The last Presidential election drove many liberals to muse about packing
up and fleeing to Canada. Not many actually did so, but Cori Carl had
already made good on the fantasy. She and her wife were committed New
Yorkers but felt increasingly disillusioned with the “political
backlash after Obama,” she told me. A visit to Toronto charmed them.
Jobs fell into place, and they moved, in early 2016, after the momentum
of the Trump campaign persuaded them that “we don’t want to stick around
for whatever’s going to happen,” Carl said. “The conversation and
political tide before the election was enough for us to say, ‘You know
what, we can move now.’ ”

Carl has embraced her new home with gusto. She’s been scouring
bookstores for Canadian histories and recently embarked on a
cross-country road trip; when I contacted her, she was driving to
Halifax. There should be no better time for newcomers to learn about
Canada than the summer of 2017: July 1st marks the hundred-and-fiftieth
anniversary of Confederation, one of the biggest milestones in Canadian
political history. The 1867 agreement, ratified by an act of British
Parliament, created the Dominion of Canada and codified the country’s
constitution. It marked a crucial step in the slow process of
independence from Britain.

Government branders have dubbed the anniversary “Canada 150.” Canadians
are celebrating with public art installations, concerts, a multicultural
“parade of nations,” international food
festivals,
and a giant rubber
duck scheduled to dock on Lake Ontario. The Canadian clothing company Roots
has launched an ad campaign to celebrate “150 years of being nice,”
complete with a nationwide
search to find “Canada’s nicest
person.”

“In the grocery store, the bread I got was in commemorative Canada 150
packaging, and there are a lot of special cookies,” Carl said. But
the festivities strike her as “a very surface-level celebration. It’s
vague notions of diversity, rather than really getting into Canadian
history.”

In some ways, these cheerful tributes to multiculturalism and good
manners are just the dose of Canadian civility that American liberals
crave. What a relief it must be to live in a country where the head of
government spends his time welcoming Syrian refugees and
hugging pandas, when our own President is busy trying to ban Muslim immigrants
and bullying critics on Twitter.

But this summer of good feelings conceals a complex debate about what
the country stands for and what it means to be Canadian. While Americans
fight loudly and publicly over the meaning of our history and founding
ideals, Canadians—at least the white, English-speaking majority—have
learned to avoid the subject. The relative absence of history from
Canadian civic discourse is a testament to just how explosive historical
debate can be, and a closer look can show Americans how they often
misunderstand culture and politics north of the border.

One reason that Canadians aren’t deeply excited about the anniversary of
Confederation is that their independence was a long process of orderly
negotiation, not a decisive declaration leading to war. July 1, 1867,
does not loom in the Canadian imagination the way July 4, 1776, does in
Americans’ minds. Decades ago, when the American historian Robin Winks
asked a group of Canadian high-school teachers when Canada became
independent, they couldn’t agree on the answer. Some offered 1867, when
Canada achieved autonomy in domestic matters. But others suggested
alternatives, such as 1931, when the Statute of Westminster freed Canada
from British command in foreign affairs. In “The Relevance of Canadian
History,”
Winks wrote:

Americans declare and assume that they are right; Canadians listen,
wait, and compromise. Carl encountered this cliché firsthand when
other industry professionals in Toronto (she works in digital marketing
and communications) politely asked her to soften the self-promoting
style she had learned in New York. “In New York, I was never perceived
as aggressive. I was constantly told to speak up for myself. In Toronto,
I’ve really had to tone it down,” she said. In this case, national
stereotypes are rooted in political history.

At the University of North Carolina, where I teach, I smuggle as much
Canadian history as possible into my U.S.-history courses. There is no
better way to push students to question aspects of our culture that they
take for granted, such as the American tendency to fetishize the
Constitution as holy scripture and venerate the Founding Fathers as
saints. Both attitudes baffle Canadians, who, like the British,
understand their constitution as an evolving set of documents and are
not inclined to spend summer vacations touring the homesteads of former
Prime Ministers.

Of course, the story of Confederation is largely a story of white men
who mostly spoke English. This summer, the few Canadians who are eager
to talk about history and reëxamine the details of their constitution are
those who feel excluded from the standard narrative of Canadian unity
and progress: indigenous people and Francophone Québécois.

