Showing papers in "American Review of Canadian Studies in 2008"

Defense Against Help: Explaining Canada-U.S. Security Relations

Abstract: A core concept in international relations theory, especially among realists, is that to survive in an anarchical world, states must rely on self-help. As John Mearsheimer explains, [S]tates cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival.... This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances. But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today's alliance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy might be tomorrow's alliance partner. (1) "Self-help" may apply to great powers, but it loses its explanatory force when extended to smaller states. As Robert Rothstein points out, lesser states are not simply "Great Powers writ small." (2) John Holmes observes that "the foreign policy ... of a middle power is generically different from that of a great power, let alone a superpower." (3) Small states, Rothstein adds, "think and act differently, and any analysis which fails to take that fact into account is bound to be simplistic and inadequate." (4) What sets lesser states apart from their great-power counterparts is "that they cannot obtain security primarily by the use of their own resources and that they have to rely fundamentally on outside help to maintain their independence." (5) It is clear that self-help does not reflect Canada's security reality. Canada shares a continent with its superpower neighbor, the United States, against which war is inconceivable. In fact, the United States serves as a powerful deterrent to external threats to Canada's safety. But while Canada relies on American power for its protection, the United States also depends on Canada--with its crucial land, air, and maritime approaches--for its own safety. In short, Canada-U.S. security is interdependent. It follows that Canada cannot ignore U.S. safety requirements, nor can Canada easily isolate itself from the consequences of American security decisions. Canada, therefore, participates in North American defense not only to deter possible external threats but also "to ensure national control over the Canadian territory" in the face of possible demands from the United States. (6) Canada does so through "defense against help," a strategy articulated by Nils Orvik, by which a mid- or small-sized state maintains a sufficient level of defense unilaterally, or in cooperation with a large state that is committed to its safety, to avoid "unwanted help" from the large state. (7) Defining Defense Against Help In Canada, defense against help is a policy response to that nation's somewhat unconventional "security dilemma," the essence of which is that the United States, in the process of guaranteeing Canada's safety, could itself become a security threat. If Canada were to become a strategic liability to the United States through military weakness or otherwise, Washington could take any measures deemed necessary for its own defense, regardless of Ottawa's preferences. (8) Moreover, if Canada failed to contribute to North American defense, Ottawa would forfeit opportunities to affect U.S. strategic policy decisions on which Canada's safety ultimately depends. The significance of the defense against help strategy in Canadian policy is evident in what can be called the U.S.-Canada "security bargain," the elements of which were first publicly expressed in statements exchanged between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1938. These statements, which still constitute the core of U.S.-Canada strategic obligations, reveal both similarities and differences in the two countries' priorities and preoccupations. President Roosevelt expressly committed the United States to the defense of Canada, giving the assurance "that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire. …

Canada-Quebec Immigration Agreements (1971–1991) and Their Impact on Federalism

Abstract: Introduction In the period 1971-1991, Quebec was the province that constantly pressed and negotiated with the federal government for more provincial rights in the field of immigration. The province signed four immigration agreements with the federal government in the immigration sphere: the Lang-Cloutier Agreement of 1971, the Andras-Bienvenue Agreement of 1975, the Cullen-Couture Agreement of 1978, and the McDougall-Gagnon-Tremblay Agreement, known as the Canada-Quebec Accord of 1991, which is still in effect today. Each new agreement gave the province additional powers and autonomy in this field. The role that the provincial government of Quebec acquired in the selection, recruitment, reception, and settlement processes of new immigrants over those two decades is enormous--well beyond that which any other Canadian province has aspired or managed to accomplish. The main argument used by Quebec to justify its demands has always been that the province is a distinct society and, therefore, needs a special status and autonomy to determine who settles in the province. It has to be noted as well that three of the four immigration agreements cited above were initiated by the provincial Liberal Party and only one by the Parti Quebecois. Thus, the immigration policy of the province of Quebec during the period in question was consistent and essentially followed the same direction, regardless of the political party in power in the province. This essay will argue that the Canada-Quebec immigration agreements had a crucial effect on the Canadian federal system, because they maintained asymmetrical federal-provincial relations in the immigration policy of Canada. Each new agreement enlarged this asymmetry while additionally undermining the role of the Canadian government in the immigration process. This essay will also examine how Quebec used the immigration autonomy that it obtained as a foundation and incentive for its independence movement. Finally, this essay will analyze the impact that this policy might have had (or might continue to have) on the other Canadian provinces and on the immigrants destined for Quebec, and discuss whether these agreements infringed on the mobility rights of the new permanent residents, as defined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 6. Asymmetrical Federalism and the Distribution of Powers in the Immigration Policy A number of Canadian political scientists consider "asymmetry" the term of choice to replace "special status" rhetoric, which is more or less discredited in the ears of many Canadians, particularly those from western Canada. Asymmetrical federalism is "a form of federalism in which one or more constituent units have differing powers and responsibilities." (1) The ideally symmetrical federal system would be a system in which all units are "equal" to each other in regard to factors such as territory, jurisdiction, culture, and history, whereas the ideally asymmetrical system would be a model in which every unit has a unique feature. (2) This is a theoretical definition, of course; in practice, one or a few units need asymmetry in any given federal system. In the Canadian federal system, however, there is only one province--Quebec--which strongly demands asymmetry, and it does so in various areas, including asymmetry in the authority over immigration. There are two extremely different views regarding Quebec's demands. Supporters of such asymmetry argue that it is the best way to retain Quebec in the federation and to satisfy Quebec's needs as a province with a different culture than the rest of Canada. The opponents, however, argue that an asymmetrical system is just a strategy of the provincial government of Quebec in a move toward complete independence. (3) The alignment of roles between the federal and the provincial governments in the field of immigration is predetermined by the Constitution: * Section 95 of the British North America (BNA) Act of 1867 defines both the federal and provincial authority over immigration policy. …

The Myth of the Pacific Society: Quebec's Contemporary Strategic Culture

Abstract: Introduction One of the most enshrined notions in Canadian foreign policy is that French-speaking Quebecois have a different attitude toward many issues than other Canadians, resulting in a national division that has come to be known as 'the two solitudes." This attitudinal difference is said to be particularly striking on defense and security policy issues. Historian J. L. Granatstein calls the phenomenon "the pacifist Quebec" (2)--a phenomenon labeled by Jean-Sebastien Rioux as "conventional wisdom." According to this view, Rioux claims, "English and French-Canadians hold differing views on security and defence issues, with French-Canadians being more dovish, isolationist, and antimilitaristic than their Anglo counterparts. This world-view allegedly causes Quebecers to oppose increases in defence spending; to be against military interventions overseas; and to favour using the Canadian Forces (CF) only in humanitarian or peacekeeping roles." (3) In short, Quebecois are more pacifist, isolationist, and/or antimilitarist than their compatriots. Two sets of evidence are generally used in the literature to support that claim. The first is a list of historical events, usually centered on the two world wars, that are used to describe the defiance and the hostility of the French-Canadians toward military institutions and their reluctance to serve in the armed forces. The second is public opinion polls that allegedly show, one after the other, a considerable difference between the two linguistic groups (or, more precisely, between Quebec and other Canadian provinces). Quite aside from any political instrumentalization that one can make of such claims (from outright accusations that the Quebecois are cowards and anti-Canadian, to a proclamation of the distinctiveness of Quebec's society), this difference in attitude is believed to be quite important in Canada's foreign policy decision-making. According to J. L. Granatstein, Quebecois are given a disproportionate influence in this process and are thus "deforming" Canada's foreign policy. This phenomenon is supposed to be at work in such recent events as the decision of the Chretien government not to participate in the "coalition of the willing" against Iraq in March 2003 and Paul Martin's failure to support the U.S. program on missile defense. (4) The thesis that Quebec's stance affects Canada's foreign policy is part of the "conventional wisdom" given that it perceives the opposition to the two above-named U.S. initiatives as an extension of Quebec's hostility either to the creation of a Canadian Navy at the beginning of the 20th century or to the conscription measures during the two world wars. In this article we will offer a different interpretation of the nature of Quebecois views on military issues and question whether the historical record supports the idea that Quebecois are, in fact, "pacifists." In other words, is it true that Quebecois are generally more distrustful or critical than other Canadians toward the use of the armed forces as an instrument of national and international problem-solving? Has this attitude changed over time? Is the conventional wisdom regarding Quebec still accurate to describe that province's contemporary public opinion? Is the critical stance observed in 2003-2004 surrounding the Iraq issue the same as the one observed in 1910, 1917, or 1942? We will try to show that neither of the two main sets of data used to support the claim of the "pacifist Quebec" thesis is as convincing as it seems. If French-Canadians could be labeled as antimilitarist or isolationist (but certainly not "pacifist") until the mid-20th century, things have changed since then. In fact, we argue that French-Canadians have expressed an "internationalist" attitude toward defense and security matters. One of the key problems in the qualification of a society's attitude lies in the definition of the concepts. Such notions as "pacifism,"(5) "antiwar," (6) "antimilitarism," (7) "anti-imperialism,"(7) "isolationism," (8) and "neutralism" (9) are generally left undefined and vague by authors. …

