Listening to the news, it is difficult not to notice the tendency of Canadian business to blend into the American economic landscape and it is increasingly difficult to make any coherent argument against it.
This is a country with a population the size of Texas located on a land mass larger than any other in the world except for China and Russia - that's right we're bigger than Australia, by quite a bit. (and honestly, I'm not sure about China)
If it were populated like any other country in the world then economic and military autonomy might make some sense but we're not. Canada's population is declining and we weren't all that populated to begin with.
I've thought a lot about this. It puzzles me that on one side of the border we have the world's superpower, bustling along making huge strides and huge mistakes but in general being followed by the rest of the world and on the other we have a huge pile of natural resources and a country that most of the world considers benignly irrelevant.
There's no question that Canadians are a bit different from Americans - for one thing cars are not as important here as they are in the states. You'd think, given the weather, that would be reversed but it isn't. I've been in plenty of cities in both countries and Canadians drive less, think less about their cars and seem, in general, to see a car more as a means to an end than as a part of their identity.
Canadians organize differently, think about health care differently - it would never occur to a Canadian to choose a job based on health benefits but in the U.S. that is common.
But when it comes to something like TV, Canadians seem to want and expect to be treated like Americans. Of course, this is not really possible and the cracks in the Canadian broadcast industry really underscore this fact.
The engine of TV is not viewers, it's advertising. If your market is the size of Texas but it has to be spread out over stations that cover the same land mass as the continental United States, and then some - you've got problems.
International advertisers aren't likely to show the same kind of enthusiasm for that market as they would for the ten times larger market in the states. And who can blame them? (And when I say international advertisers, I mean American advertisers which is really not the same since the Canadian film and TV market is widely considered to be one domestic market.)
So high-revenue generators like the Superbowl, tend not to have the same quality of ads in Canada as the do in the U.S. This means Canadian TV is not as well funded as American TV which in turn means there are less $$$$ to try to reach more territory (but fewer people) with.
All of that is fine by your basic Canadian since most of us watch more American TV than Canadian anyhow. But what does it mean from an economic standpoint? And in turn, what does that mean culturally?
Are we working? As a country, do we understand what it means to function? Or are we just focused on getting from one decade to the next with everything pretty much the same as it was the decade before? Do we know the difference between doing a job and just keeping it?
Sometimes I wonder.
