Work in progress: a very personal take on what makes Canadians tick.

Watson, Patrick

The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are Andrew Cohen McClelland and Stewart 280 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771021817

Shortly after the end of the First World War, when an Alberta magistrate named Emily Murphy was nominated to the Senate of Canada, her appointment was turned down. Senators had to be "persons" having certain qualities and, according to the Canadian Constitution, as a woman she was not legally a person. Murphy challenged the decision but the Supreme Court upheld it: our Constitution, the British North America Act, was quite clear on the matter.

Equally clear to Emily Murphy and the four women who joined her fight was the need to revise that BNA Act. The trouble was you could not do that in Canada: the BNA Act was an act of the British Parliament. And so in the end they had to take it to London where, after a decade of determined lobbying, Murphy and her colleagues won the "persons issue" and the act was revised.

It is unlikely that a street poll today would turn up more than a tiny percentage of Canadian citizens who know that story, or know that it was only 25 years ago that the Constitution was repatriated, and that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms was created and embedded in that constitution. We are not, as a people, much given to celebrating our collective accomplishments. And our provincial governments--which are responsible for public education--have largely abandoned the teaching of our history.

The one aspect of Canadianism that never seems to pall for citizens of this country, though, is the comparison with our American neighbours. Michael Adams's award-winning Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values sat at the top of bestseller lists for many months, demonstrating to Canadians that we were less conformist than our American counterparts, more adventurous and autonomous, and more tolerant of cultural difference. We enjoyed hearing all that.

But there is clearly more to our character than our relationship with the Yanks. And Andrew Cohen's The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are is a seriously undertaken who-are-we book, which the author admits to being very personal, "unscientific, selective and subjective." He may see himself as selective, but he covers a great deal of territory, beginning with some significant books and essays that have reflected on how other national characters developed--de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Stanley Karnow's Paris in the Fifties, Churchill's histories, Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island on England. His survey of these books leads to a consideration of studies of our own emergence from the colonial state of mind, the sort of material that shows up in books or in popular magazines and newspapers as "What Is a Canadian?" and "Whither Canada?" Curiously, he misses what I would have judged to be at least one of the centrepieces of this kind of writing--maybe the centrepiece--namely Arthur Lower's Colony to Nation. But he ranges pretty widely, including the too-easily-forgotten Time-Life Books volume, Canada, in their Life World Library, which was written by Brian Moore (The Luck of Ginger Coffey). Moore reported some of the same who-are-we doubts about the national nature of this country. "Canadians are not chauvinistic ... and are sometimes apologetic about [their] past ... fixing their minds on local loyalties, and local faiths," he wrote. (It is no surprise that Moore's opinions earned him some scoldings for being a fake Canadian: he was, after all, from Belfast and lived mostly in the United States.)

This early section of Cohen's book has several provocative quotes about the national character. Hemingway called the country a "fistulated asshole," whatever that means; John Dos Passos said of Toronto, "Don't you think it's a beastly place?"; Rupert Brooke found Canadians "churlish" and "vastly vulgar." But this is on the way to the more solid and recognizable ideas that Cohen finds in some later writers, such as Alistair Horne, in his Canada and the Canadians, who wrote: "He wears quieter suits, less spectacular ties than his southern cousins; builds his cities of sober grey stone instead of coloured glass and bronze. He may be a little slower to take a newcomer to his bosom than an American, but when he does his friendship may be less fickle." Horne also found us starved for praise and touchy about our national character, but concluded that "at its highest level, there is a sublime freedom that a country of the vastness of Canada alone can offer."

And Cohen notes Andrew Malcolm's pertinent observation, in his generally very positive The Canadians, that Canadians who have made it in the U.S.--and especially if they then came back to work in Canada--are seen by their fellow citizens as having been a great success.

But we do not know a lot about our own accomplishments, or about where and who we are: "a nation of amnesiacs," Cohen quips. A newspaper poll found that only two thirds of the people surveyed knew we have ten provinces, only 61 percent could name the Great Lakes, 21 percent knew that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been written by a Canadian and almost none knew that our head of state is the Queen.

In 2004, the auditor general warned that we are letting our physical heritage--forts, archeological sites, a whole catalogue of historic buildings --crumble badly. And we are reminded that the current federal government has cancelled the development of a national portrait gallery.

