Canadian rhapsody: The Great White North's unlikely progressivism By Jeet Heer, Boston Globe Ideas (July 13, 2003). VISITING TORONTO RECENTLY, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida extolled Canada for resembling the United States. ''If I were blindfolded and landed in Toronto and didn't have to go through customs, I wouldn't know I was in a foreign country,'' Bush noted. Evidently, the governor hasn't been paying attention to the press coverage Canada has recently been getting in the United States, which has focused on how the two nations are rapidly diverging politically and culturally. Whereas the United States has been moving to the right over the last few years, Canada has become increasingly progressive, especially on social issues. Earlier this year, two-thirds of Canadians supported Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien's decision to sit out the Iraq war. And polls show that roughly 55 to 60 percent are lining up behind the governing Liberal Party's push to pass federal laws legalizing same-sex marriage and relaxing marijuana restrictions. To the chagrin of US drug czar John Walters, some Canadian localities are going even further: Vancouver, for example, plans to open up North America's first police-free ''safe injection sites'' where heroin addicts can inject themselves using free, clean needles under the supervision of a nurse. Because Canada is seeing as going against the grain of trends of its southern neighbour, it is getting some startling coverage in the United States. According to the Washington Post, Canada has become the land of "peaceniks, pot and people of the same sex exchanging wedding vows." Similar accounts of a northern "hippy nation" have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. To American conservatives, Canada is going to pot in more ways than one. The right-wing political columnist Pat Buchanan denounced America's largest trading partner as ''Soviet Canuckistan.'' But to some American leftists, Canada is a progressive mecca. The superiority of Canada, with its generous social welfare programs and comparatively low rate of gun violence (despite widespread gun ownership), formed the subtext of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning film ''Bowling for Columbine.'' Ralph Nader, in a mildly goofy 1992 book called ''Canada Firsts,'' extolled worthy Canadian achievements from universal health care to the ''first rotary snowplow and snowblower.'' Yet for those who live in Canada, the idea that it is some kind of progressive paradise seems not quite right, like looking at a portrait that is painted realisticly but somehow missing a crucial aspect of the sitter's personality. The truth is, for most of its history, Canada has been a much more conservative nation than the United States-if conservatism is associated with the maintenance of social order and moderation. What's more, in adopting liberal laws in recent years, many Canadians thought they were simply following a path pioneered by their Yankee neighbors, only to find their country denounced as anti-American. Canada does in fact have a very different political tradition in the United States, but the differences between the two countries transcend the simple-minded spectrum that divides the world into left and right. For Seymour Martin Lipset, the dean of comparative political scientists, the differences date back to 1776. ''The United States is the country of the revolution, Canada of the counterrevolution,'' Lipset noted in ''Continental Divide,'' a 1990 study of the two countries. According to Lipset, the American revolution imprinted the United States with a ''classically liberal'' tradition that emphasized ''distrust of the state, egalitarianism, and populism-reinforced by a voluntaristic and congregational religious tradition.'' Canada, by contrast, was ''Tory and conservative in the British and European sense-accepting of the need for a strong state, for respect for authority, for deference-and endorsed by hierarchically organized religions that supported and were supported by the state.'' The differences between the two countries are captured in their founding documents. As Canadian textbooks often note, Canadian politicians deliberately avoided the eloquence found in the Declaration of Independence, which ringingly celebrates ''life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'' Instead, Canada's much more prosaic bedrock document, the British North America Act of 1867, promises ''peace, order, and good government.'' Paradoxically, however, Canada's Tory inheritance made it easier for a welfare state to develop in the mid-20th century. Whereas American progressives have always had to fight against their country's distrust of big government, Canadian reformers worked within a polity that extolled the centralized state. Canadians achieved universal health care in 1968. As the novelist Robertson Davies once quipped, Canada, which still retains Elizabeth II as its queen, was a contradictory beast: ''a