Abstract
Despite Canada’s proximity and its importance to the United States economy, ignorance of things Canadian is almost legendary in the United States, and one cannot assume that an American reader will bring much if any background knowledge about Canada to this book. This chapter, then, offers a short overview of some of the historical, social, and political factors that distinguish Canada from the United States and that are likely to have a bearing, however indirect at times, on the two countries’ different urban and suburban development outcomes.
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Notes
- 1.
We have tried to use “United States” consistently rather than “America” to avoid the inference that somehow the United States and the American (or North American) continent are to be identified with each other. We have, however, used the adjectival version “American” where there appears to be no reasonable alternative to its use.
- 2.
Kennedy wrote a book with that title. Romney used the phrase in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. ABC News, “Mitt Romney’s Speech at the Republican National Convention,” August 30, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/previewed-excerpts-mitt-romneys-speech-republican-national-convention/story?id=17120765.
- 3.
Andrew H. Malcolm, The Canadians (New York: Times Books, 2005), xi.
- 4.
Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North American Provinces (Quebec: Hunter, Rose & Co., Parliamentary Printers, 1985), 32.
- 5.
Quoted in J. Wheelwright, “Nationalism,” United North America, August 8, 2005, http://www.unitednorthamerica.org/nationalism.htm.
- 6.
Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide (New York: Routledge, 1990), 53.
- 7.
Kenneth McNaught, quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide (New York: Routledge, 1990), 91. Lipset also quotes novelist Margaret Atwood that “Canada must be the only country in the world where a policeman is used as a national symbol,” 90.
- 8.
The Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. “Canadian Identity,” last edited December 15, 2013, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-identity/.
- 9.
G. R. Cook, “Canadian Centennial Celebrations,” International Journal 12 (Autumn 1967): 663.
- 10.
Rudyard Griffiths, interviewed in the National Post, December 28, 2012.
- 11.
The Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. “Canadian Identity.”
- 12.
Martin Patriquin, “The Epic Collapse of Quebec Separatism,” Maclean’s, April 11, 2014.
- 13.
Wikipedia, s.v. “Newfoundland (Island),” last modified July 20, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island).
- 14.
What is referred to in Canada as the Aboriginal population includes three distinct subgroups: the Inuit, the First Nations, and the Métis. The last are descended from mixed Native and white ancestry; in contrast, however, to mixed populations in the United States, which are not perceived as a distinct ethnic group, the Métis both identify themselves and are recognized officially as a distinct part of the nation’s Aboriginal population.
- 15.
See, e.g., Lipset, Continental Divide, especially chap. 10, “Mosaic and Melting Pot.”
- 16.
Andrew Cohen, “Immigrants and Canadians, Maintaining Both Identities” New York Times, November 16, 2012. Cohen is the author of the highly critical 2003 best-seller While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World.
- 17.
Cohen, “Immigrants and Canadians.”
- 18.
A 2011 poll found that 92 percent of Canadians were satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, and a 2012 Gallup poll found that Canada is the second happiest country in the world, preceded only by Denmark. Interestingly, four out of the five Canadian metropolitan areas with the highest life satisfaction were in Quebec. Andrew Sharpe and Evan Capeluck, “Canadians Are Happy and Getting Happier: An Overview of Life Satisfaction in Canada, 2003–2011” (Ottawa: Center for the Study of Living Standards, 2012).
- 19.
Equalization in Canada refers to the program by which federal revenues are distributed to the provinces on the basis of a formula that measures the disparity between each province’s ability to raise revenues and equalizes the fiscal resources available to each province to provide services. Equalization payments are unconditional and are guaranteed by the Canadian Constitution of 1982.
- 20.
Griffiths, interview.
- 21.
Geert-Jan Hofstede and Michael Minkov, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 6. The data that serve as the basis for the Hofstede model are based on integrating the findings from a number of different field surveys of residents of different countries; see ibid, 27–45. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions make it impossible for us to quote the actual country scores directly. Interested readers can find them at http://geert-hofstede.com/countries.html
- 22.
Canadians are less likely to attend religious services than Americans, and when asked “how important to you are your religious beliefs” in a 1975 Gallup Poll, only 36 percent of Canadians answered “very important” compared with 56 percent of Americans. Lipset, Continental Divide, 84.