Anti-Americanism in Canada, Before and After Iraq

Abstract: When Americans think about anti-Americanism, they are likely to think of angry demonstrations in Pakistan, stuffy French intellectuals, or maybe a surly cab driver they once ran into in Mexico Most are not likely to think of Canada, at least not right away In fact, Americans who haven't had a lot of direct experience with Canadians might be mystified by the idea that there could be anti-Americanism in Canada, given that Canada seems to have so much in common with the United States, and Canadians are generally thought to be friendly and fair-minded But anti-Americanism has a long and colorful history in Canada, and--contrary to the expectations of those who argued that it had been defeated and exorcised in the debate over the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement--anti-Americanism in Canada is apparently alive and well today, though in a different, somewhat attenuated form In this essay, I will briefly review the historical evolution of anti-Americanism in Canada, and then offer some reflections on its nature and implications today Anti-Americanism is not the same thing as disagreement with American values or policies A person can emphatically reject something that the United States says or docs, and even harbor profound resentment toward the people who made those choices, without necessarily having anti-American views Anti-Americanism is an attitude toward the United States and its people which is profoundly mistrustful--a prejudice that colors the way a person interprets Americans' choices, and consistently attributes them to negative values and purposes (2) As comparative studies have shown, the specific content of anti-Americanism that is, the themes and arguments with which it is socially constructed--can vary widely from one society to another, and evolve over time Canadians' experiences with anti-Americanism are just about as diverse as Canada itself, but they can be readily grouped into two main collective experiences: Anglophone and Francophone" (3) Each has its own enduring, primary impulse, but each has evolved and changed over time, in terms both of the way it sees the United States and the way it manifests itself in political discourse and action Ironically, given the origins of Canada and the United States as "twins separated at birth," their essential and enduring similarities, and their long history of peace and cooperation, one might argue that the Anglophone Canadian experience has been as close as one can get to anti-Americanism in its "pure'" form It is, in other words, probably as close as we get to an anti-Americanism which persists even flourishes--without being sustained by profound political or cultural differences, anticipation of violence or direct coercion, or even deep-seated grievances The (Anglophone) Canadian, as historian Frank Underbill famously said, is "the first anti-American, the model anti-American, the archetypal anti-American, the ideal anti-American as he exists in the mind of God" (4) Despite or rather because of--the essential similarities between the two societies, the defining element of anti-Americanism in Anglophone Canada is differentiation It is in that sense consistent with a widely recognized tendency for societies to be preoccupied with demonstrating, to themselves and to others, that they are separate and different from a larger, very-similar neighbor, as in New Zealand (vis-a-vis Australia), Austria (vis-a-vis Germain), and most of Central America (vis-a-vis Mexico) The search for bases of differentiation, and the natural impulse to harness them in support of group cohesion and a positive collective self-image, fosters what Freud called the "'narcissism of small differences" (5) These impulses may be especially powerful in Canada, because of the relatively shallow and profoundly contested nature of the country's sense of national identity: Canadians are forever casting about for markers for collective identification, but there are few at hand, apart from not being Americans …

Are Enhanced Trade and Enhanced Security Mutually Exclusive? The Western Canada-U.S. Borderland in a Post-9/11 World

Abstract: In a post-September 11, 2001, North American trade environment, dramatic change appears to be the most visible constant in the Canada-United States borderland. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1989 (FTA) and the subsequent North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 (NAFTA) dramatically accelerated trade across the border, resulting in significant economic expansion and committing Canada and the United States to a policy of creating a more economically open border. In order to reap more of the potential economic benefits associated with free trade, the two countries mutually embarked on the Shared Border Accord in 1995. This agreement outlined a long-term investment plan to improve transportation and border infrastructure, and harmonized regulation procedures in order to create what was then ambitiously referred to as ''the most efficient border in the world." (1) However, the events of September 11, 2001, resulted in a number of significant and necessary policy shifts within this borderland. No longer was the focus on creating an efficient border; rather, security became the foremost priority. As a result, creating a secure border that is also efficient is now the primary objective. This is certainly a very different sort of border than anyone would have predicted when NAFTA was first signed, (2) presenting a new and difficult challenge: a challenge that threatens the very success of future North American free trade. Some analysis and researchers question the possibility of achieving both secure and efficient trade, because they view these two policies as inherently contradictory. Others have stated that free trade in North America under the new trade and security measures is not free at all that the new security measures act simply as non-tariff barriers." (1) Clearly these security measures are here to stay, so the challenge remains to make trade and travel across the Canada-U.S. border both secure and efficient. The purpose of this article is to explore and document the impacts on trade and personal travel that are a result of the post-9/11 security measures and policies. Several new programs designed to ensure both secure and efficient trade and travel have been introduced under the Smart Border Action Plan of 2001. This article will explore and evaluate how well these programs have succeeded in accomplishing this goal. In addition, we will identify certain difficulties that exist within these programs and policies, and make recommendations on how to improve or change the strategies that are already in place to ensure both secure and efficient trade and movement of people across the border in the future. Study Area From a continental standpoint--Atlantic to Pacific--this is a large task. This article will therefore focus on the situation along a representative border segment: the Pacific Slope of the Canada-U.S. border, a region originally defined by the Oregon Treaty of 1846 as extending from the summit of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific via the 49th parallel and the Strait of Juan tie Fuca. Geographically limiting this study is beneficial for several reasons. First and foremost, it makes the study more manageable, Second, the border and the amount and type of trade are notably different in the western border region than in the central or eastern border regions, and these differences have up to now not been fully appreciated. Third, much of the prior research that has been conducted on this subject has been limited to the central border region primarily Ontario (4)-with little focus on the Pacific Slope. The study area (Map I) consists of sixteen border ports ranging in size from the Pacific Highway [Blaine) WA-Douglas BG crossing, which is the fourth-busiest commercial port of entry along the entire border, to more remote rural crossings such as Nighthawk WA-Chopaka BC. This study area also contains the third-busiest passenger vehicle port along the Canada-U.S. border: the Peace Arch (Blaine) WA-Douglas BC port. …

