Why Americans don’t get Canada The nation has a unique collectivist spirit

Matthew and I are renovating our 110-year-old home. As is the case with old homes, there are surprises. Our electrician recently opened up a junction box and found the home’s old disconnect switch in a stairway closet. It looks like something out of a cartoon, a big lever one would pull in case of a code-red, or something. Since it’s no longer connected to anything, Dan asked if we’d like him to get rid of it. “I kind of dig it,” said my husband, Matthew. “I say leave it. Old houses are like old people — you have to try to keep their world intact by leaving traces of the past.”

These words came back to me the following week when the Hudson Bay Corporation, the oldest in North America, announced that it was going out of business. Incorporated by royal decree in 1670, the HBC was responsible for westward expansion into British North America. Canada became what it is because of this company. For over 200 years, the HBC was the governing authority in Western Canada. In the 20th century, it became the anchor for urban development, emerging as the country’s most iconic retailer. Every major city in Canada had its downtown centred around an HBC department store that spanned an entire city block. Even in recent years, the Christmas windows of its flagship Toronto store attracted the kind of attention that a major tourist destination receives. The floors inside were civic retail Utopia, where teen girls and new mums and corporate bankers and grandpas shopped happily under the same roof. If there was a unifying symbol of Canadian culture in the last century, it may have been an HBC wool blanket. Traded for fur pelts from the late 1700s, the blankets at one point accounted for well over half of all traded goods. There are few fashion staples dating from over 200 years ago that are still popular today, but the HBC Stripes are one of them. Every household has one somewhere in the house.

The end of the HBC, hastened by its owner, an American private equity firm that bought the company in 2012, has happened during a time of a strange resurgence of Canadian patriotism. A few months ago, one experienced a kind of fremdscham — vicarious embarrassment — if one saw a household flying a Canadian flag. We have been told, and told often, that we’re a genocidal nation; it was gauche to be proud of Canada. But now even in the most bourgeois neighbourhoods you see the maple leaf flying proudly. Canadian products in grocery stores are now labelled with a maple leaf. Californian wine has been taken off our shelves. There are Canadian flags inside businesses and on clothing, and on hats. (We have our own version of the red and white ballcap: “Canada is Already Great”, it says.) This weekend in my home province there is a Rally for Canada happening at the provincial legislature. I think there will be music, some speeches by local radio hosts, face-painting for the kids, and some fried mini doughnuts and hot dogs. You know, all the things that make us uniquely Canadian, I guess.

It is difficult to put one’s finger on the pulse of Canadian culture. We seem to define ourselves by one thing: not American. (That’s why it’s still perfectly acceptable for a Canadian backpacker to affix a maple leaf to her bag. At home our patriotism has been a cause for embarrassment, but abroad a worse embarrassment would be to be mistaken for a vulgar American.) Americans, on the other hand, typically don’t think of us at all. Years before the talk of becoming the 51st state, my husband took a trip from his home in Virginia to Canada to give a lecture. He was delayed overnight in the Chicago airport because he left his passport at home and had to have it emergency couriered. “I honestly forgot Canada was a separate country,” he joked, making fun of his own forgetfulness by deflecting it onto Canada’s deepest insecurity. “I just assumed it was like America-North.”

But Canadians forget that we’re a separate country, too, strangely. Consider this: at a party around Christmas, after the US election but before Trump’s inauguration, a fellow Canadian and I were talking about, unsurprisingly, US politics. “Trump is going to be bad for Canada,” he said. “I expect so,” I said, “but he is allowed to do things that he thinks are in the best interest of his country.” “But are you prepared to accept everything he says he’ll do?” he asked. “It doesn’t really matter since I’m Canadian. I didn’t vote for him, and I don’t pay taxes to him.” My friend stood there, as though not quite understanding what I meant, so I clarified: “he is not the president of Canada.”

Canada is a country that has long defined itself by our sense of moral superiority to our uncouth neighbour to the south. To be Canadian is to be more virtuous and more intelligent than our American cousins. But of course we learn our virtue from America, influenced by them in ways we can’t fully apprehend because our culture is so saturated by theirs. The only thing we don’t do better than them is patriotism — until recently, that is. Now that Trump has adopted a stance of hostility toward Canada, we’ve got good at that, too. Our newfound love of Canada is another import from our southern neighbours. Our response to Trump’s tariffs is to buy local, support Canada. In other words, we are now doing by way of patriotic reaction precisely what Trump is doing by way of policy: spending our money in our own country.

I know that this sounds as if I’m unpatriotic myself, eye-rolling at Canada’s reactive nationalism. This isn’t true. First of all, few things are as Canadian as being self-deprecating and self-apologising. Sorry, eh. But truly I love Canada, deeply. Not only our cold, unforgiving winters, which do forge a different kind of person, but our social and political systems, which in fact are very un-American, and make for a very pleasant society. I was a participant recently at an American conference in New York. There I was surprised by how opposed the Americans were to things like universal healthcare, public daycare and public schools, and even to taxes. One participant there was a third-generation non-social security number holder. She is off the grid so that she doesn’t have to pay a cent in taxes. To a Canadian this is unthinkable. Nobody likes paying taxes, but we certainly do enjoy the benefits of them. And we are certainly aware that we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens.

