ABSTRACT
Anti-Americanism in Canada is unique (Granatstein 1996; Daniels 1998). There is no other country in the world which owes its existence to a conscious act of anti-Americanism: Canada emerged as a separate political community because of the refusal by elites in the other British North American colonies to accept the invitation of the American revolutionaries to join in the new republican experiment. Second, there is no other political community in which anti-Americanism is so deeply established as part of the political culture. At the same time, however, there is no other political community where such deeply entrenched antiAmericanism is generally so bland that Harvey M. Sapolsky (2005) has termed it ‘low grade anti-Americanism’ – akin to Moisés Naím’s argument that there is a ‘lite’ anti-Americanism that can be contrasted with more virulent forms of this sentiment (Naím 2003). Indeed, for all the deeply rooted and pervasive anti-Americanism in Canada, one would be hard-pressed to fi nd among Canadians the kind of virulent attitudes reported in most contemporary studies of the phenomenon of anti-Americanism (e.g. Hollander 2004; Gibson 2004; Rubin and Rubin 2004; Ross and Ross 2004; Sardar and Davies 2002; Hertsgaard 2002).
