rfmcdonald | [LINK] "The Lost Canadians" (Reply)

Over at the excellent Walrus Magazine, Grant Stoddard's "The Lost Canadians" takes a look at the people of the Northwest Angle, a territory accidentally attached to the United States despite a geography that should have placed it in Canada. Interestingly enough, the people of this quasi-insular possession have been willing to take advantage of their geography.

[The] Northwest Angle and Islands [is] a 302-square-kilometre US exclave unwittingly created by the comically unwieldy Article II of the 1818 treaty. Some years later, when a survey team led by English Canadian explorer David Thompson eventually located Franklin’s northwesternmost point of the lake and surveyed the fix specified in the new document, it was found to intersect other bays of the lake, cutting off a Malta-sized chunk of US territory. The anomaly is easily found on a map: simply follow the forty-ninth parallel from west to east, and you’ll see a small upward jut, “the chimney of Minnesota,” just before the border begins to wobble off its 2,300-kilometre perpendicular course.

With Ontario to the north, Manitoba to the west, and open water to the south and east, the Angle enjoys the distinction of being the northernmost point of the contiguous forty-eight states, the only part of the continental US north of the forty-ninth parallel, and one of only four non-island locations in the lower forty-eight not directly connected by land within the country. But the Angle’s superb walleye fishing, rather than its curious location, is what sustains the local economy. It was an enduring threat to this livelihood from Ontario that spurred Dietzler and a small handful of others to explore the idea of seceding from the Union and joining Canada. The notion quickly grew beyond fanciful bar talk, and within a few months it was introduced as a bill in the US House of Representatives, supposedly prompting a miffed Bill Clinton to place an urgent call to Jean Chrétien.

Let’s ruminate upon this milieu for a moment. What could be more panic inducing to the American psyche than a group of rugged, tenacious, individualistic US citizens opting out of the dream in favour of Canada? In 1997, it might have seemed too ludicrous a proposition for many Americans to ponder, but what about now? Not only is the United States a more bilious, ailing, and fractious place than it was thirteen years ago; but in 2010, Canada consistently bests its neighbour on almost every metric pertaining to quality of life. The American wont, of course, is to compare our two countries with a more fiscal eye, but even there Canada has largely cast off its hard-won image as the habitual underperformer.

You’ll excuse me for unabashedly singing Canada’s praises. I do realize it’s considered unspeakably gauche around here, but I’m a recent émigré, and as such possess a bullish, patriotic zeal that has lingered on beyond the hoopla of the Winter Olympics. I also feel that in some way I’m a physical embodiment of the mother country and her North American offspring: Born and raised in England, I’m the grandson of a World War II vet from rural Nova Scotia who saw bloody action across Europe. After graduating from a London university, I lived in the United States for a decade before following a woman to British Columbia and marrying her. Now, sitting at my desk in Vancouver, I can clearly see the snowy peak of Mount Baker in Washington state, and am compelled to think about life on either side of this blatantly synthetic line. Visiting the Northwest Angle, then, seemed like an opportunity to meet with an entire community mulling over the very same thing. Is there a point, after all, where pragmatism trumps patriotism? My aim was to gain a better sense of where that point might lie by pitching Canada as the better place.

The advocacy of secession was much more a media strategy than anything else, but Stoddard argues persuasively that the outside world wouldn't do badly to see what makes the locals tick.

Go, read.