Reviews for The Canadians

The average rating for The Canadians based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-18 00:00:00 Marco Debe The Canadians live in one of the most beautiful, most prosperous, most peaceful, and safest countries on earth; and yet, paradoxically - and perhaps in part because of Canada's beauty, prosperity, peacefulness, and safety - Canadians and the contributions they make to the world are often overlooked. Within the world community, Canada sometimes seems like the party guest who is so polite and self-effacing that he or she is found "boring." How sad, and how short-sighted. Andrew Malcolm's The Canadians can do much to educate the reader, particularly the non-Canadian reader, regarding this complex and vitally important North American democracy. Malcolm, who was born in the U.S.A. of Canadian parents, served for years as the Toronto bureau chief for The New York Times; and he seems to have U.S. readers firmly in mind as he sets forth this survey of Canadian life, focusing in successive chapters on Canada's geography, people, and economy. A particularly informative chapter looks at relations between Canada and the United States of America. The two nations share a 5,525-mile border (the world's longest unfortified international boundary); and because the U.S.A. has ten times Canada's population, Canadians are arguably more aware than Americans of the presence and importance of their neighbor (or neighbour). In the words of one Canadian historian cited by Malcolm, "Americans…are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well-informed about the United States" (p. 165). And yes, in case you're wondering, Malcolm does include Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's well-known statement to Americans regarding Canada's proximity to the U.S.A.: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even-tempered is the beast, if I may call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt" (p. 165). Canada, the second-largest country on earth, is defined in large part by its geographic vastness - dimensions of size that may be difficult for Americans to understand fully, even given the considerable size of the U.S.A. Malcolm takes pains to convey the enormous size of Canada: At its widest point…the single province of Quebec stretches as far as from New York City to Omaha. It takes thirty-six solid hours of driving to move from Toronto to the next large Canadian city to the west, Winnipeg. Eight American states touch the Great Lakes across from one single province, Ontario, which continues eastward almost to Vermont….There is room for four Great Britains in British Columbia and almost three Frances in Quebec. Nearly three Japans would fit inside Ontario, which has fewer people than Tokyo. And Canada's two northern territories…are by themselves larger than West Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Egypt, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and all the New England and Middle Atlantic states put together. (p. 11). A further complicating factor behind that geographic vastness is that the vast majority of Canada's people live in the more temperate southern part of the country, close to the U.S. border; every major Canadian city except Edmonton is within 100 miles of the U.S.A. After pointing out Canada's "4 million square miles of land and water stretching far beyond the average citizen's scale of belief. East to west, it spans 4,545 miles and one quarter of the world's time zones", Malcolm adds that "Scattered across this area like a few specks of pepper on a huge freezer-room floor are the people, huddling together along the porous border with the United States" (p. 5). As he journeys to Canada's far north and interviews residents of the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories (at the time of this book's first publication in 1982, the First Nations-administered territory of Nunavut had not yet been established), Malcolm reflects ironically on how often the residents of comfortable Toronto suburbs like Mississauga and Don Mills ask him why he would bother to waste his time going way up there. A final, impressionistic chapter titled "My Canada" sets forth well Malcolm's own impressions regarding this great northern land. When Malcolm wrote this book in 1982, it had been just six years since René Lévesque's Parti Québécois (P.Q.), with its calls for Québécois independence from Canada, won Quebec's 1976 provincial election and formed the government of the province. Accordingly, Malcolm focuses perceptively on the causes and possible consequences of the Québécois independence movement: The [P.Q.] government…enacted controversial language laws that sought to free French speakers from the demeaning linguistic discrimination of the minority English speakers, or Anglophones, who dominated decision making [in Quebec] for two centuries….The linguistic policy decisions, which reached right down to changing 'Stop' signs to read 'Arrêt,' made sense on a PQ priority list. These are the Francophones, who until recent times could be rudely ordered by Anglophones to 'speak white' if they tried to converse in French on a Toronto streetcar. But the Quebec party has not had to try to convince an English-speaking couple in Calgary that the husband's proposed assignment to Montreal is, in fact, a promotion when for several years it meant that their children had to start, cold turkey, in French in a Quebec school…and when, for the first time in their lives, both husband and wife will have that unsettled, surrounded feeling of being a member of an obvious but silent minority. (p. 301) I first read The Canadians while preparing for a first visit to Canada, many years ago. Since then, I have travelled in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, and hope someday to visit all of Canada's other provinces and territories. One of my chief impressions as an American - aside from the unfailing courtesy of the people, the beauty of the landscape, the excellence of Québécois food and Ontarian or B.C. wine - has been of Canada's safety. One can walk alone, late at night, in any Canadian city and feel absolutely safe. An ethic of peaceful cooperation prevails in Canada, in contrast with the boastful and self-centered individualism, the ethic of competition for its own sake, the unstated but ever-present threat of violence, that I see at work too often in my own country. In my opinion, we Americans have a lot to learn from our friends to the north. On election night in November of 2016, when the unconventional presidential campaign of businessman Donald Trump ended in his unexpected election as president, the Immigration Canada website crashed, because it was being accessed by so many shocked and disheartened Americans who found themselves thinking that perhaps Trump's victory meant it was time for them to move to Canada. And indeed, Americans have sought refuge in Canada before - pro-British Loyalists during the American Revolution, African Americans escaping from slavery throughout the pre-Civil War era, draft resisters from the Vietnam War era. But Canada is much, much more than a safety valve for the excesses of American democracy; it is a great nation that deserves to be regarded and appreciated in its own terms. For the American reader who wants to learn more about the beautiful complexity that is Canada, Andrew Malcolm's The Canadians is a good place to start.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-08 00:00:00 Michael Sparacio I am always interested in books about how Canadians and Americans are different, so I felt like I should throw this one in there, even though it is pretty old and out of date at this point. I found it a year ago on a shelf at a lake house that I rented with some friends (in America). I flipped through it and decided to get it at the library to finish it up. It was written in the 80s, and a puzzlingly large chunk of it is about American investment in Canadian companies and vice versa. With lots of really specific detail about corporate takeovers and stuff. It was a very long, boring chapter...and it is all completely irrelevant now because NAFTA didn't arrive until the 90s. I didn't exactly read that one word for word. I liked the other chapters better. I enjoyed the little biographical vignettes, and I liked the author's reminiscences about his childhood and his family in Ontario. He is a little too fascinated by the far north, I think, which works against some parts of Canada. He must have made at least a half dozen trips to the Yukon and other extreme northern places, so they come up a lot, while the Maritimes are almost completely absent. It seems like he's maybe never been there. I think if you are going to write a book about "The Canadians" you kind of have to at least make an appearance in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia. At least for a sense of completeness. And honestly, Quebec wasn't in there much either. The Yukon came up more than Quebec. It was like the guy decided to write a whole book about what Canadians are like, but without interviewing anyone beyond people he had already met. Mainly what I was thinking while reading this was that someone else needs to write a book like this now, because so much has changed. The 80s doesn't seem that far away, but 30 years is a long time.