Canadian Studies Considered: Response to "A Model Environmental Nation? Canada as a Case Study for Informing US Environmental Policy"

In October 2010, I was invited to participate in the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States Enders Symposium in Seattle. My assigned task was to comment on the paper presented by Dr Tim Casey titled: "A Model Environmental Nation? Canada as a Case Study for Informing US Environmental Policy." When I was preparing my comments I found my head nodding regularly as I agreed with many of the insights provided by Dr Casey's paper. His original paper provides sweeping coverage of numerous environmental issues as he seeks to make the argument that Canada is an excellent case study for an American audience. While I did, and do, have some comments about the content of the paper, I also found that I was doing a lot of scribbling in the margins. The comments I made were of a meta-theoretical nature and tended toward broad, abstract questions such as: Does it matter who studies Canada or how we study Canada? What do our analyses say about Canada and Canadian Studies? This response, then, will seek to address some of the issues related to the content in Dr Casey's article, as well as broader, more abstract questions. My intent is not to write a "formal" academic piece that focuses on Dr Casey's assessment of the various environmental issues he addresses, although I will make some issue-specific comments, particularly in the areas of climate change, the Arctic, and the provinces. And while I will make suggestions about how to expand the research agenda, I think that Dr Casey's assessment provides us with several good places to begin our investigations. I also adopt a conversational tone with intent of replicating the very engaging exchange that Dr Casey and I had during the Enders Symposium. Finally, at the end of this article, I ponder the meta-theoretical scribbling in the margins because I believe these are questions that all of us engaged in the Canadian Studies community should consider.