@Chris: Thanks! And re: “peace, welfare, and good gov’t” in the Constitution Act of 1791 – yes, the term goes back considerably earlier than Confederation. I think Saul’s argument was that changing “welfare” to “order” happened with the BNA Act.

Like you I’m sympathetic to Saul’s politics. But he’s saying things that aren’t true, and being snooty about it. Moreover, when people criticise him (like Jonathan Kay in the Post) he derides them as witless, mean, and ignorant.

If Saul knew what he was talking about he would not have written this book.

I didn’t read Saul’s book, but the reviews instilled the same attitude in me: it’s a fascinating thesis that sticks in your head, but I’m pretty sure it’s hogwash. My previous exposure to Saul, and your example above with the US Constitutional language, reinforce my skepticism: as much as I want to like Saul, his arguments have always struck me as pretty half-baked and incoherent, and when reading his stuff I often wonder if he has any idea what he’s talking about.

The way I prefer to interpret this book is that Saul is engaged in conscious myth-building. His alternate history of Canada–a secret origin story, if you will–might not be provable or true, but it could offer a kind of usable past, a national mythology that would be more invigorating and not a lot less plausible than the one we’ve currently stitched together around hockey, Tim Horton’s, and miscellaneous insecurities.

Here I have to differ with you. Even before moving here, I was always struck by the confidence with which Canadians of my acquaintance would make pronouncements about the differences between the US and Canada (e.g. the “salad bowl vs. melting pot” multimulti line). The uniformity of these pronouncements led me to believe that these sentiments had been explicitly made a part of the Canadian primary school curriculum, and so they were — if that’s not “conscious myth-building”, I don’t know what is.

I should mention how obnoxious these pronouncements are. I’m about ten times as anti-American as most Canadians I know, but it’s irritating to be told what the problem is with the country I grew up in by people who get it so wrong with such confidence. In my experience, attitudes toward assimilation aren’t tremendously different in the two countries: many cities in each country are refreshingly cosmopolitan and pluralistic, and many other regions are toxically xenophobic, even if the Canadians tend to be a little more polite about how this gets expressed. The biggest difference I would choose tpo focus on is that the racism that infects the US is not primarily assimilationist, but eliminationist, which is much worse. (This is of course a drastic generalization, but the actual complexity of the differences is another casualty of such myths as “the salad bowl and the melting pot”.)

My point is that as much as I love Canadians, the point where its people most often falter in their otherwise impeccable courtesy and affability is caused by their being over-, not under-, burdened with “conscious myth-building”. This is, IMO, a tragic Canadian afflication: the desperate need to spin stories about who they are in terms that reduce the complexities of history to caricature. The best medicine I can think to prescribe is regular exposure to comparative national statistics on health, wealth, security, equality, and happiness: what identity does the country need other than “whatever we’re all about, it works pretty damn well”?

It’s interesting to contrast the metis argument with something like Fernandez-Armesto’s (at least in his World textbook) argument (which I found surprisingly convincing) that what happens in the Americas is “creolization”: the development of a generation of colonial-born citizens who lacked a strong cultural identification with the homeland but nonetheless shared the culture of the Enlightenment.

The U.S. gets slammed by the Canadian left because the U.S. is such a likely target. Sure there’s the uhhh socio-cultural differences, but we like big-box stores too. They like to bomb other countries, but they don’t bomb us, even though we’re an easy target. We’re their biggest trading partner, when you go to the mattresses, nobody’s earning. A big deal is made over how much of Canada is really owned by the U.S., but not enough complaint is made over how much of Canada is really owned by the rest of the world.

The US-Europe comparison is interesting because their populations are pretty well equal.

I believe _everything_ I read [it helps to only read selectively], until I read something else disputes it, so that whittles it down to five!