I think Atwood framed it as American/Canadian because we tend to have more of the awareness even in urban areas because our urban areas aren't . . . that urban?
Like it can be hard to get across just how much EMPTY SPACE Canada has, and how CROWDED WITH PEOPLE the US seems to us in comparison, how hemmed and fenced and civilized it is? And the people who are from places where, for the US, there is a lot of wild land are almost worse, because they can't quite believe that no really it's a lot emptier and a lot more up here. (In the space on the drive from my hometown to my gramma's place that my family used to do every summer in which there are literally no towns and in fact no gas stations, to the point where the highway has a sign that says "next gas station [blah] km away MAKE SURE YOU FILL UP HERE", I found eight towns in the same distance in North Dakota. For comparison.)
You don't have to go very far at all outside of even Toronto to hit Wild Howling Wilderness Which Will Eat You Alive, and Toronto is literally our largest city by quite a BIT. (Which is why most of the tourists who got lost or killed were often Americans or Europeans, and why we short-handed to that because there were so many more of them - there's actually a problem we sometimes have where people come up from the US thinking they have Wilderness Experience and then hit our Wilderness and discover it's . . . More.) (Note that I say "up"; we do not tend to have this problem with Alaskans. *solemn*)
So in some ways it is an urban/not-urban divide, but in some ways, to Canadians, almost all of the US is urban. And especially was so when Atwood was writing that, decades ago when we were even less urban than we are now. (I think now there are people in Toronto and Vancouver who count as "urban" on that divide, but in the mid C20, possibly not so much.)
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Like it can be hard to get across just how much EMPTY SPACE Canada has, and how CROWDED WITH PEOPLE the US seems to us in comparison, how hemmed and fenced and civilized it is? And the people who are from places where, for the US, there is a lot of wild land are almost worse, because they can't quite believe that no really it's a lot emptier and a lot more up here. (In the space on the drive from my hometown to my gramma's place that my family used to do every summer in which there are literally no towns and in fact no gas stations, to the point where the highway has a sign that says "next gas station [blah] km away MAKE SURE YOU FILL UP HERE", I found eight towns in the same distance in North Dakota. For comparison.)
You don't have to go very far at all outside of even Toronto to hit Wild Howling Wilderness Which Will Eat You Alive, and Toronto is literally our largest city by quite a BIT. (Which is why most of the tourists who got lost or killed were often Americans or Europeans, and why we short-handed to that because there were so many more of them - there's actually a problem we sometimes have where people come up from the US thinking they have Wilderness Experience and then hit our Wilderness and discover it's . . . More.) (Note that I say "up"; we do not tend to have this problem with Alaskans. *solemn*)
So in some ways it is an urban/not-urban divide, but in some ways, to Canadians, almost all of the US is urban. And especially was so when Atwood was writing that, decades ago when we were even less urban than we are now. (I think now there are people in Toronto and Vancouver who count as "urban" on that divide, but in the mid C20, possibly not so much.)