socialist monarchy.'' The phrase ''Red Tory,'' devised by political scientists in the 1960s, captured the curious fact that members of Canada's putatively right-wing party (the Progressive Conservatives) were sometimes willing to borrow ideas and policies from the left. Among Canadian intellectuals as well, there has been a strong tendency to combine socialist-style economic policies with an enthusiasm for traditional elite culture. This Red Tory tendency has no real parallels in the United States, although a few eccentric figures such as the diplomat George Kennan and the novelist Norman Mailer have flirted with such ideas. In a recent interview, Mailer called for the creation of a "Left-Conservative" political program which would involve thinking "in the style of Karl Marx in order to to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." In the U.S., Mailer's politics always seemed quirky and odd, but if he were a Canadian he could have hooked up with a host of figures ranging from the philosopher George Grant to the political strategist Dalton Camp. As the recent strong showing by David Orchard in the Progressive Conservative leadership campaign demonstrates, the Red Tory tradition is a still a force to reckon with in Canadian politics. Despite its stronger social safety net, midcentury Canada remained culturally a much more conservative country than its neighbor to the south. In many parts of the country, notably in predominately Catholic Quebec, the education system was controlled by various tradition-minded religious authorities. As late as 1946 the Canadian government banned the importation of books by Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Zola, and James Joyce because of their supposedly obscene content. But Pierre Trudeau, the hip prime minister who governed from 1968 to 1984 (except for a 9-month interim period), embodied the new libertarianism of his era. Trudeau rescinded sodomy laws in the late 1960s and eased rules governing access to abortion, but his most far-reaching achievement was enshrining a Charter of Rights and Freedoms within the Canadian Constitution in 1982. Deferential Canadians now began challenging laws that had been based on traditional morality. In his recent Canadian bestseller ''Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values,'' the pollster Michael Adams (himself influenced by the Red Tory tradition) notes that just as Canadians were adopting a progressive, American-style ''rights'' consciousness, the United States was putting its own rights revolution on ice. He certainly cites some eye-opening statistics. In a 2000 poll, 24 percent of Canadians believe men are naturally superior to women, as against 38 percent of Americans- a gap that has been increasing over the last few decades. For example, in 1992, Adam's firm Environics asked North Americans if they thought the father should be the head of his own house. 42% of Americans said yes, as against 26% of Canadians. In 2000, the same question was asked with even starker results: 49% of Americans said yes, as against 18% of Canadians. Aside from a few liberal redoubts like New England, where only 29% of the population believes father knows best, people in the United States are much more favorably disposed to patriarchal authority than in Canada. Such differences are partly explained by religious differences between the two countries. According to census data, evangelical Protestantism, with its emphasis on personal salvation and adherence to old-fashioned morality, is the religion of more than 40 percent of the American population (including the president) but only 11 percent of Canadians. Canadians are only half as likely to go to church, and when they do they worship as Roman Catholics (who make up half of all Canadian Christians) or as members of mainline Protestant denominations such as the Anglicans. Canada's changing demographics have also shaped its cultural outlook. Since the 1960s, the country has had a generous immigration policy, so that today 18 percent of Canadians are foreign-born, as against 11 percent of Americans. The infusion of new people from China, Jamaica, and elsewhere, together with the longstanding need for French-English compromise, has fueled an official commitment to multiculturalism. Yet for Adams, the newfound strength of social liberalism in Canada doesn't represent a complete break from the past. ''A climate of 'peace, order, and good government' allows people. . . to self-actualize,'' he said in an interview. ''As you assert your personal autonomy, you do it in Canada in the context of a kinder, gentler social welfare state and a country with a history of compromise.'' (In describing Canada's social liberalism, Adams characterizes the country as ''one huge Massachusetts.'') As with the earlier rise of the welfare state, Canada's current wave of progressive law making is built on a conservative worldview-albeit a type of sober-minded conservatism that has few parallels in an ever more radically right-wing America.