Home Washington Secretariat Seymour Lipset Lecture on Democracy

Notes for Seymour Lipset Lecture on Democracy

Colin Robertson
Minister (Advocacy) and Head, Washington Advocacy Secretariat
Canadian Embassy
Washington, DC
November 2, 2005

This evening Frank Fukuyama will present the second annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World. Born in Harlem, brought up in the Bronx, Seymour Martin Lipset, had intended to become a dentist because the only member of his immigrant family who remained relatively prosperous throughout the years of the Great Depression was his uncle, a dentist. But at City College in New York he asked himself: Why no socialist movement had ever succeeded in the United States?

As a doctoral student at Columbia University, Lipset exiled himself to the North American equivalent of Siberia, at least in terms of winter weather. He spent a winter in Saskatchewan looking at the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. The CCF, which later morphed into the NDP, remains the only national social democrat party in North America and it has formed governments not only in Saskatchewan, where it is the government, but in British Columbia, Ontario and in Manitoba, where it is also the government today.

Marty Lipset then went on to become a lecturer at the University of Toronto. Throughout his prolific writing career, Lipset has always had a fascination with Canada. His comparative study of Canada and the US, Agrarian Socialism, is now a seminal work in Canadian political science.

Lipset concluded that two nations came out of the American Revolution. Canada was the country of the counter-revolution – statist, Tory, characterized by noblesse oblige, communitarian, elitist, group-oriented, and deferential.

America, by contrast, was the child of revolution: individualistic, antistatist, antielitist, supportive of laissez-faire and less obedient.

While we speak the same language, eh, our habits – church attendance, divorce, welfare and health policies, crime rate, legal system, party systems, electoral participation; are different.

Canada, he concluded, is much more a social democracy with greater emphasis on family and personal security. America is more committed to competitive meritocratic values, institutions and behaviour.

A footnote. The leader of the CCF movement that Lipset studied last year, Tommy Douglas was voted the ‘greatest’ Canadian. Premier of Saskatchewan he is considered the ‘father of Canadian medicare’.

His grandson, Kiefer Sutherland, may be better known to many of you as Jack Bauer in Fox’s popular 24. And Kiefer’s father, Donald, plays Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton in NBC’s new hit, Commander in Chief.

Now what Marty would have made of that I’d like to know. Canadian exceptionalism?