This is one of the best descriptions of how I see Canadians, beyond things I’ve said or written:
From The Canadian Settler’s Guide, 7th Edition, by Catherine Parr Strickland Traill (1857). You can get this book free via Google Books; I’m reading it right now on my Nexus 7.
Where do we stand, politically, compared to this assessment of the character of those who built this country? I feel like we’ve become so partisan lately that we’ve lost the temperate l industriousness that Traill describes.
Paddle your own canoe, folks.
Trevor