Having studied and lived in North America in my youth and now middle age, one thing I have come to realise is that there is not one Canada but several, not one United States but many.
Another is the contrasting national sentiments about equality – a fundamental Canadian value enshrined in its constitution – and inequality, which is not only tolerated or ignored but even celebrated in many powerful circles in the US, including the current White House.
Canadians are generally proud of their egalitarianism. It is no accident that the Canadian Gini coefficient, measuring economic inequality, is about 0.30 while that of the US is 0.49.
Much ink has been spilled on the erosive effects of extreme inequality on the social fabric and body politic of the US, so I will skip that debate here.
Instead, I would like to argue that equality, Canadian style, can also be erosive; its outcomes include the separatism emerging in the province of Alberta as well as the long-standing resentment of western Canada against the federal government in Ottawa.
There are Canadas in the forms of French-speaking Quebec, western Canada, Atlantic Canada and Indigenous territories, as well as the economic divide between poorer and richer provinces. But besides these usually cited separating entities, there are also immigrant groups such as Indians, Iranians, Jews and Chinese who can be highly cohesive within their own communities and bring their own national politics, conflicts and divided loyalties into Canada.
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