Who is the president of the United States?
A) Ralph Nader
B) John Kerry
C) George W. Bush
If you chose A or B, it is likely you are a Democrat with some reality issues. If you answered C, you are correct. And you might be Canadian.
Now, who is the prime minister of Canada?
Though we may know little about that big ol’ country to our north, they know plenty about us. And, naturally, they have formed their own stereotypes.
Canadians watched our November election, holding their collective breath until the outcome. A group of students watched the election in a conference room at the University of Toronto campus on a projection screen.
“Canadians were having debates, too,” says Matthew Farish, an instructor in the American Studies department with the University of Toronto.
A ’99 Mazda 626 can get through Pennsylvania and New York to Toronto in less time than it takes to drive straight west on I-80 to Chicago. The U.S. border with Canada is the longest unprotected border in the world — including the Alaska portion, it stretches 5,524 miles — but this may be the first time you’ve ever read that the prime minister of Canada is Paul Martin.
But you can be sure Canadians know who we elected last November.
“It’s because we’re smaller,” says Bryan Ashton, the director of tourism for Toronto. “Your shadow is cast broader, so we will be more savvy. You have to be savvy because Americans think it’s arrogant for Canadians to think they have higher values or more tolerance.”
Flags line the front of a bank on Yonge Street. The American flag is often seen flying alongside the Canadian flag in Toronto.
Well, that depends on your definition of tolerance. America calls itself a melting pot, a place where cultures from around the world can mingle and mix to form one new culture. Canada calls itself a mosaic, Ashton says, a country to which immigrants can move and retain their cultural identity.
But, he says, that description is a little backward. Ethnic groups in America maintain their own cultures in the Chinatowns, the Little Italys, the Little Havanas. But wander the streets of Toronto, and you’ll notice the city is not gerrymandered according to culture.
The Imperial Pub is across the street from our hotel in downtown Toronto. A black man and a white woman play pool. About a dozen white and Asian men nurse their beers and make toasts every four minutes. America’s interracial couples can’t compare to Toronto’s. Hispanic and Asian, white and Asian, black and Hispanic — interracial couples seem to be more common than same-race ones.
Canada certainly doesn’t look any different from America. The radio stations play Usher, the newspapers scream “Iraq!” and the televisions show a Canadian version of MTV.
Because the two countries are so much alike, there’s a lot of conflict, Ashton says, not on an individual level, but on a political level.
Canada certainly doesn’t look any different from America. The radio stations play Usher, the newspapers scream “Iraq!” and the televisions show a Canadian version of MTV.
“Canadian politics is liberal,” he says. “It’s probably issued around tolerance. When you look at a Republican right-wing movement in the U.S., it seems strange and odd to us.”
One University of Toronto student went so far to say that if the election had been held in Canada, a man who received only about 1 percent of the vote would have emerged victorious. “Most people here would have voted for Ralph Nader,” says Thom Pearson, a fourth-year sociology and political science student.
Farish acknowledges that Nader would have received more support in Canada, but, “Here, Kerry would have won,” he says. The Liberal Party of Canada is the centrist party and the equivalent to the liberal Democratic Party in America. They have no equivalent to the United States’ Republican Party.
But Ashton disagrees, saying those in smaller Canadian towns would see it differently. There, people tend to hold more conservative values, and Bush’s “mistakes are seen by people as ‘He’s one of us. He thinks like us,’” he says.
Fiona Clarke, a first-year sciences major at the University of Toronto, says she was happy with the turnout of the election. “I would have voted for Bush because I agree with his values. Not terrorism,” she specifies, “but his values on abortion.”
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