With the Olympics in Vancouver, and the incidence of the psychological disorder known as ‘Canadian pride’ at an all-time high, it’s long past time to address the peculiarity to our north. Normally, Canada isn’t a subject of much reflection for us, but after that debacle of an opening ceremony and the excessive hype about Canada’s first home-turf gold medal (it felt a little like gym class, where everyone hoped the spastically untalented kid scored at least one basket),


WHENEVER I THINK OF CANADA . . . strike that. I’m an American, therefore I tend not to think of Canada. On the rare occasion when I have considered the country that Fleet Streeters call “The Great White Waste of Time,” I’ve regarded it, as most Americans do, as North America’s attic, a mildewy recess that adds little value to the house, but serves as an excellent dead space for stashing Nazi war criminals, drawing-room socialists, and hockey goons.

Henry David Thoreau nicely summed up Americans’ indifference toward our country’s little buddy when he wrote, “I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada. . . . What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” For the most part, Canadians occupy little disk space on our collective hard drive. Not for nothing did MTV have a game show that made contestants identify washed-up celebrities under the category “Dead or Canadian?”

If we have bothered forming opinions at all about Canadians, they’ve tended toward easy-pickings: that they are a docile, Zamboni-driving people who subsist on seal casserole and Molson. Their hobbies include wearing flannel, obsessing over American hegemony, exporting deadly Mad Cow disease and even deadlier Gordon Lightfoot and Nickelback albums. You can tell a lot about a nation’s mediocrity index by learning that they invented synchronized swimming. Even more, by the fact that they’re proud of it.

But ever since George W. Bush’s reelection, news accounts have been rolling in that disillusioned Americans are running for the border in protest. This prompts the thought that it may be time to stop treating Our Canadian Problem with such cavalier disregard. In fact, largely as a result of Bush and his foreign policy, what was once a polite rivalry has become a poisoned well of hurt feelings and recriminations.

These days, Canadian publications are chockablock with surveys showing that Canadians see themselves as something akin to a superior race. The prime ministers of what was once a reliable ally that ponied up in times of war have treated us like traffic-light squeegee-men when we’ve stopped at their corner, asking for assistance with our latest military adventure. They have spurned our missile-defense shield out of spite, even knowing it would save their Canadian bacon. Their legislators have publicly called us “bastards” and stomped on our president in effigy. Their citizens have booed our children at peewee hockey games.

Being bloodthirsty Americans, we have naturally fired a few warning volleys in lieu of slapping them with a restraining order. A few years ago, my friend Jonah Goldberg from National Review wrote a piece elegantly titled “Bomb Canada,” encouraging us to smack Soviet Canuckistan, as Pat Buchanan calls it, “out of its shame-spiral” since “that’s what big brothers do.” Canadians responded as Canadians always will when faced with overt aggression. They wrote inordinate numbers of letters of concern, exercising what Canadian writer Douglas Coupland calls their “almost universal editorial-page need to make disapproving clucks.”

Equal outrage was caused when Conan O’Brien showed up to help boost tourism after the SARS crisis. Along for the ride came a Conan staple, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who in dog-on-the-street interviews relentlessly mocked French Canadians. When one pudgy Quebecer admitted he was a separatist, Triumph suggested he might want to “separate himself from doughnuts for a while.”

Canadians seethed–though polls show they pride themselves on being much funnier than Americans (don’t ask me why, when they’re responsible for Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, and Alan Thicke). One MP from the socialist New Democratic party called the show “vile and vicious,” and said it was tantamount to hatemongering. Historians believe this to be the first time a member of parliament has so categorically denounced a hand puppet.

More at the Weekly Standard

I am stunned that no one from Soviet Canuckistan has responded

WELL DONE The Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says his country will build the Haitian government a temporary base.

Canada will spend up to $12 million on the building to replace several government offices that were damaged in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Harper's two-day visit began Monday. He made the announcement after meeting with Haitian President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

He said the new base was a crucial to Haiti's reconstruction.

The new base will accommodate key ministries and Haitian public servants for up to a year.

Your typical American ignorant (that means uninformed rant is not worth responding to. But I do remember we kicked you but in 1812- when we burned your White House!

According to giving by nation, a week after the quake, Canada had pledged $53 million, the USA a mere $100 million. Let me explain, on a per capita basis the USA would have to have given $530 million to just match the giving of Canada! Hmm.....tells you a lot about CAnada!

The term “ugly American” used to refer to the kind of tourist who loudly demands ketchup for his filet mignon at a fine Paris restaurant. Now, it could refer to the majority of the country. Obesity is so out of control, I wish I’d bought stock in a stretch pants manufacturer. The average American has spent most of his life strapping butter to the inside of his skin. Canada doesn’t need a big army…within a few years, an epidemic of gravy-induced heart attacks will do the work for us. And our chicks are way hotter, because they don’t have to zoom around Wal-Mart on motorized wheelchairs.

This is going to hurt for you to hear, but American beer is a laughingstock. I’m not trying to be a snob here, but even if I lost my sense of taste in some sort of firecracker incident, I still wouldn’t touch the questionable slop that passes for beer south of the border. There’s an old joke all Canadians are taught at a young age: How is sex in a canoe like American beer? They’re both fucking close to water.

But perhaps the most damning thing I can say is that many Americans don’t wish to be identified as such. While traveling throughout Europe, I encountered literally dozens of people with Canadian flags sewn onto their backpacks. As it turned out, just about all of them were Americans posing as Canadians. This is apparently a very common tactic of American travelers. Why are young Americans ashamed to be recognized as such? You’d never see Canadian travelers sewing the stars and stripes onto their belongings, after all.

Oh, and in case my arguments are insufficient, there is actually a scientific, internationally-acknowledged way to tell which country is better. It’s called the Human Development Index. It incorporates factors such as life expectancy, literacy rate, gross domestic product, etc. in order to determine which country should change its national motto to “We’re number 1! Woooooooo!”

Go ahead and click on that link. Tell me which country has been ranked highest 10 times. In case history’s not important to you either, check out the most recent Index. Canada ranked 4th, while the U.S. finished a dismal 12th, behind nations like Japan and France. That’s right. A bunch of midget, panty-obsessed salaryman drones and a nation of wine-sipping collaborators enjoy a higher standard of life than you. For shame, America.

(from a blog)

Some people just don't have a sense of Humor.

BTW Total US aid given to Haiti after the earthquake from both Government and Private groups will reach over $3 BILLION.

So the USA was finally shamed into action by smaller nations like Canada

Please.

Canada exists because the US allows it,.

Well is it normal for a US person to believe the world exists because the US allows it?
US public debt is $12,368,789,402,243 or $40,177 per capita and you still believe le monde est aux mains des Red Necks?