The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye once made a revealing observation about the differences between Canada and the United States. The United States, Frye said, was born in a war of independence against a European power and came to maturity in a civil war fought decades later. Canada, by contrast, was born in a civil war between two European powers and has been fighting a war of independence against the United States ever since. An admittedly harsh interpretation of Frye's observation would be the following: a country that first wins a war of independence and then fights a civil war goes through two processes of self-definition – in the first instance, by separating itself from an external power, and in the second, by putting an end to an internal contradiction. By contrast, a country that is born in a civil war and then fights a continuing war of independence thereafter runs a greater risk of becoming a congenital schizophrenic and a perpetual adolescent.

Whether or not schizophrenia and adolescence offer apt metaphors for Canada's political history as a whole (and they seem to be popular ones; see Stark 1992a, 158), they do capture its conflict-of-interest experience in particular. That experience is schizophrenic – it is of two minds – in the sense that Canada's historic institutions and its recent politics have come to present it with a twofold, mutually inverse understanding of conflict of interest. And Canada's conflict-of-interest regime is adolescent, or immature, in that it is substantially underdeveloped.