Indigenous activists have dismissed Canada’s openness to refugees and
reputation for “being nice” as a moral sham that diverts attention from
native communities, many of which suffer from
disproportionate rates of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide. “The Canadian concept of
inclusiveness is exclusive of First Nations people and is a threat to
us,”
wrote Robert Jago, a member of the Nooksack Tribe who lives in Quebec.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made public, in
brutal detail, the testimonies of survivors of Canadian residential
schools, which wrenched generations of indigenous children from their
families in order to “civilize” them. The last schools closed in the
late nineties. (It’s worth noting that the United States, despite a far
more murderous record of misconduct toward native populations and people
of color, has never initiated a similar commission.) Marie Wilson, one
of three commissioners who led the T.R.C., called the Canada 150
celebration “uneven.” “There are those who are cheerleaders for it, some
who are in senior levels of government whose job it is to applaud
themselves and their institutions,” she told me. But, among indigenous
Canadians, “we’ve seen a lot of pushback saying, ‘It’s not our
celebration, all it marks is the importing of laws and policies that
diminished us and marginalized us.’ ”

Meanwhile, the premier of Quebec, Philippe Couillard, has
called for reopening constitutional negotiations to address his province’s
long-standing demand for more privileges and greater recognition of
its “distinct society.” One of the many oddities of the Canadian
political system is that Quebec never signed on to the most recent
version of Canada’s constitution—yet the country has not fallen
apart.

Canada often works better in practice than in theory. This may be why
the majority of Canadians are not interested in discussing political
principles or questioning the mainstream consensus on difficult issues.
In Canadian intellectual life, certain unspoken rules govern what can
and cannot be said in any conversation about the struggles of indigenous
communities. Periodically, a rash of teen suicides on a remote northern
reserve provokes a round of hand-wringing, but little action. First
Nations’ commitments to their traditions and ancestral lands run aground
on the realities of life in many of these isolated communities, where
there are few economic opportunities and basic
groceries arrive infrequently by plane. But, last year, when former Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien
suggested that some people on one reserve might consider relocating, he was
denounced as a defender of colonialism and oppression.

When it comes to Quebec, most Canadians think that it’s best not to poke
that hornet’s nest. Americans may consider Canada a paragon of boring
stability, but the truth is that the unity of French and English Canada
has always been tenuous, held together by a series of fragile
compromises and occasionally threatened by violence. In 1970, the Front
de Libération du Québec, a separatist terrorist group, kidnapped two
officials and murdered one of them, compelling the provincial government
to ask the Prime Minister at the time—Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s
father—to send in troops and empower the Mounties to
arrest people without a warrant.

The incident, known as the October Crisis, discredited the violent wing
of the separatist movement. But twice in later years—in 1980 and
1995—citizens of Quebec called a referendum on the question of seceding
from Canada and came close to voting for independence.

Since then, the separatist movement has weakened. “The crisis lasted
from 1970 to 1995, and now we’re in the recovery stage,” said Robert
Bothwell, a historian at the University of Toronto. He applauded Justin
Trudeau’s refusal to reopen constitutional debate. Such debate is
usually a “huge mistake,” he said. “Once you take something down to the
realm of first principles, you’re shaking the foundations of society.
You’re forcing people to ask and answer difficult questions.”

Such questions are sometimes impossible to avoid, especially as Canada
continues to absorb large numbers of immigrants from vastly different
cultures. Recently, debates over Muslim students’ right to pray in public school in one Toronto
suburb have exposed the limits of secular liberal tolerance. “We have
rapidly growing multicultural communities, and time will tell whether
our openheartedness gets tested,” said Marie Wilson.

But, most of the time, the Canadian practice of avoiding touchy
questions and muddling along seems to work. “Coming to Canada was, for
me, truly a promised land,” said Wendell Adjetey, a Ghanaian immigrant
who arrived in Canada as a child and is now a Ph.D. student in North
American history at Yale. While racism persists in Canada, and
“multiculturalism can only take us so far,” the nation remains a beacon
of democracy and opportunity. “I would much rather be a poor, racialized
person in Canadian society than anywhere else,” he told me.

Canada 150, then, is a subdued celebration in a noble Canadian
tradition: one that avoids ideological confrontation and seeks not
perfection but peaceful coexistence. I’m not sure that Americans have
that option—at least not in Donald Trump’s America. But on this July
1st, we owe it to our neighbors—and to ourselves—to recognize that there
is more than one way to be a North American.