Canadian Distinctiveness into the XXIst Century/La distinction Canadienne au tournant du XXIe siecle (review)

The papers collected here were first presented at a joint initiative of the University of Ottawa's Institute of Canadian Studies and the International Council for Canadian Studies in 2000. There are noteworthy contributions by renowned Canadianists working in Canada and in the US as well as in France and India. Most of the contributors are academics, with a smaller selection of pieces by such public intellectuals as John Ralston Saul and Margaret Atwood. An uneven collection, the work is not quite a set of conference proceedings - some contributions seem extensively expanded from their oral presentation, while others retain their original length and oral style - or a coherent set of related articles. The work's loose divisions - Locus in Quo; The Texture of Canadian Society; Culture, Identity and the Market; The Place of Canada in the World of the Twenty-First Century - are not clearly explained in editor Chad Gaffield's very brief introduction and there is not much evidence of dialogue between the conference participants.

Except in the articles by Atwood, Maya Dutt, and Shirley Thomson, there is little analysis here of Canadian cultural life or, for that matter, recognition of the irony that the federal government has been avidly promoting the idea of cultural distinctiveness even while Canada's economic and political sovereignty has eroded under NAFTA and the WTO. Instead, Canadian cultural distinctiveness is largely assumed as a set of national traits flowing from our specific history and geography. Individual contributions by Margaret Atwood, revisiting the question of survival in Canadian culture, and by Alan C. Cairns, who puts forward a concise version of his recent thinking about the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, are far more engaging than the timid and platitudinous observations of many of the other contributors. There are predictable concerns: multiculturalism (placed in comparative context by Denis Lacorne), Quebec (discussed in an engaging but abstract contribution by Jocelyn Létourneau), peacekeeping, foreign policy, and communications. In one of the keynote addresses from the conference, the oddly titled 'The Inclusive Shape of Complexity,' John Ralston Saul's observations lurch from history to politics to language and provide, along the way, a set of pithy but unsupported claims. Saul lauds the tripartite nature of Aboriginal-French-English Canada, celebrates bilingualism, and claims that Canada, while unique, shares intriguing traits with Scandinavia, Latin America, Middle Europe, and Russia. Except for the 'certain sense of melancholy' that he romantically attributes to Canada (and to Scandinavia, or Latin America?) it is not apparent what these shared cultural tropes and modes might be.

Few of these contributions take seriously regional or generational differences in Canada: the growing rural-urban divide, and the increasing economic clout of immigrant-attracting urban areas; the political apathy and cultural internationalism of younger Canadians; and the achievements of recent generations of writers, artists, and filmmakers whose work queries national and other boundaries. These forms of Canadian cultural distinctiveness are deserving of inclusion.