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  In its feature story headlined “Canada’s New Spirit,” the influential British publication praised Canadian cities as “dynamic, successful,” and brimming with new immigrants. It said that Canada was showing the rest of the world “a certain boldness in social matters” as it opened doors to same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana.

  I could vouch for that myself. Earlier in the year, my editors had suggested I head across the country to “take the pulse” on the presumably “hot button” issue of same-sex marriage. I struck out, heading first into Alberta, where I’d been told resistance was highest. I went to gay bars and fundamentalist churches, dutifully reporting the responses, each one completely predictable. High in the Sushwap region of the B.C. Interior I met Don Bogstie, a big retired farmer who happily called himself a “redneck” but who told me he was “honoured” that the two women on the farm across the road had asked him to attend their wedding as a witness. He had only one condition—“That I don’t have to wear a tie!” I knew at that instant that same-sex marriage was only a hot-button issue if I pushed it. I called the paper to explain this, and we agreed that I should come home and move on to another story.

  According to The Economist, this impossibility called Canada, so often on the verge of certain collapse, deserved, at the least, a careful second look by a world that either took Canada for granted or never thought about it at all.

  Exactly how the moose got to stand in for “Canada’s New Spirit” is a bit of a mystery. Moose are hardly unique to this country—they can also be found in Alaska, the northeastern United States, Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Siberia, even Mongolia. Perhaps only in Canada do they wear surfer sunglasses, though.

  The beaver, on the other hand, is far more Canada. It might not be unique to the country, but its symbolism is one of a kind. It has by far the superior claim. The country was founded, after all, on the fur trade— beaver being synonymous with fur for centuries. A beaver was on the first stamp. A beaver is still on the Canadian nickel. The beaver is also the nation’s official symbol, thanks to Tory MP Sean O’Sullivan’s 1975 private member’s bill, “An Act to provide for the recognition of the Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of Canada.”

  There is, however, the enduring myth that male beavers will, under stress, bite off their own testicles. On the other hand, a great many male beavers have been found to possess a uterus. Further, a growing scientific argument holds that the beaver and its ponds are nature’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases.

  Flatulence, sexual confusion, and self-mutilation are hardly the message Canadians would like to see carried on the front cover of The Economist. Besides, the beaver is a rodent. Think of the fun Bill O’Reilly and Pat Buchanan and that silly young man in the bow tie would have with that. Luckily, The Economist went with the moose.

  Canadians loved what the British publication had to say about them. Like small-town clergy, they worry far too much about what others think. “Canadians are so incredibly insecure,” actor Donald Sutherland once said, “that somewhere in his psyche every single Canadian has a feeling that people in the United States have some kind of visceral, cultural and life experiences he does not have. If you’re Canadian, you think about a person from the States as the brother who went to sea, caught the clap and made a million dollars in Costa Rica or Hong Kong.”

  They fret over what Americans say, what the British say, what the French say, and seem to fret even more when no one’s saying anything at all. But if what’s being said is somehow positive they’ll clutch it to their breast as notice, at long last, of their great hidden talent.

  Those were good months for the external mirror. After The Economist pronounced, the Washington Post chimed in, saying that Canada’s open-minded attitudes toward such matters as legal pot and same-sex marriage were making the States look “fussy, Victorian and imperial.” The New Yorker added that while it might be cold up north and while Canadians might have “a reputation for paralyzing dullness,” they were also rather charmingly enlightened about certain matters. “Good old Canada,” the magazine gushed. “It’s the kind of country that makes you proud to be a North American.”

  Canadians, of course, had to deflect all the attention with their usual self-deprecation. “It’s like we woke up,” Rick Mercer told the National Post, “and suddenly we’re a European country.”

  The country The Economist described wasn’t perfect, of course. It was getting a “free ride” from the Americans in defence. It had a growing urban–rural split that should be of some concern. And taxes, of course, were too high. But Canada—dull old dependable Canada—had something new that was making it cool: that “certain boldness in social matters.”

