Leave us alone, please, we're Canadian

This is why I don't mind so much that Americans more or less ignore what goes on north of the border, regardless of what I may have written in a previous post. This Times piece on Canada -- entitled "Was Canada Just Too Good to Be True?" -- is an example of extreme superficiality. For example, the author, Clifford Krauss, suggests that "no other country puts such a high premium on its own virtue than does Canada". What? Being a Canadian and having lived in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Germany, I think I'm in a good position to attest to what I see as Canada's profound sense of self-doubt (which is precisely why we want Americans to pay attention to us and why we celebrate even our atrocious celebrities -- Celine, Shania, Avril, etc. -- who make it in the U.S.). Krauss goes on: "The recent spectacle of scandal and tawdry politics has some Canadians now wondering if all the self-congratulatory virtue is not mixed with some old-fashioned hypocrisy." Oh, come on. Yes, some Canadians ground their sense of national identity in pompous up-with-Canada cheerleading, but there's hardly an abundance of "self-congratulatory virtue" up here.

My Conservative friends, who regularly object to what they see as Liberal self-righteousness, may disagree with me, but the problem with Canada, in my view, is that it lacks precisely such a unifying sense of self. We are a country, after all, that seems to be perpetually on the verge of collapse, unsure of ourselves and our place in the age of globalization, torn between the New World and the Old, simultaneously American and un-American and anti-American, plagued by intense regionalism, and, worse, Quebecois separatism and Western alienation. Krauss may have interviewed the columnist and literary critic Robert Fulford and University of Toronto professor and public intellectual Janice Stein, neither of whom has much of substance to say (as usual), but he should have checked in with Toronto Star columnist Richard Gwyn, whose book Nationalism Without Walls is appropriately subtitled "The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian". That pretty much sums it up.

University of Toronto historian Michael Bliss is quite right. We're no moral superpower. But this narrow view of Canada in America's leading newspaper, one which gleefully exposes our apparent hypocrisies, hardly does Canada any justice at all. At least try to understand us as we really are before you condemn us for not living up to our ideals. We might just have some that are worth your consideration.