The American Canada Watch: A Northern Miscellany
Edited by James Eldin Reed and Deborah Addis

This modest collection of American writing about Canada, running to a mere three hundred printed pages, pulls together two decades and more of experience and observation north of the border.

Considered as an e-book (that distinctively postmodern literary form), this is a miscellany—a little of this and that. Yet the material presented here does have an underlying coherence in its preoccupations, viewpoint, and motive.

The major work, Archives of the American Canada Watch, is reportage on Canada from the middle to late 1990s, when the country was nearly torn apart by the threat of Quebec separatism. The newsletter’s pages are thus replete with articles not only on the role of Quebec within Canada but with broader issues of Canadian governance—the functioning of the British parliamentary system at both federal and provincial levels, the changing structure of the remarkably disciplined political parties, and, inevitably, the political wisdom of Canada’s small and cohesive governing class.

Preoccupation with the future of Quebec, whether as a “distinct society” within Canada or (as then seemed quite possible) an independent French-speaking republic on the St. Lawrence, led the editors to explore La Belle Province in its various regions. The travel article on the Gaspé in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, is a representative fragment from that cultural inquiry.

Yet to approach a foreign country through journalistic reporting or literary travel is not the same as actually living there.

In 2004 the editors entered Canada under the auspices of the Fulbright Fellowship program of the U.S. Department of State. Fulbrighters to Canada, as elsewhere, are required by act of Congress to submit a full and frank report on what they have observed in the host country. Of the many detailed questions asked in a Fulbright Report, the most telling has to do with how the Fulbright year transformed the American scholar’s views of his host country and its institutions.

In the Fulbright Report soon to be posted on this site—A Yankee in Canada: A Harvard Fulbright Scholar’s Notes on Conditions North of the Border—the reader may observe the Americans grappling with this deeper and more fundamental set of issues. In their new role as cultural diplomats on the ground, the Americans are now obliged to look below the surface of events to the underlying structural realities in today’s Canada.

Some of these structural features can be a little disillusioning to Americans of a certain generation who have long tended to idealize Canada, its institutions, and its role in the world.

As outsiders who were suddenly insiders, the editors could not fail to see the widespread patronage and corruption in the political system. They were astonished at the culture of impunity obtaining somewhat widely in the country’s governing class. They witnessed at close range the conduct of Canadian-American relations and the making of Canadian foreign policy. They were privileged to look behind the mask of state.

During their residence north of the border, the editors experienced Canada’s fabled health care system in situ. And they learned from their Canadian students, colleagues and friends about the actual social conditions of the country.

It is their sincere hope that these observations will contribute to international understanding. A clear-eyed, nuanced, and up-to-date picture of twenty-first century Canada and Canadian-American relations is all the more important in view of the regeneration of American public life in the 2008 elections--and of the difficult policy choices, in North America as elsewhere, facing the Obama administration.

The editors are sometimes asked why they developed an interest in Canada. In fact there is a long tradition of American writing about Canada, including such authors as James Fenimore Cooper (who famously described Canada as “the Country of the Frenchers”), Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, the great historian Francis Parkman, the novelist William Dean Howells, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson. We hope to have made some contribution, however modest, to the literature.

The master novelist Henry James said it best. “It is of good profit to us Americans,” he wrote, “to have near us, and of easy access, an ample something which is not our expansive selves.”

For additional information, editors or agents are invited to contact: jimreed@​post.harvard.edu


James Eldin Reed
Harvard University

Deborah Addis
Boston, Massachusetts

E-Book Website Hosted by The Authors Guild, New York.