Canadians today are a cranky lot. We vote against the Charlottetown accord, we're rude to the prime minister on TV, in Toronto they ban smoking but everyone goes right on doing it. Have we really turned from being a nation of docile sheep into being a land of backtalkers? For the last couple of years, pundits have been writing about this and talking it up on TV. Now here are two more books both looking at the question-but with a difference. Exercises in number-crunching, both use public opinion surveys to try to discover what exactly is behind the "hunch" (as one of these authors, Neil Nevitte, calls it) that something in Canadians has changed. Two books, two fairly similar basic ideas, even similar conclusions. But what a difference in the way they get there.
Of the two, Sex in the Snow has a major publisher and some real advertising money behind it, and is likely to be the more widely read. Michael Adams, the author, is the head of Environics, a Toronto-based market research group. Probably to stake out a slightly different bit of territory from David Foot, the current star of popular demographics, Adams asserts that "demographics is not destiny." If you want to understand the changes in Canadians, he says, you have to understand what is happening: we're entering a new era, in which a lot of the categories that we would once have used to define ourselves, or that would have been used to define us-religion and ethnicity are the two salient ones-no longer apply. The largest single chunk of Sex in the Snow is dedicated to showing us what has taken their place.
To do this, Adams relies on a survey system known as 3SC (Système cofremca de suivre des courants socio-culturels), a group of 250 questions about work, values, and society, grouped into eighty "trends".
The responses he has received reveal that Canadians now break down into twelve general "tribes". And while demographics may not be destiny, it still plays some role-these tribes are generational in structure with older (fifty plus) Canadians making up three tribes, the "Boomers" accounting for four, and Gen-Xers making up five. The growing number of tribes reflects the increasing fragmentation of Canadian life. Among the elders you have your Extroverted Traditionalists, your Rational Traditionalists, and your Extroverted Modernists, a group that includes Pierre Trudeau. Then there are the four kinds of Boomer: Autonomous Rebels, Connected Enthusiasts, Worried Communitarians, and Disengaged Darwinists (which would be everyone in Mike Harris's cabinet). Finally, there are five brands of Gen-Xer: Thrill-Seeking Materialists, Aimless Dependents, Social Hedonists, New Aquarians, and Autonomous Post-Materialists. The differences here can be as little as one extra piercing.
Anyone reading this can have fun slotting themselves into their appropriate tribes, or trying to disprove Adams's thesis by seeing how they straddle his categories. (Given what he tells us about each category, I would say that I'm a sort of Hedonistic Aquarian Darwinist, with Anxious Communitarian overtones: What is society? It's an arena for naked competition, but the ice in the arena should be properly maintained and the concession stand well-stocked.)
This is all enjoyable, but it's not hard to become skeptical about Adams's theories. For one thing, though his findings are based on quantitative surveys, that material is never given. Postmodern Canadians may mistrust authority, demand more autonomy, and seek to create their own way in the world, but Adams still expects his readers to take a lot on faith. He doesn't argue, he doesn't prove, he pronounces. We never see the questions, we don't know how he groups them together into the various "trends" and we have no idea of what the raw data looked like before it was all nicely massaged. It wouldn't have been necessary to stuff charts into each chapter, but an appendix listing the questions asked and the raw responses would have been nice. Perhaps Adams worried about getting too technical, but if what you're doing is technical, people deserve to see how you reached your conclusions.
If Adams shortchanges his readers on the quantitative side, he's not too hot on the more "touchy-feely" aspects of his subject either. Reginald Bibby, the clever sociologist at the University of Lethbridge who has been surveying Canadian attitudes (at least as they relate to religion) for years, often includes in his books little quotes and pieces of anecdotal information about the people he talks to, along with the numbers-little human particulars to leaven the social sciences' emphasis on the quantifiable. How much more effective Sex in the Snow would be if, instead of stating that "Rational Traditionalists" find comfort and meaning in old-fashioned values or that Gen-Xers see many Boomers as sell-outs, Adams had given us ten or twelve words from a real live human being in either "tribe", saying why he or she felt that way. Not once does he quote any of the people surveyed. Nor, apart from casual references and as chapter-openers, does he ever call on novels, history, or the classics of the social sciences for examples. Although such giants as Kate Fillion and Gail Sheehy do make appearances, the two most common publications among the book's twenty-three footnotes (this for a work more than 200 pages long) are the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, all for stories published in the last two years.
