Some people equate being Canadian with Tim Horton’s coffee.  I’m not really one of them although I do enjoy a Tim’s coffee once in a while.  All you have to do is spend some time in Western Canada specifically British Columbia and you’ll find that Tim’s coffee is not as popular there as it is in Eastern Canada.  It is a big country and we define ourselves in many ways.  If you want to be defined by coffee, go ahead.

I am old enough to remember the day Canada turned 100.  I was only eight years old at the time but I really thought it was a big deal.  At school that year we were given special medals and Centennial coins were all the rage.  On July 1st that year I can remember going to several event in Dresden, one being a parade.  It was a special time and I even got to go to Expo 67.  I’ve never been anywhere at that age but for some other reason I felt that being Canadian was special.

Fast-forward 43 years and Canada has really changed.  We’ve got three territories now, a charter of rights and a whole host of other new realities that nobody could have ever dreamed of 43 years ago.  Could you imagine an iPhone or something called the Internet back in 1967?  I digress, the world, as we know it has changed forever but how about being a Canadian?  Does it still feel the same after all these years and what does it feel to be an eight-year-old Canadian today?

Last week on my twitter feed somebody tweeted a Foreign Policy article titled “Postcards from Hell” It was a photo essay of 60 of the world’s “failed states”.  In the essay, Elizabeth Dickinson related “you’ll only know a failed state when you see it.  Google “Postcards from Hell” and you can see for yourself.  In it she documented 60 failed states and the pictures were telling.  Having visited and spent quite a bit of time in some of these “failed states” I found it sad.  Here lays me in southwestern Ontario while a huge amount of people live in these “failed states” with no way out.  And of course, who the heck am I.?

Canadians and their politicians often pride themselves as being either at the top or close to the top in the United Nations index with the highest standards of living.   We live in a land with 34 million people and resources and technology to burn.  Despite that, some of us still think we have issues, which was acted out last week in Toronto.  That’s where rich people compared to the poor souls in the “failed states” broke windows, burned police cars and complained about injustice.  It was enough to make me throw up.  As a Canadian, I was ashamed.  Why don’t some of these people who broke the windows attempt to alleviate poverty by walking into a Third World slum showing the people what Canada is really about?

However, the world is not me and that’s a very good thing.  I would be a hypocrite to say I haven’t taken part in protest because I’ve lead big protests in Ottawa.  At the time we were very cognizant of the wrong people taking over our group.  Legitimate protest is a function of our democracy and truly Canadian.

There are many things about being Canadian that I really cherish.  An incomplete list would be the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, hockey, Quebec, the Grey cup, Waterton Lakes National Park, Grand Prairie Alberta, the University of Guelph, Jean Chretien, the Inukshuk, cktimes.ca and Canadian farm country.  Of course I don’t want to yell too loud, I just want to mention these things.

One thing that I have learned is that being Canadian is special but it in no way means we are superior to anybody else especially our American friends.  For instance I think many Canadians fall in that trap of defining themselves by not being Americans.  If you are Canadian and you think about it hard I think you can realize how special being Canadian is.

Part of that evolution for me has been when I have set foot on foreign lands.  Some of these lands were not “failed states” but beautiful places far away.  It made no difference; I still felt a long way from Canada.   And of course I have spent time in foreign places nobody else would ever want to go.  The one common denominator is at the end of the day when I reach Canadian shores you know a little bit more about what it’s like to being Canadian.  So this week as we stop to celebrate Canada, consider where you are.  We have a lot to be thankful for.