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What Americans Get Wrong about Canada

Our closest neighbour has never really understood us

Twenty-eight-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson was in what he called “an immigrant train” travelling from New York to California. He was hurrying to meet his lover in San Francisco. “This is one of the lessons of travel,” he writes in his breathless account of the journey, Across the Plains, “that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.”

On that same page, Stevenson mentions Canada and Canadians among his fellow passengers, which reminds the American reader that Canadians are the strangers next door. But though it is near and easily accessible—no visa required, no special documentation, unlike the burden of red tape for anyone driving across the Mexican border—Canada is a blur to most Americans.

“If there’s a country that understands America, it’s us,” Canada’s foreign minister said early in 2025, when the American president was loudly threatening to annex Canada and make it the fifty-first state. But the reverse is not the case. If they think of Canada at all, Americans tend to see it as Samuel Johnson saw it in 1756, when he denounced it as “Canada, a cold uncomfortable uninviting region, from which nothing but furs and fish were to be had, and where the new inhabitants could only pass a laborious and necessitous life.”

And there are those who dismiss Canada as “America’s Hat”—a big fur hat sitting askew on top of the incurious noggin of the United States, indistinct and bulky and baffling. Apart from iconic poster views of snowfields, or rocky mountains, great plains, tundra, or grasslands, Canada’s landscape is too vast to sum up, its population without an identifiable face, its politics so nebulous and British in form as to be undefinable, its economy a mystery, its weather punitive, as in another American jibe, “Canada has two seasons—winter and August.”

Being Canadian is a 2015 documentary more or less seriously wondering whether Canada (like Malawi and Singapore and other tiny bewildered and conflicted republics) has anything resembling a national identity. In the film, Canada’s love-hate relationship with the US is discussed by numerous manic, gifted, and successful Canadian comedians, who agree it’s a futile search, concluding, “Canada is like an attention-seeking younger brother.”

The question of national identity was answered by Mordecai Richler, quoting another Canadian writer, Morley Callaghan: “Forget all about the words ‘identity’ and ‘culture,’ just never mention them. Seek only excellence and in good time people all over the world will ask about Canadians.” And yet this query—“Canadian identity: Do we actually have one, and, if so, what is it?”—still perturbs the Canadian mind.

Richler claimed that, in spite of the divisive language question and much else, Anglo Canada and Quebec were united in one significant trait: their bad taste. A character in his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here (1983) describes Canada as “not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.” Richler spent many years as an expatriate, and his foreign travel gave him a helpful perspective, turning him into an explainer and interpreter of Canada, believing, as he once said—and this might have the merit of being true—that the most positive aspects of Canada were invisible to non-Canadians.

Canada’s total population—41 million—is about the same as California’s. It’s also roughly the population of Tokyo, and it is actually smaller than the monstrous agglomeration in the sprawl of metro Jakarta, Indonesia (42 million), now called a “megacity.” Canada’s birthrate is in decline, its “ultra-low fertility rate,” is on par with Japan’s and Switzerland’s. Canada’s land mass (almost 4 million square miles) is greater than China and a bit larger than the US.

Canada seems to me, in many respects, like a vast archipelago, a country of far-flung urban islands, as well as actual islands and settlements, like atolls, and remote villages, like islets, each with its own peculiar weather and character and lingo, proud in its own way, and with its own distinct perimeter, surrounded by either water or forest or tundra or prairie, separated by featureless emptiness or inspissated gloom.

But to know this is to know very little.

Canadians assert, often derisively, that Canada is not the US and, when pressed, define themselves by insisting at the outset that they are not Americans. For some Canadians—perhaps many—their aggrieved anti-Americanism inspires Canadian nationalism, fuelling the boast that they do things differently in Canada. There’s some truth in the boast. In certain matters, Canadians manage........

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