Our Good Neighbours

Well, they are our good neighbours. For the most part, they are. When they're not busy complaining about our loose borders and our harbouring of would-be terrorists wanting for nothing better than to plan horrendous attacks on the United States while residing in Canada, then stealthily making their way across our porous border to launch those attacks. We forgive them. Not the terrorists, those in Congress who continue to besmirch the good name of Canada.

The truth of the matter is, none of the 9/11 terrorists reached the U.S. through Canada. It was their own sloppy immigration system, their own inattentive FBI and CIA, battling to keep vital information from one another, let alone acting on warning symptoms already in their security system files, that admitted the determined murderers into their midst. Truth, submerged time and again into falsehoods built on hysteria. Better to blame someone else.

Fact is, we're as critical of them as they are of us. We happen to think they're too immersed in themselves as heroes, as righteous Christians, as saviours of the world, as catalysts, actually, for unrest in the world at large. Needless to say, we're pale imitations of the Americans, although we decry their belligerent authorship of upheavals in countries whose governments they claim are threats to world stability.

We're not invaders of other countries. We come when we're invited.

That's the Canadian way. Timid, do-gooding, aspirational Americans. Just kidding. Don't repeat that; please.

Sometimes, though, you've got to wonder why that country keeps shooting itself in the foot. Bleeding their treasury, leaving an immense debt for future generations to hope to sort out, because their addled, aggressively swaggering president-of-the-moment decided to rescue a country from its totalitarian ruler who turned out to be an addled, aggressive, swaggering fool. Who, just incidentally, was the cause of thousands of people losing their lives.

Kind of like that president, right? Humans, ugh!

What I have in mind, though, is how the United States, as a country, with full agreement from most of its own people continues to insist that they're all right. It's all right if millions of people have no access to affordable health care. And it's obviously all right if children from poverty-stricken backgrounds are neglected. Must be; that same president just vetoed a measure to expand a children's health-care program.

Mustn't think he's insensitive, however. He does have someone's best interests in mind. He did mumble something about the rights of private health-care insurance providers being trampled on, should such a bill pass. But he's not alone, alas. His worthy would-be successor, Rudy Guiliani, the Republican Party's first-in-line for the party's pick to challenge the Democrats in 2008 will also not support universal medicare for his country.

It smacks of socialism, he thinks. How amazingly disappointing. This guy is defying the evangelical, conservative religious right with his uncompromising support of gay rights and women's right to choose, but he feels universal health care is simply un-American. He's been leading Hillary Clinton in the early polls in swing districts. If America decides it wants another Republican government they can kiss universal health care good-bye.

On the other hand, it would appear that the hard right religious parties have had second-second thoughts about supporting Mr. Giuliani. His supportive stance on gay rights and abortion is just too much for them to overlook. Both of which, they claim, in a country as rigidly religiously-observing as the United States, truly are un-American.

And since Barak Obama, running well behind Hillary Clinton is also passionately supportive of a universal made-in-America health care plan for poor, uninsured Americans, perhaps there's hope for the country to become as fair, inclusive and caring as they claim to be.