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Seventeen years ago, an innocent, wide-eyed, barefoot boy with cheek stepped off an airplane at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, clearing customs and immigration in a flash. He was a stranger in a strange land, a bewildered immigrant in a foreign country far from home. His eyes filled with wonderment at the many new and different things that he saw as he rode into the city. Such wide expressways! Such foreign words! Such colourful money!

He vowed to make the best of what he thought would be an excellent adventure, and set off on his adopted new life.

At first, the many things he needed to learn about his new land and its strange language confused and confounded him. Its odd food, its many dialects that sounded peculiar to his homogenized ear, its native dress, and its strange national holidays and celebrations.

Yet he adjusted well. That is, I adjusted well for I am the adopted Canadian.

Despite my origins on the south side of Lake Ontario, my new friends and colleagues never seemed to bear me any ill will. They knew that we're all victims of the greatest accident of all: Birth. Mine just happened to be in America.

Indeed, as time passed, they took me under their wing for many of them understood, personally or because of what their relatives or ancestors endured, what it meant to flee a country with an increasingly repressive government where leaders were elected under a cloud of suspicion and then lied to the citizens. Where politicians stole the national treasure to use for their own private wars, peccadilloes and urges. A nation with police officials who bullied and threatened and coerced into silence those who dared to speak openly in opposition to the government, and army officers who locked people in tiny cages on remote islands without the going through the bother of charging them with a crime or allowing them to write to their family back home. One that has a national assembly which passes laws taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.

They empathised with my plight of being accidental American.

Even today, some 17 years later, there remain things about my adopted home that I accept but don't comprehend. Despite being blessed with tremendous size, great beauty, abundant natural resources, an indomitable spirit, a warm heart and a tolerant attitude the rest of the world can only envy, Canada and its people undeservedly share a kind of self-effacing, national sense of humbleness about themselves and their place in the world.

In a way, it is

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