CANADA DISCOVERS ITSELF

CANADIAN histories dutifully record the glum surmise of the 16th century explorer Jacques Cartier, who sighted Labrador and declared: "This must be the land that God gave Cain." Voltaire dismissed Canada as "a few acres of snow." Canada's massive, historical inferiority complex is without question the biggest in the Western world, a longstanding wonder and delight to analysts of various national psyches. If the U.S. worries about not being liked abroad, Canada worries about not liking itself at home. Hugh MacLennan, one of the country's best-known novelists, writes wryly: "If it be true that God turns his back on a people that falls in love with itself, there seems no immediate danger that He will turn his back on Canada."

Even Canadian humor is a hair shirt, and the nation's undernourished pride is evident from the way Canadians joke about themselves. "We're an enormous Switzerland without the numbered accounts." "A Canadian is a man who hasn't yet had an offer from the U.S." Out of the trapping country of the Far North comes the gibe that "the symbol of Canada is the beaver, that industrious rodent whose destiny it is to furnish hats to warm better brains than his own." And a familiar aphorism holds: "We've had access to American know-how, British political wisdom and French culture. We've ended up with British know-how, French political wisdom and American culture."

Canadians know what they are not--not U.S.-American, not British, not French--but they do not seem to know what they are. They suffered from an identity crisis well before modern novelists discovered the condition, and their sense of no-self could fill half a dozen Antonioni movies. "We have achieved the most amazing things," says Prime Minister Lester Pearson, "a few million people opening up half a continent. But we have not yet found a Canadian soul except in time of war."

The notable fact in this centennial year of Canada's birth is that it has finally, if tentatively, begun to find its soul, its pride and its identity.

After the Explorers

To celebrate the British North America Act of 1867, which united four colonies into the nucleus of modern Canada, the whole nation is caught up in a yearlong birthday party, whose centerpiece is Expo 67, the admirable international exhibition that opened in Montreal last week (see MODERN LIVING). Expo's space-age shapes will once and for all blot out the world's cliches about Canada: Mounties bracing blizzards, Eskimos crouched over a kodlik swapping wives, bluff Quebeckers doffing berets to passing priests. Expo 67 spectacularly dramatizes Canada's achievements. If there remains an undercurrent of self-doubt even amid the celebrations, the reason must be that these achievements are mixed with shortcomings and shadowed by paradox.

Larger than China in territory, Canada has fewer people (20 million) than Ethiopia. This small population in a vast, largely forbidding land has created a standard of living second only to that of the U.S. Yet most Canadians are disturbed by the fact that this was made possible largely through a massive influx of U.S. capital. Four times, Canadian soldiers have gone to war and fought superbly: in World War II a nation of what was then 12 million raised an army of 1,000,000 and lost more than 40,000 dead. But Canadians have never fought in a conflict essentially their own, even though they may have been deeply committed to the principles at stake. They fought for Britain in the Boer War and the two World Wars, for the U.N. in Korea. Canadian soldiers have served in every U.N. peace-keeping mission except West New Guinea, and Canada is still a member of the ectoplasmic International Control Commission in Viet Nam. But despite its diplomatic aspirations, Canada carries little real weight in international affairs. It has never greatly antagonized anyone in the world--nor greatly influenced anyone, either.

The reasons for this Canadian record are not hard to find. They lie in the country's long colonial status, in its special racial mixture, and in the somewhat overwhelming nearness of the U.S. giant.

It is 5,780 miles from Cape Spear, Nfld., to Mount St. Elias in the Yukon, and the people who inhabit Canada's sweeping domain are as varied as the landscape. First to come in large numbers were the French, in the footsteps of Explorer Samuel de Champlain; they still make up nearly one-third of the population and live chiefly in Quebec. British merchants, traders and settlers followed after Quebec was captured by the British in 1759, their numbers enhanced after 1776 by immigrant American colonials who preferred British rule to U.S. independence. Today 40% of all Canadians are Anglo-Saxons. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions more came: Germans and Swedes to fish and till the prairies; Ukrainians, now the fourth largest group in Canada, to found towns with unlikely New World names like Dnieper and New Kiev.

