THANNE LONGEN FOLK TO GOON ON PILGRIMAGES

Canadian rhapsody: The Great White North's unlikely progressivism (Jeet Heer, 7/13/2003, Boston Globe)

VISITING TORONTO RECENTLY, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida extolled Canada for resembling the United States. ''If I were blindfolded and landed in Toronto and didn't have to go through customs, I wouldn't know I was in a foreign country,'' Bush noted. Evidently, the governor hasn't been paying attention to the press coverage Canada has recently been getting in the United States, which has focused on how the two nations are rapidly diverging politically and culturally.

Whereas the United States has been moving to the right over the last few years, Canada has become increasingly progressive. Earlier this year, two-thirds of Canadians supported Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien's decision to sit out the Iraq war. And polls show that roughly 55 to 60 percent are lining up behind the governing Liberal Party's push to pass federal laws legalizing same-sex marriage and relaxing marijuana restrictions. To the chagrin of US drug czar John Walters, some Canadian localities are going even further: Vancouver, for example, plans to open up North America's first police-free ''safe injection sites'' where heroin addicts can inject themselves using free, clean needles under the supervision of a nurse.

To American conservatives, Canada is going to pot in more ways than one. The right-wing political columnist Pat Buchanan denounced America's largest trading partner as ''Soviet Canuckistan.'' But to some American leftists, Canada is a progressive mecca. The superiority of Canada, with its generous social welfare programs and comparatively low rate of gun violence (despite widespread gun ownership), formed the subtext of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning film ''Bowling for Columbine.'' Ralph Nader, in a mildly goofy 1992 book called ''Canada Firsts,'' extolled worthy Canadian achievements from universal health care to the ''first rotary snowplow and snowblower.''

It''s probably too much to hope that all these folks move there, eh? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 7:38 AM