What is Canada For?
Intent for a Nation: What is Canada for?by Michael ByersDr. Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia, where he focuses on the role of international organizations, the use of military force, the law of the sea, human rights and Canada–United States relations. Prior to July 2004, he was a Professor of Law and Director of Canadian Studies at Duke University in North Carolina.
His most recent book is Intent for a Nation: What is Canada for?, a title inspired by conservative philosopher George Grant’s influential 1965 work, Lament for a Nation, in which Grant grimly predicted the inevitable absorption of Canada by the United States.
Byers sat down with Adbusters Contributing Editor Deborah Campbell recently to discuss the past, present and future of Canada on the global stage – including how long those Canucks have before the Yanks swallow them alive.
On George Grant’s fatalism
This thesis that Canada was destined to lose independence due to very powerful forces, such as economics and global culture, that was part of the accepted thinking through the 1980s and 1990s. We were all going to become this sort of bland, same-thinking, Hollywood-oriented, global community. For Canadians, that made it so much easier to go along with the requests and pressures that were emanating from the us.
But Grant made a fundamental analytic mistake, which is that he assumed that economics is everything. He also assumed that cultures are relatively malleable, not deep-rooted. Those two assumptions, I think, are both wrong, they’ve been proven wrong. On the economics front, 86 percent of Canada’s trade was with the US when Canada said no to the Iraq War. That was a really big ask from George W. Bush at a time when he was phenomenally powerful. And yet, we were able to say no. That flatly contradicts Grant’s thesis.
On the cultural front, as we know from social science work like the World Values Survey and some of the work done by people like Michael Adams, Canadians and Americans are actually diverging. This has to do with the fact that not just Canada, but also the US changes. We have institutions that feed into our values, so the existence of universal public health care isn’t just an expression of our values – it in turns feeds back into how Canadians think about community.
Grant’s thesis seemed to be playing out through the ‘80s and ‘90s, partly because of Brian Mulroney’s overt pro-Americanism, the negotiation of the FTA in 1988, and then NAFTA in 1994, but also the effects of the relatively benign, charismatic Clinton administration’s approach to North American affairs. Then along comes George W. Bush, along comes 9/11, along comes the disaster of the Iraq War, the foolishness of the American torture policy, the rise of the religious right – a whole bunch of things that a lot of people wouldn’t or couldn’t have anticipated – and all of a sudden Americans are on average moving away from us faster than we would have been moving towards them...