  While the United States seemed to be growing ever more conservative, the magazine reported, Canada was becoming ever more tolerant. You want same-sex marriage? Fine, head for Canada. You think possession of marijuana for personal use should be decriminalized? Just follow the smoke. Canada, The Economist boldly declared, had become “an increasingly self-confident country.”

  Ha. Only months later, Eeyore Nation was back in full whine. Where this facile negativity comes from isn’t precisely known. Northerners—Finns, Scandinavians, Siberians—are renowned for their periodic blackness, and we have already discussed the enormous influence of the Scots on Canada. As P.G. Wodehouse wrote in Blandings Castle, “It is never very difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”

  So foul was the sudden mood shift—largely brought on by a growing scandal involving federal sponsorship money and the province of Quebec—that New York Times correspondent Clifford Krause asked in a feature story whether something had suddenly gone seriously wrong with the country to which he’d been assigned or whether it was “just the weather.”

  What first caught Krause’s attention was a remarkably “down” piece by an Albertan academic that somehow managed to tie the 2004 Olympic stumble by world-champion hurdler Perdita Felicien to an overall “national malaise.” University of Calgary historian David Bercuson had written in a Calgary Herald comment piece that “It’s not the individual performers whose shortcomings are on display for all the world to see. It is the very spirit of the nation and the sickness that now has hold of it that is at fault.”

  The notion that the world was actually watching all this and seeing Canada as a land of shortcomings and failures fascinated Krause. It seemed more than a stretch. And yet, as he talked to thinkers across the country he found wide acceptance of the view that the place was in decline and stumbling—bare months after The Economist had been singing its praises to the world. One leading historian, University of Toronto’s Michael Bliss, told Krause he was “in almost total despair.” “You have a country,” Bliss told the Times, “but what is it for and what is it doing?”

  “For these people,” Krause wrote, “Canada is adrift at home and wilting as a player on the world stage. It is dogged not only by uninspired leaders but also by a lack of national purpose, stunted imagination, and befuddled priorities, even as its economy prospers.” All this was most bewildering to Krause, an American who’s made a special effort to comprehend what it is that makes the country tick. He’d seen Canada as a “sensible country” in its promotion of peace and social justice abroad, its enlightened tolerance at home, its history of grand projects and, when necessary, its grand effort to protect.

  Those he spoke to, on the other hand, saw that greatness as a matter of the past and an embarrassment for the present. Peacekeepers were using equipment older than their officers. Politicians seemed to think greatness could be defined by how much money they spent on things like daycare. Education budgets were shrinking and professionals were continuing the “brain drain” south. Krause noted two tellingly titled recent bestsellers: Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed the Canadian Military? and Andrew Cohen’s While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World.

  So much for the cool
moose.

  Bliss was feeling particularly bleak around this time. The much-honoured historian was heading into retirement with an essay in the Literary Review of Canada asking “Has Canada Failed?” In Bliss’s view, yes, pretty much so. National dreams had fizzled, the search for identity had gotten lost, Canadians didn’t know where they stood on the fight against terrorism, and they had a convoluted government structure that didn’t much work on any level.

  Bliss was worried about where Canada was headed. There was economic uncertainty and political confusion. Canada might be “polycultural” but seemed increasingly incapable of finding a “sense of national ‘self’ or national interest in global affairs.” In his opinion, Canada was beginning a “decline into global irrelevance” and becoming socially and politically impossible internally. “It is not,” he concluded, “the country its founders hoped to create.”

  Krause found such thinking epidemic. Curious, he checked back through bestselling books of previous generations and discovered a pattern. George Grant’s Lament for a Nation was a huge seller in the 1960s and is still studied. Other books, such as Must Canada Fail?, were also popular in their day. No surprise that when a people spend so much time examining their belly-button lint, they tend to look down. “Intellectual complaining about the state of the nation,” Krause speculated, “seems to be as much a part of the Canadian tapestry as curling and maple syrup.”

