Canada Preferred

Hugh MacLennan, a top Canadian novelist (Barometer Rising, Two Solitudes), is an alert, perceptive native of Cape Breton, N.S. who has been around quite a lot. After sampling life in England (as a Rhodes scholar), and in the U.S. (as a graduate student at Princeton for three years), he decided that Canada was the place to live after all. In MacLean's Magazine this week 39-year-old Novelist MacLennan gives some reasons why the U.S. is not his choice.

Revolution & Puritanism. The U.S., he found, is moved by a mass optimism: "The reason ... is historical. The United States was formed as the result of a successful revolution [and] . . . has never lost a war. . . . But the original groups which developed Canada all became Canadians as the result of being on the losing side in war or revolution." Result: Canada has a national inferiority complex.

Furthermore, said MacLennan, "Americans are never afraid of making a mistake. . . . This is the mark of a big man, and of a great nation. . . . Canadians pay too much importance to mistakes. . . . Americans are proud of what they do. The excessive puritanism of Canadians makes them proud of what they don't do."

But "Americans think too large, and this makes them irresponsible as a nation. . . . Canadians think too small, and this reduces our effectiveness. . . . We let too many able men go to the United States because we are too small to give them what they need. . . . [None of us] has learned what all Americans take for granted: if you want the best you must pay for it."

Common Sense & Genius. "Canadians have more common sense than Americans, and our Government has been a living testimony of this both during and after the war. The American pays twice as much for his milk and meat, and half as much for his cigarets, as we do.

"Canada has a better form of government than the United States, and therefore a better ability to advance real democracy. The American Constitution is too rigid, and stays rigid because they have made it a sacred document. At the present moment a man who does not wish to be President, and whom the majority of Americans do not wish to be President, must serve his term as a prisoner of the Constitution for two more years. The Chief Executive in the United States has too much responsibility. . . . Mackenzie King is still with us after 20 years. . . . No American President could stay alive that long in office. . . .

"Canada has been, is, and may be in the future, more fortunate than the United States. ... It seems that nothing but catastrophe can check the furious progress of Americans into a still more bleak and dangerous desert of technology than they have reached now. The very vastness of the apparatus their genius has created stands over them like a strange and terrible master. Every man, as Sophocles said years ago, loves what he has made himself. Canadians have as yet fallen in love with no such Frankenstein. And, as a resuit of this, our future is more clearly in our own hands. . . . Socialism in the United States, if it comes, might easily be totalitarian. Socialism in Canada, if it comes, will certainly be democratic."

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