Darkness in the North

Many things in Canada are confusingly American: Coca-Cola signs, Esso and Gulf and Sunoco and Shell stations, the same deodorants, the same language, even many of the same billboards. The North American surface of things assures a newly arrived Torontonian that he really is back home, in a pleasant, ethnically mixed, Great Lakes city with WASP cabdrivers. It takes a while to penetrate that surface and cast off our U.S. cliches. I offer what follows in the hope of giving perspective and detail to events of the past year in Canada that have so puzzled Americans back home: the FLQ kidnapings, the War Measures Act, the seemingly sudden outbreak of anti-Americanism.

Canada’s land area is second only to Russia’s, a few thousand square miles more than that of the U.S. Some of that land is frozen year-round; even so, the country has six acres of arable land per capita for its 22-million population (v. three acres in the U.S.), and it has oil, water, gas, timber and mineral reserves considerably in excess of its foreseeable needs for at least the next forty years.

TP

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Trevor Pembroke

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Many things in Canada are confusingly American: Coca-Cola signs, Esso and Gulf and Sunoco and Shell stations, the same deodorants, the same language, even many of the same billboards. The North American surface of things assures a newly arrived Torontonian that he really is back home, in a pleasant, ethnically mixed, Great Lakes city with WASP cabdrivers. It takes a while to penetrate that surface and cast off our U.S. cliches. I offer what follows in the hope of giving perspective and detail to events of the past year in Canada that have so puzzled Americans back home: the FLQ kidnapings, the War Measures Act, the seemingly sudden outbreak of anti-Americanism.

Canada’s land area is second only to Russia’s, a few thousand square miles more than that of the U.S. Some of that land is frozen year-round; even so, the country has six acres of arable land per capita for its 22-million population (v. three acres in the U.S.), and it has oil, water, gas, timber and mineral reserves considerably in excess of its foreseeable needs for at least the next forty years.