A Bit More Detail

When my Friday post about how historical and ethnic links were encouraging Vermonters to look to Québec came onto Facebook, commenter Ben wondered why Canadians of any language background would visit Vermont. It's so like Canada, after all. Why bother to leave the country?

If you stop at the Canadian gift shop at the border north of Burlington, you see tons of Maple Syrup and related products. Like it's something distinctly Canadian you will never see again. Then you drive into Vermont to find it chock full of Maple Syrup. The reality is, Vermont is more Canada- it's just the US portion of Canada. No, if I was Canadian, I would keep driving until I reached something more exotic. New York City, or the New England coast.

Me, I put Canadians visiting border regions of the United States (and vice versa, too) down to another manifestation of the narcissism of small differences. Canadians and Americans--even French Canadian and Americans--have much in common: history, culture, economics. Canadians and the northeastern United States have more in common, and Canada and the northern half of New England have the most similarities of all. It's not implausible to imagine that, given the prominence of French Canadian immigrants in local history and the far easier assimilation of English Canadians, for instance, that a majority of Vermonters and New Hampshirites and Mainers have a substantial number of Canadian ancestors. Visiting the northern half of New England, then, for Canadians, could plausibly be described as visiting someplace foreign that's easily familiar enough to feel broadly home-like but just different enough to remind you that you're in a separate country. I imagine that this might be the motivation for some of the cross-border regionalist efforts behind such things a plans to link Ontario to upstate New York via high-speed rail; I know myself that, driving through upstate New York, the differences between the republican and classically-named gridwork of that territory and the more organic and British/Canadian-themed landscapes of Ontario, were interesting. Taking advantage of the fairly trivial frontier to go abroad--in a fashion--seemed like a much less daunting task than, say, crossing an ocean or a continent, even. And more fairly to the people involved, if a boundary is fairly low and honestly fairly arbitrary, treating it as impermeable doesn't seem quite smart. Let the people flow!

Perhaps western Canadians feel the same way about their bordering American states, too?