By Miranda Schreiber
So many things have been proposed as constitutive of the Canadian identity, “the north” being one, or public healthcare. What these propositions omit is the role the United States plays in Canada’s self-definition. In part we feel we are in the north because we are north of the United States; our healthcare system seems unique because the U.S. doesn’t have it. Always refracted through the lens of American hegemony, Canada seems to be what America is not. We even voted the “father of socialized healthcare,” Tommy Douglas, the greatest Canadian in 2004. The former premier of Saskatchewan is often described as a Canadian hero.
What accounts of Douglas’ legacy often fail to include is that, for much of his life, Douglas was also a eugenicist. His masters thesis, The Problems of the Subnormal Family, recommended the sterilization of the disabled, sex workers, and “delinquents” with police records. And Douglas, the architect of socialized healthcare, used healthcare to make his point. On page ten of his masters thesis he wrote: “In addition to the cost of keeping these families, is the cost of their medical attention….The cost of bringing most of their children into the world is borne by the city. The cost of dental work, eye correction, and operations is borne by the citizens’ relief organization.” These violent eugenic ideals endorsed by Douglas, and other “Canadian heroes,” are not relegated to history. They continue to have material consequences. The sterilization of Indigenous people in Canada is still occurring.
Americans and Canadians alike refer to an ideal Canada, one which is defined as it diverges from the United States. This idealized country is habitually alluded to on both sides of the border. Senator Ted Kennedy, arguing in favor of single-payer healthcare in 1979, said, “the best evidence is in Canada…the last country that implemented national health insurance and one with which we have shared values and a shared standard of living.” Forty years later in 2019 Bernie Sanders crossed the Canadian border to purchase insulin at one tenth of the cost. During the debates for Democratic leadership in 2019, Sanders said, “…my neighbor fifty miles to the north Canada somehow has figured out how to provide healthcare to every man, woman, and child.” Sanders continued, “in our country, it is a much different story”. On December 4, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about COVID relief: “Canada did $2000/monthly. The US is the richest nation earth and a 2nd stimulus check is getting blocked.”
Justin Trudeau engages in the same style of comparative rhetoric. On January 27, 2017 Trump instituted the Muslim ban. The next day Trudeau tweeted: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.” Trudeau used the hashtag #WelcomeToCanada. But when over 11,000 people crossed into Canada on foot from the United States, Trudeau suddenly retracted his message. “For someone to successfully seek asylum it’s not about economic migration,” he told the press. He said, “You must follow the rules.”
The ideal Canada exists abstracted from everything else; it plays no role in the displacement of people. But in reality transnational Canadian mining companies are currently involved in the extraction of resources from Haiti, the country 85% of the migrants Trudeau criticized were from. In 2019, a report accused six Canadian peacekeepers of sexually assaulting Haitians. Afterwards, nothing happened.
The ideal Canada, which no one has visited, which exists nowhere, seems to serve everyone but the oppressed. For in reality the glare of this Canada obscures a settler-colonial state on stolen land. The $2000/month checks Ocasio-Cortez praised were withheld from disabled Canadians who weren’t working. Medical racism, homophobia, and transphobia flourish in our healthcare system. The mayor of Toronto tweets about Toronto’s diversity while overseeing mass evictions during a pandemic and presiding over an anti-Black police force. Trudeau speaks about reconciliation while appealing court rulings to give Indigenous children compensation. At a point “better than America” begins to mean very little.
And the idealized Canada doesn’t just serve Canadian politicians. American politicians gesture towards “Canada” as a model for healthcare and argue the United States is wealthy enough to have a similar system. This of course is true. But why is the United States so wealthy in the first place? The economic structure which creates American hegemony is never discussed; Americans are just encouraged to integrate public healthcare into an existing capitalist order. In 1979 Ted Kennedy described Canada as a country with shared values and standards of living. Implicitly, places like Cuba, which also had single-payer healthcare, were not aligned with capitalist American values. The ideal Canada is perfect for these sorts of arguments because it in no way contradicts a neocolonial agenda. It presents an aspirational image for leftist American politicians which can be imitated without compromising the United States’ accumulation of capital. Therefore this ideal Canada, which isn’t a country because it doesn’t exist, becomes a perfect national myth. The fantasy serves a mutually beneficial function for politicians occupying Turtle Island, allowing them espouse progressive politics while maintaining white supremacist oppressive structures.
In 2010, Weyburn Saskatchewan unveiled a statue of their former premier, Tommy Douglas, father of Canadian medicare and author of the thesis The Problems of the Subnormal Family. There is an ongoing campaign to put his face on the $5 bill. The statue of Douglas outstretches its hand, gesturing almost towards the sky. The inscription reads simply, the Greatest Canadian.
