There's More to the Canada Squabble Than Meets the Eye

We are currently going through another period of intense annoyance with each other, which politicians on both sides seek to take advantage of for passing gain. 

These are regular occurrences between the cousin countries. Heck, we fought a war with that neighbor (or neighbour) in 1812 when Britain still controlled the north. England, at the time, was kidnapping the younger nation's sailors and ships on the high seas. 

So, President Madison signed a declaration of war, and U.S. troops marched north to sack Toronto, then called York. At the time, some American militants suggested annexing the whole place. 

In reply, the British sailed up the Potomac to burn Washington and the White House, which is the part Americans remember. Also, that First Lady Dolley Madison managed to save George Washington's full-length portrait.

There’s been some talk during the Trump Era that the U.S. should annex Canada or perhaps absorb at least one Canadian province for starters. You'll notice no one talks about absorbing any part of the southern neighbor.

You might also note that the U.S. is building a towering steel wall along the 1,954-mile border with Mexico, while the Canadian border is essentially unguarded. And it is nearly three times longer.

Currently, it’s Alberta’s turn to grumble loudly about seceding through a convulsion for independence, as Quebec has done twice unsuccessfully and may try again. And as the Maritime provinces considered back in the 1800s.

The Alberta vote should happen this fall. It’s great fun for American media to chew on. And if one of Canada’s provinces ever did secede and not choose independence, Alberta would be the best fit to have some association with the U.S.

But don’t go redesigning the flag just yet.

Full disclosure: I have an abiding affection for both lands. My ancestors, going back generations, were all Canadian, as are all my living relatives. The Great Depression ended here sooner, so my parents were legal immigrants then, and I was the first-born Yank.

That resulted in a childhood and life with one foot in each country. I’ve written about my grandmother in the Malcolm's Memory series. Summers were spent in rural Ontario, where the money had a girl on it, crowns were on everything, and the world’s most delicious toffee cost a (Canadian) nickel.

Back in the States for school, I had to shed my Canadian accent — eh? — and stop calling the letter Z "zed." I realized that beneath superficial similarities, there are many differences, especially in attitudes.

Canadians, I noticed, patiently waited for the bus. Americans were always, “Where the hell is it?” Change was constant in the U.S. So many things were different every time I went somewhere – new roads, bridges, entire buildings.

Times have changed some now. But in Canada, things stayed in familiar places longer. Traditions, too. When great Uncle Jim arrived for Sunday dinner in his suit and tie and ancient, immaculate, black Packard, he removed and folded his white driving coat and grey suede gloves before hugs. It was the proper way to do things.

Then, nearly two generations later, I returned to Canada as a newspaper correspondent and launched a years-long Roots-type journey of personal and professional discoveries. 

I ended up writing two books on Canada, then another on an NHL hockey star, and hosted a network TV mini-series. Today’s column condenses some of what I learned.

Canada prides itself on being a mosaic, lots of different pockets of culture and color, two official languages, and numerous others still spoken, which inhibited a sense of national identity. Unlike the homogenized U.S. melting pot, which has long thought most everyone merged into being American, at least until recently.

Canada occupied, by definition, the harsher half of North America. So early on, multitudes seeking a better life did not automatically flock there by the millions, as they did through New York.

Years ago, my paternal grandfather was Canada’s immigration officer in Scotland. Every month, he got a requisition letter from Ottawa detailing what he was to recruit: Say, an electrician, a carpenter, and a mechanic, each with young family. No old-timers.  

They got ship passage to Halifax and train tickets to specific destinations, typically in the under-populated prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, where the federal government decided they were needed. There was no gradual migration across the country, generation by generation, coming to know the land, as in the U.S.

My great-grandfather Andrew was a farmer. He went straight from Scotland to dairy-farming in Manitoba, living among a community of Scots. Other nationalities did the same, creating pockets of varied nationalities all over, each still speaking their language from "the old country."

Some Canadians will vociferously disagree with me, but the result is our northern neighbor is not a nation in the true sense of that word – common descent, history, language, and culture. 

Nothing wrong with that. Canada is a vibrant, civilized country of many disparate, proudly independent cultures, which thrive separately. Their primary commonality (aside from love of hockey) is that they are not American. Washington's recent aggressive rhetoric has prompted more identity.

But overt patriotism is not Canadian. They may feel it, especially if an Olympic hockey contest is involved, but not show it. NHL hockey arenas play the U.S. anthem too if the visiting team is American. A few years ago, the loudspeaker failed at one game. The Canadian crowd continued the familiar U.S. lyrics politely to the end.

Now, about this 51^st state thing. In the geographic sense, it would be more appropriate if 50 states joined to give Canada 60 provinces. Canada is actually 10 percent larger than the entire United States, with just 12 percent of the population, most of it clustered within 150 miles of the border.

