Response to "Where in the World is Canada?"

Defining what it is to be Canadian by enumerating what we are not does not define who and what we are.

I agree with Professor Cameron's assertion that Canada has lost its place in the world as a strong middle power player on the international stage - a bridge between our European cultural roots and neighbourly southern relations. However, the notion that his definition of what is Canadian - rooted in the similar feedback loop of what we are not (i.e. American lap dogs ("the customer is always right," "knee-jerk neo-mercantilists," etc.) does not, in fact, define who and what we are any better than those values the Professor espouses to be un-Canadian.

We seem to have little desire to hold a national dialogue structured to understand what it is exactly we are, and are striving to be. We get caught up in these infantile attempts to assert ourselves as individuals apart from our big brother, constantly denying perhaps what we actually are: a knowledge economy with a huge percentage of GDP reliant on civil ties with the U.S. – you know, the democratic nation we share the world's longest unprotected border with. Notwithstanding the fact that the vast, vast majority of the world still thinks of Canada as thousands of clean lakes and rivers, waterfalls and tundra, deep forests and all sorts of other benign, safe, and (in their minds) insignificant imagery, what we perhaps truly are is an international economic, (burgeoning) military and intellectual power that punches far above our weight.

Our continuing inability to confront these facts will always prevent us from being all we are capable of being. If the Professor prefers for us to become the utopian image of what Canada is – a branch plant economy sprinkled with a little agrarian romanticism – we must then give up our economic growth, international treaty obligations, status as a home for industrious entrepreneurial immigrants, and place at the table as a conciliatory voice of reason between Western powers. I wouldn’t even mind if that became the case, but close examination of our economy, and an open dialogue around what it is we truly are as Canadians is required – and Professor Cameron may not like the answer many Canadians come back with.