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If I had a penny for every time someone asked me about differences between living in the U.S. and living in Canada...I'd have a few pennies, but, because Canada is phasing out pennies (just like my old pal New Zealand), they wouldn't be worth much on this side of the border. So that's one difference, right there. But it's a valid question, and as it's Canada Day--and we're coming up on the 4th of July--I figure I may as well take a stab at addressing it.

One thing I'll say right off the bat is that every time I've left America I've returned with a fresh appreciation of how American I am. It's something I'm comfortable with, now: I'm hardly going to get the stars and stripes tattooed on my bicep, but I'm American, I'm 'from the states'--it's okay to say, not least because it's true. Periodically you'll hear that Americans abroad should sew a Canadian flag on their luggage because Canadians are better liked. This might be true. It doesn't matter, though, because I'm not Canadian. To pretend otherwise--well.

The contrast between Canada and the U.S. is marked by our countries' similarities; both nations are North American with similar patterns of immigration and settlement. Our biomes meet and merge; we share upwards of five thousand miles of border (by contrast, the more contentious U.S.-Mexico border is just under two thousand miles long). But our histories diverged, and that's where it gets interesting.

By virtue of growing up in New England and going through the American public school system, I have a deep seam in my general knowledge devoted to Revolutionary war history. It's old, somewhat prone to inaccuracies--but it's there. And here's the thing: Canada's a constitutional monarchy. Queen Elizabeth II is on those pennies that are being phased out (also: most, if not all, other currently minted Canadian coins). In practice, it's not a big deal. But with all these stories of revolution buried deep in my head, with the number of times I've glimpsed the Bennington Monument in passing (and recall: "Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils")--something that happened almost two hundred and fifty years ago feels present, and here in Canada I just see the things that didn't happen, and it seems like all the modern assumptions about Canada and America can be summed up right there: America revolted, Canada didn't. 

But Saskatchewan is further west than those colonies that revolted or didn't, and in many ways too young to have been a part of that conversation. In 1776 its First Nations were being slowly encroached upon by the Hudson's Bay Company, but it was also part of what would eventually be labeled the Great American Desert (quoth Edwin James: "I do not hesitate in giving the opinion, that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence."). Saskatchewan became a province in 1905, and because of the Dominion Lands Act settlers could claim 160 acres of land free of charge, so long as they built a homestead upon it. Because of this, Saskatchewan attracted new immigrants--not just from the Old World, but also from states to the south.

The other day when I was loading my bike into the trunk of my car after a visit to the mechanic, an elderly man accosted me in the parking lot to ask if I was really from Massachusetts, and, if so, what I was doing here. I answered to the affirmative and explained that I was here for school, and for my trouble I got an extended monologue about the man's father, who had graduated from high school in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1908, given a valedictory address about saving Niagara Falls, and promptly headed north to claim land here. The son, in our conversation, repeatedly circled back to that speech--"Save Niagara Falls," he'd say, impressed. "And that was in 1908!" Then our conversation veered off in another direction. The man was telling me how concerned his father was about the environment--about Niagara Falls--and then he told me how he was concerned, but he was also concerned about people saying the Alberta tar sands shouldn't be developed for oil because of the potential for environmental degradation. "It's not true," he told me. "And we need those jobs."

What could I say? This man's monologue had cycled around and around, and he wound up with his thumb on a hot button issue. He waited. He was standing between me and my car, with its trunk strapped shut around the bike. So I nodded, and when the man went on to tell me that I needed to make sure people knew this, knew how important those jobs were and how harmless the tar sands were, I nodded again, and then I was released.

Really, what could I say? The Alberta tar sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline are an especially strange issue because of how perfectly they straddle the U.S.-Canada border (a bit like Niagara Falls, that way). The man in the parking lot was asking me to support the pipeline not just because I told him I was studying the environment, but because I was an American, because this whole endeavor is an effort to exchange something Americans want (oil) for something Canadians want (oil, but mostly money). We're a lot alike in this. But the difference lies in the size disparity between the U.S. and Canada: in square miles, Canada is larger than the U.S., but Canada's citizenship is a fraction of ours, and that fraction is one ninth. Put another way: the U.S. has 87 people per square mile. Canada has 8.

I've been reading a bit this week about the 'end of nature.' Bill McKibben wrote a book entitled "The End of Nature," published in 1989. In it, Bill McKibben tells us that nature--a thing independent of humans, a wild force we have not tamed, something that in other forums has been called wilderness--has disappeared, as been overtaken by technology, by people.

I suspect it's easier to say something like this when you have an awareness of the other 86 humans you share your square mile of space with (for the purpose of this thought experiment, we're going to make the ecologically incorrect assumption that humans are evenly distributed), when you drive out of the city and find that even the woods are replete with houses, bottle dumps, abandoned cars, stone walls--artifacts of our civilization, of us.

Look, Canadians are certainly aware of environmental issues; I'm enrolled in a Canadian graduate program in environmental studies, I should at least know that much. But Canadians also take an enormous pride in their natural resources, and there's an old myth in North America about a limitless wilderness, a nature so resilient that no human action could possibly cause permanent harm. That myth still persists in the U.S., but I think it sits just a little easier in this Canadian space, which is a little more open, a little emptier. Canada and the U.S. both found their wealth in their natural resources, but in the U.S. population growth outpaced the resources at a good clip, and eventually we made our population into its own resource.

Consider: if you derive both your pride and your wealth from your natural resources, there's going to be an inherent conflict there. That man in the mechanic's parking lot embodied that; he was pleased to say that Niagara Falls had been saved, but exhibited less concern about the Athabasca, because right now, the Athabasca felt necessary, felt right. What are these resources for, if not for using? Canada has done well for itself by straddling the line of resource use and conservation, but each time a new question arises the conversation begins again. Part of me wonders if I'm just using Canada as a mirror for America, maybe using this as an excuse to lay bare the same questions I always have, rather than answering the one I used to initiate this exercise, because we're having the same conversation there, the same extended dialogue, weighted with similar vagaries of region and class (of course someone from BC would be against Keystone, and of course someone from eastern Canada wouldn't be concerned about the problems in western Canada, and of course a Québécois would be completely out of touch with the rest of the country).

I think my problem with trying to tease apart the differences between Canada and the U.S. is that I so often wind up here: these countries are both different and the same, and they are both very, very large. Painting either America or Canada cleanly with one brush is an almost foolish endeavor, especially for someone like me: I've never been to Quebec, PEI, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland or Labrador, the Yukon or NWT (let alone Nunavut), never been to Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal, and while I think I've been to BC and New Brunswick, if I have it was when I was a child. What do I know of Canada?

I know what it feels like, though, so here's that: it feels like the U.S., tilted ever so slightly to the side. Or maybe it's the other way around; regardless, the difference is one of degree. And if I took a long time to get to this point, that's because it was easier to describe than measure, easier to speak to the specifics than the generalizations.

(If you got through that and would like more, here's an interesting piece on Canada and Canada Day written by a bonafied Canadian instead of, well, me.)