Conducted Spring 1975
From Canada Today/D’Aujourd’hui, 7 (January–February 1976): 3–4. Canada Today was an eight-page brochure put out by the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., for an American readership. The issue Canadian Voices was a humorous look at the Canadian psyche and its relation to the United States through quotations from well-known Canadians such as Frye, Mordecai Richler, and Mel Hurtig. In introducing Frye’s section, the editors commented that “in an interview last spring, he talked about a variety of things and, most particularly, about the ways in which Canadians and Americans are not alike.” The interview took place while Frye was living in the United States; he spent the academic year of 1974–75 at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. The italicized headings presumably represent topics introduced by the unnamed interviewer.
Points Of Difference
Every once in a while [a Canadian in the U.S.] realizes he is in a foreign country. When I was first faced with the question, I thought: my religious affinities at the moment are the United Church of Canada, and my political affinities at the moment are CCF.1 These were two categories I could never translate into American terms. The boundary has a reality in the Canadian mind of which the American has no conception. In Canada you hear the phrase “across the line” to describe America. I’ve never heard an American say, “across the line.”
I think the greatest source of misunderstanding by Americans is the assumption that the two countries are essentially the same—that there have not been enough differences in historical cultural development to make Canadians a separate people. The two countries have had different rhythms of aggressiveness. There has been a great deal of aggressive violence in American history, whereas the violence in Canadian history has been imposed from the top—the military conquest of French Canada, the Western police. In Canada, it has never taken the form of the elimination of dissident elements. Canada has managed to avoid things like Indian wars.
The United States became articulate in the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, and it’s had a fixation on the eighteenth century ever since. The Constitution begins by saying, “We hold these facts to be self-evident.” Canada is a country where nothing has been self-evident and it didn’t have an eighteenth century at all. The English and the French spent the eighteenth century battering down each other’s forts. Canada took shape in the Baroque, aggressive seventeenth century and took new shape in the Romantic, aggressive nineteenth.
I often run into people from the U.S. who come to Canada and who haven’t the remotest notion of the kind of unconscious arrogance they have as people among colonials. I have often said Canada is the only real colony left in the world. It is now an American colony.
The Young
American students are much more frank in talking about their personal problems. Americans also ask me about my own personal views or beliefs—political or religious beliefs—much more freely. Canadians are much shyer and more reserved. I have a great affection for American students, but young people who have been conditioned from infancy as citizens of a great world power are not the same people as young Canadians.
Population
I think that people think in terms of empty space in Canada, but the empty space is not so easy to fill up. The people who come to Canada mostly head for Montreal and Toronto. The increase in population is going to be substantially in the very places that don’t need it. The whole fantasy about the great open spaces—that there ought to be a hundred million people here—just doesn’t fit the facts of twentieth century life. Even if we got fifty million, the U.S. would have five hundred million. Canada will always be a small country.
The conception of Canada as a country of ironies—for example, Margaret Atwood’s concept of the loser as hero—does identify a certain quality of Canadian writing that is worth looking at. Mackenzie King was a loser, but he was the incarnation of the kind of compromise that you have to keep making to hold the country together … If Canada had not been able to compromise, it would never have been Canada.
The Significance of Technology
Two things, the airplane and television, are beginning to make sense of the country. Now it is possible for Canadians to become simultaneously conscious of the rest of the country in a way that was never possible before. It makes for a considerable quieting down of the separatism which has been such an active movement in every part of the country.
Economic Domination
I suppose that almost every industry in Canada is a subsidiary of an American industry, so that the great masses of the working population are in effect American employees. I don’t suppose there is a great difference in working in a refinery in Canada or one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But I think the higher up you go, the more you are aware that the real orders come from somewhere else, and there comes a point at which that becomes very oppressive.
Nationalism
I have much more sympathy with economic nationalism than I have with cultural nationalism, which seems to be a substitute activity. I don’t think the Canadian writer is threatened; that’s why I think the question of cultural domination is partly phony. It’s a matter of understanding the potential of your own environment.
The Canadian Radio-Television Commission
I sat on the CRTC for some years, and the CRTC is really putting up a very gallant fight to keep control of our communication systems, so they won’t become just a branch of NBC and CBS. You know when all the magazine business, all the book business, all the movie business, and so forth have already been sold, it’s a pretty desperate, last ditch struggle.