Does this kind of stuff matter? A lot of the neglect of heritage sites has to do with homes and other places associated with politicians. I would argue that, national politics being most of the time of virtually no consequence to the daily lives of Canadians, perhaps this neglect reflects maturity on the part of our citizens, an appropriate level of disdain that our politics-obsessed media should take note of.

The cancellation--or at least the temporary suspension--of the portrait gallery is another matter, and Cohen argues strongly for its restoration, and for its location in Ottawa and not in Alberta (as has been bruited).

Andrew Cohen begins to focus on our seemingly willful ignorance of ourselves in his third chapter, "The Unconscious Canadian," as he gets into the work of some contemporary historians, especially Jack Granatstein, who have been trying to counter this obliviousness partly by scolding and partly by writing compellingly about the magnitude and the intriguing nature of the stories we have to tell about ourselves. Cohen is tough on the CBC in this regard, singling out especially its infamous cancelling of the Tommy Douglas movie Prairie Giant after its initial broadcast (and killing the DVD) without giving the writer and director a chance to be heard, simply because the former Saskatchewan premier's grandchildren claimed it demeaned their grandfather.

Among the mythologies Cohen invites us to reconsider is the idea of our superiority to the Americans in cultural diversity. Cohen reports the opinions of thoughtful writers who dispute this, pointing to the huge increase in hispanophones in the U.S., the richness and durability of Jewish culture in New York and the assertiveness of Islam as ways of at least moderating our smugness in this regard (although later he, in effect, shares that smugness).

To those Canadians who have begun to wonder, during the administration of George W. Bush, whether the United States of America will ever become a democracy, Cohen vigorously argues for the democratic effectiveness of their political system. To those of us who worry that the White House has moved a long way toward rendering the houses of Congress weak and irrelevant, and that those institutions are in any case populated primarily by the wealthy elites, "American politics is lively and inventive," he declares, "a robust, responsive democracy.

 They elect representatives to a number of offices,
 from sheriff to District Attorney ... They can
 recall and replace sitting politicians ... They
 express views on many issues in binding referenda.
 They expect their representatives to hold
 confirmation hearings to review the credentials of
 judicial nominees, as well as cabinet secretaries,
 ambassadors, and senior officials.

 In Canada, we tend to disparage much of this;
 confirmation hearings are inevitably seen as a
 "circus," as if they were irredeemably disorderly.
 Sometimes they are. We have few referenda in
 Canada, as if consulting the people were a dangerous
 thing.

Well, in fact, binding referenda are dangerous things. The Swiss use them, but with caution, requiring extended preparation and public discussion before the vote, and then a cooling-off period of two years followed by a second vote before the matter becomes law. The use of instant referenda, a simple matter to arrange in the internet age, carries with it a terrifying risk of thoughtless mob response to crisis. This is one of the few places in this well-argued book where I felt that the author ought to have stopped a little longer to reflect.

But it is a minor point. More substantial is his depiction of how we are beginning to modify our electoral traditions, even putting into discussion the idea of fixed terms for a government, and other reforms that seem to bring us closer to the traditions of our American neighbour in the matter of citizen involvement in the democratic process.

Each chapter is subtitled with an adjective for different aspects of the Canadian character: "The Hybrid Canadian," "The Capital Canadian." One of the most provocative is "The American Canadian."

 His world is defined by his neighbour, largely
 because of economic, commercial, and political
 decisions made a generation or two ago. He may
 work in a branch plant or a subsidiary run by
 Americans ... He may sell his goods, services, or
 resources to Americans, who buy some 76 percent
 of his country's exports and accept without
 complaint, year after year, a colossal trade deficit
 with Canada. Either way, the capital, investment,
 and market of the United States is the fundamental
 reason he enjoys one of the highest standards
 of living in the world ... He watches American
 movies and television, wears American jeans,
 listens to American music, reads American books
 and magazines. He drinks coffee at Starbucks, eats
 hamburgers at McDonald's and ice cream at Ben
 and Jerry's. He aspires to the American Dream ...

Okay. Of course. We know all that. But one of the strengths of The Unfinished Canadian is that in addition to telling us a lot of things we did not know, and--at the end--delivering an exhilerating package of recommendations for strengthening the country, Cohen also carefully reminds us of details and textures of our social, cultural and political life that another writer might have skipped over on the assumption that "we all know that." It is nourishing and helpful to find a writer who takes the time to remind us, and to fit what we all know into the context of broader arguments.

