Canada’s View on Social Issues Is Opening Rifts With the U.S.----
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
SOURCE: The New York Times via Factiva
TEXT:
TORONTO, Dec. 1 – Canadians and Americans still dress alike, talk alike, like
the same books, television shows and movies, and trade more goods and
services than ever before. But from gay marriage to drug use to church
attendance, a chasm has opened up on social issues that go to the heart of
fundamental values.
A more distinctive Canadian identity – one far more in line with European
sensibilities – is emerging and generating new frictions with the United
States.
‘‘Being attached to America these days is like being in a pen with a wounded
bull,’’ Rick Mercer, Canada’s leading political satirist, said at a recent
show in Toronto. ‘‘Between the pot smoking and the gay marriage, quite
frankly it’s a wonder there is not a giant deck of cards out there with
all our faces on it.’’
Mr. Mercer acknowledged in an interview that he was overstating the case for
laughs – two Canadian provinces have legalized gay marriage, and Ottawa
has moved to decriminalize use of small amounts of marijuana. But in the
view of many experts the two countries are heading in different
directions, at least for the time being.
Recent disagreements over trade, drugs and the war in Iraq, where Canada has
refused to send troops, has made the relationship more contentious and
Canadians increasingly outspoken about the things that separate them from
their American neighbors.
‘‘The two countries are sounding more different – after 9/11, dramatically
more different,’’ noted Gil Troy, an American historian who teaches at
McGill University in Montreal. ‘‘You hear a lot more static and you see
more brittleness.’’
Of course there have been frictions before, for instance during the Vietnam
War, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau welcomed American draft evaders,
but the differences in those years were more political than social.
Analysts say that Canada and the United States have always been similar
yet different, and that the differences are often accentuated at the
margins.
But today, many analysts and ordinary Canadians said in interviews around the
country, the differences appear to have moved center stage, particularly
in social and cultural values.
The nations remain like-minded in pockets, but the center of gravity in each
has changed. French-speaking Quebec, with nearly a quarter of the
population and its open social attitudes, pulls Canada to the left, just
as the South and Bible Belt increasingly pull the United States in the
opposite direction, particularly on issues like abortion, gay marriage and
capital punishment.
None of those have resonated much over the last decade in Canada, where the
consensus on social policy seems more solidly formed, its fissures
narrower and less exploitable.
Chris Ragan, a McGill University economist, observed: ‘‘You can be a social
conservative in the U.S. without being a wacko. Not in Canada.’’
Drugs are one point of departure. A bill to decriminalize small amounts of
marijuana is working its way through the lower house of Parliament,
bringing threats from the White House that such a law could slow trade at
the border.
Recently, while musing about his retirement plans, Prime Minister Jean
Chretien said he might just kick back and smoke some pot. ‘‘I will have my
money for my fine and a joint in the other hand,’’ he said with a smile.
The glibness of the remark made it nearly impossible to imagine an
American president uttering it. But in a nation where the dominant west
coast city, Vancouver, has come to be known as Vansterdam, few Canadians
blinked.
When Massachusetts’s highest court ruled for gay marriage, the issue loomed
over American politics. Conservatives vowed to change the Constitution.
President Bush said he would defend marriage. Even the major Democratic
presidential candidates backed away from supporting gay marriage outright.
Contrast that with Canada, where two provincial courts issued similar rulings
this year. With little anguish, Canada became only the third country –
after the Netherlands and Belgium – to allow same-sex marriage as a
matter of civil rights.
Canadians themselves are not wholly united on the issue. Most elderly and
rural Canadians express reservations, and the Canadian Anglican Church is
almost as divided over homosexuality as the American Episcopal Church.
Still, Canadians remain tolerant of the shift.
More than 1,500 gay and lesbian couples have married since the court rulings.
‘‘The Canadian reaction to same-sex marriage has been mostly positive,’’
said Neil Bissoondath, an acclaimed Trinidadian-born Canadian novelist and
social critic.
But the same issue in the United States ‘‘has upset the fundamentalist
Christians who drive a lot of the politics in the country, especially with
the present administration in power,’’ Mr. Bissoondath added.
Rachel Brickner, 29, a political science graduate student at McGill originally
from Detroit, said that despite her own liberal views, she sometimes tired
of the anti-Americanism she encountered among Canadian students.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she said, an old roommate told her that
‘‘the U.S. deserved 9/11 because we’re bullies.’’
‘‘Canadians are quick to blame the United States for not knowing about
Canada,’’ she said, ‘‘but Canadians make a lot of ignorant statements
about the U.S.’’ No Canadian city reveals differences as much as
Vancouver. It looks like any American city, except for a drug culture that
is so abundantly open. The police rarely interfere with bars, storefronts
and even offices where people can buy or smoke marijuana. A ‘‘compassion
club’’ distributes marijuana legally to cancer patients and others who
have doctors’ notes.
The city opened a publicly financed and supervised injection site for heroin
users in September. The federal government, meanwhile, is preparing to
start an experimental heroin distribution program for addicts in Toronto,
Montreal and Vancouver in 2004.
The changes in marriage and drug laws, said Michael Adams, a Toronto
consultant and polling expert, ‘‘means Canada is moving in the opposite
direction with the United States and closer to Europe.’’
In his new book ‘‘Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of
Converging Values,’’ he argues that greater Canadian tolerance reflects a
fundamental difference in outlook about everthing from the ethnic and
linguistic diversity of immigrants to the relative status of the sexes.
Mr. Adams notes that weekly church attendance among Canadians has plummeted
since the 1950’s while American church attendance has remained virtually
constant.
To many commentators the two countries seem to be exchanging their traditional
roles, one founded in America’s birth as a revolutionary country and
Canada’s as a counterrevolutionary alternative.
During the Depression, under the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United
States was the progressive force, while Canada stubbornly held on to
conservative economic policies.
By the mid-1960’s, though, Canada shifted to a far more activist government,
moving to a national health insurance system. Not long afterward, the
Vietnam War began siphoning popularity from the Great Society experiment
of President Johnson. The trends have only widened since.
Not all analysts see a big, lasting divergence. Some like Peter Jennings, the
ABC News broadcaster who was born in Toronto and became a dual American
and Canadian citizen in May, believe that Canadians have actually drawn
closer to Americans. Nevertheless, Mr. Jennings said Canada had become ‘‘a
socially more relaxed kind of place.’’
‘‘Canada, as it is with some of the European countries,’’ he added, ‘‘is
trying to balance some of the market forces with public policy, which is
not as apparent in the United States, where the pursuit of happiness and
individualism are very much alive.’’
Still, a cultural gulf is widening.
‘‘In the 70’s we were taught Canada would be absorbed by the United States,
and in the 80’s it looked like it was happening,’’ recalled Douglas
Coupland, the Canadian author known for his cultural commentaries on both
sides of the border. ''Then came the latter part of the 90’s and it was
like some high school class 16-millimeter film where you see the
chromosome duplicates, then realigns, and finally the cell splits.
‘‘And that process only seems to be quickening in recent months.’’
Photos: Among the establishments catering to marijuana users on this street in
Vancouver is the British Columbia Marijuana Party Bookstore.; Members of
the British Columbia Compassion Club in Vancouver, who have their doctors’
permission to smoke marijuana to alleviate medical symptoms, in the club’s
smoking room one day recently. (Photographs by Bayne Stanley for The New
York Times)(pg. A16)
Chart: ‘‘A Common Border, Different Opinions’’
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Raphael Lasar
Matawan, NJ
