To some Americans, Canada feels less foreign than some parts of America. In many ways, Canadians do a lot of things much as we do, just with odd twists. They have a Thanksgiving in the fall – but it’s a long weekend, coinciding with what we used to call Columbus Day. They speak English – yes, French is an official language, but hey, we have a lot of Spanish speakers. They use a dollar for money – a little different in value from ours, printed in colors, with coins that don’t quite fit our vending machines. They buy milk in plastic bags, but their material life is much like ours. Their national day is the First of July – they call it Canada Day. Our civic values are the same, though where we declaim “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” as fruits of a revolutionary war, their motto is “Peace, Order and Good Government.”
Canada’s independence occurred incrementally. It started with the UK’s passage of the then-labelled British North America Act of 1867, now known as the Constitution Act, and was completed with Canada’s formal adoption of its own Constitution, or “Patriation,” in 1982. And still, Canada’s head of state is the “Governor General,” semantically implying that sovereignty resides in the British King.
In this devolution out of the British Empire, Canada differs in more than just a “twist” from the United States. America declared ourselves a new “People,” separated from the British. This also separated us from the traditions, bloodlines, territorial history, church, and hierarchies that make Britons British. Our only identification of our new People was as “we” who hold certain Truths: our creedal tenets of equal endowment of persons in unalienable rights, and of government that exists to secure those rights, legitimated by consent of the governed. These tenets do carry much of what many call the “rights of Englishmen.” But in the Declaration of Independence we renounced English rights. Conceiving ourselves from scratch, even as our tenets essentially match those rights, we espouse the concepts as if from scratch.
We also ceded the English laws and norms of social order. However our lives might resemble “old country” habits, we would live unconstrained by any received traditions and norms, and make our own laws on our own initiative. At conception on July 4, 1776, we were an anarchy. Every law, every social norm, was, in concept, cobbled up by this unrestrained – and often unruly – new people, as per our unalienable rights, from an existential ground zero.
Canada, on the other hand, kept up the rights of Englishmen, and their social order and laws. Independence came from British institutional actions. There was no novation of a “People;” the population retained existing British order, and its constraints on unruly characters, uninterrupted by renunciation of order or identity. Where America must claim our own governing ethos, Canada simply lived in those aspects of British identity.
One quirk is that Canada, while it might live the values of liberal order more naturally, did not define its nationality by them. They form, for Canada and other nations that devolved from UK governance, one strand, however central, of the culture that shaped the polity. The UK actually opted to pick up on other strands in the Brexit vote. Just so, Canada could, theoretically, by other traditions of their evolved identity, also choose de-liberalizing pathways.
America cannot renounce its foundation on rights and consent of the governed and still be America. In this self-conception from scratch, we do, too often, transgress those principles. As any American who’s had a serious discussion with an anti-American Canadian can attest, our transgressions can make us look hypocritical, and our pride in principle can come across as unfounded preening. But, as is said in one example, the Declaration converted slavery from ancient “natural” practice to national sin, and we fought a Civil War to ensure that slavery, not our founding principle, carried the hypocrisy. Britain abolished slavery in a certain British conscience but could, in theory, undo the abolition, in other choices of national nature.
Canada’s and America’s distinct creation processes lead to what seems mostly a bit of attitudinal difference. But in fact they are meaningful enough, and show up enough in real life, to make us distinct countries. Thus can PM Mark Carney liken Canada to the 1980s Prague shopkeeper “taking down the store window sign,” equating an American-led world order to the USSR’s hegemony over eastern Europe. However much we look alike, we have different national interests, and hold each other as “enemies in war, in peace, friends,” as the Declaration said about England.
Perhaps this implication of Carney’s speech can become less cold. America is undergoing a vitriolic, disorderly re-shaping of our politics. Peace, Order and Good Government have been receding here for decades. Our next self-re-invention needs to renew our fidelity to our founding-from-scratch on rights. If that happens, a Canadian impulse for distancing might diminish.
Common Conviction 