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Graham Fraser

July 8, 2025

In the summer of 1964, I travelled to Brevard, North Carolina, where, through a series of happy coincidences, I had been hired as a camp counsellor.

It was the summer that Barry Goldwater was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate, that three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi, and that Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, on July 2nd.

Racial barriers were now invisible, unspoken, but still ever-present. There was no longer a sign outside a nearby village warning Blacks to stay away in brutal terms, but it wasn’t necessary. I had no difficulty grasping that I was in a very different country: friendly, but foreign.

My first culture shock on arriving was the southern accent. It took me a while to realize that, contrary to the stereotype — much more pervasive at the time, especially in Canada — some of the staff were highly intelligent and sophisticated. By the end of the summer, my own vowels had stretched and broadened.

I was also conscious of how settled the United States was compared to Canada. In Ottawa, where my family lived, you could cross the river and drive north; after a couple of hours, you would reach a dead end in Mont Laurier and could turn northwest or southeast. Straight ahead, there was nothing but wilderness until James Bay. In North Carolina, while there was plenty of wild and hilly country to the west, there were villages, towns and cities all the way to the Pacific. I was suddenly aware of how history, geography and climate had made America’s population density different from what I was familiar with.

My experience that summer was informative in a number of ways. It contributed to a feeling that I wanted to focus on Canadian questions rather than American ones, that however familiar American issues were, they were not mine. I had a Canadian language to learn and a Canadian society to discover that I would find every bit as complex and challenging as the society to the south.

Almost 30 years later, I moved to the United States as The Globe and Mail’s Washington correspondent and was there for the four years of the first Clinton administration. It was an exciting time to be there — although that is true for every presidential mandate. Again, I learned about the differences between Ottawa and Washington and between Canada and the US.

In Ottawa, all power flows from the prime minister and the Prime Minister’s Office. That is where decisions are made, where people get promoted or dismissed, and where ideas are transformed into legislation or ignored. Reporters in Ottawa gather around the microphone outside the House of Commons because that is where power speaks. I concluded that Ottawa was like Old Hollywood. In Old Hollywood, the studio bosses would decide which movies would be made, who would star in them, and who would be banished to B movies.

Life in the US was like scrambling up the down escalator; if you ever stopped, you’d be abruptly descending.

In Washington, power is scattered all over town, and each power centre has its own press corps. Just as today, anyone who has an idea and can put together the money can make a movie, in Washington anyone who has an idea and can put together the votes can pass legislation. (Donald Trump’s success in dominating every branch of government is remarkable and virtually unique.)

Another remarkable difference was the dominance of three publications: The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Journalists from those three publications got their phone calls returned by everyone; reporters from other newspapers were often limited to the senators and members of Congress from their state. There was a ruthless calculus of utility.

Foreign correspondents, on the other hand, would get quick replies from experts at think tanks; when I marvelled at this, it was explained to me that being quoted in the foreign press was a significant asset when filling out their internal public impact reports: not as valuable as appearing before a Congressional committee, but worth more than being cited in a US paper.

However, foreign correspondents were on an equal footing with American reporters when they were on the road. Travelling — and I visited almost every state east of the Mississippi — I found that Americans were not only friendly and gregarious, they were quotable and camera-ready. Television — especially the arrival of CNN in 1980 — had trained them how to speak in short snappy sentences when questioned by reporters.

I travelled to Philadelphia Mississippi, where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan 30 years earlier, and was stunned at how little had changed in terms of race relations in small towns in the south. I flew to Florida, and discovered that crime novelist Carl Hiaasen did not have to use much imagination to create his zany crooks, he simply had to read the newspaper and change a few names. I went to Baltimore and New York and Chicago and Kansas City and Columbia and Buffalo and Detroit and revelled in the stories of decay and rebirth, ingenuity and ritual, crime and compassion. It was a fascinating four years.

My four years in Washington made me realize that competition and ambition were virtues in the United States and regrettable but occasionally necessary in Canada. Life in the US was like scrambling up the down escalator; if you ever stopped, you’d be abruptly descending. Rather than making me feel more at home, my years in Washington only made me feel more like a foreigner in America.

At the end of it, I was offered a job with the Boston Globe covering the State Department that would have involved a new challenge, a fascinating assignment and a green card. But it was time to go home. There were Canadian stories I wanted to tell. I’ve always appreciated that offer but have never regretted my decision.

Policy Contributing Writer Graham Fraser served as Washington bureau chief for The Globe and Mail from 1993-1997. He is also the former federal Commissioner of Official Languages, serving from 2006-16.