In passing, David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy neatly summarizes life in Canada:
By 2003, Robert Martin, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Western Ontario, commented that he increasingly thinks that "Canada now is a totalitarian theocracy. I see this as a country ruled today by what I would describe as a secular state religion [of political correctness]. Anything that is regarded as heresy or blasphemy is not tolerated."
I find that characterization basically accurate.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, what we call Veterans' Day in the States. World War I was a national trauma and transformative experience for Canadians (as Colby Cosh writes in his National Post column) and the Great War still has an influence on Canada that it's hard for me, as an American, to understand.
Canada lost 65,000 killed in WWI (as many as 15,000 from a single action-- Passchendaele) from a total population of around 8 million people (7.2 in 1911 and 8.7 in 1921). Which is to say that 1.6% of Canadian men died in WWI. Somehow Canada suffered that and still remained friendly with England; Australia, suffering similar losses in the Gallipoli campaign, become more estranged. (I'll never understand the Commonwealth.)
Remembrance Day is one of the times that I truly feel foreign in Canada. The first remembrance day I spent here, I saw a man wearing one of the poppies in his lapel and commented to my wife, "What an ugly flower!" She was shocked.
Although many current commentaries tie Remembrance Day with Canadian involvement in UN peackeeping missions and peace in general, I like to think that most people who wear the poppies wear them in the original spirit of John McCrae's poem:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep...
She's a funny country, Canada, but there's still some fight left in her.