980s and 1990s, when the Quebec separatist movement threatened to pull Canada apart, have many American readers paid attention to Quebec.
What are the consequences of all this shortage of dramatic fireworks? The only way most Canadians can aspire to play a major role on the world stage is by keeping their nationality invisible. It’s an open secret that such performers as Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox, Dan Aykroyd and Donald Sutherland are all Canadians. No one in the U.S. talks about that, because it doesn’t really matter, even to those Americans who feel most stirred by patriotic emotion. Almost universally, these actors gained fame performing the role of Americans, and they do so flawlessly, since the cultural gap is hardly vast.
Some Canadians have even gained fame performing the role of highly patriotic Americans – such as Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln (in the film Abe Lincoln in Illinois) and Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, jingoist superhero of the Fox TV series 24, which became popular among neoconservative supporters of the Iraq War.
Famous companies such as Research in Motion, makers of BlackBerry smart phones, downplay their Canadian origins, and most Americans don’t know – or care about them. Canada’s invisibility – and its similarity to the U.S. – also makes it easier for Canadian companies such as RIM and Descartes to sell an overwhelming percentage of their goods in the U.S. without having to make changes in their corporate culture.
In addition, while some U.S. customers may balk at buying sophisticated products labelled ‘Made in Mexico,’ Americans don’t think of ‘Made-in-Canada’ products as particularly ‘foreign’ or suspect.
Apart from scenic locations (such as Banff and Vancouver) known for their unique beauty, most Canadian locations are never identified as specifically Canadian when they appear on the silver screen. On numerous occasions, downtown Toronto has doubled as New York; Vancouver as Seattle; and numerous small Canadian towns and prairies as their nearly identical counterparts just south of the border. It would be impossible to imagine a Mexican town doubling on screen for one in the U.S.
Finally, there’s another reason why Americans aren’t threatened by Canadians – and therefore don’t pay much attention. Many Americans, including myself, view Canada as a country that is, in many ways and places, much less exotic than our own Southern states. When it comes ‘exotic,’ it’s hard to argue to a native New Yorker that Toronto is more foreign than New Orleans. Or that the small towns of Ontario are more ‘foreign’ than the antebellum plantations along the Mississippi Delta.
In many respects, Northerners and Southerners are still struggling to come to grips with the legacy of the American Civil War, but tensions of that sort have long since disappeared between the descendants of those North Americans who declared their independence in 1776, and those who remained British citizens in the vast land that later became an independent Canada.
Alan M. Field is Canadian Sailings’ U.S. contributing writer.