Canada has its red states
In February, razib of Gene Expression gave the follow gloomy assessment of Canada. For while America is certainly on the global Right on economic and fiscal issues:
On issues of race and ethnicity Europe is to the Right of America. On particularities of Church and State, most of Europe is to the Right of America (the French exception notwithstanding).
But I believe there is one country that can be portrayed as unequivocally to America's Left: Canada, European socialism + American pluralism.
There's a great deal of truth in this assessment. But at National Review Online, commenting on Bush's official visit to the country, David Frum issues a powerful reminder that Canada has its vigorous virtues, too:
Past American presidential visitors have paid tribute - as say Bill Clinton did on his official visit in 1995 - to Canada's softer, gentler side: its healthcare programs, its social welfare, its gun control, its multiculturalism. Well they all exist, and they are popular with many Canadians, although less so now perhaps than they were a decade ago.
But there is another Canada: the Canada that sacrified three times as many people as the US (in proportion to population) in two world wars; the Canada whose forces led the great drive of August 9, 1918, the "black day" of the German army; the Canada that took responsibility for one of the beaches at D-Day while an America that then had almost 15 times Canada's population took two; the Canada that fought in Korea, the Gulf War, now in Afghanistan - and, as many Halifax naval families know well, that helps even today to patrol the Persian Gulf.
This Canada was the Canada that President Bush singled out for praise - even acknowledging (a fact that Canadians do not forget), "In the early days of World War II, when the United States was still wrestling with isolationism, Canadian forces were already engaging the enemies of freedom across the Atlantic."
Whatever Canada's leftist recent history, the Anglosphere certainly exists north of Minnesota and east of Alaska.
