Being Canadian: Margaret Wenteshares her thoughts on Pierre Burton's famous quote, "A Canadian is someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe."
I hate Margaret Wente more than I hate any other writer, and despite the fact that the image of her mugshot bobbing up and down in a canoe will haunt my dreams forever, I have to say I agree with her on this one. Or rather, I am with her when she agrees with Atwood, Frye and Burton that being Canadian has something to do with an appreciation for our natural landscape/geography. And I don't think you need to have climbed the Rockies to appreciate them. It's the mere thought that our country is so wild and vast that gives me a sense of being Canadian. The furthest north I've been is Bracebridge and yet I feel a very strong association between Canadian landscape/geography and being Canadian.

In fact, the same goes for being a bilingual country. I know about as much French as I knew in Grade 9 (not much, although I've read the labels of a few more bottles of shampoo: "shower gel/gel douche", "shampoo/shampooing") but I'm proud of the fact that there are a bunch of people speaking French in a very specific part of the place I call home. And until I can speak passable French, I don't think I'll be able to consider myself a true Canadian.

Things I like about Canada:

socialized healthcare,
an international reputation for being polite,
being constantly at odds with American culture.

We see ourselves as the antithesis to "those Americans" and pride ourselves on how different we are. And although I think we're more similar than we would like to admit, and although I think a lot of that sort of comparative talk is more destructive than constructive, I think that Canadians, forced to abandon all attempts to compete in the "Free Market", produce things that are necessarily more honest and uncorrupted by the dictates of the masses. Low budget things necessarily have a "low-budget" look - they lack the million-dollar sheen everything from the states has on it - but lacking the varnish, it's easier to tell the better cut. And when people are forced to do more with little, the product has potential to be much more efficient, more compact and precise. True, this is not always the case, but a bad concept is a bad concept. All I'm saying is that a lot of the time, money makes things look passable that probably shouldn't pass at all, things without an original thought involved in their conception. Here in Canada, we don't have that luxury so things that suck look as good as they are whereas the Americans could dress up a turd sandwich and it would sell at Quiznos. I'm mixing metaphors - food is not the same as art. Don't think about it too hard and we'll be fine.

In short: O Canada. Our home and budget land.