The Quiet Revolution

Yet immigration to Canada was much smaller in numbers than in the U.S., and Canada made different use of it. Most U.S. immigrants came not merely to a country, but to an idea. They were thrown into a swirl of enterprise that could be brutal but that was deeply committed to the future and--after the Civil War--to unity. Canada never became a melting pot: its people mixed but failed to merge. In a thinly settled country, dominated by the secular empire of Britain (or, in French Canada, by the clerical empire of the Catholic Church) people identified themselves more by their separate origins than by their common destination.

History deprived Canadians of the customary sources of nationalism. The British North America Act was, in essence, a Confederation not of free provinces but of colonies (Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). It was a quietly negotiated compact between ruled and ruling. Other colonies and territories joined the Confederation over the years, and Canada slipped toward independence almost effortlessly. At Vimy Ridge in World War I, the courage of Canadian fighting men won Canada the courtesy of a separate signature on the treaty of Versailles. But not until 1931 did Canada achieve genuine independence.

Canada thus won its freedom without rebellion, or without major national heroes. Perhaps it was good (or bad) luck. Perhaps it was more, for after all, character is fate. In the 18th century, as Historian Ramsay Cook points out, English-speaking Canadian settlers had rejected the American Revolution, just as 13 years later, in 1789, French-speaking settlers rejected the French Revolution. As a result, Canada's 1867 charter contained little thought of revolutionary fervor or political ideology. In contrast to the American Declaration of Independence, with its ringing "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," Canada's Constitution enjoins "Peace, Order and Good Government." For a people preoccupied from the outset with conquering a harsh land, that was mandate enough. But it nonetheless has deprived a maturing Canada of what John Porter calls a "myth proclaiming a Utopia against which, periodically, progress can be measured. In the U.S. there is a Utopian image which slowly over time bends intractable social patterns in the direction of equality, but a Canadian counterpart is difficult to find."

The American Constitution reserved to the states all rights not specifically granted to the Federal Government; yet the reality of union created strong central rule. In Canada, the reverse was the case: the Constitution reserved to the Federal Government all powers not specifically granted to the provinces; yet the reality of disunity created a weak central regime from the start. The most threatening aspect of this disunity was the conflict between French-and English-speaking Canadians. In 1838 Lord Durham came from London following a series of minor rebellions and reported back: "I expected to find a conflict between a government and a people. I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state. I found a struggle not of principle but of races."

Canada's 6,000,000 French are concentrated in Quebec, whose motto is a meaningful "Je me souviens" (I remember). Originally they meant to establish New France in the New World. With the English conquest of a land that French explorers and Catholic missionaries had opened up, they turned fiercely inward to survive as a minority on a vast English-speaking continent. Ill-educated, church-dominated, cut off by language and often by prejudice from improving themselves, the French Canadians grew ever more provincial. Only after World War II did the "quiet revolution" of the French Canadians take form, demanding better schools and opportunity to share equally in the country's growth. In the early 1960's French separatism, including cells of bearded conspiratorial terrorists, was a major threat to Canada's very fabric as a nation. There was serious worry that Canada might disintegrate. The most striking fact about the present Canadian scene is that this threat has for all practical purposes disappeared.

Ironically, it was the threat itself that produced an awakening and invigoration of national life as perhaps nothing else could have. It is to Lester Pearson's immense credit that he caught that new spirit and helped translate it into reality. He did it not merely by paying attention to Quebec and by bringing more first-rate French talent into the national Government than ever before. More important, he did it by thinking in terms of a national problem rather than an English-French one. Partly under pressure from some exceptionally energetic provincial prime ministers, a "cooperative federalism" was worked out that gave Quebec and all of Canada's nine other provinces a larger say in Government--and a larger share of Government revenues. Making use of Canada's economic upsurge, Pearson's Liberal Government has since 1963 rounded out a social-welfare system that rivals those of Sweden and Britain. Next on the agenda is a guaranteed annual wage for all Canadians. "I am a great reformer even at 70," says Pearson, and he feels strong enough to challenge Catholic Quebec with demands for more liberal divorce, birth control and abortion laws.

The rift between English and French Canadians is not over, and probably never can disappear completely, but Canada takes comfort from hopeful symbols such as the new Canadian maple-leaf flag, which does away with both the Union Jack and the French fleur-de-lis. Officials in Ottawa are taking crash courses in French paid for by the Government. Listening to their atrociously accented speech, cynics wonder whether there is really much of a future for the French language on the continent. But the linguistic effort is significant.

