Happy Canada Day!

Today is Canada Day. And Qatar Happening happens to have an affiliation for the icy wonderland, so we're going to town today :) For more, check out www.qatarhappening.com.

No, we did not fight a battle, throw off tyranny, or make grandiose promises about being an empire or never going hungry again. And since Trudeau I don’t think any politician has grandstanded with promises of ‘yes we can’- he preferred a rose in his lapel and pure awesomness. Instead we quietly and politely gathered together and said ‘yes, let’s be a country. And for kicks, lets keep the Queen on our money. Next to a moose.”

We don’t live in igloos, although in some parts of the country you do have to tuck your car in at night so it runs the next day. We speak two languages, and we prefer our leading politicians to be incomprehensible in both. We believe in freedom and nationalism but in an understated way, and we like our fries with vinegar or preferably gravy and cheese. I spend a lot of time as a Canadian abroad explaining how I’m in fact, not an American with a higher cold tolerance, and usually, after much discussion about the proper use of the word ‘eh’ and what exactly a Governor General does and how Canada did in fact invent basketball, daylight savings time, and countless other things, I usually just fall back on a story from last year.

Last year, my car was broken into. Nothing really was stolen, mainly because I didn’t own anything. They smashed the window, rifled through my things, and stole a handful of change out of my cupholder before moving on and doing the same thing to another car in the parking lot. It seemed senseless, it seemed idiotic, and it made me mad. We're Canadian- we don't do that here. What's more, this was Nova Scotia; if Canada is 'nice', Nova Scotia is on a whole lot of valium. And possibly xanax. This is the province that redefined nice, underlined Canadian politeness, and epitomized laid back. Or so the tourism brochures would have us believe, and I, an Ontario transplant, had experienced since I moved here. So to have my car, which has prior to this made not one but two cross country journeys filled with all my worldly possessions, violated as it quietly sat in my private parking lot threw me for a loop.

But maybe this, like everything else, is just like Canada in general. We recently blew out 142 candles on our patriotic birthday cake, but what really makes us a country? Canadian identity is something that's tenuous at best. Most of it seems to be defined by what we aren't. We have spent 142 years as America's Hat and that's the thing that mostly seems to define us. We are not American. We are friendly, we are kind to our neighbours, we are politically a little left-of-centre, we like deep fried foods coated in cheese and gravy, cheap coffee, the occasional puff on a weed that’s a little silly, and long walks on our many beaches.

But is that it? Yes, Canada led the world in peacekeeping missions- but we still don't donate the minimum amount of money we recommended each industrialized country should be giving in development aid around the world. Yes, we value our justice system and shun for the most part the death penalty- but we've had numerous people locked up for years on security certificates, without charges and without being able to see the evidence against them, because they might, just maybe, possibly, have something to do with terrorism. We champion environmental stewardship and were one of the first countries to sign the Kyoto accord, yet we quibble over the carbon tax and allow politicians to disregard that same accord. We shepherd in international standards like the Declaration of Human Rights and the treaty to ban landmines, and make large, public apologies for our past violations, but we voted against the United Nations declaration on Aboriginal rights.

Clearly, we're all a little conflicted about our identity here. But just as clear, there is a drive to do good, even if we don't often follow through with it. So my car was broken into? That sucked. Whoever did it thought they had a right to vandalize my property for no other reason than their own amusement. But on the flip side, there was a very nice lady up the street who, after the punks dumped my possessions all over her lawn, gathered them up and instead of finding a dumpster, took them to the police so I could get my sneakers back.

And maybe that's Canada. Sometimes we suck, but we at least want to try to make things right and clean up other people's messes, even if we don't have to.