Neglectful Disrespect

The unkindest remark about Canada in this book is right in the title. Readers keen to crank their nationalistic dander up another notch should skip to page 85. That is where the excerpts from Jonah Goldberg’s article “Bomb Canada: The Case for War” appear.

“Despite Canada’s self-delusions,” Goldberg writes, “it is, quite simply, not a serious country anymore. It is a northern Puerto Rico, with an EU sensibility.”

And there is plenty more to offend where that came from. However, this article, which appeared after 9/11 in the right-wing National Review, is a deliberate provocation: a Swiftian “Modest Proposal” seeking to make the point—however heavy-handedly—that Canada should spend more on defence.

Very little of the rest of Chantal Allan’s material is as piquant.

The best of it is tart, intelligent and sometimes chauvinistic—but hardly “unkind.” Although it makes for occasionally amusing reading, it is not clear why she went to the trouble of compiling it. As Allan admits herself, it was hard work finding enough critical material in 200 years of ebullient, generally responsible coverage from south of the border: “Compare the sheer number of words thrown about during a daily news cycle, and it’s apparent that the amount of anti-Canadianism in the American media is miniscule,” she writes.

In fact, this project began as a master’s thesis for Allan and someone then thought a book version might appeal to Canada’s weird masochism—a masochism the Los Angeles Times wrote about in a 2002 editorial, quoted in Allan’s book: “As the physically larger and less populated half of North America, Canada has long displayed a penchant for receiving slights and feeling underappreciated, even abused.”

Allan’s selection, while not especially abusive, does serve as a potted 150-year history of U.S.-Canadian disagreements, starting with Canada’s version of political independence from Britain. An 1867 Chicago Tribune editorial bursts with brash disdain for the post-Confederation monarchy: republicanism is so “vastly superior,” crows the paper, that “Canada can never hope to be anything more than she now is—a helpless, hopeless, aimless dependent, without a present and without a future, other than a blank in history.”

And on we speed, with Allan’s sampling of American comment on the free trade talks of the early 1900s, disagreements over Cuba, NORAD, selling wheat to the Soviet Union, right up to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are, however, some mystifying gaps. For example, there is not a single citation from any American media during the whole of the Second World War. And, oddly, some of the hottest issues apparently failed to inspire American poison pens. In 1965, when the Quebec students’ union considered helping American draft dodgers evade military service in Vietnam, the U.S. coverage, says Allan, was “factual and didn’t take sides. There were no comments deriding Canada for becoming a haven for the resisters and deserters.”

Really? Well, why not?

This book does not provide much analysis, unfortunately, or take into account—as context—the reams of fair and balanced coverage American reporters have produced over the years. Allan further draws attention to the thinness of her material by ending her chapters with ominous foreboding: “and the situation would get worse” or “and this time, there would be a nasty new tone in the Canada bashing.” The trouble is she fails to deliver much that is truly nasty.

In the last chapter, “Hitting Below the Belt: 2001 Onward,” Allan suddenly veers away from quoting venerable newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and turns instead to the ranters on Fox News, who generally preach to the right-wing choir. Allan may have been forced to lower the bar of her citations because by then, the big mainstream papers had stopped paying much attention to Canada.

The era of American newspapers keeping full-time correspondents in Canada ended in 2007, when the Washington Post closed its Toronto bureau—the last in a whole string of major U.S. newspapers to shut up shop in Canada.

(However, this past summer, the Wall Street Journal bucked the trend and actually opened a bureau in Toronto as part of its determination—under its new owner Rupert Murdoch—to compete with London’s Financial Times in providing first-rate global financial coverage.)

Anthony DePalma, who was the penultimate correspondent for the New York Times in Toronto, is the 2009 winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for his journalistic contribution to inter-American understanding. (He was also a correspondent for the Times in Mexico City.) Since the Toronto bureau closed, he writes to this reviewer, there have been few, if any, Canadian pieces on the New York Times front page.

“That does not imply however that there have been more pieces inside [the paper],” he says. “No, the competition for that space is just as intense. And Canada often is pushed aside. What we have now is ‘parachute journalism’ from our closest and in many ways—strategic, economic and social—most important ally. The problem with parachute journalism is that events seem to pop out of nowhere. There’s no context, no lead up, no follow through … It makes events north of the border seems as erratic and unpredictable as those that occur in Yemen or the massacre in the Philippines.”

In 2000 I left the CBC, where I had worked as a journalist for 20 years, to take a reporting job with CBS News. It was a shock, leaping from the decorous cocoon of Canadian public broadcasting into the huge, rowdy, competitive sea of big-time American journalism. It convinced me that America is not just a country. It’s a universe: a deeply complex superpower that generates more domestic news every day than there are pages and airwaves to contain it. It is also a superpower currently at war, with a steady stream of life and death news pouring in from both fighting fronts. This is what Canada—peaceful, functional, cooperative Canada—is up against. Sadly, it loses.

Bernard Simon, Toronto correspondent for the Financial Times of London—and one of the few full-time foreign correspondents left in Canada—tells me in an email comment that there is another factor: the rise of the East.

“It’s harder than ever now to sell stories about Canada to the news desk because its relative position in the world has declined,” he writes. “Stories the paper would have taken ten years ago are no longer interesting because they are competing with stories on India and China.”

All over the world, the media business is in turmoil. News organizations—both public and private—are groping for a financial and distribution model for our brave new internet/blogging/mobile/Kindle world. In this environment, more, and more thorough, American reporting on Canadian affairs looks unlikely.

It is a net loss for America, says DePalma. “Most Americans know that Canadians are fighting alongside us in Afghanistan … But there is a kind of neglectful disrespect, a big brother–little brother kind of interaction … The impact of this neglect goes both ways. Right now, in the midst of [America’s] critical healthcare debate, there is a crying need for sharp-eyed reporting about the reality of a single-payer system. There is so much misinformation that this kind of accountability journalism would truly be helpful. But it’s not there. In its place is barroom chatter that wouldn’t recognize facts if they walked through the door … We in the U.S. are the poorer for it.”

So are we, in Canada. In retrospect, the century and a half of reporting represented in Allan’s book—occasional unkind remarks and all—may have been as good as it gets.