Anti-American Torontonians

The Toronto Star, of all media outlets, reports on the high degree of anti-Americanism in Toronto. The story relates how a Mississipi reporter walked around Kensington Market soliciting opinions about the U.S. It wasn’t pretty.

The Star also interviewed the New York Times’s Canada correspondent (doesn’t get much more incestuous than that, eh?), who observed:

“I’ve seen some really appalling behaviour simply because I’m an American,” said New York-native Clifford Krauss, Canadian correspondent for The New York Times, who has lived in Toronto and travelled the country for several years.

Though he feels the attitude has improved a little since the November re-election of President George W. Bush and beginning of the war in Iraq, Krauss said he’s noticed this “waving a virtuous finger of superiority” is most pronounced in Ontario.

“I think that the anti-Americanism is part of a regional character that fills a vacuum. The Canadian identity, which in some parts of Canada is quite strong, is not so strong here. I say with some trepidation, because it might sound very arrogant, but there are other places in Canada where the culture is richer and where people are more confident in their culture,” said Krauss. And, as he points out, the feeling is ingrained in the national psyche, even if what makes an American ugly to some Canadians changes through time (from isolationist in the early days of World War II to world’s cop today).

“It goes back to the American Revolution. It’s inbred â€??? the Loyalists coming up here, the fact that there was quite a bit of fighting going on between the United States and Canada,” Krauss said.

Krauss’s observations echo Barry Cooper and Lydia Miljan’s thesis that CBC anti-Americanism reflects the “garrison” mentality of southern Ontario. According to Cooper and Miljan:

It is a story of exile (from the rebellious American colonies), of a covenant (to remain ever loyal to the Crown), and of a promised or merely hoped for return to a garden (of a transformed wilderness in the early days, and today of a society infused with “distinctive Canadian values� that renders Canadians morally superior to the United States).
…
Part of the problem of defining oneself as not being another is that the comparison invariably tends to look unfavorably on what you are comparing yourself to. Given the stark choices of garrison life, namely to fight or to betray, this is no surprise. The division takes a more gentle form as well so that, when Canadians claim they are better mannered, more tolerant, more egalitarian, and so on, they are also saying something about Americans.

In short, the “garrison” mentality is contentless. It’s defined simply by what it’s not.

How Torontonian.

UPDATE: Pictures say more than words over at Burkean Canuck.