2) Corn Bran Squares ™. You can buy them in the US, but they can be hard to find.

3) Timmy’s

4) Toques

5) Constant high profile hockey coverage on TV and in print that makes it easy to keep up to date with little to no effort on your part. I doubt I’ll be hearing anything much about the World Junior Hockey Championships once I’m back home.

6) The Kit-Kat bars taste better.

7) Kilometres, centigrade, and other units of measurement that actually make sense. What does 18 degrees Fahrenheit mean anyway?

Things not to miss:

1) The cold, dreary weather.

In “Final Period,” Karen Houppert discusses a new birth control pill that eliminates periods completely, linking it to the recalcitrant argument that women are somehow physically and mentally debilitated by their periods. This argument has emerged periodically throughout the last 100 years (and more), and is generally trotted out any time women seek more rights or to enter into spaces from which they were previously excluded. In my research on women scientists during World War II I found an article by psychologist Georgene Seward, called “Psychological Effects of the Menstrual Cycle on Women Worker” (published in the Psychological Bulletin in 1944) in which she smashes previous arguments against women workers that were based on menstrual debility. She notes that women who got more exercise and worked more actually had fewer premenstrual symptoms, suggesting that PMS and related infirmities had more to do with culture than biology. Yet we still get the message that women are somehow weakened by menstruation and that, thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, we can just avoid menstruation all together.

Similarly, Paul Krugman argues that “the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments.” While I wish this were the case, even Krugman cannot magically vanquish all arguments against universal health care by fiat. I’m sure that they will continue to circulate as the debate continues, with opponents offering the same objections they’ve been offering for years: universal health care = higher taxes, longer waits, etc.

What accounts for “rhetorical recalcitrance”? It doesn’t seem to have much to do with logic, that’s for sure, but it does have a lot to do with the values, beliefs, habits, and customs that give certain arguments a kind of “rightness” or “appropriateness” to audiences. Plus, these resistant arguments tend to have a lot of backing from economic interests.

On an unrelated note, from a NYT Editorial on Conrad Black: “there is nothing so frighteningly passive-aggressive as a well-irked Canadian.”Also, with regards to Canadian Exceptionalism: “In Canada, any disagreement with the United States is typically cast in David and Goliath terms, with the Canadians as beleaguered underdogs and the Americans as rapacious swindlers (see: soft wood lumber, treaties regarding).”

“Canada is an open, free and democratic society with the strongest economy in the G8 today, while also being a proud and independent country with our own way of life. Canada’s political structures differ substantially from those in the United States. Our cultural values and social models have also been shaped by unique forces and we’ve made our own policy choices to meet our own needs.”

As is often the case in Canadian rhetoric, the primary function is differentiation from the United States. Maybe I’m being cynical, but I’m really not sure how this “third way” is all that different from the American approach, unless Harper is assuring Chileans that they can still sell and market whatever their equivalents are to Canadian bacon, stuffed moose dressed up as Mounties, and mass produced “First Nations” artwork.

Afterwards, the 3 of us discussed what might have been done differently to persuade such an audience, if indeed they were persuadable on such a topic given their apparent political leanings. Mark suggested that the Reagan era had inculcated a deep distrust of taxes, big government, and any other perceived infringement on “choice” or “freedom,” one that might prevent some audiences from accepting (or really listening to) arguments for universal health care. Laura suggested that more facts and statistics might have been useful. In addition to showing how a family in Britain or France lived, for instance, Moore might have shown how much those families paid in taxes for their free health care and cheap prescription drugs. Lauren and I felt that Americans are trained NOT to identify with people who appear to be lower-middle class or below. So even those who might be in similar financial straights as the families who were led to near bankruptcy to pay for medical bills might not identify with those families… no one wants to admit to being anything less than middle class.

