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The Permeable Border, the Great Lakes Region, and the Canadian-American Relationship
by
John J. Bukowczyk
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Largely undefended, virtually invisible, and easily traversed, the Canada-United States border has meant different things at different moments in the lives of these two countries and in their relationship to each other, most frequently perhaps serving as a symbol for the intangible constructions of sovereignty and national identity. |
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In parsing the Canadian-American relationship on a practical level, the historiography of this subject has revolved largely around whether historians have stressed the permeability of the border or the fact that it nonetheless has been a border. The differing emphases have related not only to the fluctuating character of the border in different periods and circumstances, but also to the divergent perspectives of Canadian and American policymakers, ideologues, migrants, visitors, investors, manufacturers, traders, and others, who have viewed the border either from the north looking south or from the south looking north, but rarely if ever from both directions at once or squarely down the middle. It is no less true in historical writing that emphases have varied due to the differing interpretive frameworks of the historians who have written about these subjects and to the various influences on them and their work. |
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In the past thirty-five years, three books have used the phrase "permeable border" as part of their titles and as a point of departure for their analyses; the approaches taken in these three studies tell us a great deal about how the Canadian-American relationship has evolved in recent decades and how the ways Canadians and Americans have viewed it have changed. The early 1970s, when the first of these volumes appeared, was a time of soul-searching in Canada about Canadian
identity, nationalism and federalism, dependency and American imperialism, and, with the "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec as a backdrop, Canada's very survival as a unified country. In 1972 Harold M. Troper, Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, published a slim book of documents and discussions of "issues" titled The Permeable Border. Covering such topics as the migration of U.S. "draft dodgers" (Troper's term) to Canada, the Canadian "brain drain" to the United States, and the penetration of Canada by American media and culture, Troper stressed the need for Canada to maintain its "cultural independence," which he defined as "the ability of a group or nation to decide its own social, intellectual, artistic and educational development free of outside pressure." "For Canada," according to Troper, "this means to maintain a distinct identity on the same continent as the United States.... We Canadians are looking to our traditions and history to find that which makes us Canadian. We want to know what preserved Canada as a separate country in North America for over one hundred years, and how we can best continue to live in harmony with the United States while deciding our own destiny." The last section of the book, consisting of an editorial from the Toronto Daily Star, was titled "Stem the American cultural flood."1 |
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The second Permeable Border, by Christine Boyanoski, then Assistant Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is a study of the "art of Canada and the United States, 1920–1940," which is also the book's subtitle. It was published in 1989, seventeen years after the Troper volume. Boyanoski's book was the catalogue for an exhibition organized at the Art Gallery of Ontario to coincide with a joint conference of the Canadian Association for American Studies and the American Studies Association held in Toronto.2 In a dawning era of free trade between the two countries, Boyanoski's book stepped away from a defensive Canadian cultural nationalism to undertake "a comparison of Canadian and American art between the two world wars ... the common influences affecting North American art following World War I, American influence on Canadian art, and the indigenous differences in Canadian and American painting."3 The introduction acknowledged that the exhibition and the catalogue appeared amidst "a burgeoning interest in Canadian studies in the United States" and a "heightened interest in bilateral relations."4 |
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