When Moses Znaimer invited me to speak at ideaCity02, I felt I was being summoned home at long last from my adventure in the American wilderness. On day two, a fellow participant gave me a droll look and rolled his eyes at “the obligatory Canadian navel-gazing.” But Canadian navel-gazing is my secret vice, more compelling than any pornography I have ever seen.
I do a lot of my navel-gazing on the Web, of course. Five years ago, when I stumbled upon the chlamydia statistics for Ottawa, I gleefully bookmarked the URL. No, I’m not proud of Ottawa’s chlamydia rate—it’s alarmingly high. But Ottawa is the place where all navel-gazing begins for me.
I love having access to intimate statistics about my hometown. I imagine that each of those anonymous chlamydia carriers has sought pleasure in the nation’s capital and I relish the evidence of Ottawa’s wayward humanity. If you love a town, a city, a region or a nation, you love its secrets and, of course, its mistakes.
Because of a decision my parents made when I was a toddler, I grew up in Canada rather than the United States. In the family archives are black and white pictures of a happy infant relaxing on the lawn of a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania where one of my uncles was a resident shrink. Then, there are colourful snapshots taken in front of the Rideau Canal—of a moody pre-adolescent surrounded by the brilliant greens of government-sponsored foliage under a blue sky. I’m technically American, but psychologically Canadian. When I moved to the United States in my late teens, I felt like a foreigner.
Other Canadians may disagree, but I find the search for the Canadian identity seductive. It’s as if the entire nation is in psychoanalysis. There is something about getting on the couch and calling it patriotism. It suggests material and emotional prosperity—preconditions for introspection. Of course, this search for meaning is terribly narcissistic. But one must be narcissistic to be seductive. One thing I have noticed about the United States: It is filled with seductive Canadians who are part of its entertainment and media culture. The stereotypical view of Canadians—“self-effacing”—is an American misreading. When it comes to narcissism, the United States is simply underdeveloped.
The Lost Canadian
The identity riddles, STD epidemics and other problems of the Americans interest me greatly but they do not get me where I live—even though it’s where I live. Fellow Americans might say I should care more about the plight of Vietnam vets than I do about Austro-Hungarian Canadians who were rounded up by the RCMP during the First World War. But the latter situation is more compelling to me. The messy presidential election that gave us George Bush the Younger did not cause me to click and search for breaking news, day after day, as it did with my American friends. During the Canadian elections that same year, however, I was glued to my laptop, combing the local results. I breathed a sigh of relief wherever the Canadian Alliance was flatly defeated. A few times I gasped—horrified to see them, perhaps, gaining a foothold in my hometown. I’ve never felt this way about a U.S. election because the political parties are so similar. Besides, there are only two. And what’s a federal election without a secessionist to liven things up? Canadian politics makes for better theatre. And I mean that in a good way.
My obsession with how the Canadian Alliance was doing in each riding of Ottawa got me curious about other aspects of neighbourhood life. On election night, I perused police reports on prostitution, drug-dealing and stalking. I tried to figure out whether areas with more prostitution busts were more likely to vote for the natural governing party or the arriviste Canadian Alliance. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for my 13th summer as I studied the drug arrests. And I came to the conclusion that you’re more likely to be stalked in the `burbs than in Ottawa’s Centretown, something I long suspected.
But here’s what puzzles me: It would never occur to me to look for Manhattan’s stalker ratio, even though I probably should. And I wish I could get equally excited about the minutiae of American politics.
I’ve made a home for myself in this quasi-wilderness—and have lived in New York for more than fifteen years. I came of age in the States and remember being distinctly annoyed when a childhood friend enquired: “When are you coming down for another visit?” An alert New Yorker, accustomed to travelling up First Avenue and down Fifth, I’m always aware of which way the street runs. So I would bristle and mutter: “Why can’t they remember that I’m coming ‘up’ to Canada?” (Call me a “direction queen” but why, oh why, can’t anyone in Toronto give a precise address with actual cross streets the way we do in Manhattan?) My lingering affection for childhood terrain is often mingled with a bit of disdain.
This summer’s pilgrimage to ideaCity got me thinking: Am I a closet Canadian, a Lost Canadian or perhaps, even, a post-Canadian?
I have sometimes described New York as “the only home I have ever known” because I don’t buy into that poetic chestnut about home being the place where “they have to take you in.”
Instead, I regard as my home the place where I can make the rules, earn a decent living and decorate the environment to my liking: my Manhattan apartment. I have ended every romantic partnership in which leaving New York was raised as a likely condition—and each time it made me feel more profoundly “at home”.
And yet, I’m still a wide-eyed girl from Ottawa who gets a jolt of pleasure each time she arrives in Toronto. My responses are, in many ways, those of a small town adolescent nerd and Toronto is still the much too distant metropolis. New York is a place where I feel cozily ensconced as I never did elsewhere, but Toronto has a peculiar effect on my appetites.
And I have come to appreciate Toronto for other reasons. Toronto once viewed New York as a role model, but now there is reason for New York to emulate Toronto. New York’s immigrant population is lagging behind Toronto at 40 per cent while Toronto famously boasts a 51 per cent majority.
