Greetings from the Explosion City

After a splendid, two-week vacation in China and some time recuperating from having a wisdom tooth extracted, I’m now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I spend my says (six of them a week), in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. I’m going through a sample of around 14,000 files about families that applied for aid after an enormous explosion in 1917. The explosion, which killed around 2000 people, was the largest human-caused explosion until Hiroshima (although that’s a rather silly thing to say, since “largest explosion” doesn’t actually have very much meaning).

A friend of mine–at the time, I was living in France and he in England–once described a theory of expat experience to me. He suggested that when Americans go to country that speaks a foreign language, they expect things to be different, and so their time there is spent becoming more and more aware of how much the same things are. In contrast, when Americans go abroad to Anglophone countries, they expect things to be roughly the same, and so they spend their time there discovering how different things are in each country. I’m not actually sure he’s right, but in any case, one of the things frequent or long-term American visitors to Canada have to think about is how and whether Canada is particularly different from the US. (Those of us who study Canada, of course, could be said to study this as our jobs.) Here are three pieces of news that Canadians are talking about that help describe the difference, or not, between the Canada and “the Republic to the South.”

1. Today, as you may have seen on the New York Times website, Conrad Black was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. Black was a Canadian newspaper mogul; he owned community papers, major local papers, and founded a national paper with the express intention of using it to encourage a merger of what were then the two conservative parties in Canada. That is to say, he founded the National Post explicitly to foster conservative politics. (Incidentally, the two conservative parties did indeed merge, but I don’t think the National Post had much to do with it.) Then he decided he wanted to become a member of the British House of Lords, but under British and Canadian law, he could only do that with permission of the Canadian prime minister, who at the time was a Liberal and declined permission. So Black gave up his Canadian citizenship, moved in England, and became Lord Black. Then it turned out he stole $30 million from his shareholders, and now he’s going to go to jail. The point here is the rather breathless way Canadian newspapers and other media covered the story, with far more interest than their American counterparts, despite the fact that it was an American trial. The Globe and Mail, for instance, got up its report of the verdict far before the Times did. And I don’t think I’m crazy to see some amount of glee in the Globe’s coverage.
2. Page One in the Globe yesterday was the news that the Top Mountie Won’t Wear Uniform. PM Stephen Harper (a Conservative with a minority government) appointed a man to head the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who didn’t come from the ranks; he’s a lawyer, not a cop. As an American, I just don’t see the problem. In fact, I think it’s probably a good thing not to have a police veteran be in charge of the national police, because it suggest there may be fewer abuses of power. While many FBI directors have been former G-men, certainly not all of them have, and I don’t think there’d be any expectation that they would be. But Canadians seem really upset about it.
3. Finally, there’s region. In an important article from 1969, Canadian historian JMS Careless (a great name for an academic if ever there was one) posited three “limited identities”–that is, sub-identities below the shared identity “Canadian.” They were: gender, class, religion, and region. (Um, I think. I can’t remember if it was religion or race, and now I can’t get into the Duke library system to find the article and check.) Region, you say? That’s kind of weird. Very not-American. When I first got here, the press, especially here in Nova Scotia, was all atwitter about the Atlantic Accords. In short and very simplified form, the story is this. There’s something called “equalization here,” where “have not” provinces–currently the six poorest of the 10 provinces–get cash from the Federal Government, so that they can offer the same level of services as the the richer, “have” provinces even though their tax revenues are lower. Recently, oil and natural gas has has been found in the waters off the Atlantic provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A deal called the Atlantic Accords was struck a few years ago which said that extraction revenue wouldn’t be “clawed back” by the Federal Government, that is, that they wouldn’t be counted against the provinces in determination of their equalization payments. Except in this year’s budget, Stephen Harper reneged on the Accords and took basically took away a lot of the equalization payments. (Like I said, this is very over-simplified.) So that’s one way to think about region–Atlantic Canada always feeling like they got the short end of the confederation stick, Central Canada, always feeling like they subsidize everyone else, and the West feeling ignored.But here’s a better way to think about it: on Wednesday, the Polaris Prize short list was announced. It’s a prize for the best album released in Canada, any genre, any sales, any label. Take a look at these comments on the CBC Radio 3 blog. Note the complaints: where’s the West? why so many Central Canadian bands? Sure some of it is what Americans expect–Anglophone vs. Francophone–but it’s much more than that, and regionalism goes much deeper.

-jacob