[Ombrageux]

Why do you act like you hate Canada with every fiber of your being? Canadians should be proud to be their own country. And since you insist on the comparison with America lets indulge:
* You do not have 15% of your population without health coverage
* You do not need to have the world's highest number of prisoners per capita for to preserve your socio-economic system (the U.S. has 2.7 million prisoners)
* You do not have the Gini coefficient of Brazil
* You do not spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined
* You do not drag foreign nations into wars of aggression, despite the express will of the peoples concerned
Not that Canada is perfect, no country is. Canada is an environmentally atrocious country. Perhaps bilingualism is untenable and Quebec will eventually break free. But for now, why not appreciate Canada for what it is: a peaceful, prosperous and free nation.

[JJ]

I'm not sure where I made any comparisons with America. All I said is that Canadians have an unhealthy obsession with proving their differences, and that's often not very entertaining or flattering.

Tell me what you disagreed with in my actual review. A list of the ways America sucks is not a rebuttal.

[Ombrageux]

You might like this article.

Quote:

So one consequence of all the flag-waving and chanting is that Canadians may be a little less smug in the future: they've shown that they can be just as blindly patriotic as (say) their neighbors to the south. As they become more ostentatiously Canadian, they undermine that sense of entitlement that comes precisely from the notion that "ostentatious" and "Canadian" are two words that don't really belong in the same sentence.
The more visibly Canadian they become, the less "Canadian" they actually are.

[JJ]

It's a good piece.

But I still have to question where this mythology of the "restrained Canadian patriot" comes from. What I saw in the streets of Vancouver wasn't much different from what I've seen at every single Canada Day celebration I've ever attended.

[Mr_Canada]

Quote:

I wonder if this is because painting your face with a maple leaf or waving the flag from a hockey stick is a form of nationalism that is more available to new immigrants than the rather more insidious distanced self-regard that has hitherto characterized Canadians' sense of themselves. It is a habitus that can more easily be picked up or (better) incarnated, whatever one's background or skin color.

I feel this really does ring true.