"This Goddam Proximity

If the strain inside Canada has been eased, the "little brother" or "pygmy" complex remains. Its hold is deep. A century ago, John A. Macdonald, the architect of Canadian Confederation and the first Prime Minister, wrote a friend: "A great future would await our country if it were not for those wretched Yankees." A contemporary character in Novelist John Peter's new work, Take Hands at Winter, is as vehement today: "It eats the hell out of us, this goddam proximity."

Canadians no longer fear U.S. territorial conquest as some of them did when U.S. House Speaker Champ Clark declared in 1911 that he hoped to see the day "when the American flag will float over every square foot clear to the North Pole." But the U.S. cultural and economic pull is almost irresistible. U.S. companies today control 46% of Canadian manufacturing industry. Canadian reactions have ranged from almost-serious consideration of joining the U.S. to former Finance Minister Walter Gordon's Yankee-go-home economic isolationism.

Pearson himself has admitted that U.S. economic influence in Canada is partly due to the passivity of Canadian investors. "They might go into the wilderness, cut down trees, break the land, and move over mountains, but if they made $100 in five years, damned if they'd put it in anything but gilt-edge securities." He half jokes that the U.S. has done a lot for Canadian unity because anti-Americanism, at least on the surface, "is one bond between us all." Yet the fact that Americans and Canadians are so much alike is disconcerting: "If you're supposed to be anti someone you resemble so much, it makes for a kind of schizophrenia."

The Task of Unity

Foreign policy is one area in which Canada can and does demonstrate its independence from the U.S. Despite close cooperation in countless other respects, Ottawa has sided with De Gaulle against Washington on NATO's removal from France, and notably disapproves of U.S. policy in Viet Nam. But elsewhere the "little brother" complex is strengthened by the limitations of Canadian culture. Canada has produced no artists or writers of truly international rank. The only Canadian authors who have achieved renown in the U.S. are the late humorist Stephen Leacock and, currently, Prophet Marshall McLuhan. One difficulty is that Canadian artists, once they begin to succeed, tend to leave their country, a phenomenon described by 19th century Poet Charles G. D. Roberts after he himself moved abroad:

You've piped at home, where none could pay,

Till now, I trust, your wits are riper,

Make no delay but come this way,

And pipe for them that pay the piper.

Canadians today are more than willing to pay the piper. There are innumerable signs that Canada is coming of age in the arts. Much of the awakening is due to vigorous Government participation in the arts, such as Canada's imaginative National Film Board, which has put Canadian documentaries on the world cinema map. But what Canada has wrought physically remains its most stunning reason for pride. Montreal, Canada's largest metropolis, with 2,400,000 people, is agleam with new office buildings, hotels, theaters, boutiques (one soon to be opened by Mary Quant) and more miniskirts per square thigh than New York. Toronto (pop. 2,100,000), the Anglo-Saxon's answer to French Montreal, is richer, and rebuilding itself even faster. Both are youthful cities: half of Canada's population is under 25.

For all the new urban sophistication, the most cogent economic fact of Canada today is the push into pioneer land, where technology is taking on nature to create a new frontier unlike anything ever seen before (TIME cover, Sept. 30, 1966). With vast areas as yet unexplored, only a fraction of the returns are in. The potash finds in Saskatchewan and oil reserves in Alberta are estimated to be equal to all those known in the rest of the world.

There is noticeably less self-denigration and more self-confidence among Canadians today, and not only in the material field. There is a feeling that Canada's way of handling its problems, both internal and with the U.S., could serve as a model for many lesser-endowed countries struggling toward maturity. "We are always apologizing for not having had any wars or revolutions," says Toronto's Father Michael Quealey. "This is too bad only if history is going to be a replacement for Batman. Creative fumbling is always preferable to fighting. We have made compromise work." That thought may or may not be sound historically; what is important about it is its welcome new sense of Canadian self-assurance.

As they enter their second century, Canada's people, having passed the first stage of conquering their land, seem at last on the verge of conquering and discovering themselves. The task of creating unity out of both adversity and diversity is more than the work of a century. But the work to date, with all the problems remaining, gives much cause for pride on the part of Canadians, and for congratulations on the part of their neighbors.

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