Canadian, eh?

[blatherskite]

An Indian friend recently asked me about how and whether we Canadians consider ourselves to be different from Americans. We Canucks are interesting in that we protest loudly and repeatedly that we are emphatically not Americans, yet most of us seem hard-pressed to define why we believe that. The winning entry in a CBC contest to complete the phrase "As Canadian as..." was revealing: "... as possible under the circumstances."

But to me, it wasn't all that hard to come up with some strong opinions about the differences between Canadian and American culture. With the important caveat that any such effort becomes an exercise in ignoring the subtleties and the extremes, and thereby risking oversimplification and offense, here are my thoughts on the differences:

Canadians don't have any belief that we are the world's greatest anything, and we have no notion of manifest destiny. As a result, we're inherently more humble than Americans—some would say less ambitious. This tends to lead the stereotype of the overly polite Canadian, which is true in my experience. Every time I travel outside North America, people I spend any time with tend to comment on this; it's enough of an issue for Americans that I have several American friends who stitch a Canadian flag on their backpacks when they travel abroad. It also leads Canadians to be more respectful about other cultures. We certainly have our ugly Canadians, of course, but it's not a national characteristic to be so self-absorbed. As a result, Canadians are loved or at least tolerated in places Americans fear to tread. In China, for example, I recall with some bemusement receiving warm smiles when my delegation was introduced as American, with me the only Canadian. My American colleagues received polite acknowledgment, but no immediate warmth.

We are orders of magnitude more socialist than Americans. Speaking of China, Canada was one of the first nations to recognize the People's Republic after the revolution cum civil war; the U.S. didn't establish anything like serious diplomatic ties for many decades, and never really trusted China even then. The U.S. furor over publicly funded healthcare is another example. Only a few right-wing loonies in Canada believe that publicly funded healthcare is morally evil, unlike in the U.S., where opposition to this notion is strong and vociferous.

We are inherently more multicultural because of our dominantly French and English founding cultures. I like to speculate that this makes us less overtly racist than America, though of course we do have serious race problems here and there and we have our share of racist loonies. Still, we're officially bilingual, and though Quebec separatists sometimes make the rest of the country regret this, we mostly accept and embrace this dual nature. As a result, Canadians consider ourselves part of a "cultural mosaic" rather than the U.S. "melting pot". Of course, I'm not ignorant of the fact that any member of Canada's First Nations would sneer at my naïvete in making such a statement.

Reactionary-conservative religion isn't a dominant force in our culture, unlike in the U.S.

These differences aren't obvious, but they're real and profound. A weak tie-in to the ostensible purpose of this blog, writing about writing, is that understanding such nuances can help you do a better job of creating distinct cultures in your fiction. But more importantly, such introspection also gives one far more appreciation of the good and bad things about one's real-world culture.