Minority Government in Canada: The Stephen Harper Experience

Abstract: "The art of minority government is engineering defeat on the most favourable terms." (1) Canada's politics, consistent with Britain's history under the same plurality electoral system (known as "first-past-the-post," or FPP), considers majority governments to be the norm. The largest party in the House of Commons usually has more than half the members of Parliament (MPs). Through the quarter-century between 1980 and 2004, Canadians elected six consecutive majorities. Since Canada's voters reduced Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin to a minority position in 2004, and then replaced him in 2006 with a minority under a right-wing Calgary economist, Conservative Stephen Harper, Canadians once again have had to deal with minority situations. (2) The seven post--Second World War minorities before Harper's lasted less than two years on average; they took up barely twelve years of the six postwar decades. In Canada's majority-oriented plurality electoral system, the parties, the public, and the media perceive minorities, and expect them to operate, as "fragile constructs, capable of providing a short bridge between majorities but otherwise untrustworthy as governing instruments." (3) This self-fulfilling prophecy should not surprise us. The influence of electoral systems on party systems, electoral outcomes, governing styles, and political cultures is well attested in the literature on Western democracies. (4) Indeed, most European and other countries with proportional electoral systems regard at least one minority or coalition government model as normal. In this article, I do the following: * Assess and attempt to explain how and why Canadians operate under minorities, using Harper as the current case study. * Review proportional systems' performance, especially given that some Canadian provinces are considering a shift to New Zealand--style mixed-member proportional elections. * Consider Ontario's unusual two-party contract in its 1985-1987 FPP minority government. * Identify and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian approach to minority government. * Argue that Prime Minister Harper, although he evidently covets a majority and wishes to trigger an election as soon as he thinks he can secure one, derives advantages from his minority position, and from the plurality electoral system itself. Harper might further his cause better in his FPP minority than with a majority or in a different electoral system; moreover, the circumstances of his minority afford him an opportunity, which he has been exploiting, to effect far-reaching changes to Ottawa's domestic and foreign policies. Minority and Coalition Politics under Proportional Representation Minority and coalition governments are common and often enduring outside plurality electoral systems. Under proportional representation (PR), large parties and one or more small parties negotiate coalition and support pacts. As European political scientists observe, they sometimes maintain long-term formal nexuses. According to Michael Gallagher et al., small European parties eagerly negotiate agreements with large parties in return for policy concessions. The smaller parties effectively exist for this very purpose. They harbor no ambitions or illusions that would make them aspire to lead the government themselves or to maneuver to attain that position. (5) Jorg Steiner and Markus Crepaz use the term "contract parliamentarism" for the post-election inter-party bargaining that regulates governing and support parties' roles and functions. (6) Under contract parliamentarism, a country's parties employ their understood "decision rules," or rules of the game, to secure coalition or minority agreements that often survive for a full parliamentary term. (7) Gallagher et al. point out that the small parties in coalition or minority pacts usually do not repudiate such an agreement, potentially forcing an early election, so long as the government honors the agreement's terms. …

Popular Music and Identity in Quebec

Abstract: Introduction In his book Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig demonstrates that nationalism is by no means a "peripheral phenomenon, present in ethnic separatist movements but removed from common nation states." (1) Instead, citizens are perpetually reminded of their national identities by symbols such as flags, coins, national anthems, and political discourse. Quebecers are constantly bombarded with competing political discourse regarding whether Quebec is a "nation" or a "distinct society" and whether Quebecers form a "people," but such explicitly political discourse is not really "banal" nationalism. Billig writes: "The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building." (2) Perhaps the most visible arena of symbolic conflict occurs in the battles over flags in Quebec, but popular culture is another arena where differences between "Quebecers" and "Canadians" manifest themselves. Others have noted the importance of popular culture in reinforcing a Quebecois identity. In particular, the development of French language television has led to the emergence of a class of Quebecois celebrities and television shows that appeal almost exclusively to Quebecers. Louis Balthazar writes that television has enabled Quebecers to see a new image of themselves transmitted--an image that serves to reinforce a common identity, one that excludes Francophones outside of Quebec. (3) Furthermore, most of these shows probably have little audience among Anglophones within Quebec, who have a far greater choice of television options in their own language. Thus, television may serve to reinforce linguistic differences. This article will consider how popular music also influences perceptions of national identity in Quebec. Francophone Quebecers have increasingly identified themselves as "Quebecois(e)" rather than as "French Canadian" or simply as "Canadian." (4) Self-identification as Quebecois(e) has been linked to support for sovereignty. For example, in one survey of college students, 82 percent of those students who considered themselves to be more Quebecois(e) than Canadian supported sovereignty, whereas only 4 percent of those considering themselves to be more Canadian than Quebecois(e) and only 12 percent of those sharing both identities equally supported sovereignty. (5) At the societal level, the constant reinforcement of a Quebec-centered identity is undoubtedly crucial for sustaining an environment where sovereignty is viewed as a reasonable alternative. In Quebec, where two identities are in competition, the ever-present markers of Quebecois, rather than Canadian, identity are an important asset for those who argue that Quebec should be sovereign, and the question of how a Quebec-centered identity has become ascendant within Quebec deserves study. Music and National Identity Benedict Anderson famously describes nations as "imagined communities" and emphasizes the importance of newspapers in defining such communities by providing their readers with a shared stock of common national referents. (6) More recently, Tim Edensor has argued that radio and television are critical in situating individuals within a national imagined community. (7) Popular songs tell stories about social groups--stories that form part of a narrative that helps individuals find their place in the world and develop a political identity, creating what Bruno Roy describes as the "collective imagination" of a group. (8) Maureen Whitebrook writes that "persons understand their own lives as stories" and that without the structure of stories life would be unintelligible. (9) A song that tells a compelling story about one's group may have more impact than would an account in a history book. For example, the (sometimes) fictional individuals whose stories are told in songs often serve as role models for how real individuals should act. …

Transnational Christian Charity: The Canadian Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and the Hungarian Refugee Crisis, 1956–1957

Abstract: Canada's response to the 1956-1957 Hungarian refugee crisis has generally been treated by scholars as a highpoint in Canadian immigration history. In late October 1956, pro-democracy, anti-Soviet demonstrations directed at the Soviet-backed government of Erno Gero broke out in Budapest. Fearing that its control of the Warsaw Pact was unraveling, the Kremlin ordered the Red Army to put down the revolution. On 4 November, events turned violent. Soviet forces clashed with protestors, prompting hundreds of thousands of Hungarians to flee across the border into Austria and Yugoslavia. (2) For its part, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was unprepared to intervene militarily for fear of provoking a conflict with the USSR. (3) NATO members were, however, able to relieve the pressure placed on Austria. In the days and weeks after the invasion, Canadian immigration officials reinforced the number of immigration officers at the Canadian Embassy in Vienna, loosened the normal requirements concerning proper travel documentation, medical exams, and security clearances, and enlisted commercial airplanes to transport the refugees out of Austria. These initiatives produced impressive results: by the end of 1957 more than 37,000 Hungarians had been accepted into Canada. But government actors were not solely responsible for this shift in policy; indeed, the response was truly a national one and would not have been possible without the support and assistance of a whole host of voluntary organizations from a wide range of sectors of Canadian society, all of which contributed greatly to the resettlement effort. (4) Most scholars of immigration, such as Gerald Dirks and Robert Key-serlingk, underline the importance of the reception of Hungarian refugees as having a liberalizing impact in the immigration policy arena in Canada, serving as a useful precedent for other refugee migrations during times of crisis. (5) The Hungarian situation also had an immediate impact on the operation of Canada's refugee program, as Freda Hawkins notes: ''Briefly, during the Hungarian crisis and refugee movement, there was a glimpse of what better leadership and a much more co-operative approach to immigration in Canada might achieve." (6) N. F. Dreisziger makes a crucial distinction, however, by detailing not only the cooperative efforts between the Canadian government and welfare agencies, but also the role of the Hungarian Canadian community in refugee reception. (7) Forgetting Canadian contributions to the resettlement of the displaced persons in Europe following the Second World War, Michael Lanphier describes the Canadian response to the Hungarian refugee crisis as "the first ever crisis to demand Canada's participation in the international resettlement effort." (8) It is also interesting to note that while some of the above-mentioned scholars claim that the decision to accept a significant number of refugees was reached only after pressure was exerted on policymakers from within and beyond the federal government, they do not indicate either the methods by which such pressure was applied or the international characteristics of the pressure itself The Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) was one of a number of voluntary organizations in Canada that offered assistance to the refugees during the Hungarian refugee crisis. (9) Like other domestic groups, it both assisted with the material needs of the Hungarians once they arrived in Canada, and lobbied Ottawa to include not just the most able in its selection of refugees. But what separates the CCC from other groups in Canada is the larger transnational context in which that agency advocated on behalf of the Hungarian refugees. Throughout the period from 1956 to 1958, it worked closely with its sister council in Europe, the World Council of Churches (WCC), which had direct contact with the Hungarians. The WCC worked on an international level to achieve a more efficient and judicious handling of the refugee crisis by lobbying governments, non-governmental organizations, and particularly its member groups, such as the CCC. …