Adams's generational groupings will probably attract the most interest from readers of Sex in the Snow, but they aren't the whole of the book. He follows them with a series of largely unrelated chapters on technology, men and women, and comparisons between the United States and Canada. Surprisingly-to return to the question of Canadians' loss of deference-Adams reports (though once again, alas, without showing) that we are now more skeptical about government than our neighbours to the south, a reversal of long-time historical trends. It's in his chapter on Canada and the U.S. that Sex in the Snow comes alive, almost for the first time. He is making comparisons, over time and from one country to another. That old line of Kipling's-"And what should they know of England who only England know?"-still holds true, for Anxious Communitarian and Autonomous Rebel Canadian alike.
By contrast, comparisons are what The Decline of Deference is all about. As I said earlier, Neil Nevitte, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, starts with a hunch that Canadians have changed and that this change reflects a shift in values. His book came out last fall, which should have given him a head start on Adams, but the world doesn't work that way. He has no flashy categories, no smart names, no trite lists. What he does have are a few ideas about Canada, and a strong body of-that hateful word-data.
The body of information that Nevitte calls on is something termed the World Values Survey (WVS). This is a broad selection of questions about religion, authority, and work, which social scientists have asked sample groups in different countries around the world. The year 1981 was the first time that Canada was included in the survey, which was repeated again in 1990. That's not much of a time span, but Nevitte believes it might give him some trends. If Canadians' values have indeed changed, he plans to check out three possible explanations for these changes: a growing American influence, the influx of immigrants with values different from those of old-time Canadians, or perhaps a shift that's in keeping with what is going on in other advanced industrial countries.
Finding signs of a trend involves examining Canadians' and other nations' responses to the WVS's questions about politics, economics, and what Nevitte calls our "primary relations": a complex of family values and social ideas like tolerance, a degree of secularism, and moral permissiveness. To be sure, these are simply stops on the road to his major conclusions, but this is a book where getting there is part of the fun. Did you know that only 14 percent of the French regard religion as very important? As compared to 38 percent of New Canadians? Or that while the number of Britons saying they would never participate in a boycott declined by 9.4 percent between 1981 and 1990, it actually increased by 0.9 percent among the Dutch? Anyone with a love of statistics, meaningful or otherwise, should know that The Decline of Deference has masses of such material.
So, have Canadians' values changed between 1981 and 1990? Yes. In some cases, they do seem to follow most closely changes in the United States, particularly regarding attitudes towards economics (more laissez-faire). In some cases we are between the United States and Europe. In other cases, surprisingly, we are ahead of trends in the United States (religious observance is declining faster here than there, for example). But the growth of skepticism about authority and our relationship to it is a trend found in every industrial country. With local variations, everywhere in Western Europe and North America, people put less and less faith in political hierarchies (although people also report that they are very interested in politics and political change). At work, they are concerned more with personal satisfaction than just a pay-cheque. And in the family, people are more interested in equality-with Europeans being more egalitarian when it comes to parent-child relations, and North Americans focusing on the relationship between husband and wife. Ultimately, with the aid of a couple of diagrams-one of which looks like three oil drums tied together by arrows and another that looks like six one-a-day multiple vitamins wired into a circuit diagram-Nevitte ties all these disparate trends together: changed attitudes to the family affect attitudes to work and vice versa, and attitudes towards family and politics influence, and are influenced by, our political beliefs. Why these changes? Read the book; it's not a big surprise, and The Decline of Deference never really builds much suspense, but readers should have to find out for themselves.
Ultimately one of the joys of Nevitte's book is that he shows you everything. You may disagree with his conclusions, you may not really understand them, but he's not holding anything back. And that includes the questions that were used to conduct the World Values Survey. Just what new, non-deferential Canadians need: the tools to go out and be their own statisticians. 

Ian Coutts is an editor at Madison Press.