- 23.
Michael Adams, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2004), 51.
- 24.
Adams, Fire and Ice, 119. Adams cites a 2001 survey that found that 19 percent of Canadians owned guns.
- 25.
Aaron Karp, Small Arms Survey Research Notes No. 9: Estimating Civilian Owned Firearms (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2011).
- 26.
Christian Boucher, “Canada-US Values Distinct, Inevitably Carbon Copy, or Narcissism of Small Differences?,” Horizons, June 2014.
- 27.
See generally Lipset, Continental Divide, 140–42, and Adams, Fire and Ice, 110– 44; see also J. P. Alston, T. M. Morris, and A. Vedlitz, “Comparing Canadian and American Values: New Evidence from National Surveys” American Review of Canadian Studies 26, no. 3 (1996): 301–14.
- 28.
There is considerable disagreement among sources about precisely what percentage of Canada’s population lives within 100 miles of the US border, with estimates varying from 75 to 90 percent.
- 29.
- 30.
The lower percentage for Canada is largely attributable to a narrower definition of metropolitan area used by Statistics Canada.
- 31.
The World Bank, “GINI Index (World Bank Estimate),” 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI.
- 32.
For Canada, see Government of Canada, “Union Coverage in Canada, 2013,” June 11, 2014, http://www.labour.gc.ca/eng/resources/info/publications/union_coverage/union_coverage.shtml; and for the United States, see Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, news release “Union Members—2014,” January 23, 2015, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf. Both in Canada and the United States, however, public-sector workers are significantly more likely to be unionized than private-sector workers, although the disparity is less pronounced in Canada.
- 33.
Data for Canada from Employment and Social Development Canada is from http://well-being.esdc.gc.ca/misme-iowb/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=23; for the United States, from the Bureau of the Census,, https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-01.pdf.
- 34.
See, e.g., the research of the Broadbent Institute, at http://www.broadbentinstitute.ca/income_inequality.
- 35.
Much of the data in this section come from the Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook,” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/.
- 36.
The measurement periods are slightly different. Canadian data are for the period 2001–2010, whereas US data are for the period 2000–2009.
- 37.
Of course, 2 percent of the US population is a far larger number than 4 percent of the Canadian population.
- 38.
Canada also has a Senate made up of members appointed by the governor-general on the prime minister’s recommendation. Although in theory the two bodies are coequal, in practice the House of Commons is the dominant chamber, and it would not be too much of an exaggeration to characterize the Canadian system as having a de facto unicameral legislature.
- 39.
The leader of the winning party is invited by the governor-general, who serves as ceremonial head of state representing the English monarch. Arguably, the power to select the prime minister and upon a prime minister’s request to dissolve a government are the only substantive powers held by the governor-general.
- 40.
Although it has never formed a national government, the NDP has at one time or another held the reins in five of Canada’s eleven provinces. The NDP currently holds roughly 30 percent of the seats in the federal Parliament and has the status of official opposition.
- 41.
Canada did not have a formal constitution until 1982.
- 42.
In the same speech quoted earlier (see note 4), MacDonald decried the notion of “state’s rights” as held in the United States and stressed that the proposed confederation would be radically different, noting that “we have strengthened the general government. We have given the general legislature all the great subjects of legislation” (33).
- 43.
An interesting outcome of this particular separation of powers was the fate of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs created in 1971 under the Trudeau government. Barred from exercising any direct authority in the realm of urban affairs, as Goldberg and Mercer write, “it quickly ran afoul of entrenched and power [national government] interests. It raised false expectations amongst the municipalities, and seemed to confirm provincial suspicions of larger federal role in urban development.” It was abolished in 1979. Michael A. Goldberg and John Mercer, The Myth of the North American City (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 123.
- 44.
Quantifying this fact, however, is difficult. A handful of states are pure “Dillon’s rule” states that provide little or no discretion to local governments, and a handful are pure home rule states; most, though, are a combination, including many like Illinois and Montana, which provide discretion to those municipalities that enact a charter or otherwise qualify as “home rule” municipalities.
- 45.
Montana State Constitution, art. 11, § 6.
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Tomalty, R., Mallach, A. (2015). Canada and the United States: Similar yet Different. In: America’s Urban Future. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-597-7_3
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