Journalist Thomas Friedman had a pretty stark open for his recent New York Times opinion piece: “The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist”

But if you got past that – he soon presented a silver lining:  “But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbour’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.”

I don’t think it’s happenstance that this emerged in Minnesota, one of the most northernly states in the US. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Minneapolis – St. Paul area on business. On those trips, I found something very familiar there, a sense of – for lack of a better word – “Canadianism.”  Minnesota “Nice” felt very close to Canadian “Polite.”

In the piece, Friedman wrestled with a verb that was also new to him – “neighbouring.” He described it as “a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbours and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.”

I think there’s a correlation between neighbouring and living in the North. When you live in a place where the weather can kill you, you’d better be able to count on the people who live next door to you. As Friedman said, “Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighbourliness”

The same is true – I would say – from coast to coast to coast (we have three) in Canada. I have written about this before. When almost half the year is a matter of survival, you tend to huddle together to fight the common foe.

Northerly = Neighbourly

Weather has a way of tying you to your geography.  It forces you to define community – at least in part – by those who live in the same area as you. You naturally bond with the people who will help you shovel your driveway, loan you six eggs if you’re snowed in or invite you in on a frosty morning for a cup of hot coffee (and, in Canada, a shot of rye). It is the great common denominator. For many months every year, weather is the number one topic for everyone that lives in the North.

Canada and the Northern states are not unique in this regard. The same is true for the Nordic Countries in Europe. And this translates into many good things in terms of civic engagement. The World Happiness Report has consistently found the same pattern, commenting in their 2020 report: “No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.”

Neighbouring and Systemic Trust

But there is not a one-to-one correlation between the Northern parts of North America and Northern Europe. In my example of the connection between distance from the equator and civic cohesion, you could rightly say there are anomalies. For example, the politics in the Canadian province of Alberta and states south of the border in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas bear little similarity to the politics of British Columbia, Washington, Minnesota or Maine. Yet all of those lie in the North. And what about Alaska, which is solidly “Red?” You can’t get much further north than Alaska.

“Neighbouring” isn’t about politics. It can be misleading to conflate the two. Being a good neighbour isn’t unique to the right or left. I grew up in rural Alberta and I can tell you from experience that if you need help from your neighbour, Alberta is a pretty damned good place to be.

But there is something else happening in those places – the remnants of a “cowboy” ethic and a feeling of distrust breed by generations of alienation from the power bases thousands miles away in the eastern regions of the country. This is true both in Canada and the U.S. In this case, geography is our enemy. Big, spread-out countries have a tough time keeping everyone happy at the same time. This leads to distrust of the system and the federal government. Chances are your neighbours feel the same way as you do.

But what Minnesota did show us is the basic human dyad – the relationship between two people who happen to be in the same place at the same time. – is still very much alive and well. We still band together when threatened from the outside. But these social connections are like muscles – the more they’re exercised the stronger they get. It just happens that in places where winter is more severe, we are more used to relying on our neighbours to overcome a common threat. That is why Minnesota taught us a timely lesson in what it means to be “neighbourly.”