[Peace-discuss] Blame Canada

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From the blog American Leftist, last Friday.  --CGE]

Tommy Douglas and the Difference Between Canada and the USA

Yesterday, there was a panel discussion on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer
about the current rift in relations between the United States and Canada.
For the most part the panelists made the obvious points, but I found the
closing comment of Mark Kingwell, a professor at the University of
Toronto, to be particularly interesting:

    "One thing I agreed with in what [Margaret Wente, of The Globe and
Mail] said is that we don't understand Americans as well as we think we
do. That's why there was so much bafflement after the election results.
It's also the case that we are far more different from Americans than the
Americans think we are. We are not your northern 51st state. This is a
completely different political culture. Our baseline values are quite
distinct.

    "The CBC just ran, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a contest to
decide who was the greatest Canadian. The winner was Tommy Douglas, who --
a name I'm sure is unfamiliar to many of your viewers, if not most, who
was the architect of universal health care in this country. So that is our
baseline value, or one of them, and it's not one that we share with you."

Kingwell is correct; I'm fairly well-versed in these matters, and I had no
idea who Tommy Douglas was. From the brief bio included on the CBC's web
page announcing that Douglas had been voted the greatest Canadian, one
thing is pretty clear: the guy was a socialist. To me and I think to most
American leftists, this is fascinating -- it would be like if NBC
conducted a poll of its viewers to name the greatest American, and Eugene
V. Debs was the winner.

What accounts for such huge differences in culture between two countries
that are in other ways so similar? I think it's the power and dominance of
the corporate system in the USA -- the same historical forces that led to
the US becoming an economic and military superpower have created an
internal culture that values profits and the rights of corporations above
all else. One wonders if such an internal culture is a necessary condition
of global hegemony and empire.

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