Releasing the inner Canadian
Will Wilkinson can’t help poking fun at Canada, but amidst the jest is a kind of admiration for a Canadian vision of citizenship:
I work for a libertarian think tank, and libertarians are supposed to disdain the land of poutine and Dan Aykroyd for its socialist health-care system and general failure to really love liberty…. But even more important to me is the conviction—a libertarian conviction, I believe—that crossing national borders ought to differ little from crossing the imagined line between Iowa and Minnesota. That’s really why I’m so keen about being Canadian. I want my own boundaries to widen, as I’d like everyone’s boundaries to widen. Also, I can now put the Canadian flag on my backpack….
I return to Iowa with a Maple Leaf pin on my backpack. I give my American fiancée her present: a ridiculous action figure of Macdonald, complete with reading table and book. He was a “father of confederation,” I explain. I tell her what the enthusiastic Parliament tour guide told me: “Sir John A. Macdonald was a dreamer.”