Trade Corridors and North American Competitiveness

Abstract: The North American economy can best be visualized in the early 21st century as a deeply integrated continental system of supply chains structured by networks linking production centers and distribution hubs across the continent. These supply chains depend on an efficient and secure physical infrastructure of rails, roads and bridges, pipelines and wires, and ports and border crossings, and on a coherent and consistent system of regulations that affect individuals, machines, firms, and goods. This North American economic system emerged mainly through a bottom-up process driven by corporate strategies and investment decisions that focus less and less on national economies. The process began in the 1980s, (1) when many major U.S. companies responded to tougher international competition and falling profit margins by rationalizing their operations and reducing excess capacity tied up in Canadian (and Mexican) branch plant "miniature replica" operations. (2) They sought to build instead integrated North American production, marketing, and sourcing networks. Changes in North American markets drove this process as well. By the mid-1980s, because of the reduction of trade barriers in the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and deregulation, distinct national markets in many sectors had begun to blur. Subsidiaries were becoming operations in Canada or Mexico rather than operations producing for Canada and Mexico, and branches that once owned national markets found themselves competing in new continental markets with other divisions in their own firms. This degree of collaboration and complementarity between countries is unprecedented. For the result--a new system with levels of integration that often surpass those of the European Union--there is no adequate social science vocabulary. Efforts to force this North American system into standard economic integration paradigms confuse more than they illuminate. A fundamental problem with the traditional trade paradigm is that it builds a model based on the exchange of finished goods across national borders. But this is not a productive way of imaging the substance of the North American economic system. What flows across our borders are not mainly finished goods. Rather, we collaborate in complex, cross-border production systems. For example, a quarter of the more than a billion and a quarter dollars of goods that cross the U.S.-Canada-Mexico borders daily is automotive. But we don't sell cars to each other. That's the key: we build them together. We also share increasingly integrated energy markets, service the same customers with an array of financial services, use the same roads and railroads to transport jointly made products to market, fly on the same integrated airline networks, and increasingly meet the same or similar standards of professional practice. This is what economists call "deep" or structural integration. The existence of this continental network of supply chains that cross national borders is a key differentiating factor of the North American economy. In Europe even today, major economic sectors continue to be characterized by national champions. One could argue that while Europe has a much more developed superstructure of integration, the economic substructure may well be less deeply integrated than is the case in North America. This image of a continental network of supply chains that cross national borders also helps us understand the extreme vulnerability of this system. As a recent report jointly produced by the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies and Canada's Fraser Institute observes, "The supply chains that span the U.S.-Canada border are unique in the global context. They are heavily reliant on land transportation that travels primarily through just a handful of key border crossings. Major shipments are routinely timed for handful of key border crossings. Major shipments are routinely timed for delivery within hours, and sometimes to the minute. …

Neglected Structures of Governance in U.S.-Canadian Cross-Border Relationships

Abstract: Introduction On different occasions over the past several years, I have had the opportunity of examining the everyday policy-making activities of industry and government leaders involved in the planning of Alaska's natural gas pipeline project, a proposed 3,500-mile steel pipe that would deliver Alaska's vast reserves of arctic natural gas to mid-continental Canadian and U.S. energy consumers. In particular, I have observed how these leaders articulate the ongoing political dynamics and economic risks in response to the indeterminacy of social, political, and market conditions associated with the project. What I have found curious about these activities is that policy-makers are often drawn into ad hoc problem-solving on issues that defy characterization in terms of the new structures of governance described by scholars of U.S.-Canadian relationships. My aim in this paper is to use the Alaska pipeline planning process as a case study to foreground the relevance of one neglected structure of governance to infrastructural planning in U.S.-Canadian cross-border relationships. I identify this structure of governance as the impact of competing knowledge systems that pertain to periods of regulation and restructuring. Elsewhere, I identify additional neglected structures of governance, such as the critical role of techno-economic uncertainty in shaping representations of progress, and the emergence of undisputed assumptions, such as energy forecasting, in fields of controversy and disagreement (Mason 2006, 2005). I argue that these neglected structures of governance reflect a diversity of forces that affect new styles of thinking and acting which impact in unpredictable ways those relations of governance currently under consideration by scholars of U.S.-Canadian affairs. I begin by identifying briefly the recent interest in governance in U.S.-Canadian studies and then relate my research on the Alaska pipeline context. My resources for the study include analyses of economic and regulation literature on U.S. and Canadian natural gas markets as well as government and industry reports on arctic natural gas development (e.g., Doucet and Littlechild 2006). A key source of knowledge comes from ethnography gathered during 2001 and again in 2003 in the Office of the Alaska Governor. During these periods, I became familiar with potential sponsors and plans of Alaskan and western Canadian natural gas development. I learned also of the value placed by government and industry participants on various systems of knowledge that govern these projects. Ethnography is itself a tool for gaining access to systems of thought and action by which the analysis of small, local occurrences are set against an analysis of large phenomena and in which both levels can be understood only in terms of one another (Burawoy 2000). Ethnographically based studies of large technical systems (e.g., pipelines, power plants) are of recent origin, but current research calls attention to examining systems of knowledge through which scientific, government, and industrial domains of society are involved (Mason 2007). This approach often involves looking over the shoulders of diverse groups at the prism of technology, economics, and regulation, and learning diverse points of view of experts, laypeople, men, women, etc. (Traweek 1988). Modes of U.S.-Canadian Governance There is increasing scholarly interest in the new structures of governance and models of social development in U.S.-Canadian cross-border relationships that have arisen over the past two decades. Academics are writing on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the emergence of new co-management regimes surrounding development of key resources (particularly of the energy sector), to how federal, state, and provincial governments should respond to the involvement of indigenous peoples and organizations that require self-government. On the empirical level, this interest reflects the specialization of scholars focusing on commodity flows and cultural exchanges, as these factors shape and intertwine with the economies, polities, and social contexts of North America--all this at a time when transnational interactions are calling into question national sovereignty, stirring controversy about new forms of association that transcend national functions (e. …

Parading the Underworld of New Orleans in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Abstract: [A place] implies an indication of stability. [...] [S]pace is like the word when it is spoken. [...] In short, space is a practiced place. --de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life On the unnumbered page following the opening dedication to his 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje presents three sonographs of dolphin "music." In a long caption, he explains that dolphins make "echolocation clicks (sharp, multi-frequency sounds)" and whistles that have a narrow frequency range and therefore a "'pure' sound" that can "identify each dolphin as well as its location." The caption concludes: "No one knows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously." In effect, he begins the novel with an enigma. The sonographs, being poor substitutes for actual sounds, do not clarify the enigma, but become associated with the often unrecorded sounds of early jazz musicians--some of whom are characters in Coming Through Slaughter. The dolphin symbolizes the novel's main character, the ragtime/ jazz cornet player Charles "Buddy" Bolden (Kamboureli 1983, 118). He was a real person who had a significant influence on jazz when it first developed around the beginning of the twentieth century. Written into fiction in Coming Through Slaughter, Bolden cannot be understood without due consideration of his identity (related to his music, his "'pure' sound") in tune with his location: New Orleans, Louisiana. In an apt musical analogy from S/Z, the literary theorist Roland Barthes suggests that literature often relies on mysteries (or enigmas) to pose and respond to questions ([1970] 1974, 17); he explains enigmas in a graph arranged like a musical score. Adapting standard musical notation, he depicts the enigma as a sustained note tied to implied others that the author will not signify (or play) explicitly (Barthes [1970] 1974, 29). Similarly, Ondaatje poses the enigma and sustains it without reiteration: How can the whistles (narrow-frequency sounds) and echolocation clicks (multi-frequency sounds) coexist? The literary theorist Northrop Frye might have understood such a "riddle" (Frye 1971, 220) simply as the effect of geography on identity, but even with the acknowledgment of the "important landscapes" in and around New Orleans at the end of Coming Through Slaughter, Ondaatje does not entirely explain the enigma. Coming Through Slaughter is explicitly about Bolden's identity expressed in his music, but it is implicitly about his identity as a black man whose musical insistence on freedom is thwarted by worsening racism in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ondaatje portrays Bolden, an American of African ancestry as a tragic artist, a man whose musical genius isolates him from friends and family, eventually leading to his insanity. Ondaatje situates Bolden in a typically urban and often figurative geography To illustrate Bolden's mental landscape--"His mind became the street" (Ondaatje [1976] 1998, 37) and its deterioration, the novel parades before its readers the underworld of New Orleans its vice districts and poor neighborhoods) but without explicitly acknowledging the history of racism in that city Race can be taken, as the poet and critic Douglas Barbour takes it, as a given that needs not much explanation in Coming Through Slaughter, but Barbour is probably incorrect to suggest that blacks in turn-of-the-century New Orleans ''would not [tend to] be self-conscious about their color" (1993, 102). On the contrary, the novel suggests that Bolden is concerned about his race and place by beginning with the dolphin's call (in effect, his call), which both identifies and locates, and with "his geography" (Ondaatje [1976] 1998, 2), the first two words after the caption beneath the sonographs. As historical fiction, Coming Through Siaughter uses geography as the cipher for its cryptic racial subtext; the novel prompts readers to investigate how Bolden's identity is affected by the segregated geography of New Orleans at the time of his band's success, from "about 1897 to 1907" (Peretti 1992, 26), and how, as a character, Bolden tactically (often musically) attempts to counteract the racism that is an implicit catalyst for his madness. …

