Canadians and the Discourse of "Anti-Americanism"

According to the Canadian historian W.L. Morton, "the intimacy of the relations [between Canada and the U.S.] and the disparity of power between the two states make it inevitable that American indifference and power will provoke Canadian resentment from time to time." This resentment - if that’s the correct term for this pattern of resistance - routinely shows up in discourses of Canadian identity, from Margaret Atwood’s Survival and Pierre Berton’s Why We Act Like Canadians to Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans and Molson Breweries’ recent "I Am Canadian" advertising campaign. Canadians’ insistence on cultural difference, and in particular their cultural protectionism, are frequently portrayed, and widely accepted, as nothing more than "anti-Americanism." It is true that, as Margaret Atwood points out, Canadians can be "like itchy underwear" on the topic of Canadian difference, and are frequently guilty of portraying their American neighbours in ways that are sometimes "manifestly unfair, Sam." However, this paper proposes that such apparent "American-bashing" is actually something quite different and much more complex. The answer to what provokes such attitudes lies in the process of cultural identification itself, and in particular that which is typical of marginalised cultures. Cultural theorist John Fiske argues that "all social allegiances have not only a sense of with whom but also of against whom" and Fiske demonstrates the importance of a "sense of oppositionality" to a culture’s self-definition. This paper analyses this pattern of "oppositionality" in a variety of significant discourses of Canadian identity in order to demonstrate that what looks like "anti-Americanism" is something quite other; and that Canadian self-interest is not any more "anti-American" than American self-interest is "anti-Canadian." It is simply that, as Atwood shrewdly points out, "a preoccupation with one’s survival is necessarily also a preoccupation with the obstacles to that survival."

I teach rhetoric and communication at the University of Saskatchewan, where I currently occupy the D.K. Seaman Chair in Professional and Technical Communication in the College of Engineering. I am also the founding Academic Director of the Ron & Jane Graham Centre for the Study of Communication, for which I developed all programming and designed a unique Professional Communication Option. I obtained a PhD in rhetoric (speech) from the University of Washington in Seattle, and hold degrees in English language and literature from McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, and St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, NS. My interest in Canadian-American difference in discussions of Canadian identity stems partly from the three years I spent in the U.S., where I wrote a dissertation on Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction. Since returning to Canada in 1992, I have continued to study the way Canadians talk about what it means to be Canadian, and have produced a series Goodof papers that I plan to gather into a single volume. I have written nine books on various communication-related subjects, including a collection of Canadian essays on language issues, soon to be released in its second edition. My other research interests include the rhetoric of popular culture, professional communication, and the rhetorical theories of Northrop Frye. In addition to this paper (soon to appear as a chapter in a book on Canadian-American relations), recent papers include ‘Practical Sense and Social Participation: Northrop Frye on the Language of Rhetoric,’ ‘Canadian Documentary Realism and the Dynamics of Identity in Degrassi Junior High,’ and ‘A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness: Crime-Scene Profiling as Burkean Analysis.’

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