When Canadians aren’t busy with election campaigns, which seems to have become a perennial activity, one of their favourite pastimes involves identifying differences between their country and their neighbour to the south, the United States.
The most prominent display of such analysis usually occurs around July 1, Canada’s national holiday, but when people are bombarded with election news, both at home and in the US, they’re always tempted to emphasize the differences, and similarities, between our two great nations.
It would be absolutely wrong to conclude that the US and Canada are as different as day and night, because we actually have a lot more in common than either side cares to admit. Americans and Canadians tend to focus on the same issues and challenges, such as health care, taxes or the state of the economy.
But where we differ greatly is in our willingness to espouse the “lunatic fringe”.
The Americans went through an election last November and are now gearing up for the big showdown in 2012, but Canadians are in the middle of a campaign right now, which probably makes us a bit more sensitive to what’s going on in this country and around the world.
Our leaders are travelling around the country, explaining themselves and their ideas for a better Canada. Sometimes public discourse becomes heated, but it rarely leaves the realm of policy-based debate, which is something we should be grateful for.
In the US, unfortunately, voters aren’t always allowed to form their opinions based on objective facts. There is an excessive amount of hype, innuendo and outright lunacy that shapes the outcome of elections, with the most current example of the latter being the “birther” movement, a group of Americans who still believe that President Barack Obama wasn’t born on American soil and therefore is ineligible for the highest office in the land.
Thankfully, this is a kind of debate that we, as Canadians, don’t have to endure. Not only do we not have “second-class citizens”, as America does, who are barred from becoming president, despite the lofty principles invoked in the country’s constitution, but we’re also not that susceptible to fringe ideas.
By now, there is more than sufficient evidence of Obama’s birth right, enough to satisfy any court of law even under the strictest and most narrow standards of reasonable doubt or balance of probabilities. Yet, a still sizable number of Americans refuse to accept the evidence and still keep claiming that their president isn’t legit.
In recent memory, no one has done more screaming on that issue than billionaire and reality-TV host Donald Trump. He’s understood to have deployed an army of private investigators to Hawaii in an attempt to disprove Obama’s claims. When confronted with the evidence on public record, Trump seemingly abandons all reason and sense, screams at and threatens journalists and generally acts like one of those homeless and dishevelled guys standing on a corner somewhere who talk to themselves about alien invasions or black helicopters.
The top leaders of the Republican party have already conceded defeat on the birther issue, and gone on record as saying that they no longer have any doubt about Obama’s place of birth. So, one can safely say without any amount of exaggeration that those who still sense a conspiracy or cover-up are not of sound mind at all.
But who would have thought that The Donald himself, no less, would be among those who require urgent psychiatric attention? True, it might all be a stunt, a gimmick he’s pulled out of his toupee either to drive up sagging ratings for his ailing TV show or to connect, incomprehensibly, with the lowest common denominator within Republican and Tea Party ranks.
Many suspect it’s just a stunt to boost his show and that he’ll drop the act of running for president once the season finale has aired, but his feeding the mentally unstable is reckless in the extreme, because it aggravates an already polarized political system, where death threats against or attempts on the lives of legislators are no longer a remote possibility.
So, if we are to look for what makes Canada quite different from the US, it’s safe to say that it’s the former’s unwillingness to go down the path of sheer lunacy. There are a few who try to bring this lunatic fringe approach in politics to Canada, such as Ezra Levant, who just the other day demonstrated his lack of sound mind and maturity by taking a chainsaw to a tree on Earth Day, and thus proving that his TV show has nothing to do with professional journalism, but thankfully they can be counted on a hand or two.
It also speaks in favour of the Canadian public that it doesn’t allow itself to be influenced by such fringe personalities. Sadly, the same is not always true of our American friends and cousins.