BoatBanter.com - What is wrong with Canada

What is wrong with Canada? I mean in the sense of our national
character. What are we doing that I am no longer proud of this country?

We have been blessed with a wealth of resources and natural beauty, of
economic privilege and personal freedom, with hardy people who buckled
down and got things done with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of result.
What have we done that this is no longer enough?

We made Anti-Americanism our defining characteristic.

This is, unfortunately, nothing new. It is a chosen policy older than I
am, an interwoven, unquestioned aspect of Canadian life. But now weÂ’ve
reached the dead end of this particular road, and I find that instead of
greatness, we have made ourselves small, and petty, and mean. We not
only lack the courage of our convictions, we lack the convictions as well.

We have turned our backs on our past, on our strength, and our good
sense, and sold our heritage for a squalid mess of envy and delusions of
grandeur. We bought into the pernicious nonsense that we are superior to
the Americans by sole virtue of being Canadian, and nothing else. And we
accepted blindly, and wrongly, that the definition of Â‘CanadianÂ’ is a
negative: we are not whatever Americans are.

That trapped us. If we found America was strong, proud, successful and
independent, then we had to champion the weak, the self-effacing and the
apologetic within us, as if that would make us better than them. And all
it would cost was our history and our honour.

The Canadians who did in one day at Vimy Ridge what the British and
French couldnÂ’t do in two years were not peace-keepers, they were
Peacemakers. We fought brutally, heroically and won against vicious odds
in two world wars. But our celebrated Â‘historyÂ’, our vaunted
Â‘legacyÂ’ is as a bunch of blue-helmeted hostages for whatever
collection of despotic thugs are currently trying to kill each other in
whatever pestilent global backwater is in the news today.

If America was a world power thanks to her military and economic might,
then there had to be a place for a collection of hand-wringing Canadian
diplomats to run around behind the scenes, dripping unction and
self-importance in equal measure. We made this a point of national
pride, and this is why we will not give up on the UN in spite of its
obvious irrelevance in the wake of its feeble efforts to disarm Saddam
Hussein.

We crow about our respected position as a Â‘soft diplomatic forceÂ’
while decrying American forcefulness, without admitting to ourselves
that the only reason that the world listens even for a second is that
selfsame massive US strength just south of our border. We are curried
because the world knows the United States would not stand for an attack
on us, and we are curried because we are conveniently next door to the
real power. What else do we have to offer? This is not, and never has
been Mr. RogerÂ’s World. We need to stop saying Â“You like us! You
really, really like us!Â” and get off the world stage.

We take a failure of efficiency and make of it a sacred cow. We have
enshrined universal mediocre health care as proof of moral superiority
over the United States. IÂ’m sure that those of us who suffer and die
while waiting for backlogged services do it proudly, spines stiffened
with the thought that this is the better Canadian way, even as our
bodies fall apart. Each moment of agony is worth all the moral prestige
our leaders can cloak themselves in Â– and they pay themselves well
enough anyway to head to the US whenever theyÂ’re sick. Good on them.

We tell ourselves that the Americans are mass-consumption driven,
shallow, crass, ill-educated, brash, money-obsessed even as we flock to
the theatres in our American cars and chase American dollars and flop in
front of the television to soak up all of their cultural excesses we
claim to abhor. We do this even as our home-grown intellectual triumphs
garner scant attention abroad and no notice to the south. But we do
cherish that fleeting foreign notice above gold.

Oh, look at us. WeÂ’re better than the Yanks. WeÂ’ve got Margaret Atwood.

Our foreign policy in the face of evil seems to consist of trying to
draw distinctions between us and our American neighbours that the
despots and terrorists are not interested in. We wonÂ’t admit that, to
our enemies, the West is all infidel. We wonÂ’t even admit that we have
enemies.

Twenty-four Canadians died on September 11, 2001 at the hands of vile
fanatics, and are forgotten. Jean Chretien canÂ’t even bring himself to
attend the dedication of a small plaque to their memory in an obscure
back room in Parliament. But four Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan
from friendly fire while supporting retaliation against the terrorists
and we canÂ’t forgive the Americans for being American. (Let me add
before I am accused of the opposite, that I think those four men are
shining examples of what is best about this country, even if our
spineless leaders canÂ’t see it, and want to spend more on child care
and gun control than they do on defence.)

We canÂ’t defend ourselves against any determined world power, and
shamelessly freeload off American might to secure our safety. We exist
at the sufferance of the Americans, and pretend to be sovereign
nevertheless. We will not admit that should anyone rise against us, we
must go to our supposed inferiors, to a forthright, strong and
successful land, to the very people we revile in the country in whose
image we unmade ourselves, and beg for aid, cap in hand. Instead we take
as granted that they will leap to save us from our own folly, and draw
some kind of unholy sustenance from that fact.

A country that will not work for its own defence has no right to exist.

We have thrown away everything great about Canada for half a century of
pointless social engineering, of official-policy penis envy and bitter
hauteur. We are morally bankrupt and pathetic. I am heartily sick of us
and ashamed.