Last Monday, The Globe and Mail's front page featured a poll commissioned by two continental think tanks showing "a marked convergence in deeper social values" between Canada and the United States. The poll was said to put the lie to the "conventional wisdom" that Canadians and Americans are diverging in their values.
I admit to some surprise that Canada-U.S. divergence is the "conventional wisdom," as a 2004 poll found that just 17 per cent of Canadians believe that Canada and the U.S. are becoming increasingly different. I was still more surprised that the evidence of divergence I presented in my book Fire and Ice, the results of 14,413 social-values surveys conducted over nine years among representative samples of Canadians and Americans, is now considered the stuff of "myth."
I was not surprised, however, that someone should sponsor a poll that sought to refute the thesis of Canada-U.S. difference. This thesis, however empirical, has proven unpopular among at least three groups of Canadians.
Those on Canada's ideological right have a gut opposition to research showing Canada to be on a different path from its southern neighbour. They see these findings as evidence that "Soviet Canuckistan" is triumphing over the American Dream in Canada - and they don't like it.
The business community, whose leaders often find themselves on the right side of the ideological spectrum, think the idea of diverging values to be absurd. After all, the only values that count are fear and greed, and those are as obvious on Bay Street as Wall Street.
But the group I find most intriguing are the diplomats and the continental mandarinate who serve them. For these folks, the thesis of diverging values runs counter to their very raison d'être. When diplomats get together, they do not start by talking about their differences. Canadian and U.S. ambassadors talk about the "values" they have in common. The U.S. ambassador to Canada and our ambassador in Washington are programmed to talk about the parallel values of their country's "best friend and ally," sharing the world's longest undefended cliché.
It is only fair that those who see their interests - commercial or political - as being threatened by Canadian distinctiveness should look critically at research supporting such distinctness.
But setting aside their arguments, and also mine, for a moment, let's take a look at a group whose commercial interests lie in fully understanding Canada and the U.S., not in proving Canadians and Americans are identical or distinct. One group of North Americans has had a uniquely clear-eyed picture of the areas of Canada/U.S. convergence (yes, there are many) and divergence for years. They are our marketers and managers of human resources. If consumer marketers and HR people treated Canada as an extension of North Dakota, they would soon be toast, and they know it. Sure, those continental business gatherings in Las Vegas start out with homilies of shared values; then they get down to the serious business of examining cultural differences between and within our two countries to develop strategies to beat their competitors in the marketplace.
The values and cultures of our two countries remain distinct even in the face of powerful forces of globalization and continental free trade. This should be a source of interest, not an object of denial, to those who wish deeper continental integration. Instead of commissioning polls to refute social science, our think tanks should face the facts on cultural divergence and get on with exploring our common interests in search of solutions to our many binational problems, and in aid of our wonderful shared projects - shared not only by our governments, but by our artists, academics, scientists, business people, and athletes.
As U.S. president Richard Nixon told Canadians in a 1972 address to our House of Commons, "Mature partners must have autonomous, independent policies: Each nation must define the nature of its own interests, decide the requirements of its own security, the path of its own progress. The soundest unity is that which respects diversity, and the strongest cohesion is that which rejects coercion."
Michael Adams, president of the Environics group of companies, is author of Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values.