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The border between Canada and the United States has been described as a one-way mirror, with Canadians situated at the back of the mirror, wellinformed and unreflected, and Americans who happen to look northward seeing only reflections of themselves. The truth of this metaphor can be illustrated in many ways, and it helps to explain much about economic, social and political life in Canada.
For example, Canada has always been one of the world's most cabled countries, so that television sets all over the country have all of the U.S. channels as well as the smaller number of Canadian channels. Even on the Canadian channels, many of the most watched programs are American, and even the Canadian-origin news has heavy emphasis on U.S. affairs. In a sense, Canadians have broader access to U.S. news than do Americans, since Canadians see U.S. news through both U.S. and Canadian lenses. In the reverse direction, the amount of Canadian news on U.S. channels is essentially zero, beyond the allusions to the origins of the worst winter storms. Direct access to Canadian channels is also very limited, with Canadian channels absent from almost all U.S. cable systems. This asymmetry is more than a matter of relative size, or else California, with the population of Canada, would be equivalently represented on the U.S. nightly news. It is also much larger than can be explained by national border effects, since the latter generally reflect each country's activities back to its own residents, rather than being porous when headed in one direction and almost impermeable when headed in the other. A full explanation is likely to require a combination of national border effects plus a center-periphery model of outward information flow of the sort emphasized by Harold Innis, the only resident Canadian to have been president of the American Economic Association.
This asymmetry can be seen close to home in the economics profession, too. In 1999, the American Economic Association had 656 individual members in Canada, compared to 14,507 resident in the United States. In per capita terms, Canadian residents were almost half as likely as American residents to belong to the AEA. Conversely, there are 848 individual members of the Canadian Economic Association living in Canada, compared to 205 living in...