There is a tangible difference between Canada and the US that made me realise how incompatible our cultures are. Canada is collectivist, if not even a teensy bit socialist. We have government corporations, such as energy utilities and insurance companies. They work well, in general. We pay high taxes, but we get services in return — no, don’t snicker. It’s true. For many years I was a single mother. I had to work. Daycare in my home province is heavily subsidised by the government. The cost to all is $10 a day. Affordable and necessary, so off my kids went. To the average American, I have learned, state-run daycare sounds menacing, as though it’s the kind of institution where toddlers are given sippy cups of Soylent Green as images of blue-haired angry teens are beamed into their innocent eyes, like Clockwork Orange for three-year-olds. But in practice provincial daycares are each run separately by a board made up of parent volunteers. The province provides the funding, but the community determines the policies. And the daycares are truly diverse communities. Professional mums and dads mingle with recent immigrants at pre-school parties. The lawyer and the grocery store custodian become friends as they plan weekend playdates together. The Eritrean refugee family and the Russian Jewish family laugh together as their kids hang from the monkey bars at pick-up time. It is a kind of classless polis. It is beautiful, and it works.

And the same goes with our healthcare system. Although certainly strained and now with a very questionable policy regarding medically assisted dying, it is still highly functional. That is why we hear about cases when the system fails. They are newsworthy because they are not commonplace. A few years ago, my daughter fell on glass and sliced her knee; it was cut open to the bone. My American husband and I took her to the downtown Children’s Hospital. Within three hours, her knee was stitched (10 big sutures and two subcutaneous ones) and we were sent home with Advil and extra bandages. As we drove home, I asked Matthew how much he paid for parking in the hospital parking garage. “Seven dollars,” he said. “Seven dollars!” I replied, shaking my head. “Tsk, tsk. They get you coming and going around here.” He slowly turned his head to glare at me. “In the US that bandage alone would have cost $25.” He is right. Our system is not perfect, but it has in large part been saved from outright corruption because it is a public good.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is, as we all know, America’s saying. Canada’s lesser-known one is “Peace, Order, and Good Government”. At the heart of Canada is a spirit that embraces governance as long as it is for the common good. We have an election here at the end of this month. It will be, as usual, a battle between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. The latter would have won the election handily had it been called in the autumn (as it should have been) while the deeply disliked Trudeau was in power and Trump had not yet started a trade war with America’s longest-running trade partner. But now to be Conservative in Canada is aligned, incorrectly, with American Trumpism. To be Liberal is to be, more or less correctly, a lib globalist. The American political landscape has so overshadowed our politics and culture that their terms have become ours; their division of political policy our own — you’re either Right or Left — just as our “Canadian culture” is in so many ways the same as theirs: doughnuts and hot dogs.

But Canada has a unique history of political values that have neither formed themselves as a negation of American values or a colonisation by them. To be a Red Tory is to be both fiscally conservative and collectivist; it is to hold socialist policies that look to the community’s good, while often holding onto conservative social values. Unlike America’s focus on individual liberty, Canadian Red Toryism focuses on the collective. The Canadian Wheat Board was such an institution: a single government-run trade platform where farmers marketed their grain. It effectively dissolved in 2012 in favour of open market globalisation, which has been devastating to family farms but good for corporate ones. (The majority of Canadian farmers opposed its dissolution; my father, a Ukrainian immigrant farmer, was one of them. Corporate farms, however, lobbied strongly for “market freedom” as opposed to collective capitalism. They won.) I wonder if now, in the face of high tariffs in our American market, it might be time to bring Canadian collectivism back to our grain market. Few things would make me prouder to be Canadian. Western farmers, like our truckers, are remarkably unified. Ottawa might want to remember this.

But probably I’m being naïve. It feels increasingly like a remnant of the past to imagine a government that is both collectivist and conservative, like a trace of old wiring in a house that no longer serves any purpose. But it could still happen. I am no economist, but I love this country of mine and, as the wife of an American, have more insight than I might otherwise have had to the differences between our two nations. Of course we will never, ever become annexed to the USA — for one thing, the Americans couldn’t handle Quebecers for a day, let alone conciliate them for well over a century.

But the history of Canada is to keep traces of the past intact. That is why we still have a king — God save him. We have always been loyalists. This might now mean being loyal to our unique Canadian collectivism. Socialist, but not wokeist. Fiscally conservative, but not anti-taxation or anti-government. Neither on the Right nor the Left, but maybe somewhere beneath these divisions, closer to the land. The old Canada of the mid-20th century might feel no longer relevant to the functioning of the modern globalist markets, but then again, the modern globalist market seems to be crashing down before our eyes. Canadian Red Toryism need not be an artefact of the past. Just as old houses can be restored, Canadian Red Toryism may become again a vital force in a functioning modern state, for the current of collectivism still flows through our country. In a time of diminishing exports, a uniquely Canadian socialism might still be a viable commodity to the people of Canada.