J. E. Bernier and the Assertion of Canadian Sovereignty in the Arctic

Abstract: (2008). J. E. Bernier and the Assertion of Canadian Sovereignty in the Arctic. American Review of Canadian Studies: Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 409-427.

Canadian Cannabis: Marijuana as an Irritant/Problem in Canada-U.S. Relations

Abstract: The electronic, peer-reviewed Occasional Papers on Public Policy series, published at acsus.org by the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, is designed to highlight ongoing research in Canadian domestic and foreign policy at the federal, provincial, and city levels. ACSUS invites submissions on issues of public policy that pertain to cross-border relations between Canada and the United States, or policies in one of these countries that have implications for the other. As with ARCS, the e-journal is multidisciplinary and encourages submissions from all fields of policy inquiry. Ideally, papers will be four to eight pages in length (double-spaced) and should be submitted electronically to: Professor Michael Lusztig, Department of Political Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275; mlusztig@smu.edu. The first "volume" in the Occasional Papers on Public Policy series is published in the pages that follow. The four occasional papers in this volume address a wide range of matters important to both the United States and Canada. In a recent survey of the Canada-U.S. relationship, Munroe Eagles noted that the "popular impression" for many Americans was that Canadians were "out of step with their more conservative neighbor to the south" (Eagles 2006, 821). John Herd Thompson made a similar claim in his review of the bilateral relationship over the 1994-2003 period, writing that Canadians are perceived by some Americans as being "left wing wimps" (Thompson 2003, 17). One area in which Canada may be regarded as out of step with the United States, and Canadians as left wing wimps, is the issue of marijuana. There are real and noticeable differences between Canada and the U.S. in the way each side deals with the issue of marijuana. The following pages examine the marijuana issue in terms of the growing volume of the drug being smuggled into the United States from Canada, the increased potency of the strains of marijuana grown in Canada, and the differences in judicial deterrents adopted to penalize possession and cultivation. This is followed by a look at a couple of possibilities that have the potential to transform the marijuana irritant into the marijuana problem in Canada-U.S. relations. The amount of marijuana being produced in Canada and then illegally exported to the United States is of increasing concern to all levels of American law enforcement. While British Columbia (B.C.), Ontario, and Quebec are all of concern to U.S. officials, British Columbia presents the largest source of Canadian marijuana for the U.S. market, so the discussion will focus primarily upon that province. The marijuana cultivation industry in B.C. is thriving, as demonstrated by the fact that the province accounted for almost 40 percent of all growing operations found by law enforcement officials in Canada in 2003. the last year for which full data are available (CCJS 2004). During that year, the province also had the highest rate of cultivation "incidents" in Canada, at 79 per 100,000 people. What this means is that 79 marijuana cultivation operations were found for every 100,000 people in the province. This is nearly triple the national rate of 27 per 100,000 people, and 33 higher than second-place New Brunswick, at 46. More marijuana cultivation facilities were uncovered by Canadian law enforcement officials in B.C. (3274) than in all of the other provinces combined (2564), except Quebec (2939), in 2003 (CCJS 2004). In their study of the B.C. marijuana growing industry over the 1997-2003 period, Darryl Plecas, Aili Malm, and Bryan Kinney identified over 25,000 cultivation operations uncovered by police officers in the province (Plecas, Malm, and Kinney 2005). In terms of the monetary value of marijuana, it is estimated that the annual wholesale value of the provincial industry is approximately C$6 billion, or what is equivalent to about 5 percent of the annual provincial gross domestic product. …

"Interests but No Foreign Policy": Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean, 1941-1966

Abstract: Canadians have long delighted in the notion of a diplomatic "golden age," whose Pearsonian qualities of selfless and progressive internationalism set them apart as a chosen, if perhaps smug, people. Even today, the notion retains its potency, encouraging pundits and politicians alike to hark back to a simpler age when, in the pithy words of journalist Lawrence Martin, there "was some idealism around this place. We didn't kneel at the altar of militarism." (2) While historians have generally acknowledged that there was obviously more Canadian foreign policy after 1945, they have been skeptical of the idealist notions associated with a transformative "golden age." Canada's postwar diplomats, argues Carleton University historian Norman Hillmer, "were cautious, careful in their actions, and hewed closer to the approach followed by Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King in the 1930s than they later confessed." (3) King's successors grasped the nature of global power, were conscious of Canada's limited means, and were inclined to shun international responsibilities. As political scientist Denis Stairs explains, they were traditional realists "who owed more to Metternich than to Axworthy." (8) Recent scholarship has tended to confirm these conclusions, while pushing their critical analysis in new directions. Younger academics, more attuned to the Cold War's transitory character and the persistent challenges of the postcolonial world, have begun to explore the limited geographical reach of Canadian diplomacy in the period just after 1945. Their general conclusions are no longer surprising: the familiar North Atlantic and its safe alliance structure, where Canada's most obvious economic and political interests lay, constrained Ottawa's ability to address the emerging challenges of distant lands, torn asunder by decolonization and revolution. (5) Canada's relationship with a decolonizing Commonwealth Caribbean has not attracted much attention. Consequently, the evolution of this relationship since 1941 remains largely overlooked in the literature, which still tends to emphasize the well-documented prewar period or to offer brief, prescriptive analysis of contemporary policy. (6) Yet Canadian-Caribbean relations after 1941 clearly deserve more study. In 1964, for instance, Canada exported more to this region than it did to India, and it ranked third as a destination for exports from the Caribbean. (7) Nor can the region's later importance as a source of immigrants be overstated. This article begins to address this gap, tracing the Canadian government's reaction to political and economic changes in the Commonwealth Caribbean from the early days of the Second World War until the mid-1960s, when Canada and the area's newly independent states met to fashion a mature relationship. During this quarter-century, Canadian policymakers were often divided over the significance of Caribbean decolonization and their appropriate response. Rarely, and then only briefly, did Ottawa show any signs of developing a coherent strategic vision for its relations with the Caribbean. The result was an inconsistent and incremental approach, seeking largely to meet Canada's immediate economic and political interests. As Klaus Goldschlag, a senior Canadian diplomat, once quipped, "In the Caribbean we have interests but no foreign policy." (8) By 1939, Canada's relations with the Commonwealth Caribbean were ripe for examination. The product of over two centuries of political and economic interaction, the relationship had settled into a complacent routine in which Canadian salt-fish, wheat, and flour flowed southward in exchange for sugar, molasses, and rum, all effectively subsidized by Ottawa under the terms of the 1925 Canada-British West Indies Trade Agreement. (9) As well, several of the big Canadian banks--the Bank of Montreal, the Bank of Nova Scotia, and the Royal Bank of Canada--had located in the regions in the 19th century and remained very active on the islands they served. …

