Reasons I Love Being Canadian; pt.1

Canadian Vampire in London

Oh... Canada - Classified

Canadian Please

Waving Flag - Young Artists For Haiti

Home For a Rest - Spirit of the West

Whose Game They're Playing - Coke Commercial

I am Canadian

Beer! Did you know: In most nations, the labelled alcohol percentage is either the average or maximum percentage allowed. However, most Canadian provinces require the minimum alcohol percentage to be labelled rather than the average... this means while other countries put a max or average (meaning that there could be, or probably is less alcohol than that in the beer), here in canada when we say 5% we mean AT LEAST 5%. I think I'm going to enjoy my beer extra tonight because of that!

For all of the nerdy like to read stuff people: Culture in Canada
It's part of a series which also talks about history, national identity and more.

What other people have to say about Canada:

Pierre Berton, a Canadian journalist and novelist, said: "A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe without tipping it."

British novelist Douglas Adams said each country was like a particular type of person, and "Canada is like an intelligent 35 year old woman".

Andrew Cohen believes that there is a value to considering what foreigners have to say: "Looking at Canadians through the eyes of foreigners, we get a sense of how they see us. They say so much about us: that we are nice, hospitable, modest, blind to our achievements. That we are obedient, conservative, deferential, colonial and complex, particularly so. That we are fractious, envious, geographically impossible and politically improbable."

In defining a Canadian identity, five key distinctive characteristics have been emphasized.

• First, special emphasis is placed upon the bicultural nature of Canada and the important ways in which English-French relations since the 1760s have shaped the Canadian experience.
• Second, Canada had quite a different historical experience in resisting revolution and republicanism compared to the U.S., leading to less individualism and more support for government activism, such as wheat pools and the health care system.[7]
• Third, British parliamentary system and the British legal system, augmented by the conservatism associated with the Loyalists and the pre-1960 French Canadians, have given Canada its ongoing collective obsession with "peace, order and good government".[8]
• Fourth is the social structure of multiple ethnic groups that kept their identities and produced a mosaic rather than a melting pot.[9]
• Fifth, the influence of geophysical factors (vast area, coldness, northness; St. Lawrence spine) together with the proximity of the United States have produced in the collective Canadian psyche what Northrop Frye has called the garrison mind or siege mentality, and what novelist Margaret Atwood has argued is the Canadian preoccupation with survival.[10] For Herschel Hardin, because of the remarkable hold of the siege mentality and the concern with survival, Canada in its essentials is "a public enterprise country." According to Hardin, the "fundamental mode of Canadian life" has always been, "the un-American mechanism of redistribution as opposed to the mystic American mechanism of market rule." Most Canadians, in other words, whether on the right or left in politics, expect their governments to be actively involved in the economic and social life of the nation.[11]