Pay attention: There will be a quiz! <\/b><\/p>\n
This Sunday, July 1, is an important day for America’s northern neighbor. It’s Canada Day<\/b>. Happy Canada Day, everybody!<\/p>\n
I wish I could tell you how Canadians actually<\/span> celebrate this, but it’s one of many things about Canada that Americans know nothing aboot<\/abbr> \u2014 I mean, about. Aside from a few clich\u00e9s about beer, ice hockey, tar sands<\/span> and the metric system, Canada appears to us as a vast<\/span>, uncharted<\/span> land mass. Most of the time, it’s simply invisible<\/span> to us.<\/p>\n Canada is almost never mentioned in our news. It is almost never mentioned in school. We don’t get Canadian TV unless we live in a border town. Most Americans have never been there, and we rarely, if ever, meet any actual<\/span> Canadians in our country.<\/p>\n We have, at least, heard of Canada \u2014 and having been there myself, I can confirm that Canada exists.<\/b> But I had to go there to find that out. I grew up less than 300 kilometers from the border, without the slightest<\/span> idea of what was up there.<\/p>\n Our own ignorance is only part of the problem. The other part is that Canadians have mastered the art of camouflage<\/span>.<\/p>\n Canadian actors have lived among us for generations. Some, like William Shatner<\/a> and “Jawbone<\/abbr>” Sutherland<\/b>, are best known for playing characters with a strong American identity. In films, the Canadian city of Vancouver<\/b> regularly pretends to be Los Angeles, while Toronto<\/b> often masquerades as New York City.<\/p>\n This is absurd. Why can’t a story be set in Vancouver? Why doesn’t Toronto market itself to US tourists? No Canadian I know would ever want to be mistaken for an American, so why do they disguise<\/span> their cities?<\/p>\n Canadian films and TV series do exist. I’ve seen them; they comprise<\/span> at least a third of the on-board entertainment on Air Canada. Wikipedia names hundreds<\/a> of Canadian actors and actresses. Yet the only Canadian TV series I can remember seeing in the US was SCTV<\/i><\/a>, which in this segment was basically a parody of rural<\/span> Canada:<\/p>\nThey walk among us<\/h2>\n