Trey Parker and Matt Stone said what a lot of you were thinking with a song in “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and & Uncut” called “Blame Canada.” But as an American citizen ambivalently lodged between my Canadian parents, I have spent years considering this joyfully amusing phrase, not realizing that my not getting the joke is part of the reason the joke exists. So, Canadians are considered dull, passive, old-fashioned and generally out of the loop. We Americans manage to applaud their comedians, their environmental policies, Banff and Whistler, usually hockey and don’t forget Montreal (never forget Montreal – they need your tourism). So what, besides Kids in the Hall, is so funny? The accent? The Mounties? The arguably pointless allegiance to Queen Elizabeth? The metric system? All those trees? Admittedly, I’m torn between laughing at and running to the defense of these cultural stigmas.
Allow me to posit a cliché by saying that we can learn a lot from our neighbors. Take, for example, Canadian recycling. It’s phenomenal. You would find it hard to hate on Canadian recycling, unless you actually had to partake of it, in which case I assure you that your petulance would be mixed with deep fondness and respect. I speak from experience, having been present the day my parents moved to the town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia three years ago. I merely stood on the sidelines, pompously waving my U.S. passport in their faces while they were initiated into 21st-century Canada, having come from the relatively lax city of London, England (where pollution and, say, an empty bag of Doritos blowing in the wind of passing traffic is just part of the charm).
The garbage system in Nova Scotia works a little like the one in the United States, in that garbage is collected twice weekly, but every piece of anything you could think of disposing or recycling is categorized and must be put in separate clear, green bags. As far as I could tell, the only thing that can permissibly be sequestered to the regular old garbage dump, if there is such a thing in Canada, is Kleenex. What is particularly Swiss, and by that I mean stringent and conscientious, is that you are fined if any of your recycling categorizations are wrong or if you slack off. My favorite feature of this fairly recent and revolutionary program was a little green bucket, the compost bin, that sat by our other seventeen trash cans in the kitchen and played host to the things you might be tempted to put down the in-sinker-ator.
Pay a visit to the website of Environment Canada, http://www.ec.gc.ca/envhome.html, the equivalent of the EPA, and you’ll find a link that allows you to calculate your Ecological Footprint, a term I think many Wesleyan students are aware of. This survey requires tedious calculations, such as how many pounds of trash your household produces each week – perhaps it’s a bad sign that few people know this sort of information, but the awareness you’ll gain from calculating your footprint is invaluable. I found no such tool on the website of the EPA, www.epa.gov, but the latter was, as far as websites go, a good indicator of the alleged progress of the agency. The Canadian government’s pretty pictures of trees and lack of substantive information suggested a romantic notion of the environment that may, surprisingly, explain the diligence of their nationwide recycling program.
So what other commendable activities are going on across the border besides bad American football and a few thousand gay marriages? Well, Hollywood movies are being made cheaply, 18-year-olds are drinking legally, hockey fans are bored and recreational hunters are oppressed. Like in any country, there are a sizeable number of conservative-minded individuals, homophobes, racists, and hockey haters. But most importantly for us college students, the music scene in Canada is booming. If you like any of the following bands, you have bitterly cold, progressive Montreal to thank: the Stills, the Arcade Fire, the Unicorns, the Dears, the Stars, and Sam Roberts, to name a few.
Lately, the idea of living in the wilderness of this northerly ally has become quite appealing to many Americans, who retain a little of the standard Canada-directed mirth in their voices when they declare they’re moving “up there” to escape the second Bush administration. Certainly some cynics also realize the other perks of living in Canada: It’s beautiful, peaceful, and consequently you will live longer, statistically speaking. But some current affairs, such as the Quebec “issue” and the national health service, are no laughing matter. To summarize these conundrums, Quebec hates the rest of the country and might actually appreciate the song “Blame Canada,” and, last time I checked, the wait time for the removal of a brain tumor in the beautiful Annapolis Valley region of Nova Scotia is six months. One can’t forget that Canada is modeled after England, which could also use a little assistance in the area of national health.
To put it rather obtusely, no country is perfect, but there is certainly good work happening in Canada. Even the starkly conservative province of Alberta, home to the largest oil supply outside of Saudi Arabia, is dedicated to the environmental friendliness of tripling their oil output in the next ten years. Yes, the Canadian Parliament airings on C-SPAN, of which Seinfeld’s Kramer was a devoted fan, may be fuel for our comedic fire, but we need to scale down the belittling of our vastly picturesque neighbor, because Canada dotes on planet Earth like no other. The grass and a hell of a lot else is greener on the other side.
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