There are people for whom the threat of Americanization apparently looms over the Canadian collective consciousness like a cultural guillotine. As a major preoccupation of Canadian studies of political culture, comparisons of Canadian culture to that of the United States seem at once natural and myopic. As two of the most similar countries in the world, it is not always clear whether the comparison allows for important insights into some aspect of what it means to be Canadian or instead obscures it entirely. A significant subset of commentary on Americanization is alarmist: the influence of the United States is viewed as an existential threat in the realm of public policy for protectionist lobby groups such as the Council of Canadians, or is routinely employed as a useful cudgel for politicians against opponents’ ideas.
In Red, White and Kind of Blue? The Conservatives and the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture, David Schneiderman makes a...
Emmett Macfarlane is a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role (UBC Press, 2013) and the editor of the forthcoming book Constitutional Amendment in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016).
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