Today I ran across this post via a link on Speak Up. Randy Hunt, an American, said “do everything within your power to lobby against this communist…err…bureaucratic centralization of the design profession.” The link is to a blog from Bucharest, where designer Christian Paul writes about the the communisation of design. What he’s talking about is a proposed system in Romania, that looks remarkably familiar. In fact, it looks like the RGD.

I’ve been futilely (and less convictedly) arguing the accreditation argument with American designers for years. At some point I realized that my view as a Canadian was clashing with an American view on the grounds of comfortability with government control, socialism and free enterprise. The above two posts add to my conviction that one of the major differences between Canadians and Americans is political.

We have medicare, they don’t. One of our most formative political movements under Tommy Douglas was unfolding during the 1950s—during which time the US was undergoing a formative political movement of their own: the McCarthy era. Canadians are just basically more inclined to organize. America has an every man for himself; the cream will rise to the top; lone gunslinger mentality. When I fail to see eye-to-eye with an American I stop and ask myself “is this a political difference?” and usually it is.

The American design profession will never embark on the route of accreditation—not in our lifetime, anyway—because to them it simply looks like government control, and that looks like Communism, and to them Communism is all about taking away people’s rights.

The question is, when our highly influencial big brother next door disavows an accredited design profession, what will happen in Canada? In the bigger picture, Canada has been politically drifting towards the American right for decades, and what we find acceptable or desirable is no longer as distinctly different as it was 50 or even 25 years ago. And the arguments against accreditation in this country sound increasingly familiar.