Continental Divide
Regarding Michael Adams’s “Continental Divide” (April/May): Americans, generally, I think, regard us with good-will, but they don’t quite understand why Canada exists.

I think we should be careful to stroke American feelings with well-constructed diplomacy. What the Chrétien government did in response to the Iraq crisis may not have been wrong, and certainly it had majority support in Canada, but what it said was ill-considered.

Canadian nationalism is usually low-key, and in many circles “nationalism” is a bad word. That is not unwise, for though we are free to be different, we should not trumpet the differences too loudly. The United States will not tolerate a rival on its border.
James Allan Evans
Mayne Island, B.C.

Michael Adams argues with his usual verve that the values Canadians report they have differ sharply from those of Americans. I have no quarrel with that; I applaud his attempt to preserve the difference.

The reality that many Canadians face, however, is not as rosy as he depicts. He lumps our social-assistance programs in with those of Europe, in contrast to the U.S. Usually, those who study the problem link Canada and the U.S. together. For instance, despite all the blathering by politicians over the years, one in six Canadian children still lives in a poor family – a far cry from European figures.

How is the disconnect possible? For one thing, three of the most populous provinces have had right-wing governments who savaged the social-assistance programs and their recipients. But behind all that, none other than Paul Martin, in his 1995 budget, cut the provinces fiscally adrift when he cut back on the cost-sharing of social expenditures. Cost-sharing was a quintessentially Canadian device, arising from the recommendations of the Rowell-Sirois Commission in 1940 on how to avoid the political and social chaos of the Great Depression, patiently negotiated during the early 1960s. Martin rammed through Parliament what was tantamount to a constitutional change.

Martin has already demonstrated his ability to move Canada closer to the U.S. Who knows? Would presiding over a minority government stop him?
Pat Kerans
Ottawa

I think Michael Adams is generally correct about how Canadian society has diverged from the values of many Americans. The problem with all of this is that as we have become more different, we have also become more smug, interpreting our difference as a sign of superiority.