The Options for Internet Gambling in Canada

Abstract: Globally, online gambling is now at least a $15.5 billion a year market (James 2006). Currently, there are around 2,000 online gambling sites around the world, many of which are operating in small countries such as Antigua and Barbuda (537 sites) and Costa Rica (474 sites) (BBC 2007). Estimates suggest that U.S. residents spend more money on online gambling than any other public, supplying more than half of all revenues while increasing their activity at a rate of more than 20 percent per year (Stewart 2006, 1-2). On the other hand, a relatively small number of Canadians are thought to gamble online. One survey of Ontario adults suggested that 5.3 percent had gambled on the Internet in a given year (MacKay 2004, 7). Other national research suggests a much lower figure--less than 1 percent (MacKay 2004, 7). In any event, some Canadians do gamble online, and while some do so legally through province-sponsored sites, others do so through sites that exist in unclear legal terrain. As online gambling has grown, national governments have developed different ways to handle it. The United Kingdom has taken a regulation-and-taxation approach: Parliament passed the Gambling Act in 2005, to be fully implemented by September 2007, which allows online gambling sites to operate inside the U.K. while being regulated and taxed by the government (Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport). In the United States, the federal government has taken nearly the opposite approach. Recently, it has tried to eliminate online gambling indirectly by making illegal the use of U.S. credit card accounts for online gambling payment mechanisms (Stewart 2006, 5). Traditionally, it has also interpreted the 1961 Wire Act as banning online gambling, although contrasting interpretations of the law exist (Stewart 2006, 7). Canada, however, so far has chosen not to move policy in either the U.S. or U.K. direction. As Terri L. MacKay of the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba puts it, in Canada online gambling "waits in legal purgatory." This paper aims to offer a way out of purgatory for online gambling in Canada. We begin with an examination of the status of online gambling in Canada. This is followed by an analysis of the two most prominent and contrasting options for regulating online gambling, using as exemplars the U.S. and U.K. approaches. (1) We conclude with a call for Canada to recognize the growing trend of online gambling and the need to develop policy to address it. Canadian Policy Before 1969, the Criminal Code of Canada banned all forms of gambling other than charity lotteries, lotteries at fairs, and pari-mutuel betting on horse races (Seelig and Seelig 1996). In 1969, the Code was amended to allow the federal and provincial governments to hold lotteries, but in 1985 the federal government left gambling entirely to the provinces in exchange for a payment of $ 100 million (Seelig and Seelig 1996). Every province in Canada now has a lottery, and there are dozens of casinos in Canada. It remains somewhat unclear whether the Criminal Code of Canada bans Internet gambling other than that provided by provincial lottery corporations. The Code makes it illegal to run or to be found in a betting house, but it does not state whether a virtual betting house falls under the ban. The Code permits the provinces to allow myriad forms of gambling, including, including "lottery schemes," and section 207 defines lottery schemes to include those operated on or through a computer. The Atlantic provinces as well as British Columbia have taken advantage of section 207 to offer limited online gambling, although participants must be residents of the province and within its borders at the time of purchase in order to buy tickets legally. (2) Elsewhere in Canada, the Kahnawake Mohawk Nation in Quebec has been leasing server space to Internet gambling operations since 1999, which makes a $2 million profit per year for them (Beazley 2007). …

Whose Mission Accomplished? Alberta at the 2006 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Abstract: In the summer of 2006, Alberta became the first ever Canadian province to be featured at the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Festival seeks to celebrate cultural diversity and promote awareness of cultural traditions, but in this case, these goals were overshadowed by the province's commercial goals. With rising gas prices and concerns about reliance on foreign oil, the timing was just right to introduce Alberta and its rich energy supply to Americans. As a Canada-phile who has spent the better part of her academic career studying Canada, I was eager to examine the Alberta program more closely to see how an American institution conceives of a Canadian province. This article seeks to uncover the tensions at play in the representation of Alberta at the 2006 Folklife Festival by analyzing the central preoccupations of the two main institutions involved--the Smithsonian and the government of Alberta. A close analysis of the discourse surrounding this event--specifically, the collection of utterances made by these two institutions and their representatives--reveals that the central discursive preoccupation of the Alberta program was the promotion of the province's oil industry. Moreover, this goal appears to conflict with the anthropological goals of the Folklife Festival. My primary sources, in addition to the Alberta program itself, include the Smithsonian Institution's Festival website and its 2006 program book, as well as the government of Alberta's press releases before, during, and after the Festival, and its Final Mission Report, published at the conclusion of the Festival. Before examining the discourse, I provide some background on the Festival to establish a prediscursive frame for the 2006 Alberta program. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival The Festival began as the Festival of American Folklife in 1967. Thirty-one years later, the name was changed to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to reflect its scope as "an annual exhibition of living cultural heritage from across the United States and around the world." (1) Although its organization has changed over the years, its underlying philosophy has not. Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which puts on the Festival, states, "The most distinctive feature of the Festival is the attempt to foreground the voices of tradition bearers as they demonstrate, discuss, and present their cultures. At the Festival, tradition bearers, scholars, and Smithsonian curators speak for themselves, with each other, and to the public." (2) The Festival is based on a "living history" model, with each featured nation, region, or program having its own outdoor museum space on the mall. Booths staffed by people from the participating regions are supplemented with stages for musical performances, a food tent, museum-quality signs and text panels, and a glossy program book. According to folklorist Laurie Kay Summers, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is informed by a philosophy that grew out of the New Deal's conceptions of folklife as a grassroots, bottom-up form of culture. (3) As conceived by founder Ralph Rinzler and folklorist Alan Lomax, the Festival is an attempt to support this form of culture in the face of "growing commercialism and cultural elitism." (4) The two immediate goals of the Festival are: [t]o honor the participants and the cultural groups they represent through display of their traditional arts, skills, and knowledge-- and thereby encourage their efforts, and to make a broader public aware of the rich variety of cultural traditions, the value of cultural diversity and its continuity, and the obstacles impinging on traditional cultural practice. (5) At its birth in 1967, the festival focused on Texas; three years later it added a Native American program. Every state in the United States has been featured, including the District of Columbia. …

Grooving the Nation: 1965-1980 as a Literary Era in Canada

Abstract: Literary critics have long been in the business of defining literary eras. Often the task is to organize national literatures into manageable segments, providing readers with landmarks for what might otherwise seem like a sea of narrative. This categorization usually involves making the literature understandable according to larger national stories. British literature, for example, evolved into categories the Renaissance, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Period, the Modern Period, to name a few--defined by time periods that are now widely accepted, although the exact dates may still vary from critic to critic (Abrams 1988, 134 135). American literature is organized around wars relevant to the definition of the country (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II). American literary critic Meyer Abrams suggests that what does not fit into the larger national story is often downloaded into subcategories, "some [of which] name a time span or a form of political organization, others a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, and others still a predominant form of literature" (1988, 130). Canadian literature has not yet been the subject of intensive debate about categorization, in part because it has only recently, by comparison, been packaged as a national literature at all. To complicate matters, English, American, and Canadian national stories share overarching political events such as World War I and World War II, as well as overlapping critical concepts and generic histories associated with the development of the English language. Nevertheless, one would expect Canada's literary categories to differ according to the country's unique and important national moments, just as other national literatures differ according to theirs. I suggest that one of these moments is captured in the time span of 1965-1980. This era is uniquely important to Canadian literature because widespread changes in political understandings of national and female identities contextualized the appreciation of literature published during this time. As will be detailed, identity politics in this era was made up of two dominant social movements--Canadian nationalism and second-wave feminism--that prompted Canadians and women to think of themselves differently. For example, a wider range of Canadians committed to their national cultural autonomy found economic issues important. Historian Sylvia Bashevkin reports that "Gallup surveys show that approximately 7 1 per cent of Canadians in 1975 believed that the country had enough US investment, compared with a level of 52 per cent in 1961" (1991, 24). Similarly, the second-wave feminist movement, typically described as "a highly visible proliferation of women's organizations that mobilized an unprecedented range and number of women," politicized issues arising from the idea that women were being denied autonomy in a sexist society (Prentice el. al. 1996, 414). That these two movements came together at the same place among the same people contributes vitally to the ways Canadian and female fictional characters were understood at this time. Any attempt at literary periodization invites the question of why we need a category at all. Certainly an arbitrary span of years should be seen according to some special coherence only if it can pay its own freight in the currency of adding something important to understanding that literature. After all, people living at a particular time do not necessarily know that they are living in a defining era, much less when that period might begin or end. There is no suggestion here that this claim of coherence in the years 1965-1980 is either encompassingly descriptive or prescriptive of the literature that should be studied. Instead, it is a conclusion drawn from what was important to a majority of people in a national context at a certain time, and is meant to generate rather than conclude debate and discussion. My argument suggests that the most salient aspect of the 1965-1980 era was located in the political and social Zeitgeist regarding identity, and not in the literature itself Cultural theorist Imre Szeman observes that "in Canada the concept of the nation is articulated differently within literary criticism than within literature," and that "in Canada (the nation] can be seen as emerging pre-eminently as a strategy of reading" (2003, 164). …

