University of Toronto political scientist Stephen Clarkson says the type of nationalism that flourished in Canada in the 1960s and '70s is all but dead. "The issues are pretty much the same, but the debate is non-existent." Economically, Canadians seemed to have surrendered once free trade became a reality. Culturally, the success of our musicians, actors and novelists, both nationally and internationally, seems to have soothed our fears of assimilation. "There's no crisis to respond to," Clarkson says. In his latest book, Uncle Sam and Us, he writes that the question isn't whether Canada will survive — no politician in America wants to upset the apple cart by adding millions of socialized-medicine-loving, gun-hating northerners to the mix — but what type of country will we become? Canada has already proven that it can fill a positive role in the new globalized order by playing midwife to efforts to forgive Third World debt and ban land mines, he says. Now Canadians have to decide if that's the type of country they still favour.But frankly, it's not an issue that is consuming us. Matthew Mendelsohn, the director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archives at Queen's University, says the trends in public thought are so contradictory that it's sometimes hard to tell whether we're sophisticated or naive. "It's like we believe we can have our cake and eat it too," he says. "That we can be closer to the U.S. on issues of defence and security, have closer economic ties, but that we can still symbolically object to American policy around the world and maintain a distinct societal organization."
Canadians, especially young Canadians, are voting less, and fewer and fewer of us belong to a political party. Our patriotism is real, says Mendelsohn, but it hasn't yet translated into an economic platform or a political agenda. And in the absence of elected leaders who are presenting a vision that the public is willing to buy into, we find our national sustenance in the frothy, feel-good symbolism that Don Cherry and Molson hawk. "We have become a people who, without a trace of irony, love to yell about how modest they are," says Mendelsohn. Screaming our virtues from the rooftops? Strange, but that sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing we used to object so strongly to about Americans. And if that's the case, maybe it's time to start hating ourselves.
In other words, they've become northern noodges.