Canada is, in fact, the second-largest country in the world after Russia. Oh, look! Canada is the only thing between Russia and the U.S. 

We’ve witnessed for the past four years in Ukraine how Russia treats neighbors. Canadians have their own military and work closely with the Pentagon, but they don't mind sharing a massive U.S. defense umbrella that serves us, too.

That’s another very good reason, besides economics and culture, why Canada and the U.S. need each other. "We are not in the same boat,” a Canadian prime minister, Arthur Meighen, said long ago, “But we are pretty much in the same waters.”

The United States always looms far larger in the Canadian mind than vice versa. Simon Kiss, a political science professor, put it this way:

The U.S. is always a fundamental fact of Canadian life. We are a small country in the shadow of an empire, so we can’t not pay attention to it.

Americans don’t care, if they're even aware, that countless parts of their culture come from Canada, among them: Leslie Nielsen, John Candy, William Shatner, Lorne Greene, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Rick Moranis, Dan Aykroyd. Walter Pidgeon, Lorne Michaels, Margot Kidder, Genevieve Bujold, Monty Hall, Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), and perhaps my favorite adopted northerner, Mary Pickford, who was acclaimed America’s Sweetheart despite being a Toronto native.

Now, what about Alberta? It was named for a daughter of Queen Victoria and became a province in 1905. It is said to have the world’s third-largest oil reserves. 

Of all the Canadian provinces, Alberta feels the most American. It has a Wild West, get-'em, give-it-a-shot business attitude and more conservative politics, by Canada’s liberal standards. 

When I took a son to a stock-car race in Alberta, the announcer asked everyone to rise and played "O Canada." Ten seconds in, however, he cut it off and said, "You know the rest."

There’s a reason for Alberta's flavor: When the American Frontier was generally considered settled around 1890, Canada began recruiting the continuing westward flow of American settlers as “The Last Best West.” Farm some land there for five years, and it’s yours.

The province stretches nearly 800 miles from Montana to the Northwest Territories, where winter traffic on dirt roads is pretty much confined to nights this time of year when the roads, creeks, and rivers refreeze.

Alberta is only slightly smaller than Texas, with but 15 percent of the population. However, it has eight times the oil reserves. That gives you a sense of the latent economic potential there.

Already, more than 400,000 barrels of oil a day flow to Texas refineries by pipeline and train. As part of his plan to smother U.S. energy independence, Joe Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline that would have delivered 800,000 barrels a day.

Advocates of Alberta separation have acquired sufficient signatures to get the issue on this fall's ballot. Truth is, either way, the vote won’t change anything.

Alberta’s long grievances focus on the federal parliament, which is most often controlled by the Liberal Party, and Ontario, the most populous and economically powerful province. Thirty-eight percent of Canadians live there and elect 122 members to the House of Commons, one-third its total. Alberta elects 37.

Remember in 2015-16 how Donald Trump tapped into the Heartland’s festering anger and frustration at Washington’s deaf power and political establishments?

Most Canadian provinces, and especially Alberta, feel the same, only much more so toward Ontario. Federal policies and rules appear designed to serve central Canada and thwart the growth and independence of Alberta, which contributes billions more to Ottawa than it receives.

But when it comes down to physically splitting the country, even voters in historically alienated, French-speaking Quebec have balked at secession, twice.

And if the Alberta secession proposal passes, there must be detailed negotiations with other provinces and with the federal parliament, which is opposed.  

Then would come a decision on independence or some kind of association with the U.S., say, as a territory, which is how Hawaii and Alaska eventually became states last century.

In a fascinating way, all of this turmoil can be traced back 159 years to William Seward. Remember him? 

In the mid-1800s, the Russian Tsar thought he could annex Crimea, as Vladimir Putin finally did in 2014.

But the Tsar lost that war with France and Britain. He was in debt. He saw the Union Army victorious in the U.S. Civil War with one of the world’s largest armies. Seward, an expansionist Secretary of State in Abraham Lincoln’s administration, had annexed Midway Island and was negotiating to acquire Greenland.  

Rather than potentially lose the 663,267 square miles of Alaska for nothing to an expanding America, the Tsar sold the worthless frozen mass to Seward for $7.2 million (about $1.1 billion today). Oops, Alaska is now known to hold an estimated 22 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

But then London saw the U.S. leapfrog western Canada to acquire Alaska and feared the worst for its colony. So, in 1867, without Canadian input, it quickly passed the British North America Act to create the country of Canada.

News to Canada, which hadn’t sought independence. In fact, Nova Scotia was so unhappy, it discussed seceding and joining what it called “the Boston states.” It didn’t.

All of which shows why we study history to understand the present. 

Or should.