It's Canada Day, so here's a fluff article about what makes Canada better than the US

Here are the ways Canada is indisputably better than the United States - no civil war, no slavery, no penny and we’re marginally less fat

Let's see the FBI do this! | Postmedia File

Thanks to Donald Trump’s baffling decision to plunge us into a trade war, Canada Day this year will almost certainly feature a higher-than-average rate of passive-aggressive America-bashing.

The United States remains our closest friend and ally, and continues to supply us with all our non-Drake entertainment. Nevertheless, in the spirit of informed jingoism, here is a quick (and obviously biased) guide to the ways in which Canada is indisputably superior to our southern neighbour.

We fought Nazis earlier!
The awesome might and manpower of the United States was instrumental in liberating Western Europe from Nazi domination and shielding it from Soviet conquest. Nevertheless, Canada can take pride that we were killing Nazis while Charles Lindbergh was still hosting isolationist “America First” rallies. The United States not only entered the Second World War late, but retained financial ties with Nazi Germany well into 1941. Even as Hitler steamrolled Europe and laid siege to Great Britain, Germany was getting its movies from Hollywood and building Wehrmacht trucks in Ford Motor Company factories. Frustrated by their country’s neutrality, thousands of Americans would cross the border to join the Canadian military. The RCAF alone recruited around 9,000 Americans before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. George H.W. Bush, in fact, was seriously considering strapping on a maple leaf to fight the Nazis before Pearl Harbor intervened.

Swastikas being paraded through New York City in October, 1939 - one month after Canada had declared war on Germany. | U.S. Library of Congress

No Civil War!
The United States had only been a country for 87 years (or four score and seven years if you’re being formal) before it was plunged into a horrific civil war. On Canada’s 87th birthday in 1954, by contrast, it hosted a Commonwealth games and invented Yahtzee. Not only has Canada never had a civil war, but it hasn’t even come close. The 1869 Red River Rebellion killed one person. Quebec secessionist terrorism in the 1960s claimed fewer than six people. The biggest armed uprising in Canada’s history was arguably a series of rebellions in 1837 designed to remake British North America as a republic. But the rebellions were small and laughably unsuccessful. In one particularly ignominious example in Toronto, 800 rebels turned and fled after encountering a loyalist force of only 20 riflemen. Also, in a detail that would have flabbergasted Americans of the age, many of the pro-government troops who put down the 1837 rebellions were black.

A view of the Gettysburg Battlefield. There are much fewer battlefields to visit in Canada. | Pixabay

No slavery!
By the time of Canada’s 1867 founding, the United States was also slavery-free (see “Civil War,” above). While Canadian soil has also hosted plenty of human bondage, be it pre-contact Indigenous slavery or African slavery in colonial times, slavery was nevertheless officially illegal in the lands that would become Canada by 1834 — 31 years before it was the case in the U.S. We also never participated in the particularly brutal and industrialized form of plantation slavery that came to dominate the southern United States. The slave population in British North America was never more than 10,000. In Mississippi on the eve of the Civil War, there were more than 440,000 slaves compared to a free population of only 354,000.

Slaves plant sweet potatoes at a South Carolina plantation in the early 1860s. There are no pictures of Canadian slaves, since Canadian slavery was abolished by the time photography was widely available. | New York Historical Society

No vicious beatings in our parliament!
One of the darker moments in U.S. legislative history came in 1856, when a South Carolina senator approached Massachusetts’ Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate chamber and proceeded to cane him to within an inch of his life. Worst still, the incident was only an extreme example of a political culture renowned for its violence. Nineteenth century U.S. federal politicians regularly beat, threatened or pulled guns on their opponents on Capitol Hill. Two-term U.S. president Andrew Jackson participated in more than 100 duels over his lifetime, and later expressed regret that he had not shot the then-Speaker of the House, Henry Clay. Against all this, it’s quite an achievement that one of the most uncivil moments in Canada’s parliament remains the time a Tory called a Liberal a “political sewer pipe.”

