(Found this in my drafts folder in January 2018; it is unfinished, but I’ve lost the thread of my thought, so I am back-posting it now)
On Canada Day, post-Brexit and pre-US Presidential Vote, I was feeling the Canadian smugness, not going to lie. Something about having spent almost a year now with a government that seems a lot saner and less deliberately apocalyptic than the last has put part of my brain at a dangerous ease, and I slipped more readily into the national myth than I have for years. Isn’t it a nice feeling, to be Canadian? Isn’t it nice that we’re just so nice?
We’ve been telling ourselves that for decades, now. Even last year this time, when anxiety over the Harper Government was at its height, a lot of the criticism could be boiled down to a concern that we had become, as a country, not very nice. We love this myth. The world loves this myth.