There is a view, shared by continentalists and Canadian nationalists alike, that holds that the viability and even legitimacy of Canada as a sovereign country depends on us remaining distinct from the United States in several important ways.

This is usually framed in terms of “culture” and “values” — thus we have a department of Heritage dedicated to preserving and promoting Canadian culture, while the Prime Minister often frames his agenda in terms of promoting and defending Canadian values.

This sort of Canadian nationalism got an unexpected boost recently, with the publication of pollster Michael Adams’ new book, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values.

I say unexpected, since “Canadian culture”, such as it is, has been taking quite a beating recently. Our television industry is barely alive, no one sees our films or reads our magazines, and even nominal Canadian successes such as Celine Dion and Shania Twain are simply cogs in a massive global pop machine.

Adams argues that over the past decade, social values between the two countries have diverged in significant ways and that the long-term trend points to increasing divergence.

Social values are the various beliefs and preferences people have of what constitutes the good life, such as community involvement, tolerance, and religiosity. Adams has spent the past ten years tracking changes in dozens of such values on both sides of the border, and the results are interesting.

Both countries are trending away from traditional values, are becoming less deferential to authority and more individualistic.

But while Canadians are moving toward values associated with idealism and personal self-fulfillment (e.g. creativity, ecological concern, and cultural sampling), Americans are apparently “moving away en masse from the trends associated with civic engagement and social and ecological concern.” According to Adams, Americans are becoming more survivalist in outlook, embracing “values of nihilism, aggression, fear of others, and consumptive one-upmanship.”

For many people, this is some serious cognitive dissonance. And what it suggests is that “culture” as it is commonly understood might be largely irrelevant to the entire debate over sovereignty.

Most of us operate under an implicit theory of how society works, according to which culture drives social values, which in turn shape our social institutions.

Broad acceptance of this theory drives a great deal of the social and political debate in North America. A recent example is the movie Bowling for Columbine, in which Michael Moore argues that America’s gun-loving culture in general, and the political strength of the NRA in particular, is a function of a “culture of fear” that drives American society.

Many Canadian continentalists make similar assumptions about the relationship between culture, values and institutions.

In a series of articles published in the National Post last fall, historian Michael Bliss made a tremendous amount of hay out of his observation that Canadians had become culturally almost indistinguishable from Americans.

Since we all shop at the Gap and drink Starbucks coffee and watch Survivor and listen to Eminem, surely we must share the same values as Americans? And if that is so (goes the argument), then surely we might want to consider, perhaps, a North American political union?

But the argument only gets whatever plausibility it has from that implicit folk-sociological theory about culture being in the driver’s seat, and there is a great deal of evidence that the theory is wrong.

We could just as easily turn the theory on its head, and argue that socialization under certain institutions determines social values, which in turn shapes the broader culture. Or we could argue that values affect the structure of social institutions, and are in turn shaped by them, with culture doing little to no work.

Something like this last possibility seems to be what is driving the diverging trend lines in American and Canadian values.

Michael Adams has a chapter called “Separated at Birth”, in which he argues that the differences between the countries arise out of original, fundamental differences between the political culture of Yankee revolutionaries and Tory loyalists.

I suspect that what matters today are not the remnants of those original cultures, but rather the substantially different institutions that they created.

It is often claimed that Canada is a more “socialist” country than the United States. Whatever truth there is to that, it clearly has nothing to do with our culture, since our culture is pretty much American culture. What we do have is much more activist government at all levels, willing and able to implement programs and policies that are in the broad public interest.

To put it bluntly, with a majority government Parliament can ride roughshod over the particular interests that might otherwise block collective action.

This sits in stark contrast to the American system of government. A helpful example is Bill Clinton’s failed attempt at national health care reform, contrasted with the national medicare system that is developing in Canada.

What is interesting is to see the way in which this institutional difference can actually affect values.

A colleague of mine likes to explain how you could always tell the difference between the Americans and the Canadians when he was in graduate school in Chicago.

The Americans were extremely job-conscious, always concerned with their ranking in the department and how it would affect them on the academic job market. The Canadians, in contrast, had a much more blasé attitude toward the “professional” aspects of their degree; many of them planned on traveling or taking time off after graduation.

What explains this difference? As my colleague sees it, there is one fundamental factor: the day the Americans graduate is the day they have no medical insurance. No job, no healthcare.

The point is, institutions matter. Culture, on the other hand, matters little, perhaps not at all.

It is vital that we keep this in mind as we enter an era of renewed constitutional unhappiness, and as the governing Liberals prepare to select a leader who has vowed to do something about our so-called “democratic deficit”.

Our institutions are far from perfect, but they have made us who we are as a nation. If we set about changing them, and if we value our values, we would do well to choose reform over revolution.