No Indian Wars!
Canada has nothing to be smug about when it comes to our history of Indigenous relations. From Indian Residential Schools to forced relocation to the simple act of arresting Indigenous people if they were found off reserve, it’s all pretty ugly. But for every crime against Indigenous people in Canada’s history, U.S. history usually has a worse version. The most obvious example is that the United States spent much of the 19th century engaged in open and often brutal warfare with everyone from Seminoles in Florida to Apache in New Mexico to Sioux in Montana. Canada absolutely did not keep its hands clean settling the west, but it did do it with little to no outright warfare. Major Canadian incidents of settler-Indigenous violence, such as the Chilcotin War or the North-West Rebellion, would barely qualify as footnotes in the massacre-packed history of U.S. expansion. Even at the time, Americans marveled at the apparent Canadian ability to co-exist with Indigenous people without shooting them. Canada had “the same greedy, dominant Anglo-Saxon race, and the same heathen,” wrote the Minnesota Episcopal bishop Henry Whipple in the 1870s. “They have not spent one dollar on Indian wars, they have had no Indian massacres.”

It’s no accident that after his victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull fled north and made friends with a Mountie. | File foto

We abolished the penny!
When a Canadian crosses the United States border, they are stepping into a museum of obsolete payment systems. U.S. credit cards still stubbornly refuse to come equipped with microchips, preferring to rely exclusively on easily-defrauded magnetic strips. Banknotes are printed on paper rather than polymer. Most notoriously, Americans still use the penny, a monstrous one cent copper-plated disc worth far less than the metal it contains. And the penny remains in U.S. circulation for the dumbest of reasons: A combination of legislative apathy and aggressive lobbying by the U.S. zinc industry.

Pictured: A tyranny from which Americans have not freed themselves. | Craig Glover - The London Free Press

No violent founding!
Canada’s peaceful 1867 birth was so easily overlooked that our own head of state forgot to mention it in her diary. The United States, by contrast, came into being atop more than 100,000 dead. These dual histories are all the more notable given that the United States and Canada were both seeking autonomy from the same country: Great Britain. The vast majority of British colonies, in fact, would gain their independence without killing anybody. This makes it all the more unreasonable that the Founding Fathers allowed a tax dispute with London to spiral into a devastating internecine war that sent thousands of families fleeing into Nova Scotia for their lives.

A statue of Loyalist refugees in Hamilton, Ont. Americans usually leave out the part about the refugees. | Wikimedia Commons

We had way less Prohibition!
Alcohol was effectively illegal in the United States from 1920 to 1933. The policy is now regarded as an epic failure, having spawned a dramatic rise in organized crime, political corruption and fatal poisonings. Canada also flirted with Prohibition after the First World War, but was much quicker to realize it was a terrible idea. Quebec, for one, repealed prohibition a mere two years after instituting it. The legal concept of “airspace,” in fact, was invented because the prohibitionist U.S. government objected to Canada constantly flying planeloads of whiskey over “dry” Alaska in order to resupply the Yukon.

We’re not as fat!
To be sure, Canada is still one of the fattest countries in the world. Just ask the thousands of new Canadians who sprout a beer belly almost immediately after swearing an oath to the Queen. Nevertheless, only 20.2 per cent of Canadian adults are obese. This is compared to 39.8 per cent of U.S. adults. This is despite the fact that Canadians similarly live in car-dependent cities, not to mention occupying a far colder country. However, the Great White North also lacks Cheez-Its and White Castle, which arguably means we are less susceptible to caloric temptation.

An obese Canadian. These are much rarer. |Tom Braid

We aren’t utterly crushed by debt!
The Liberals under Justin Trudeau are the most spendthrift Canadian government in decades. Despite this, we’re still not even close to the utterly meteoric sums being run up by Washington. In the current fiscal year, the Canadian federal government is set to run up a deficit of $19.4 billion — roughly $524 per Canadian. In the U.S., meanwhile, a Republican-dominated Washington is set to rack up a federal deficit of $985 billion next year — or US$3,024 per American (CDN$4,032.40). The disparity gets even starker when comparing our respective national debts. The per-capita share of the Canadian federal debt is $17,800. In the U.S., it’s US$64,564 (CDN$86,057.68).

Our obnoxious reality TV star failed miserably at politics!
It may be hard to remember, but there was once a Canadian reality TV star who knew almost nothing about our political system and had no legislative experience whatsoever. Regardless, he figured he could use his wealth and star power alone to cruise into the prime minister’s office. Not only did Kevin O’Leary not become prime minister, but he withdrew from the Conservative leadership election within four months and continues to nurse $400,000 in campaign debts. To be fair, though, O’Leary’s political ambitions didn’t fall apart because Canadians have a deep-rooted culture of demanding sober, thoughtful and experienced legislators. Rather, it’s because O’Leary can’t speak French.

Kevin O’Leary has no idea what those words behind him mean. | The Canadian Press -Paul Chiasson

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