The policy areas that most strongly express Canadian values are reflected in our social safety net, our universal health-care system, and our multilateral approach to international relations. Many Canadians see these as the aspects of our country that differentiate us most clearly from the United States. And it’s these policies the government must treat with the greatest care.
The area in which there is the greatest potential for U.S. pressure on Canada is, of course, international relations. As Canadians demonstrated in their response to the Iraq war, we are far from ready to abandon our traditional commitment to the “soft power” of multilateralism. The moralistic narratives of absolute good and evil that win many hearts and minds south of the border don’t work in Canada, where pragmatism has always trumped ideology. If George Bush is re-elected, and chooses to apply pressure to Iran, Syria, and North Korea, Paul Martin will have great difficulty offering any support without raising the ire of the Canadian people. Any effort at “régime change” that Canadians would approve would have to be idealistic, humanitarian, and free from any taint of U.S. commercial self-interest.
Though our domestic behaviour is of much less significance to the U.S. than is our role in the international arena, it is nevertheless instructive to see how Canadian and American social values inform big policy decisions in, for example, the area of social spending. The primary destination of such spending in the United States is education. The American assumption is that everyone should get a fair crack at public schooling; anyone who fails is guilty on a very personal level. Individuals who do not seize the day are only entitled to minimal further assistance.
In the United States – particularly since Bill Clinton’s Republican-endorsed welfare reform in 1996, help for the poor has been doled out, or withheld, as if by the hand of a strict father. U.S. welfare reform was intended to kick-start lives – but in fact it was a kind of triage: a portion of those on welfare before 1996 did, indeed, pull themselves up by the bootstraps; a portion remained on the dole, and a portion simply disappeared.
In this country things are different. The Canadian welfare system is commonly given a more dignified name of social assistance, and it is not handed out in a strict, patriarchal manner. We handle our poor rather more magnanimously than in the U.S. But what is perhaps most interesting about the Canadian welfare program is the fact that our poor are treated in much the same way as other minority groups – regions and provinces and so on. We accommodate them, and, whether criticisms can be made of particular policies from province to province, at least attempt to bring them into the fold. In Canada, welfare is not exploited as a disciplinary action but treated as an investment in social capital.
Of course, shared responsibility has always been cast as the ideological counterpoint to individual advancement. But it is increasingly the case that Canada, France, Germany, and the Nordic European countries, which have tended to emphasize shared responsibility, do a better job than the United States of providing a landscape in which social mobility is possible. In the European countries mentioned, a child born into poverty is six times more likely than a poor American child to escape that poverty during her lifetime. Socio-economic mobility – the American Dream of moving from rags to riches – is more of a reality and less of a dream in Canada than in the United States.
Inevitably, Prime Minister Paul Martin will find it necessary to make concessions to the U.S. But given Canadians’ commitment to a distinct set of values, he will be able to discover a very limited horizon in which he could transform Canada into a fifty-first state.
