An announcement was made the other day that an American investor was interested in taking over The Hudsons Bay Company(HBC). Not surprisingly, this invoked the kind of reaction that the Molson-Coors deal had done a year back. There is always that worry in Canada about the American elephant simply rolling over onto our small country and taking over.

After a few days of letting this news run freely through my mind, I came to a somewhat surprising conclusion that it was really no big deal. Why? Well let me back up about 20 years to help illustrate how I came to this conclusion.

I spent 6 formative years of my childhood living in a small town along the St. Clair river. For those unfamiliar with this area of Ontario, it runs between the Ontario/Michigan border from Sarnia/Port Huron to Windsor/Detroit. The majority of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the border but few live so close they can see the land to the south simply by walking out their front door and looking down the street.

Growing up, to an even greater degree than most children, I was subjected to a bombardment of American media, advertising, and a slew of seemingly endless products. From sugar saturated cereals to the latest in video entertainment, they seemed to have it all.

It took some time to realize, but numerous trips to the mall and grocery store soon revealed that not all was available to those living in the Great White North. Deprived of our coveted goods, people fled across the border for day trips in that temporary migration known as "cross border shopping".

The local Canadian news broadcast seemed to have a news story every week on how damaging it was to our economy and seemed to elevate it to a magnitude of importance far beyond its reality. As quickly as a sinking dollar had helped fuel this trend, The North American Free Trade Agreement under the Mulrooney government, helped reverse it.

Canadian shopping malls and suburbia soon found themselves in a dynamic change that saw such well known companies as wal-Mart, The Nike Store, The Disney Store, The Gap, and more recently retailers such as Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, and Pottery Barn enter our backyards. There became less a need to travel next door as more products simply were delivered to our front porches.

This is not to simplify this trend as just being a result of NAFTA and currency differentials. There are many more reasons and the chain of events far more complicated then I have just indicated. But for brevity sake I wont go any further and in another article I will delve into this issue in more. The change in Retailing was easily visible over this period and the explosion of big boxes and power centers has been an undeniable one.

Which brings us back to today. After reflecting a bit on my own past, it occurred to me just what an incredible force American Retailing is. While Canadians do like to shop and purchase wonderful knick knacks and trinkets and widgets to take home, it pales when compared to force that exists in the United States. Retailing isn't just a secondary function to the everyday duties. It is the everyday. It is part of the economic backbone. It is such a strong component that in times of crisis, the President often encourages the citizens to "spend for the good of the economy", as though somehow shopping was going to keep everyone safe.

The support network that has been created to ensure that people consume at every possible moment is incredible. Credit cards and debt ensure the ability to spend beyond ones means. A media system whose primary function is to advertise in the form of cheap, mindless entertainment. A built urban environment where owning a car, filling it with gas, fixing it, upgrading it, equipping it with GPS to nagivate the curvilinear streets of a subdivision in anywhere USA ensure that even supposedly free movements outside of the house involve some form of consumption.

The retailers that once tantalized the youth who could not buy them, and now invade the urban landscape allowing the next generation unfettered access to them, are enormous. Canada cannot even come close to claiming a beast of its own as large and predatory as wal-Mart.

Amongst what often might seem like hyperbolic prose about American retailing, how can I derive a conclusion that this is no big deal?

Because Canadians are a plucky bunch. The first successful store wide Union was organized at a Canadian Wal-Mart in Jonquiere, Quebec. Despite its closure, its still a victory by most. For every Home Depot, there is a Rona. For every Foot Locker, there is Aldo. For every Gap, there is Roots. And given I have yet to see an American store come close to being a Canadian Tire, score one point for us there.

It is the nature of living next to a country 10 times our population. Its influences are hard to ignore. Yet, just as many might have thought that it would be better for people to be able to shop at a wal-Mart here rather than across the river, there are those too who might propose banishing American retailers once again. Over time we will adapt, developing Canadian solutions to the big box problems, continually pondering that ultimate Canadian retailing model that will challenge Wal-Mart. And rest assured there are die hards like myself who simply avoid American retailing at all cost in pure defiance of its nature, in yet another form of expression of support for the Canadian nation-state.

So even if HBC is bought by an American investor, there will still be Holt-Renfrew. It will not upset the balance of our country and send us spilling southward. It will be just another blip on the ever changing state of our country, our continent, and increasingly, our world.

Somehow, it often seems, that these so called threats to our Canadian nationalism actually do more to strengthen us, that actually weaken us.