RSS Feed MenuNever enough Canada blogging! Matt Yglesias makes this (apt) point today:
But it is always worth looking at the other Anglophone settler-states that generally score very similarly on efforts to assess social values. If you compare the United States to Canada, for example, I think you’ll clearly see that the key difference has to do with Canadian political institutions. The US system just makes it difficult to pass major legislative changes. You can like that or not, but it’s a major source of different outcomes.
He’s right about that – which I wish more Canadians would remember when they talk about how very, very different “Canadian values” are from “American values.” The most dramatic demonstration of the power of institutions comes from Peter Brimelow’s outstanding 1986 book on Canada, The Patriot Game. If the U.S. had Canadian institutions, it would have been governed through the 1980s not by President Ronald Reagan but by Prime Minister Tip O’Neill.
ottovbvs // Mar 17, 2010 at 4:51 pm
…….Well yes, David that would be because they have a parliamentary system that in exactly the same period you mention produced in Britain Margaret Thatcher and not Tip O’Neill …..Touche?……the problem with the increasing polarization of the fragmented US system is that it is starting to look less like Canada, and more like 18th Century Poland……..not the more perfect Union needed to keep us competitive with China and India!
sinz54 // Mar 17, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I think the key difference between Canada and America has to do with our more violent political history.
The United States, unlike Canada, was not granted its independence by Britain. We Americans had to fight for it, and defeated the British army at Yorktown. That experience–popular revolution–made us suspicious of powerful central governments and their arrogance.
The tension between freedom and security runs down throughout our military history: The Civil War with its military draft and draft riots; World War I with the Sedition Act; World War II with its wholesale incarceration of innocent Japanese-Americans in detention camps and with the start of the employer-based health care system; the Vietnam War and the public’s revolt against a war gone wrong.
Any student of this history has to come away from it suspicious of what a central government is capable of in times of crisis.
Whereas, as a colony of the British Empire, Canada didn’t have to make most of those kinds of decisions for itself.
JonF // Mar 17, 2010 at 7:17 pm
I’ve heard it said that if you subtract Quebec from Canada and the South from the USA, the two nations are, culturally, twins.
Telly Davidson // Mar 17, 2010 at 8:33 pm
As someone with feet in both camps (born in the USA, as Mr. Springsteen would say — if Cedars in Hollywood counts) and a Canadian on my Ontario-citizen father’s side, this is certainly a great topic for exploration. During the New Deal era of 1932-1980, there didn’t seem to have been much appreciable difference between the two countries’ way of looking at governance (the long Pierre Trudeau nightmare being an exception, though an argument can be made that our own Jerry Brown was a $1.98 knockoff.) As to foriegn wars, Britain’s wholesale raiding of Canadian troops during World War I, sending tens of thousands to their deaths in a conflict that Canada didn’t “have a horse in”, was a strong impetus for effective “divorce” from British heavy-handed policies, even before the 1982 Constitutional reboot.
But now, there is a wide gulf — largely because the dialog in the US tends to boil down to pioneer-ethic, individualist “hands off” small government versus overweening, Nanny State “big Government”, with the Religious Right and its attempts to ensure that their thou-shalt-nots remain in law. Whereas Canada tends to debate between “Good Government” and, er, “Not-So-Good Government”.
If I could wave a magic wand and Canadianize one aspect of the US Constitution, it would be to replace the clunky “impeachment” dynamic with a “vote of no confidence” motion — with say, a 2/3 supermajority requirement rather than the 50/50 of Canada, Great Britain, France, etc. Does anybody think that LBJ would’ve had the guts to get us into Vietnam with no way out, or Nixon would have even tried to pull Watergate, or that we (and the hostages) would have suffered over a year under Carter, if that had hung over them? Let alone the round-the-clock abuses of power and intelligence-insulting of Clinton and Bush II. And that way, if a special election could be called under true emergency circumstances (instead of by a referendum, a la the 2003 CA governor’s circus), the President would first, last, and always remain accountable to We the People.
SpartacusIsNotDead // Mar 18, 2010 at 12:42 am
Ottovbvs, hey, where have you been? We’ve missed your smackdowns.
sinz54 // Mar 18, 2010 at 9:26 am
SpartacusIsNotDead:
“ottovbs” fled after Scott Brown won in MA, seemingly dooming ObamaCare.
And now that ObamaCare has a better than even chance of passage, “ottovbs” has returned, likely to gloat over having achieved half a loaf (the other half, a public option, he ain’t getting).
sinz54 // Mar 18, 2010 at 9:28 am
Telly Davidson: If I could wave a magic wand and Canadianize one aspect of the US Constitution, it would be to replace the clunky “impeachment” dynamic with a “vote of no confidence” motion
What legal force would such a thing have?
The President would still retain all his war-making and veto powers. And the next Presidential election might still be far off.
Independent // Mar 18, 2010 at 11:09 am
DavidF suggests an American Armageddon : “Prime Minister Tip O’Neill.”
That would have been a “Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue” for sure. Shudders all around.
SpartacusIsNotDead // Mar 18, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Sinz wrote: “And now that ObamaCare has a better than even chance of passage, “ottovbs” has returned, likely to gloat over having achieved half a loaf (the other half, a public option, he ain’t getting).”
More likely, he probably just got terribly bored by the intellectual impotence and/or intellectual dishonesty of today’s conservatives. At some point, the “dialogue” with conservatives on this site becomes more akin to trying to convince a 6-year old there’s no such thing as a superhero than to an honest discussion about actual policy consequences.
And, do you really think a public option is not on the horizon? Or are you simply trying to salvage some kind of temporary glee from the GOP’s complete failure to stop health care reform altogether?
ottovbvs // Mar 18, 2010 at 1:50 pm
sinz54 // Mar 18, 2010 at 9:26 am
“ottovbs” fled after Scott Brown won in MA, seemingly dooming ObamaCare.
……Yep I fled to Europe for three months overwhelmed by Sinz’s brilliance……and I’d say it’s actually 8/10ths of a loaf which is being passed under recon rules as I always predicted it would be ……and you never know someone could pull a fast one in the senate and slip the PO in
Telly Davidson // Mar 18, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Sinz54 sez: “What legal force would such a thing have? The President would still retain all his war-making and veto powers. And the next Presidential election might still be far off.”
A successful “no-confidence” motion in Canada and Britain automatically means that a special election must be held within a speedy amount of time, for the public to affirm (keep) the current party and Prime Minister’s administration/government coalition in office, or if it loses the vote, to vote the alternate party in (with its head becoming PM) . (That’s how Jim Callaghan of Britain was replaced by Lady Thatcher in 1979.)
In an American context, instead of the threat of a long-drawn-out impeachment process for Clinton/Monicagate or Nixon/Watergate or Dubya/Abu Ghraib, if half — or in my dynamic, 2/3 — of the Congress voted “no confidence”, it would mean that a special election would have to have been scheduled within say, 30 days, to see if we would keep the current President or say “aur revoir”. (In the case of Ford replacing Nixon (as did happen), or even Gore replacing Clinton or Humphrey replacing Vietnam-era LBJ, a case could be made that significant change would have resulted, that the person causing the problem would’ve been eliminated. I must admit though, that under the Cheney-model of a VP who’s really running the show, a “no confidence” solution would be useless.)