At the beginning of every summer, Maclean’s publishes its Canada Day Survey. It is an early start on seasonal silliness, as filling as a Popsicle and as sturdy as a sandcastle.
So, don’t take the magazine’s sixth annual exercise in self-congratulation too seriously. Consider it an opportunity, though, for Canadians to sashay down the runway of nations, svelte and sexy, basking in the applause of a world grateful to share the planet with us.
That’s because, if you didn’t know it, we are the Chosen People. We are prosperous, healthy, humorous, smart, industrious and cosmopolitan, and that’s just for starters. Why, according to Maclean’s, there’s no one quite like us — at least not in North America.
MacLean’s doesn’t just think this; it has the numbers. It always has numbers — some more persuasive than others — and year after year, they say the same thing: we’re wonderful! Now, surely we can brag on our birthday, like everyone else does on theirs. We have much to celebrate and appreciate.
As satirist Tom Lehrer used to sing, what good are laurels if you can’t rest on them?
This year, Maclean’s again examines the United States and finds “99 reasons why it’s better to be Canadian.” The paint-by-numbers portrait is a Valentine to ourselves: We live longer, we are happier, we divorce less, we kill ourselves less, we are healthier, we are smarter, we drink less, we are cooler about homosexuality. We even have bigger houses, which must really offend the Americans.
Didn’t you know that we’re better at special effects than the Americans? Or that we are less fat (one-quarter of Canadians are obese in contrast to one-third of Americans)?
Didn’t you know we are more peaceful? We’re leaders in fecal transplant therapy (“holy crap,” says Maclean’s) and our weather is better than their climate of tornadoes and hurricanes, which is surely news to our many snowbirds.
You get the point, though, especially that we’re funnier.
And it is funny, or it would be funny, if surveys like this didn’t reveal just our irrepressible inferiority complex. If it endures in us, well, it’s understandable. We live next to the world’s most successful people. It’s hard.
After all, we have Stephen Harper and they have Barack Obama. We have John Baird and they have John Kerry. Before Kerry, they had Hillary Clinton and we had Lawrence Cannon.
We have hockey; they have baseball, football, basketball. Olympics after Olympics, they present the greatest athletes in the world. In the Olympics of the Mind, they produce the most Nobel laureates.
We have the Royal Ontario Museum and Montreal’s Musée des beaux-arts, good as they are. They have the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, unique as they are.
We have the Trans-Canada Highway, which goes in two directions, in two lanes. They have the Interstate highway system, which goes in all directions, in four lanes.
They were late to both world wars, which we don’t let them forget, but their intervention won them both. In the 1940s, they rebuilt Europe and fostered the international nomenclature that emerged from it.
They have made mistakes, some pretty awful, but they have a remarkable capacity to recover. They embrace ambition and celebrate success like no other people. They know how to dream.
Ultimately, these differences make America a great nation and Canada a good nation.
Maclean’s, though, is right: Canadians are the luckiest people in the world — if only because in the lottery of neighbours, we drew the United States of America.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
