Recently, after taking part in a literary festival, I asked an organizer how to fill in the expense claim. She answered: “Our mileage rate is 50 cents a kilometre.”
Only if she had said “kilometrage rate” would I, or any Canadian, have had any difficult understanding what she meant. To us, it’s perfectly natural to mix and muddle two quite different systems of measurement.
This is my entry point into a theory about Canadian identity I’ve been developing and make public here in the hope it will earn me a Canada Council grant.
This is that Canada can only be understood as a bumblebee nation.
Bumblebees, so it’s said, cannot fly. Their wings are too short and stubby. Yet they in fact buzz about entirely efficiently, even can hover motionless while sucking out pollen. The reason is that bees don’t know that they cannot fly.
We, too, ought not to be able to fly. But we do, and on the whole not at all badly.
Take our Constitution. By far the greatest part, the original British North America Act of 1867, makes no sense at all.
It was drafted to create a highly centralized federation in direct contrast to the United States, which was so decentralized it had just gone through an appalling civil war.
Instead, Canada has developed into what is probably the most highly decentralized of all federations in the world, while the U.S. had become highly centralized. Yet we make this system work — and today are looking good economically — because in the 1990s we did what normally is only possible in centralized nation-states, namely put our national finances in order.
Now take that great Canadian curiosity, that we can only buy wines and spirits in government-owned stores. Economically, this is lunatic. Governments have no competence in retail selling and nothing about wines and spirits makes them a natural monopoly, as once was the case with, say, telephone companies.
Yet the system works. Governments get regular revenues. Liquor store employees get higher wages than they would in the private sector. And customers don’t do at all badly because the Ontario Liquor Control Board is the largest buyer in the world, and so gets all kinds of deals.
Only a bumblebee nation could make so lunatic a system work.
Nevertheless, our system really is nutty. As a current example, we are the only nation in the world with no national agency to regulate stocks and bonds. Attempts to create one to replace the 10 provincial agencies have gone on for 30 years, and have gone nowhere.
Progress is now being made. Only two provinces — surprise, surprise, Quebec and Alberta — are adamantly opposed. But a new problem has arisen. A national agency should have a national head office.
The obvious place for it is where most stocks and bonds are sold — Toronto. But everyone hates Toronto. So it’s being proposed, seriously, that the agency have no head office.
A bit of history may be useful: For a long time, we, uniquely, had no national capital. We only got one because Queen Victoria chose a place for it and, back then, no one could argue with the Queen. Still, Queen Victoria was adroit enough to put the capital in the one place that Canadians from all contending cities couldn’t complain about: She put it in the middle of nowhere.
Today’s Queen, while greatly admired, doesn’t have the same authority. But a good substitute does exist. It’s the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. All Canadian corporations of consequence are registered with it. So all we need to do is recognize we’ve already got a national regulatory agency, while of course never admitting it.
I expect a call from the Canada Council very shortly.
Richard Gwyn’s column appears every other Friday. firstname.lastname@example.org