Understanding Canadian attitudes to the United States is one of the most complex and misunderstood areas of public opinion research. American attitudes to Canada are, on the other hand, fairly straightforward. Based on low levels of fluency and interest, Americans see us in either positive or benign terms. For many Americans we are seen as mostly like them, an acknowledgement they would consider complimentary. Although this loosely formed sense of sameness is in large measure accurate, many Canadians bridle at the thought of being seen as largely similar to Americans. Herein lays the essence of a national conundrum.
For many years Canadians have defined and prided themselves on their un-Americaness. This may be why Fire and Ice (Adams 2003) has been such a resonant national narrative. The harder evidence suggests this sense of large and growing difference is both untrue and at times unhelpful. Now nowhere are we suggesting that Canada and the United States are homogenous societies. Canadians are more secular, statist, and cosmopolitan than their American cousins and unlike Europe, where national identities have increasingly been eclipsed by local and continental identities since Maastricht, national identities in North America have been strengthening since the FTA and NAFTA agreements. Our research (Graves 2007), however, and the research of other scholars as well (Basáñez, Inglehart, Nevitte 2007) , is increasingly concluding that, far from the thesis of elemental and widening normative differences, our value differences with the United States are modest at best, and the recent historical pattern is to convergence, not divergence.
So why is this observation so difficult for Canadians? And why the tension between what is happening and what we wish to be the case? Further, is this reluctance to acknowledge our similarities hindering or helping our progress as a nation?
Let us begin by considering some public opinion evidence that we recently updated for Carleton University's Canada-US Project. By a wide margin (more than 2:1), Canadians think we are becoming more, rather than less like the United States. This conclusion is consistent with our empirical tests of value changes over the past decade, and largely resonant with the "post-materialist" models which see value convergence occurring in most of the advanced Western world. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find two countries with more similar value systems than Canada and the United States. The second part of the question shows the rub. By an even larger margin (8:1) Canadians say they would like to become less like the United States, rather than more similar. So why does a country which Canadians readily acknowledge to be our best friend and ally (roughly 7 in 10 in agreement) and which displays broad normative resonance, engender such a wilful desire to diverge?
I am not generally fond of psychological explanations for social facts, but Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences. In this case the insecurities of the smaller and somewhat neglected neighbour stimulate a magnified sense of difference. This irrationality imposes a challenge for Canada's political leaders: they must negotiate a delicate equilibrium of intimacy and difference. Despite the fact that we find Canadians close to unanimous (95 per cent) in their desire to see the federal government strengthen the relationship with the United States to at least some extent (Americans, by the way, feel the same way), heaven forbid if the leader is seen as casting Canada in an obsequious or servile position.
Following September 11th, we were all Americans. But in the aftermath of the exuberant internationalism that produced — in the minds of both Canadians and Americans — an adventurous, but the ultimately wrongheaded foreign policy of President Bush's administration, we saw an erosion of reciprocal outlooks. In many respects, America entered a new period of isolationism tantamount to the period after the Vietnam War ended. Americans once again wanted to pull the drawbridge up and cut off a hostile and unwelcoming world. The new isolationist and protectionist sentiments in the United States were mirrored in a more negative outlook on the United States by Canada (and indeed most of the external world). In this context, we witnessed the border between Canada and the United States "thicken" with the introduction of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and the resulting deleterious impact this had on trade and travel. Likewise, the erstwhile longest undefended border now bristles with guns on both sides.