I used to think of New York as a virtual city-state, a haven for rootless cosmopolitans disconnected from the national value system. I did not really trade one country for another: I traded national identity for local. A few years ago, I was doing an interview on WBAI (a community radio station in Manhattan). At the studio on 8th Avenue, someone had preserved a campaign poster from Norman Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign: New York City as the 51st State of the Union. My heart leapt with joy! This New York City state-of-mind also meant we were disconnected from New York “State”.
In the aftermath of September 11, this kind of nostalgia became pointless. New Yorkers were viewed—by the attackers “and” well-wishers—as “Americans”, and it became heretical to object. Hence this further heresy—the suggestion that Toronto, on a good day, might actually trump New York.
The American Gaze
What do Americans see when they look at Canada? Earlier this year in a “New Yorker” Talk of the Town column, Adam Gopnik fixed his gaze on the navel to the north and attempted to explain by harping on the lack of conflict in Canadian culture. Yes, that’s right. A lack of conflict. Citing the Senate as an embodiment of Canada’s political culture, he seemed to be having amnesia about Quebec.
The invigorating left-right-secessionist confrontations of Canadian politics are way sexier and more contentious than the predictable rituals of America’s two entrenched parties. When Americans learn that, just north of the 49th parallel, there’s a lively national circus featuring two newly formed yet viable political parties—one of which was invented for the purposes of breaking up the country—their jaws drop. By American standards, the Canadian Alliance and the Bloc Québécois were born yesterday—and yet they are “in play”. These opposition parties are chronologically younger than their leaders. An equivalent American scenario is unthinkable. By comparison, our two-party system in the States is a stultifying snooze, a middle-aged dinosaur.
Consider this: If you take for granted a controversial separatist like Lucien Bouchard, you do not find an eccentric American outsider like Al Sharpton especially outrageous. Contrary to Gopnik’s view of the Canadian psyche, Canadians are less likely to be fazed by Reverend Sharpton’s confrontational antics. In my experience, it’s Americans, not Canadians, who can’t accept him as a viable politician.
What I heard at the Barbecue
Canadians often snicker at their fellow North Americans for thinking that Ontario is the capital of Toronto. Or assuming that Vancouver is an hour away from Maine. This is a little unfair since many Canadians are clueless about U.S. geography. More troubling to me are misconceptions about Canadian society which prevent some Americans from coming to terms with their own homegrown problems.
At a barbecue in Westchester County, I was told by another guest—a man in his forties born and raised in Queens—that “Canada’s more civilized because they have a basically homogeneous population up there.” In New York, I am sorry to report, this is code for: “If we didn’t have so many visible minorities and immigrants, we’d have a civilized society, too.” I almost choked on my Chardonnay. Then I politely explained that Canada has a diverse population of immigrants from every continent and that we—the children of these immigrants—regard the “homogeneous” Canada of days gone by as profoundly uncivilized. (This is ex-pat code for: “You’d better find another excuse to justify your American racism.”)
But the biggest split between the two cultures might be a sexual one. This became clear during—and after—the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, otherwise known as “Pantygate”. Many Americans saw President Clinton as a kind of Don Juan, a victim of other people’s puritanism. Last fall, at a bookstore event in Ottawa, a man in a beige parka asked me to comment on “Pantygate”, adding that “Pierre Trudeau said the state has no place in the bedrooms of a nation.” But if you grew up with the Trudeau myth—and the Trudeau marriage—Clinton looks like an amateur, a modern puritan pretending to be a Don Juan.
Consider these two North American statesmen—and what we know about their relationships with women.
Bill Clinton married a buttoned-down law school grad and engaged in wholesome “tag-team parenting” with his feminist wife, presenting to the world a politically correct “peer marriage”—the feminist version of Ozzie and Harriet. In private—later to be made public—he had a contrarian yearning for big-haired floozies. There is something sadly formulaic about the Clinton marriage because of the way it renders illegitimate all his other wanderings. It seems to be based on an updated form of Madonna/whore outsourcing.
Pierre Trudeau’s marriage was sexy and perhaps a bit decadent from the start. Margaret Trudeau was three decades younger—a former flower child turned First Lady who morphed into a party girl and was photographed “sans” panties with her skirt in the air at Studio 54.
Nobody knows what really happened when the First Lady partied with the Rolling Stones, but her affairs with actors and other celebs were not kept secret. This confused free spirit was also the mother of his three children and their separation was surprisingly dignified—a friendly resolution. Trudeau emerged as a romantic figure, a longtime ladies man still learning about Woman in all her mixed-up modern complexity—thanks to Margaret.
Clinton, on the surface, might seem modern, and his marriage egalitarian, but you can’t help thinking that he deliberately chose a mate who was not his equal in sexiness. Clinton, though charismatic, does not come across as a man of the world. Trudeau most certainly did and is remembered fondly by Canadian women.
Margaret’s partying streak must have tested and strengthened his compassion. Whatever the facts of either statesman’s sex life, it’s impossible to imagine Trudeau taking his pleasure in the Clintonian fashion—but easy to picture him as a giver of pleasure, highly verbal, in love with women. I can’t think of an American head of state whom I would describe or imagine in quite this way.
If Canada’s sexier—and I say it is—the United States can blame Trudeau.
Tracy Quan is the author of the novel “Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl” and a contributor to “NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America.” Visit her website at
