Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

What Was Canada?

For George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) “Is Canada Postcolonial?” The question is piercing, impertinent, and urgent: a destabilizing, disorienting provocation. It insists that we consider the “nationality” of the nation as well as its sovereignty. We answer it at our peril, oui, but answer it we must. No “globalist” philosopher would risk this discourse, but we, we who dream ourselves as Canadian, well, we must speculate. We have no choice—and no other chance. In 1953, Northrop Frye articulated an unsurpassed definition of Canadian: “a Canadian is an American” (“Letters” 273). The simplicity of his finding, his truth, allows us to admit, despite our discomfort, that Canada and the United States share common values and harmonized policies, that we compose a single North American entity (excepting Mexico and the Caribbean). Frye’s definition of the Canadian is clairvoyant , for it eliminates the crude, anti-intellectual practice—the hypocrisy—of some Canadian cognoscenti, whether French or English, to deny our indelible Américanité. With Frygian clarity, we must recognize that we are American and relish that identity richly. Scholars of Canadian studies will recognize that the previous paragraph is, of course, facetious. I have betrayed Frye. His full definition reads, “a Canadian is an American who rejects the [American] Revolution ” (“Letters” 273). With this comment, one as stringently insightful as the previously distorted quotation, the contradictions of our nation come sharp, cold, and clear as glacier water. We admire and 27 G E O R G E E L L I O T T C L A R K E What Was Canada? appreciate US culture and unapologetic power, their glamorous presidents , their characteristic generosity and gaudy wealth, and we ache to reproduce American practices and approaches because they offer the acme of comfort, the climax of luxury and chic ease. American standards —principles—are ours, though we shrink, still, from the American penchant for extremism—in religion, in political disputation, in citizenship , in the practice, yep, of racism. (Our “outsiders” and “marginals” are rendered so aboriginally.) In contrast, our cities are cleaner, our citizens healthier, our children better educated, and our “visible minorities ” not as viciously brutalized. The Peaceable Kingdom is the “kinder, gentler” America Bush Sr. extolled in his inauguration in 1989. The Canadian “difference” from the US is one of degree and sentiment, not a stark, merciless alterity. Fundamentally, we like America and Americans , but reject the excessive impulses of its patriotism. We are uncomfortable with the mass—and individual—violence that a revolutionary people must practice occasionally. Given our practical union with the US, however, we are now justified —following the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) (1989) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1994)—in dismantling Canadian institutions (airlines, banks, hydroelectric power, oil companies , even the power to print our own currency) to accommodate North American capitalist expansion. Why should an anachronism such as Parliament impede our heady embrace of continentalism, or, rather, our peaceful absorption within the Manifest Destiny of the self-evidently superior American Dream? Let us abolish the House of Commons, finally, and sue for the right to elect Haligonians, Montréalaises, and Calgarians to a truly “continental” Congress. Let us integrate consciously, willingly, with the United States, rather than continue to do so haphazardly , unwittingly. Let us terminate the monarchy too, for it obstructs the harmonization of our currency and postage stamps with the US Federal Reserve and the US Mail. The sooner we jettison Canada and its inferior dollars, the wealthier and happier we will be—or so our neo-colonial business and political chefs clamour in 2003. Clearly, we are postcolonial now only in relation to Britain, whose cultural influence in Canada is pretty much nil (save for Coronation Street, Benny Hill Show re-runs, and the British monarch we dub, constitutionally , the “Queen of Canada”). Indeed, an intellectual history of the last century, focused on English Canada, would reveal that our poets, professors, and politicians effectively denounced the British Empire as a bastion of class prejudice, religious bigotry, white 28 G E O R G E E L L I O T T C L A R K E fetishism, and nasty sexual repression. They were able, only after great toil and great pain, to urge our marginal, hardscrabble, resourceexploitative civilization (I mean, economy) to abandon the boring backwardness of the British “bond” for the progress, modernity, and social liberalism represented by the US, the...