Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom and The History of Fort St. Joseph, and the co-author of
Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American

The Fraser Institute would seem a more likely publisher for this highly
polemical book than the University of Toronto Press. Its author’s
stated purpose is to “infuriate” the left.

As far as Watson is concerned, globalization is good. It does not
prevent Canadians from being different from Americans. But even if it
did, there is no earthly reason why Canadians should want to be
different from Americans. Canadian traditions are hardly worth
preserving.

Government is not a savior, says Watson. The growth of government has
coincided with a growing crisis in Canadian unity. Canada has been part
of the global economy for 400 years, and the prime minister who tried to
defy the trend, Sir John A. Macdonald, wasn’t in the same league as
the founding fathers of the United States. While they offered treatises
on liberty, he offered only higher tariffs and the slogan “A British
subject I was born. A British subject I shall die.”

According to Watson, Canadians are overtaxed. Moreover, taxes do not
add to our quality of life. Low levels of government-financed social
assistance programs and easy access to guns do not account for
discrepancies between the U.S. and Canadian crime rates. The Swiss and
the Japanese pay lower taxes than Canadians do, but their crime rate is
also lower. New Brunswick’s murder rate is worse than those of Maine,
New Hampshire, and Vermont; Manitoba’s is worse than those of North
Dakota or Minnesota; and Canada’s crime rate is among the world’s
worst.

Apart from the bracketed source references that replace footnotes or
endnotes, the text is easy to read. But as Watson intends, the message
is “infuriating.”