by John Graham

Created on: April 09, 2008

AN INDISTINCT SOCIETY

Despite having bought a home, and added fence and garden; despite having taken a post and worked to make the future bright; despite having assumed a permanence and taken time to penetrate the bureaucratic maze of Canadian identity: I believe I have always felt that our years in Canada were an exercise in foreign travel. READ ON!

Canada suffers from an inferiority complex all right. How many times have I been reminded Donald and Swan's line "simply because they are inferior." Canada is a small nation, in population less than the size of California, yet it blows itself large like a puffer fish. It postulates an international importance complete with international peacekeeping forces and insufficiently deals with its own domestic bigotries. It postulates an army, a navy, and an air force, and insufficiently deals with its own domestic violence and church pedophilia. It postulates international "charity" and plagues it's citizens with paying for the publicity required by its ambitious politicians. It is a nation of politicians and it deserves them. The nation certainly tries too hard to be more than it can be.

Canada's attitude to the United States is part of its independence paranoia. Ever since Benjamin Franklin requested that the British offer the Canadian territory to the fledgling American nation as part of British war reparations in 1795, and ever since the Americans attacked Ontario in 1812, Canada has burnished the idea that the United States desperately wants the promised land to the north. In fact, it is not at all clear that the U.S. could afford to offer statehood to any region of Canada so deeply is Canada in debt in its social programs.

The wealth of Canada now that synthetic yarns have outmode the beaver lies in the undeveloped wilderness to the north and promises of material resources for the late 21st century. It has little else to offer. The promise of free trade has recessed into selective protectionism, while the idea of a united North America is hastily rejected on the grounds that the Americans are really "not nice people like the Canadians." Put to the test of what Canada might lose under the terms of Statehood, all that dedicated Canadians can come up with is the Canadian Broadcasting Company and a lowest-common-denominator health service.

In fact, Canada is not a single nation. It became a loose confederation, as an act of perceived self-preservation after the War Between the States was resolved. The Meech Lake Discord

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