With respect to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, my three tales of 21st-century Toronto demonstrate how distant Canada and Australia have recently grown from one another.
June 2003—on a warm early summer’s day, sitting in a taxi in Toronto, I strike up a conversation with a Somalian taxi-driver. He’s a refugee and he’s fascinated by global politics. We discuss Australia and Canada and the conversation turns to political parties. I make the point that John Howard is the leader of the Liberal Party in Australia. He turns his head sharply and snaps, ‘John Howard’s no liberal. Now Jean Chrétien [the Canadian PM], he’s a liberal.’
September 2, 2002—at the 175-year-old University of Toronto. One of the contending heirs to the Canadian prime ministerial mantle (soon to be vacated by Chrétien), former Finance Minister Paul Martin, stands before an audience telling them that Canada is poised to become the world’s first ‘postmodern nation’.
What he meant was that as a diverse, independent and enriched nation, Canada understands the need to govern ourselves on this planet as ‘one humanity’. That globalisation means that we have to ‘come together to try to figure out how in fact in an age of migration of peoples, the migration of disease, the migration of environmental problems, we as a world begin to govern ourselves.’ (The Globe and Mail, 3 September 2002) June 11, 2003—splashed across the front page of Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, is a gay couple kissing in the first official gay marriage ceremony in North America. That day the Ontario Court of Appeal had ruled that gay marriages are legal. Only a week later Canada’s Attorney-General, Maurice Cauchon, says he’s proud to be a Canadian as the Canadian federal government decides that it will not appeal the Ontario decision.
Just as Maupin’s Tales encapsulated the essence of San Francisco as the most progressive and liberal culture in the US from the late 1960s onwards, so do these three vignettes capture the spirit that is modern Canada.
And they drive home another point. If Canada and Australia were once frequently compared—because of the political and social heritage and diversity they shared—these days, most of the once positive
comparisons have ended. Canada is indeed becoming the world’s first ‘postmodern’ nation as Paul Martin said it would, and in doing so makes Australia look a fawningly colonial, closed-minded and embittered country that resents being geographically situated in