The issue of Canadian citizenship is a good example, the idea of citizen (rather than subject) being a relatively new one in our history, and one about whose history and whose speculative path of development readers may know a lot less than they thought they knew. His discussion of some of the issues around dual citizenship--very relevant when we spend millions to get Lebanese Canadians out of a war-torn Beirut, for example--is fascinating. As is his dramatic account of what happened around the present Governor General's French citizenship, and that of the present head of the Liberal Par ty of Canada. (While applauding Paul Martin's appointment of the immigrant female descendant of slaves to the country's vice-regal post, where she is also head of the armed forces, Cohen did not, alas, discuss the long-overdue imperative of our having a governor general whose ancestors were on this land long before the Europeans ever knew of it.)

Andrew Cohen teaches journalism at Ottawa's Carleton University, and I hope his students realize how lucky they are to be in the same room with such a generous and wide-ranging student of this country's character, strengths and weaknesses. And, living in Ottawa as he does, Cohen has taken a good tough look at our nation's capital, in what is, en fin de compte, the funniest part of the whole book. I will leave it to the reader to discover the joys of this part, only hinting that after he departs Parliament Hill, where he finds the Parliamentary Library to be one of the most beautiful rooms in the world, he struggles through the hashed-up urban mess that begins a block or two away from Parliament, extending east, west and south right out to the suburbs, including the city's profoundly disappointing cuisine. To one restaurant (Ottawanians: guess which?) a Montreal food writer returned twice, not trusting her judgement of the first two visits, and concluded that she was right, after all, and that this was The Worst Restaurant in the World.

The discerning reader may have noticed that I am enthusiastic about The Unfinished Canadian. This is in no small measure because Andrew Cohen handles language with a love and care we do not usually expect from journalists. And the book is the work of a journalist who has not been hypnotized by the demonstrable compulsion of so many journalists that if it is not bad news it won't sell. That is refreshing. I hope editors across the land will take note.

This book is not, however, without its severe criticisms of how we behave. On foreign aid, while the international consensus is that 0.7 percent of a wealthy country's GDP should be given to poor countries, "Our refusal to embrace 0.7 is a moral failure," says Cohen. And "the biggest donors [to charity in Canada] are the working poor, who give the largest percentage of their wealth, 1.7 percent ... those earning over $60,000 give only 0.5%."

It is in this section that he permits himself one of his few moments of tangible anger, as he notes that the late Kenneth Thomson, who died worth some $19 billion, gave none of it to charity and defied anyone to call him a philanthropist for having given his art collection to the Art Gallery of Ontario: "He was just looking for a place to keep his paintings." Cohen's anger is not so much directed at Thomson. He is furious that the media let the newspaper magnate get away with it, one of the Great Ones even calling him, at his death, "the quintessential Canadian."

There are really only two lacunae that I found puzzling in this otherwise comprehensive essay: guns and consumers. As observed, he gives a lot of space to comparing Canadian and American values and behaviour. But Americans, arguing that guns keep them safe, shoot more of one other in a week than Canadians kill by any means in a year. Cohen does not examine this, and I would have been interested in his interpretation. Consumerism has become the morality of both countries, eclipsing the imperatives of citizenship; I would have liked his take on that issue as well.

But these are small points given the overall strength of The Unfinished Canadian. And Cohen uses his last pages for a tightly written and largely persuasive review of some of the steps we could take to strengthen this country for which he declares such love and admiration. It should not be so easy to obtain citizenship, he declares; and, once obtained, some obligations should attach to that citizenship, not just rights. There should be mandatory public service (perhaps modelled on Switzerland's, I might suggest? Community service, say, for two years, that would move young people around the country? With an option to serve it in the military?). "If living in Canada is winning the lottery, as Jan Morris says, why not charge more for a ticket?"

And, yes, we need that portrait gallery--in the capital--and the capital needs its appalling ugliness tended to. And perhaps most importantly, we must guard against the risk that our vaunted multiculturalism does not turn into balkanization, where the idea of the nation and of national purpose and national values gets lost. Our country must "be more than an area code, a postal code, an email address ... We have come too far. We have too much to do. We are favoured and we are unfinished."

Bravo.

Patrick Watson's latest book is Wittgenstein and the Goshawk (McArthur and Company, 2004), a fable for adults. He is creative director of the Historica Foundation.