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Article: Continental Divide: the Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada.
- Article from:
- The New Leader
- Article date:
- May 14, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 American Labor Conference on International Affairs. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IT IS OUR single most important trade partner. It has the second-highest level of direct investment in our economy of any nation on earth, as well as the world's second-highest gross domestic product per capita. Yet Americans, as the historian J. Bartlett Brebner once put it, "are benevolently ignorant about Canada, " while Canadians, by contrast, " are malevolently well-informed about the United States. " We suppose that they resemble us more than they actually do. They, however, seize enthusiastically upon every difference, large and small, because a sense of being North American but not American holds Canada together, if anything does.
As Seymour Martin Lipset ...