UL) J.J. McCullough, OP Columnist Nlitical Ideology Doesn t ange at the Border 5 summer I took a relaxing trip to San Francisco yisit my good friend in the United States. After ding a month with a friend from Holland who been visiting my family in BC, I was eager to erience my own foreign trip. I got my passport ated, exchanged my money, and did all the other ine procedures one usually goes through when baring to enter a foreign country. When I got e, I was determined to have a foreign experi- p. I had never been to northern California bre, and I expected to see many quaint cultural erences. In the end however, there were very few be seen. I suppose I knew it all along, as all adians enviably do. To be a British Columbian in like San Francisco is an odd experience; you’re inally a foreigner, yet culturally, few things seem brent. The fact is, the United States and Canada are wing closer together than ever before. This of se goes in face of the “conventional wisdom” e various liberal media and academic elites who k in somber terms about the “growing cultural He” between the two nations of English-speak- orth America. Books such as Michael Adams’ and Ice are now being churned out by Canadian ors, denouncing the supposed “myth of itability” that Canada is “doomed” to culturally pe with the United States. The Walrus, a trendy new left-wing Canadian azine, went even farther, running a cover story the rather self-righteous title “Canada Is hing Like The United States.” Publications of e sorts inevitably use vast amounts of aggregate ng data to create sweeping generalizations of “Americans” and “Canadians” think and want, how they diverge on key issues. There is of se a small flaw to this way of drawing conclu- is (aside from the fact that Canadian-made US ion polls are notorious for using all sorts of tricks brce their data to support their pre-determined lusions). When it comes to political battles, an e country does not change its mind all at once. le Canadian pollsters may proudly brandish data seems to point to a “more right wing” US that is pf-tune with supposed liberal “Canadian values” a great mistake to confuse a narrow plurality of US public opinion on one issue with a national endorsement or rejection of it. For example, one could make the sweeping gener- alization that the United States is “less tolerant” of gays than Canada. I suppose the “proof” of this is that three Canadian courts have ruled same-sex mar- riage legal while only one in the US has thus far. Of course, courts operate independently from the public will (or at least they’re supposed to) so to point to the status of gay marriage in Canada as proof that we’re more tolerant of gays is either an admission that Canada’s justice system is openly activist and driven by popular opinion, or that we define our entire nation’s ideology solely by what the judges say. Polling data is no less decisive. A very slim majority of Americans are said to oppose gay marriage while an even slimmer majority of Canadians are said to favour it. San Francisco, where I was, is obviously one of the biggest gay communities on earth. The sprawling Castro district far surpasses anything in the more-tol- erant Canada. Indeed, the entire modern “gay subculture” of rainbow flags, drag queens, and the like, originated in the US, not Canada. The same can be said of the hippie subculture, the pothead subcul- ture, and even the radical anti-war college student subculture. How could all of these anti-establishment, left-wing subcultures manage to originate in a country that is supposedly so fundamentally rightist? Are Americans who live in liberal cities like San Francisco “less American” than those who live in conservative ones? Are Canadians who live in Calgary and oppose gay marriage “less Canadian” than those who don’t? Uh, why are you | doing this? Ultimately, what must be taken into account when comparing the US and Canada side-by-side is the vast population size and distribution differences between the two countries. The United States has a population ten times the size of Canada’s and virtually all of the country is inhabited in some form or another. There are rural cities in the United States with populations far greater than some of Canada’s biggest. Canada, by contrast, is a vastly under-populated country with most of the people congregating in the biggest cities. One out of three Canadians, for example, lives with- in driving distance of Toronto. What this ultimately means is that Canadian opin- ions, when polled nationally, are naturally skewed towards reflecting the opinions of big-city, metropol- itan populations, which tend to be more socially and economically liberal. In the United States, where the population is more evenly distributed, other regions such as the rural Midwest and the Deep South have their views substantially better reflected in US nation- al numbers than say, Alberta’s or Manitoba’s opinions are reflected in Canadian polls. As well, under the US system of government, every state, regardless of pop- ulation, is given equal representation in the US Senate. This means that smaller states or bloc regions such as the South can hold a far greater sway in the legislative process than they ever would under the Canadian sys- tem, which is grossly slanted to always favor the interests of the two biggest provinces. Though this doesn’t diminish the political impor- tance of rural or southern opinion in the United States, it does prove that both the US and Canada are essentially regional nations, or a “community of com- munities” as Joe Clark once put it. If you disregard the South’s views from US public opinion, and disre- gard the opinions of far-left Quebec from Canada’s, you'll find the majority of North Americans are actu- ally near consensus on most of the big issues of the day. In the end, the most accurate analysis of North America is, as columnist David Frum once put it, “a common culture divided between two political sys- tems, one tilted to the left by one unusual region, the other tilted to the right by another.’ Understanding this regional dynamic is the key to understanding why the politics of our two nations can sometimes diverge in unexpected ways. It’s not a matter of Canada being fundamentally “more liberal” or the US being funda- “more religious” or “right wing.” We’re more alike than any two nations on Earth, and no matter what your stance on a major issue of the day is, there’ll always be a segment of America that agrees with you. Sometimes you just have to look closely. mentally