  It’s not just the intellectuals, though. Canadians complain bitterly about everything from the weather to the politicians they just voted into office. “Canada’s one true national art form,” Douglas Coupland wrote in Souvenir of Canada 2, “is the indignant letter to the editor.”

  Such obsessive complaining reached a certain level of absurdity when, in Michael Ignatieff’s keynote address to the Liberals’ March 2005 national convention, he told the gathering that Canada was coming apart at the seams. Its looming breakup, he warned, would be “unprecedented in the annals of political history.” Less than a year later Ignatieff was a duly elected member of the House of Commons and, a few months after that, running for the leadership of that same Liberal Party and promising to lead a unified, confident Canada into a significant role in the world.

  Clifford Krause’s report on how miserable Canada had become was followed by the release of the “Happy Planet Index,” a new international ranking from the U.K.-based New Economic Foundation. The happiest country in the world, it claimed, was the little Oceania island of Vanuatu, where some 200,000 blissful people live on a bare subsistence. Then came Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica, and Panama. Unhappiest were Berundi, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. Canada wasn’t even within sight of the miserable bottom.

  Canadians, according to the Happy Planet Index, are far happier than their neighbours, the United States of America.

  Happy, but insecure. It was around this time that the Canadian Tourism Commission became convinced that the world does not quite see Canada as Canada really is. And so the commission set out to “rebrand” the country. After all, everyone else was doing it. Kentucky Fried Chicken was now KFC. Radio Shack was becoming The Source. The Reform Party had changed to Alliance and then to Conservative. A small cup of regular coffee had somehow evolved into a tall latte. Why not tweak Canada?

  The commission decided to kiss off the old “mountains, Mounties and moose” motif. So what if The Economist had used the moose? That was strictly old school. “Our brand,” it said, “had started to fade. People weren’t sure what we were any more.”

  The CTC wanted Canada to move into the modern tourism age. If France, a little country that could be plopped virtually unnoticed into northern Ontario, could haul in 75 million visitors a year, why should Canada be happy with a paltry 17.5 million? We might not have vineyards or the Eiffel Tower, but there was 5 percent beer and the CN Tower, not to mention all that empty space for trekking around in. Canada, the commission determined, needed to compete with Australia and India as a place people headed for to have a great adventure. It even had a new slogan to offer up: “Canada. Keep Exploring.”

  There was little need to advertise that, at least in this country. Hockey and lacrosse might be the national games, but searching has forever been the national sport.

  Around the same time, Darrell Bricker and John Wright released their book What Canadians Think. The two Ipsos-Reid pollsters came to the conclusion that Canadians, in the early going of the twenty-first century, were a people under enormous stress. Four of ten felt life to be beyond their control. Four of ten felt life was changing too quickly. Three of four claimed they had less free time today than at the turn of the new century. Four of five believed in God but only one in five went to church. Traffic was unbearable. They didn’t like other people reading over their shoulder and they particularly did not like men who crack their knuckles.

  Nearly three of every four Canadian women would take a good night’s sleep over a good night of sex. More Canadians had faith in angels than in those they elected to office. One in five believed aliens from outer space visit Canada regularly, one in ten thought mandatory name tags an excellent idea, and nearly four of every five couldn’t deliver the first line of the national anthem—even though that first line happens to be the name of the song.

  Not too long after, the Dominion Institute released another poll on the attitudes of Canadians, who expressed grave concern about the effects of global warming and seemed certain that Canada would one day be attacked by terrorists. Toward the end of the survey the pollster had thrown in the old question concerning the eternal glass. Half empty? Or half full? Fourteen percent said half-empty. More than eight of ten said half-full.

  No real surprise there, but perhaps it’s necessary to be Canadian to understand this. I am, at one and the same time, a constant griper and a constant optimist. I find as much pleasure in poking at the country as I do in celebrating it. Canadians may be the only creatures on earth capable of shaking their heads and nodding them at the same time.

