The Weekly Standard takes a few shots at our neighbors to the North:
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.
Ouch.
Canada is a cleaner country than the United States, that has in many respects a much better quality of life. Anti-Canadianism that doesn’t pertain to specific policies of personalities is infantile and idiotic. With the exception of the recent Iraq war, Canada has been by the US’s side at every major conflict. Britain may be regarded as our best ally, but Canada definetly deserves to share that mantle. Canadians invented AM radio (Gugliliemo Marconi), the IMAX system (Roman Kroitor and Robert Kerr), the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), television (reginald fessenden), music synthesizer (Hugh LeCain), the electron microscope (James Hillier and Albert Prebus), basketball (James Naismith) and even trivial pursuit (Chris Haney and Scott Abott). Hardly a mediocre country. Canadians sort of sneak up on you, who ever knew that the likes of Peter Jennings, Alex Trebek, and William Shatner were Canadian unless you researched them. Canadians aren’t so easy to spot, especially because they are so integrated into American cultural spheres. Of course I am sure there are some canadians, such as Jim Carey or Pamela Anderson, who, thanks to their antics, most Canadian citizens are glad don’t stick out as being from North America’s largest landmass.