Canadian Identity - Basic Models

Basic Models

In defining a Canadian identity, five key distinctive characteristics have been emphasized:

1. First, special emphasis is placed upon the bicultural nature of Canada and the important ways in which English-French relations since the 1760s have shaped the Canadian experience.
2. Second, Canada had quite a different historical experience in resisting revolution and republicanism compared to the U.S., leading to less individualism and more support for government activism, such as wheat pools and the health care system.
3. Third, British parliamentary system and the British legal system, augmented by the conservatism associated with the Loyalists and the pre-1960 French Canadians, have given Canada its ongoing collective obsession with "peace, order and good government".
4. Fourth is the social structure of multiple ethnic groups that kept their identities and produced a cultural mosaic rather than a melting pot.
5. Fifth, the influence of geophysical factors (vast area, coldness, northness; St. Lawrence spine) together with the proximity of the United States have produced in the collective Canadian psyche what Northrop Frye has called the garrison mind or siege mentality, and what novelist Margaret Atwood has argued is the Canadian preoccupation with survival. For Herschel Hardin, because of the remarkable hold of the siege mentality and the concern with survival, Canada in its essentials is "a public enterprise country." According to Hardin, the "fundamental mode of Canadian life" has always been, "the un-American mechanism of redistribution as opposed to the mystic American mechanism of market rule." Most Canadians, in other words, whether on the right or left in politics, expect their governments to be actively involved in the economic and social life of the nation.