Fellow British Subjects or Colonial “Others”? Race, Empire, and Ambivalence in Canadian Representations of India in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, English-Canadian schoolchildren learned to divide the British Empire into "the white man's country" and "the coloured man's country." According to one geography textbook, India clearly belonged in the latter category. "In the vast peninsula of India we find [a] ... coloured man's country, densely populated by nearly one fifth of the world's whole population, all of dark skin, but varying in civilization from the most degraded savage to the highly-cultured Hindu." Following from this division, a region's facility for self-government was explained in racial terms. While all the "white man's lands of the Empire have Parliaments of their own" and a citizenry "free to elect" members of government, in "the coloured man's country the natives have no such rights, for in many cases they are mere savages, and in others they could not yet be trusted with such power." (1) The imperial logic that associated the absence of home-rule in India with "racial character" mirrored broader currents of understanding in Canada. A strong affection for "Mother Britain" among Canadians of British descent, and a firm belief in Britain's divinely inspired benevolence, fueled a racialized rhetoric of empire. According to a popular imperialist narrative, Britain had brought order, enlightenment, and civilization to a formerly backward territory of the globe, and Britain's imperial project in India was an "inevitable" outcome of the "march of the Anglo-Saxon race." (2) These depictions reflected intellectual and political trends in Britain. Quasi-scientific theories of racial difference--increasingly popular in Europe and North America in the latter half of the nineteenth century--combined with the mythology surrounding the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (British heroism versus Indian barbarism), confirmed British ideas about Indian racial inferiority. Such sentiments, as South Asian historian Judith Brown observes, "bred an elaboration of stereotypes of Indians which helped to justify imperial rule.... Indians were, for example, often described as weak and effeminate, deceitful and deficient in character, and incapable of leadership: and thus needing and benefiting from rule by Anglo-Saxons displaying opposite and desirable qualities." (3) Coupled with Britain's considerable strategic and economic interests in the region, these attitudes created tremendous obstacles along India's path to self-government. The political demands of India's growing educated classes from the 1860s on, and the work of the Indian National Congress after 1885, brought some concessions, including limited enfranchisement, election to municipal government, and opportunities to join the Indian Civil Service, if only as minor officials. (4) Yet by the turn of the century, scant gains had been made in the direction of self-government, and Britain's grip on India showed few signs of faltering. This article explores the discursive production of an imagined India in the work of English-Canadian educators, intellectuals, politicians, and other public commentators in the first three decades of the twentieth century. (5) Intellectuals such as Alfred Baker, James Morison, George Wrong, J. Castell Hopkins, and George Sidney Brett, for example, wrote enthusiastically about Britain's imperial project in India. These men, and many other commentators, identified themselves as imperialists--or, at the very least, loyal British subjects. Particularly influential were Wrong's various books on the history of Britain and the Empire (almost always including content about India), which circulated in public schools across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Manitoba and British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. The ideas of these authors, moreover, were generally disseminated through organizations and publications that were imperialist in orientation (or at least imperial-friendly), such as the Empire Club of Canada, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs. …

Complexity and Contradiction in Canadian Public Sculpture: The Case of Walter Allward

Abstract: [The Great War] was a war of mass death in which massed men were fed for 1500 days to massed fire power so that more than 6000 corpses could be processed each day without letup. When it was over, 10,000,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed and mass death had become an acceptable part of the experience and values of European civilization. (Rubenstein 1983, 161) I feel that the unveiling of that monument [at Vimy] and all that was connected with it was really something more than the simple display of a great memorial. It has a tremendous bearing on our whole national development. (Scott 1936) The idea that is running in my mind is that it is through sacrifice that we achieve the spiritual things which your [word illegible] figures represent. (Col. H. C. Osborne to Walter Allward, December 12, 1928) Richard Rubenstein, quoted in the first epigraph above, was not writing inscriptions for Great War memorials. His expression of modern memory could never comfort the numbed, grieving nations attempting to reestablish themselves and their moral order after that War. The buried cries of those mourners are typically displayed in the remarks of Canon Scott and Colonel Osborne. War memorials--especially the Vimy Memorial that they are talking about--sought to voice the unspeakable within the discourse of comfort. (2) An array of elegant evasions enables this exercise. For vulnerable flesh, substitute bronze and granite. Upon the earthbound killing ground, raise a monumental elevation. To an audience wracked by grief, chant a hymn of sacrifice. Walter S. Allward's (1876-1955) memorial at Vimy, France, to Canada's Great War dead performs these functions on a gigantic scale. (3) Hundreds of tons of granite and reinforced concrete weighted with twenty allegorical figures (each of them, double-lifesize), flanked by two soaring pylons towering ten stories above a magnificent hilltop setting, ought to have a lot to say about what they commemorate. (4) The recent (April 9, 2007) TV coverage of the ceremonies marking the 90th anniversary of the Canadian Corps' assault upon Vimy Ridge threw images of the newly renovated and repaired Memorial into millions of Canadian living rooms. The background grandeur that the sight lent to the speeches, ceremonials, and color commentary reinforced the assumption that the statuary convincingly embodied a nation's grief and remembrance. Unnoticed went the possibility that the Memorial's proclamation of comfort amid tribulation remains in fact severely qualified and compromised. A lengthy series of monumentally inscribed statements--11,285 of them, in fact--insinuate a message at once starker and emotionally distant, a laconic registry of heartache and loss. Allward's forced inclusion on his memorial of 11,285 names of the Missing--properly read--undermines his allegorical grande machine of consolation, fostering contradiction rather than complexity in his statement. What we can term the failure of the allegorical is not confined to Allward's masterwork, but extends onward to his final public commission. The opacity of the chief allegorical figure that dominates the William Lyon Mackenzie Memorial at Queen's Park in Toronto (unveiled in 1940) conveys that failure in another fashion. Both pieces demonstrate that Allward's habit of allegorized discourse had reached the limits of its intelligibility. This exhaustion of attributed meaning helps account for the implosion of Allward's career as a public sculptor, an implosion that would haunt him for the decade and a half that he had left to live. His frequent applications to various potential patrons resulted in failure, itself a result of the passing of a symbolic discourse that had engaged him too fully. I A friend of Walter Allward's at Toronto's Arts and Letters Club wrote that Allward's 1898 visit to Paris involved more than romance: "[T]hey honeymooned in Paris so that Walter could more closely examine the Rodin sculptures" (Hopkins). …

Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec

Abstract: By the 1760s, British subjects in North America were familiar with elected assemblies. As their imperial administrators made a concerted effort to control colonial trade and to collect more taxes to pay down a massive war debt that had increased during the Seven Years' War, many British North Americans had come to the conclusion that local assemblies were essential to the protection of their interests. State legislatures were established, and thousands fought to defend a hastily cobbled together association of representative governments. The fragile republic established as a result served as a model to opponents of monarchy in other nations--most notably, France. Slaves in the French colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti) learned the lessons of revolution and overthrew their masters. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, no corner of North America was untouched by the outcomes of these revolutions. Spanish imperial administrators, who governed the colony from 1762 until 1800, when it was returned to France, became increasingly fearful of peoples who arrived in Louisiana from the United States, France, and St. Domingue with an open disrespect for royalists. When the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, those survivors of three revolutions constituted an important segment of the new American territory's population. Despite the expansion of attachment to representative government in North America after the mid-eighteenth century, Britain in 1763 and the United States in 1803, seeking to maintain effective control over vulnerable new territories inhabited primarily by those who had served monarchs of hostile empires, established remarkably similar unrepresentative governments for Louisiana and Quebec, respectively. An appointed governor ruled over people who were not granted the power to elect an assembly. The French of Quebec had lived under an appointed royal governor who answered only to the king of France before the British conquest of that province, formalized in 1763, and the French and Spanish of Louisiana had also lived under such a system under French and Spanish rule before 1803. (1) Quebec and Louisiana had greatly changed after the mid-eighteenth century, however. By the time of the British conquest, over 60,000 people lived in Quebec. Although British subjects were a small minority (Governor Murray reported that there were "but two hundred Protestant subjects in the Province" in 1764 (2)), those subjects, hoping to reap the economic benefits of their military victory (especially with regard to the fur trade), considered it only just that this colony would have a system of government that included assemblies similar to other British colonies in North America. Furthermore, they believed that any assembly should be reserved for Protestants. Americans settled in Louisiana while Spain ruled the colony, and by 1803 the total population of Louisiana was approximately 43,000. (3) Because of their connections to American trade and American settlers, some Louisianans of Spanish and French origin were well aware of the history of representative government in North America, and Americans who had fought in the American Revolution Jived and traded with them. Given the fact that some peoples in Quebec and Louisiana were at the very least familiar with the benefits of representative assembly, the British and American governments that established unrepresentative forms of government for Quebec and for Louisiana were bound to face resistance. In Quebec after 1763, and in Louisiana after 1803, some citizens protested against the unrepresentative systems of government, founded on their behalf, by sending petitions to London and Washington. An analysis of two such petitions will provide important evidence regarding the various arguments made by the inhabitants of Louisiana and Quebec to pressure governments in Washington and London to introduce representative government in newly acquired territory. …

"A Barricade of Ships, Guns, Airplanes and Men": Arming the Niagara Border, 1920-1930

Abstract: On April 19,1929, Chief Boatswain's Mate Hubert E. Wilbur and Surfman Orville M. LaGrant, both members of the US. Coast Guard, began a routine patrol of the Niagara River. The patrol, which nearly ended in bloodshed, provoked an international incident that took almost a year to resolve. The episode resulted from the United States' arming its borders to an unprecedented extent in an effort to win the Canadian government's assistance in enforcing Prohibition laws. Perceived by Canadians as an integral part of American policies that took Canadian sovereignty lightly the arming of the border jeopardized U.S. treaty obligations and brought extraordinary violence to border communities. (1) This federal activity south of the border threatened to negate local efforts to enhance along-successful borderlands community. Thus, Wilbur and LaGrant's experience illuminates a seldom-told story of cross-border relations between the United States and Canada. A number of historians point out that Prohibition was a singularly divisive factor in relations between Canada and the United States. The American desire to assert greater control over U.S. borders, they note, often conflicted with a growing Canadian nationalism that sought to assert an independent identity. These historians approach the issue in a variety of ways: Richard N. Kottman comments that Canadian support for assisting Americans with Prohibition enforcement varied regionally. His analysis pays little attention to events on the interior border as a factor in Canadian-American relations, however; he focuses instead on the U.S. Coast Guard's sinking of the Nova Scotian schooner I'm Alone in the Gulf of Mexico in 1929. Stephen T Moore elaborates on the cross-border community between Washington and British Columbia, noting that violent activities of liquor hijackers, coupled with evidence of government corruption, threatened to disrupt a local heritage of cross-border cooperation. That disruption, in turn, led to regional support for cooperating with the United States in Prohibition enforcement. Sean T. Moore has considered the ways in which outside law enforcement disrupted a binationallocal economy in northern New York, causing locals to abandon support for Prohibition. (2) None of these historians takes into consideration the extent to which the United States tried to force Canadian public and political opinion into line with American government demands by posting a heavily armed, uniformed military force along the border. This article attempts to add another piece to the puzzle. Prelude In a public spectacle in the summer of 1927, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain showcased the familiar story of cross-border relations. On August 7, 1927, before 100,000 people and an international radio audience that may have reached as many as 50 million, Edward, Prince of Wales, United States Vice President Charles G. Dawes, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, and a host of other dignitaries (including the governor of New York, the premier of Ontario, and the U.S. secretary of state) met at Buffalo to dedicate the Peace Bridge, a new commercial link facilitating automobile traffic between the east coast of North America and the interior. It was a major international event. All of the speakers praised the 100-plus years of peace that had prevailed among the United Stales, Great Britain, and Canada since the War of 1812. The "piers of a bridge of friendship" now replaced two hostile forts, Mackenzie King observed. Acknowledging the recent exchange of ministers between the United States and Canada, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg observed that between the two countries there "are no racial animosities, no great international antagonism," and that differences "can be settled with the exercise of tolerance and patience, and the application of good common sense." Calling it "a bridge of understanding," Dawes said that the Peace Bridge had been built upon both "the firm bedrock of the Niagara, and the peace of the English-speaking peoples. …

The Redcoat and the Ranger: Screening Bilateral Friendship in Cecil B. DeMille's North West Mounted Police (1940)

Abstract: On October 21, 1940, the world premiere of North West Mounted Police (JWMP) took place in Regina, Saskatchewan, with much fanfare. This epic western, which was producer/director Cecil B. DeMille's first foray into shooting entirely in Technicolor, stars Gary Cooper as Dusty Rivers, a Texas Ranger who crosses the 49th parallel in pursuit of Jacques Corbeau (George Bancroft), a ruthless "half-breed" whiskey smuggler and gunrunner wanted for murder in Texas. (1) In the process, Dusty helps the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) suppress an uprising led by Corbeau. The story was inspired by the 1885 North-West Rebellion: the unsuccessful campaign on the part of the Metis community--mixed-race descendents of French (and some Scottish) male fur traders and Native (largely Cree, Chippewa, and Ojibwa) women--to defend the diminishing buffalo hunting lands from Euro-Canadian encroachment into present-day Saskatchewan. However, DeMille intended the picture to illustrate the theme of friendship between the United States and Canada through, in DeMille's words, "the uniting of the two men on the border." (2) This essay argues that from NWMP's pre-production stages through its publicity campaign, DeMille used a distorted vision of the North-West Rebellion to frame the importance of bilateral amity in the context of the World War II period. Although the United States remained ostensibly neutral in 1940, DeMille hoped that his film would reinforce the notion that Canada was a strong and valuable nation--this, at a time when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration had endeavored to shore up the continental defense system by strengthening hemispheric relationships. To that end, the FDR administration designed the Good Neighbor Policy to fortify the bonds between the United States and Latin American republics, particularly Mexico. Likewise, FDR regarded healthy cultural, political, and socioeconomic relations with Canada as vital to U.S. national security. The very public and politically expedient friendship between FDR and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King personified the strengthening ties between Canada and the United States. Moreover, in the summer of 1940, FDR and King agreed to a formal Canadian-American military alliance. (3) However, prior to Pearl Harbor, explicit war-related themes in U.S. motion pictures were uncommon due to that country's Production Code Administration (PCA), the film industry's self-regulatory agency. Established in 1934, the PCA enforced the Production Code, a set of moral standards governing film content based on what constituted appropriate entertainment for an undifferentiated mass audience. According to the Code, motion pictures were pure entertainment and not vehicles of social criticism. The Code thus included a "Fair Treatment Clause" that required films to portray impartially all foreign nations and their citizens. (4) Therefore, the studios were leery of outwardly naming a country as hostile to the United States, fearing that the PCA would withhold its seal of approval and thus prevent the film's exhibition. Nevertheless, as the global crisis intensified, Hollywood increasingly released films with pro-interventionist, anti-fascist, or war-preparedness themes. (5) In NWMP, the friendship between the redcoat, as officers of the North West Mounted Police were known, and the ranger indirectly reveals DeMille's pro-ally sympathies and his fondness for Britain and its Dominions, especially Canada. Though a political supporter of the Republican Party, DeMille backed the FDR administration's efforts to guide the United States away from isolationism and toward preparedness. DeMille later wrote in his autobiography, I never had any doubt, from the outbreak of World War II, where America must and eventually would take her stand. In domestic policies, I felt that the New Deal had done a certain amount of good and a great amount of harm; but in foreign policy, when Franklin D. …