bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1993) — Fall/Winter 1993 // Automne/Hiver 1993, pp. 39–40
Pledge of Allegiance: The Americanization
of Canada in the Mulroney Years by
Lawrence Martin, McClelland & Stewart,
1993, 296 pp., $29.99.
Reviewed by Norman Hillmer
In 1984 there was a widespread belief that Canadian-American relations were at their lowest state in years, perhaps ever. Prime Minister Trudeau’s Third Option thinking had apparently gone too far, and polls showed that Canadians wanted the two countries to be friends again. Yet four years later, after getting to know Brian Mulroney and despite considerable support for free trade, the pendulum had swung in dramatic — and very Canadian — fashion. The government had cosied up too close to the Americans. Without a healthy distance from the United States, Canadians now seemed to say, there could be no independence.
Lawrence Martin thinks that we were wrong in 1984 and right in 1988. In his thought-provoking account of “the blurring of the border” under Mulroney and the Conservatives, Martin asserts that the Prime Minister and his gang dismantled the essential instruments of national integration and ruthlessly aligned Canada with right wing US policies from drugs and deregulation through tax reform and free trade to film policy and foreign policy. The Tories’ way “was the American way, and if they had to preside over the demise of the Canadian dream — if such a grand description could be used for the civility, compassion, and restraint that Canada stood for — then so be it.”
Only recently it had been very different. Canadian governments down the years, whatever their political stripe, had rejected free market continentalism and developed a tradition of state intervention to offset north-south impulses and “reinforce the unnatural east-west infrastructure that ensured the survival of the country.”
Then came what Martin dismissively calls the “border boys,” men like Derek Burney, Jim Kelleher and Tom d’Aquino, raised within sight of the Canadian-American frontier, unafraid and unaware of the consequences of much more intimate ties with the United States. They were not annexationists, and they were certainly not beyond redemption or some retrospective good sense, but theirs was a key role in putting forward and promoting the American agenda of materialism, individualism and free trade at any cost. The ultimate border boy, of course, was Mulroney himself, whose well-known origins at the knee of Colonel McCormick and subsequent business connections guarantee the most egregious of branch plant mentalities.
Lawrence Martin is too fine a journalist not to give occasional evidence for a second opinion. The trends and forces that he describes, it is clear, are much broader and deeper than any leader or political movement. Moreover, Mulroney did not always support Reagan and Bush on foreign policy, and the Conservative government took strong stands against certain questions such as Arctic sovereignty and acid rain. That Mulroney’s overall approach to Canadian- American relations was conciliatory there can be no doubt, but it seems to have borne fruit in Washington in the form of an upgraded profile and confidence. Martin points out that Mulroney gained entry into the Bush inner circle, “not just by virtue of his skill as a stroker, but also by demonstrating on several occasions to the president that he was a sharp, well-informed interlocutor.” Nor was the Conservative record on culture all negative. And, far from being Americanized under Mulroney, Canadians were more sceptical and fearful of US influences than before. That might have been because of Mulroney, but if so, the Prime Minister, from the Martin point of view, must at least have done one thing correctly.
Balance, however, is not the author’s aim. His distaste for raw, narrow, violent and unintellectual Americanism is all too evident, and he sets out to demolish those who have propelled us in that direction — the Canadian agents of American Empire, the schmoozing, huckstering you-know-who in the lead; Ronald Reagan, dozy, ignorant, but possessing a master plan for an homogenized continent; George Bush, coming North “just a few months after running up the body count in Panama” and invoking his own vision of Manifest Destiny; and their collaborators, the “would-be traitors” who deserted Canada to set up shop in the United States after the Free Trade Agreement went through.
Martin delivers wicked phrase-making and valuable information — a good deal of it based on more than a hundred imperfectly documented) interviews — but never sufficient analysis. There is, crucially, no thoroughgoing discussion of the impact of free trade, Martin arguing that the FTA’s real importance has been psychological. There might be something in this. It may be that Canadians are being put in a mood to accept and chase the American dream. However, the evidence, as for so much else in this book, is slight and largely anecdotal. The canvas of this 1960s version of Lament for a Nation is impressive in scope and reach, but the author does not linger long enough over any one issue to get below the surface.
So much of what makes this book powerful — its very singlemindedness — also makes it in the final analysis less satisfying than it might have been.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1993) — Fall/Winter 1993 // Automne/Hiver 1993, pp. 39–40. Read the rest of this issue →
