Why does Canada have universal medical insurance while the United States has a mixture of private and public programmes that leaves 70 million Americans without insurance for at least part of the year? More generally, why is Canada's welfare state more advanced than its American counterpart? According to Seymour Martin Lipset, Americans are heirs to a revolution that embodied individualist values. Canadians, heirs to the North Americans who stayed within the British fold, developed a more ‘toryish’ or organic approach to society, an approach that eventually allowed socialism to emerge as an important, if minority, ideology. While socialism became a ‘foreign’ ideology to Americans, it gained respectability in Canada. ‘Red Tories’ became the backbone of a social consensus in Canada decidedly left of its American counterpart.

The historical record contradicts Lipset's theory. As late as 1960, the American welfare state trumped its Canadian counterpart. Progressive social interventionism in Canada is a recent phenomenon for which events in the 1770s provide little explanation. This chapter argues that Lipset confuses cause and effect regarding social policy variances between the two countries. He provides little evidence that Canadians favoured social intervention more than Americans in the period before their major social programmes were implemented. He merely establishes that today's Canadians support their country's social programmes while Americans seem happy enough with the limited social welfare state that characterizes their country.