Don't Wanna Be a Canadian Idiot

And I'm off to pissing people off already.

Before anyone gets too incensed at what I'm about to type, bear in mind I'm an anonymous schmuck in a sea of anonymous schmucks and I'm definitely not a political sciences major or sociologist, so any observation I make is by definition that of an amateur. However, if there's anything the Internet in general and the political blogosphere specifically has taught us, there's no harm in letting your voice be heard.

So that out of the way, there is one thing about the Canadian political character that annoys the sweet piss right out of me, and it's this: we compare ourselves too often to the U.S. and not enough to ourselves.

Yes, we have a better health care system, and with single payer more or less off the table with the new U.S. administration odds are that this'll continue. But when I have to take my father to the emergency room for treatment of a bacterial outbreak and we wait half the night to be seen, we could still stand to improve it. We boast about how we stayed out of Iraq, while ignoring that both current leaders of our two major parties supported it. Yes, we had a female PM before the US did, albeit one that was elected in an inter-party election and lasted less time than Cop Rock did, but the most prominent current female politician in the country is the head of a party that doesn't have a single seat. We are content to be a little bit "more enlightened" than the U.S. - for a given, left-leaning value of enlightened - and I think that's a defect in our character, because whenever I bring up some problem in our system odds are I'll hear a response that starts with "Yeah, but in the States..."

Comparing yourself to others, either as an individual or as a group, is understandable but I think it's a bad thing to do, especially if the one you're comparing yourself to doesn't really care what you think. Your standards wind up tied to someone whose behaviour you don't affect. I saw this happen with the torture debate, statements that started with "Yeah, but the terrorists..." And it's true, terrorist organizations don't have rules about the treatment of prisoners, but defining ourselves as "better than people who blow up other people" isn't a high enough standard. We should seek to define ourselves as "better than who we were yesterday." Our own behaviour we can control. We have less control over people halfway around the world whose modus operandi is "hide and hide some more."

Part of it's the age old problem of tribalism - Canada is the Us and the U.S. the Them and bashing the Them always lifts the Us up. But most of my social life is online and I know more Americans than Canadians via online networks, so my Us is cross-border, and I'm beginning to realize that the divisions built up by patriotism are largely false. So I get faintly annoyed at hearing Canadian criticism of U.S. attitudes towards, say, the Gaza Strip conflict while our own leaders are barely more even-handed. For better or for worse we've tied ourselves to the U.S. and are happy with calling ourselves a slightly 'better' version of it. I'm not sure that's a good thing at all. After all, they elected their last leader, and we were reminded painfully in December that we are still subject to an unelected monarch. They got out from under the British crown centuries ago and maybe we ought to get cracking on that.