"The political lines run east and west, the economic lines mostly south. They are some thirty million people who line up along the southern border like goldfish against the glass, all the while leaving the North so empty the rest of the world can say, with some legitimacy, that they aren't even in it.
They have a jagged line far up empty northern stretch with trees on one side and no trees on the other. They begin the real New Year the day after Labour Day Weekend. They celebrate Groundhog Day when winter has just settled in, not when it's supposedly ending. They complain about the cold and yet, in places like White River, Ontario, and Snag, Yukon, they argue over and boast about record lows. They revere their anthem although only professional anthem singers know the words. They mostly like Americans and often dislike America. They drive from flat prairie into mountains. They have three ocean shores - one with high rocks at the Atlantic, one with shrinking ice over the Arctic, one with inviting beaches into the Pacific - and a fourt shore, freshwater, along the Great Lakes, where for long stretches they stare across to the Unites States at night as if that country were lighted store windows on the far side of a street that's most vacant lot on theirs. And yet, they consider their vacant lot the superior property.
They are familiar with the touchstones: the Canadian Shield, Peggy's Cove, Old Quebec, nuisance grounds, curling, Georgian Bay, Nanaimo bars, maple syrup, the Rockies, muskeg, road hockey, weather talk, late-night newscasts being bumped by Hockey Night in Canada, place names like Climax, Sakatchewan, Dildo, Newfoundland, and Medicine Hat, Alberta, soapstone carvings, legends like Mufferaw Joe of the Ottawa Valley and the Windigo of northern Crees, the Avro Arrow, May two-four weekends, Screech, Céline Dion, the lake, John Deere caps, fiddleheads, Morningside, Razzle Dazzle, Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys, Don Cherry, Michel Trembay plays, Anne of Green Gables, poutine, "peace, order and good government", with everything held together by Red Green's duct tape.
Canada is a country that, like Einstein's theory of relativity, is impossible for virtually any of us to grasp.
Canada have two languages but rarely speak them both; they have two official national sports but hardly ever play one, lacrosse; they fret over other provinces' separation threats and race to threaten separation themselves; they use Ottawa as both capital city and swear word; they have politicians who are elected to the federal government to work for the elimination of the federal government; they have academics calling for the end of provinces, premiers working for ever-increasing provincial powers, and mayors hoping for the creation of city states at the expense of provincial powers; they argue, still, over whether Louis Riel should have been hanged as a traitor back in 1885 or deserves a statue of Parliament Hill as a Father of Confederation.
A country where pollsters not long ago discovered that more people believe in the Loch Ness monster than believe their potiticians. A country whose citizens often seem less interested in whether a glass is half full or empty than they are in whether there might be chips in the rim - and yet will still tell pollsters they think of themselves as contented people.
This is a country with no history of civil war - but only because historians haven't yet come to terms with what the Meech Lake Accord was all about.
It takes creative minds to keep a place like this together - and perhaps the true secret to the little-recognized longevity of Canada belongs to the inventors. After all, as the poet Miriam Waddington asks:
Are they real or did someone invent them?"
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