More observations:

• Canada comes out looking pretty good in the movie, but not nearly as good as France.
• There are cute doctors in England and Cuba. Must visit Cuba.
• Not too many people in the theater seemed to get the joke about not being able to show the viewers how to get to Cuba by boat.
• The Young Republicans found it extremely funny that the Canadian golfer identified himself as Conservative, politically, but that he supported universal health care. This goes to show how deeply entrenched the conservative/liberal dichotomy is in the United States and how it does not map neatly onto other countries. Oddly, there are political parties actually named Liberal and Conservative in Canada.
• Someone needs to do a project on Tommy Douglas, the Canadian who apparently single handedly convinced all of Canada to support socialized medicine (according to the golfer in the movie) and who was recently named The Greatest Canadian. I’m sure he was a very eloquent person, but there’s got to be more to the story than that. Anyone? Anyone?

To explain this phenomenon, we generated the following hypotheses:

1) A revolutionary country requires an early investment in producing national identity through rhetoric, while a country that gradually weans itself away from the great mothership has less of a need to do so, (until it is struck by its own identity crisis much much later in the 1970s.)

2) In America, rhetorical displays of patriotism are produced and driven by the market (see “Proud to Be an American,” etc.) I guess that’s the true definition of freedom–no one has to force you to produce patriotic pap for the radio; it just naturally arises from the patriotic spirit of the nation. Or something. In Canada, the market does not naturally produce rhetorical displays of patriotism. At least not in song. It didn’t even produce many good singers until the CANCON rules were inaugurated. So these have to be commissioned by the government, as was the case when the government sponsored a contest for a song to commemorate the 125th anniversary of confederation in 1992. The song sucked, not surprisingly.

Apparently Canada has a long list of patriotic songs, including these:

At The Canada Jubilee
Bells of Canada
Canada, Land of the Maple Tree
Canada in My Pocket
The Canadian Boat Song
Canadian Folk ‘Overture’
The Canadian Girl
Canadian Man
Drink Canada Dry
Hockey Night in Canada Theme
Sweet, Sweet Canada
Un Canadien Errant (A Wandering Canadian)
Young Man From Canada

Aside from “Oh Canada” and “God Save the Queen” (which really isn’t about Canada) and “Hockey Night in Canada” (which as far as I know has no words), I haven’t heard of any of them. And I’ll bet most of these were commissioned for various milestones in Canadian history.

3) Canada defines it self in contradistinction to the United States, and you can’t wax poetic (or rhetorical) about a lack.

*****

In case you were wondering, here’s more about Canadian Girls in Training:

World War II didn’t start the uniform trend for women. Far from it. But the pseudo-military uniform, outside of wartime, was usually meant for girls and teenagers who were encouraged to join clubs and training groups, I think. I belonged to Explorers and then to Canadian Girls in Training. Both were kind of nautical-themed. In Explorers, we had to wear a white blouse onto which we sewed these different badges. I think you had to get six of them, for things like memorizing the Explorer creed or what have you. Then you could move up to CGIT, where you got to wear a sailor blouse called a middy (see left). The uniform also entailed a “lanyard,” which I think was some kind of white rope thingy. I forget. The whole point of these organizations was to emulate the premier group, the Girl Guides, who were in turn emulating either the American Girl Scouts or the British Girl Guides. I wanted to be a Brownie (precursor to Girl Guide), in part because they had a cute brown uniform that they got to wear to school on Remembrance Day. We didn’t wear our Explorer uniforms on Remembrance Day.

Aside: The whole episode is kind of representative of my childhood. Whenever I asked for something, my mom would give me a reasonable facsimile, which she thought was better. But I just wanted the original. So, for instance, I wanted a Mr. Potatohead and asked for one for 7 consecutive Christmases. Instead, I got this kind of dumpy, flat, pear shaped plastic thingy that came with a bunch of different Colorforms for hair, eyes, and clothing. Not the same as a Mr. Potatohead. I’m not knocking Colorforms or anything, though. In fact, if I had this set I’d probably still play with it. It’s very mod.