Today is July 1, Canada Day. the one day of the year that we normally reserved and modest Canadians can muster up the courage to quietly sing our own praises and gently toot our modest little horns.

We celebrate ourselves today, even though it doesn’t come naturally to us. It’s not that Canadians are not proud of their country or that Canadians lack communal spirit.

We’re just not a super demonstrative people. Singing our own praises seems far too American to us, and if there is one thing about the Canadian identity upon which all Canadians agree, it is that we are NOT American.

I can only imagine that every time we insist upon that on the world stage, it seems like one twin insisting on how different it is from the other. We are New Zealand to the USA’s Australia, Austria to their Germany, Portugal to their Spain. No matter how strongly any of us insist on how unique we are compared to our bigger, louder counterparts, and no matter how many absolutely true and valid points of difference we can point to, from the outside, we will still look more or less the same.

And unless you are absolutely sure you could tell an Austrian from a German, you can’t blame those outside North America from looking at us that way.

The differences, therefore, are for us to understand, and nobody else. We live and grow in the shadow of American cultural dominance, and while we don’t like to think about it, we have to admit that if the USA were to disappear tomorrow, we would be ill prepared to go on without them.

I mean, we would have to watch Canadian TV! The horror.

In some ways, then, it is amazing that we retain any unique identity at all. But no matter how strong an influence another culture has on our own, national character remains the same, and ours is strikingly different from that of our cousins to the South. We are a quiet, unassuming, public-minded, reserved people, and while we have very little influence on what goes on down South in the United States, we do have the world’s best view for the show.

As for the world stage, we are distinctly part of the crew, not the on-stage talent. We show up when we are needed and do what is needed to be done and we neither seek nor receive praise for it, because Canadians have, in their quiet way, an extremely strong sense of duty, and we are perfectly content to just do our part without requiring individual recognition.

Time and again, Canada has shown its willingness to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. We were fighting Hitler for years before the USA decided to show up, and we didn’t need a personal motivation either. Hitler was no immediate threat to us. Tojo hadn’t bombed Vancouver Island.

We saw the threat, saw that our friends and allies in Europe needed us, and showed up ready to fight.

And that has been our pattern ever since, sometimes to our detriment. We show up where we are needed, whether it’s Cyprus, Sarajevo, or Afghanistan, and we do the jobs that are not sexy or glamorous enough for others, and when the job is done, we just go home and resume our lives.

We do our part. That’s what Canadians do.

This extends to the domestic realm as well. Unlike certain nations we border, Canadians have a much better grasp on the idea that society requires a sacrifice from each and every one of us, and that when something benefits us all, it is more than just a noble ideal to support it, it’s a sound investment.

We are the “peace, order, and good government” nation. Note the lack of soaring, inspirational ideals there. We are not looking to become shining examples of awesomeness even in our (unofficial) national motto. We just want things to be peaceful, orderly, and sound.

Note especially that last phrase : good government. Can you imagine an American even saying those two words together? Implicit in the phrase is the idea not just that government can be good (surprise, Fox News!), but that it is something that can be made good. It is an inherently communalist phrase, at least compared to the radical individualists down south, and I think it says a lot about who we are as a people.

It also says a lot about who we are as a people that we are constantly trying to figure out who we are as a people. When you live in the apartment above what it arguably the loudest nation on Earth, it is no wonder that you end up having trouble hearing your own voice.

And it is so much easier to just listen to whatever songs they are playing downstairs.

But I don’t think we Canadians need to worry so much about who we are. Clearly, whoever we are, we are despite all the noise from down south, and we will continue to be that nation no matter how loud and self-aggrandizing they get.

We might not always be able to hear our own voice, or understand who we truly are apart from simply not being American, and that is understandable given our unique situation.

But we always have been, always are, and always will be our own people, and we do not have to understand what that means in order for it to be true.

Call us the Invisible Nation. There is nowhere in the world where our cultural identity makes a big impact… not even Canada. We are a nation who stays out of the limelight and just gets on with the job. We will never be someone’s shining city on the hill where the streets are paved with gold.

And that’s fine. Someone has to still be there after the heroes have all gone home and there is plain, unglamorous, unsexy work to be done in order to make the world a better place.

And that is what Canada does best.

Make the world a better place.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!