Re: Canada 3, US 0

"George W. Cherry" wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       December 2, 2003
>       Canada's View on Social Issues Is Opening Rifts With the U.S.
>       By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
>
>       ORONTO, Dec. 1 - Canadians and Americans still dress alike, talk
> alike, like the same books, television shows and movies, and trade more
> goods and services than ever before. But from gay marriage to drug use to
> church attendance, a chasm has opened up on social issues that go to the
> heart of fundamental values.
>
>       A more distinctive Canadian identity - one far more in line with
> European sensibilities - is emerging and generating new frictions with the
> United States.
>
>       "Being attached to America these days is like being in a pen with a
> wounded bull," Rick Mercer, Canada's leading political satirist, said at a
> recent show in Toronto. "Between the pot smoking and the gay marriage, quite
> frankly it's a wonder there is not a giant deck of cards out there with all
> our faces on it."
>
>       Mr. Mercer acknowledged in an interview that he was overstating the
> case for laughs - two Canadian provinces have legalized gay marriage, and
> Ottawa has moved to decriminalize use of small amounts of marijuana. But in
> the view of many experts the two countries are heading in different
> directions, at least for the time being.
>
>       Recent disagreements over trade, drugs and the war in Iraq, where
> Canada has refused to send troops, has made the relationship more
> contentious and Canadians increasingly outspoken about the things that
> separate them from their American neighbors.
>
>       "The two countries are sounding more different - after 9/11,
> dramatically more different," noted Gil Troy, an American historian who
> teaches at McGill University in Montreal. "You hear a lot more static and
> you see more brittleness."
>
>       Of course there have been frictions before, for instance during the
> Vietnam War, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau welcomed American draft
> evaders, but the differences in those years were more political than social.
> Analysts say that Canada and the United States have always been similar yet
> different, and that the differences are often accentuated at the margins.
>
>       But today, many analysts and ordinary Canadians said in interviews
> around the country, the differences appear to have moved center stage,
> particularly in social and cultural values.
>
>       The nations remain like-minded in pockets, but the center of gravity
> in each has changed. French-speaking Quebec, with nearly a quarter of the
> population and its open social attitudes, pulls Canada to the left, just as
> the South and Bible Belt increasingly pull the United States in the opposite
> direction, particularly on issues like abortion, gay marriage and capital
> punishment.
>
>       None of those have resonated much over the last decade in Canada,
> where the consensus on social policy seems more solidly formed, its fissures
> narrower and less exploitable.
>
>       Chris Ragan, a McGill University economist, observed: "You can be a
> social conservative in the U.S. without being a wacko. Not in Canada."
>
>       Drugs are one point of departure. A bill to decriminalize small
> amounts of marijuana is working its way through the lower house of
> Parliament, bringing threats from the White House that such a law could slow
> trade at the border.
>
>       Recently, while musing about his retirement plans, Prime Minister Jean
> Chrétien said he might just kick back and smoke some pot. "I will have my
> money for my fine and a joint in the other hand," he said with a smile. The
> glibness of the remark made it nearly impossible to imagine an American
> president uttering it. But in a nation where the dominant west coast city,
> Vancouver, has come to be known as Vansterdam, few Canadians blinked.
>
>       When Massachusetts's highest court ruled for gay marriage, the issue
> loomed over American politics. Conservatives vowed to change the
> Constitution. President Bush said he would defend marriage. Even the major
> Democratic presidential candidates backed away from supporting gay marriage
> outright.
>
>       Contrast that with Canada, where two provincial courts issued similar
> rulings this year. With little anguish, Canada became only the third
> country - after the Netherlands and Belgium - to allow same-sex marriage as
> a matter of civil rights.
>
>       Canadians themselves are not wholly united on the issue. Most elderly
> and rural Canadians express reservations, and the Canadian Anglican Church
> is almost as divided over homosexuality as the American Episcopal Church.
> Still, Canadians remain tolerant of the shift.
>
>       More than 1,500 gay and lesbian couples have married since the court
> rulings. "The Canadian reaction to same-sex marriage has been mostly
> positive," said Neil Bissoondath, an acclaimed Trinidadian-born Canadian
> novelist and social critic.
>
>       But the same issue in the United States "has upset the fundamentalist
> Christians who drive a lot of the politics in the country, especially with
> the present administration in power," Mr. Bissoondath added.
>
>       Rachel Brickner, 29, a political science graduate student at McGill
> originally from Detroit, said that despite her own liberal views, she
> sometimes tired of the anti-Americanism she encountered among Canadian
> students.
>
>       After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she said, an old roommate told her
> that "the U.S. deserved 9/11 because we're bullies."
>
>       "Canadians are quick to blame the United States for not knowing about
> Canada," she said, "but Canadians make a lot of ignorant statements about
> the U.S." No Canadian city reveals differences as much as Vancouver. It
> looks like any American city, except for a drug culture that is so
> abundantly open. The police rarely interfere with bars, storefronts and even
> offices where people can buy or smoke marijuana. A "compassion club"
> distributes marijuana legally to cancer patients and others who have
> doctors' notes.
>
>       The city opened a publicly financed and supervised injection site for
> heroin users in September. The federal government, meanwhile, is preparing
> to start an experimental heroin distribution program for addicts in Toronto,
> Montreal and Vancouver in 2004.
>
>       The changes in marriage and drug laws, said Michael Adams, a Toronto
> consultant and polling expert, "means Canada is moving in the opposite
> direction with the United States and closer to Europe."
>
>       In his new book "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth
> of Converging Values," he argues that greater Canadian tolerance reflects a
> fundamental difference in outlook about everthing from the ethnic and
> linguistic diversity of immigrants to the relative status of the sexes.
>
>       Mr. Adams notes that weekly church attendance among Canadians has
> plummeted since the 1950's while American church attendance has remained
> virtually constant.
>
>       To many commentators the two countries seem to be exchanging their
> traditional roles, one founded in America's birth as a revolutionary country
> and Canada's as a counterrevolutionary alternative.
>
>       During the Depression, under the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
> the United States was the progressive force, while Canada stubbornly held on
> to conservative economic policies.
>
>       By the mid-1960's, though, Canada shifted to a far more activist
> government, moving to a national health insurance system. Not long
> afterward, the Vietnam War began siphoning popularity from the Great Society
> experiment of President Johnson. The trends have only widened since.
>
>       Not all analysts see a big, lasting divergence. Some like Peter
> Jennings, the ABC News broadcaster who was born in Toronto and became a dual
> American and Canadian citizen in May, believe that Canadians have actually
> drawn closer to Americans. Nevertheless, Mr. Jennings said Canada had become
> "a socially more relaxed kind of place."
>
>       "Canada, as it is with some of the European countries," he added, "is
> trying to balance some of the market forces with public policy, which is not
> as apparent in the United States, where the pursuit of happiness and
> individualism are very much alive."
>
>       Still, a cultural gulf is widening.
>
>       "In the 70's we were taught Canada would be absorbed by the United
> States, and in the 80's it looked like it was happening," recalled Douglas
> Coupland, the Canadian author known for his cultural commentaries on both
> sides of the border. "Then came the latter part of the 90's and it was like
> some high school class 16-millimeter film where you see the chromosome
> duplicates, then realigns, and finally the cell splits.
>

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