  “We’re doomed!” Bob Hunter shouted out during a 2004 talk at the University of Toronto. “It’s obvious that the world is going to hell in a hand basket—as usual.” Hunter, the Canadian co-founder of the Greenpeace movement, thought of himself as a “committed apocalypicist.” He’d spent a lifetime warning about fisheries and the environment. He’d stared down a Russian harpooner. He’d made a stand on a dangerous ice floe to prevent a sealing ship from getting to its prey. He’d argued that global warming is merely “the slow-motion equivalent of nuclear war.”

  And yet, in that familiar, wonderfully mystifying Canadian inconsistency, Hunter said he could sense change coming, sense people changing, sense the world finally coming to its senses. He saw hope for everything, The Globe and Mail ’s John Barber reported, including the future prospects of the endangered three-toed salamander.

  Hunter was sixty-three years old and dying of cancer—he would not last six more months—and wanted one final opportunity to speak to the people of his country about the world they’re about to enter.

  “The only thing incurable about me,” he said, laughing, “is my optimism.”

  ONE SUCH OPTIMIST is The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson, who recently published a book called The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream. In a seeming slap to the perpetual doomsayer’s face, he begins with the surprising proposal that “Some time, not too long ago, while no one was watching, Canada became the world’s most successful country.”

  Canada works, Ibbitson argues. In part through luck. In part by intent. Whatever the reason, Canada stands at the forefront of a fundamental world change. Ibbitson further contends that it is Canadian history, with its very lack of dramatic confrontation, that makes this country unique.

  The legendary politeness of Canadians, he says, is hardly accidental; how else could the French and English have continued after 1759? Such polite accommodation would go on to serve Canada wonderfully well as wave after wave of immigrants—first from France, Britain, and Western Europe, th
en from Eastern Europe, southern Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa—transformed it from a country of two founding nations into one nation in search of not only its identity but a purpose higher than collecting taxes and issuing passports.

  Ibbitson—who comes from Gravenhurst, a small town in central Ontario that has also produced Dr. Norman Bethune—sees a Canada that is increasingly colour blind and that will one day be colour blended. His Canada is urban and ethnically diverse. It has a strong economy and good social programs. Of course it has its problems, from homelessness to unresolved Aboriginal issues. All the same, it works. Canada, he would argue, is already the world’s first truly cosmopolitan society.

  “The result,” Ibbitson said in a subsequent Globe article, “is nothing less than a miracle.” Canadian cities no longer have one dominant race. They’re places where equality rules, where gay and lesbian couples and communities are accepted, where people even remember to pick up their dog poop in the parks. “This has never happened anywhere before,” he writes. “Not like this.”

  There’s nothing accidental about politeness in this country, he believes. Others might joke about it, but politeness stands at the very core of how this country operates. “It is the means by which we accommodate each other. It is the secret recipe for a nation of different cultures, languages and customs, whose citizens all get along.” Politeness is what led to the social revolution that modern Canada exhibits to the world, a country that he sees as “young, creative, polyglot, open-minded, forward-looking, fabulous.”

  It might sound Pollyanna-ish, but Ibbitson is hardly naive. He knows the Aboriginal situation is untenable. He deplores the deterioration of Canada’s military over the past decades. He thinks foreign policy has become “a mess”—not the least of which is the strained relationship between the two countries that claim Sweetgrass on one side of the razor wire and Coutts on the other.

  Where he separates himself dramatically from those who similarly worry about Canada’s place in the world is his view of the past. He advises Canadians to adopt “ahistoricism”—to move away from the past of Riel, Conscription, Quebec sovereignty, the national energy program, and Meech Lake and embrace instead the country as seen through the eyes of those recently arrived. History, Ibbitson claims, dwells too much on misery, brings up little but old resentments. Besides, the flood of immigrants in recent years has “swamped” the history of the old Canada. Stop picking at old wounds, he advises. Stop acting superior. “The Canada we are becoming is moving past all that. The emerging Canada is nothing less than the engine of the social revolution that, if the world is lucky, will one day overtake the world. You don’t think it’s possible? Think of where we were a century ago. Think of what we have been through since then, what we have endured, what we have learned.