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Canada and Canadians Quotes and Quotations
 Canada is like an old cow. The West feeds it. Ontario and Quebec milk it. And you can well imagine what it's doing in the Maritimes.  Canada is not so much a country as a clothesline nearly 4,000 miles long. St John's in Newfoundland is closer to Milan, Italy than to Vancouver. Canada is so square even the female impersonators are women. No one is the worse for knowing two languages. One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden. That long (Canadian) frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, guarded only by neighbourly respect and honourable obligations, as an example to every country and a pattern for the future of the world. To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American. You've never seen this country It's not the way you thought it was Look again. - Al Purdy The whole history of the Canadian north can be divided into two periods - before and after the aeroplane. The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born. The father of confederation is deadlock. The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada. Quebec is the original heart, the hardest and deepest kernel, the core of first time. All round, nine other provinces form the flesh of this still-bitter fruit called Canada. Ottawa - a sub-arctic lumber-village converted by royal mandate into a political cockpit. Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status. I suppose the half-breeds in Manitoba, in 1870, did not fight for two hundred forty acres of land, but it is to be understood there were two societies who treated together. One was small, but in its smallness it had its rights. The other was great, but in its greatness it had no greater rights than the rights of the small, because the right is the same for everyone. Canada's national bird is the grouse. Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics. An arena large as Europe Silent waiting the contest There has never been a war of Canadian origin, nor for a Canadian cause. Canada is a collection often provinces with strong governments loosely connected by fear. Canada is a good country to be from. It has a gentler, slower pace - it lends perspective. My generation of Canadians grew up believing that, if we were very good or very smart, or both, we would some day graduate from Canada. We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours. Never hear anything bad about Canada, that's one thing - in fact, I guess it's the only thing. Canada is a society, rather than a nation. Living next to the United States is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt. Canada reminds me of vichyssoise - it's cold, half-French and difficult to stir. Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics. Americans assume Canada to be bestowed as a right and accept this bounty, as they do air, without thought or appreciation. Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States. 'Old Tomorrow.' 'Rich by nature, poor by policy' might be written over Canada's door. Canadian politics in British Columbia is an adventure, on the Prairies a cause, in Ontario a business, in Quebec a religion, in the Maritimes a disease. (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness. When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street, it couldn't be anywhere but Canada, but how can I prove it? Newfoundland is a great English ship, moored near the Banks during the fishing season for the convenience of the English fishermen. The land too poor for any other crop, is best for raising men. I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates. Is heaven more beautiful than the country of the muskox in summer when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? Much will have to change in Canada if the country is to stay the same. The Greeks, who knew everything, understood that without the orgy there is no middle ground between bedlam and Toronto ... we need the healing grace of the orgy in this country. Canada is a live country - live, but not, like the States, kicking. There was a small boy of Quebec Who was buried in snow to the neck: When they said 'Are you friz?' He replied 'Yes, I is - But we don't call this cold in Quebec!' The mighty voice of Canada will ever call to me. Saskatchewan is much like Texas - except it's more friendly to the United States. If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. Canada is not a country for the cold of heart or the cold of feet. We sing about the North, but live as far south as possible. Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity. So long as the majority of Canadians have two countries, one here and one in Europe, national unity will remain a myth and a constant source of internecine quarrels. We French-Canadians belong to one country, Canada: Canada is for us the whole world: but the English-Canadians have two countries, one here and one across the sea. My father spoke French with a Bank of Montreal accent. If a player continues transgressing the rules, his side shall lose him. That one never asks a question unless he knows the answer is basic to parliamentary questioning. Love Canada or give it back. The Americans are our best friends - whether we like it or not. Scenery here in Canada is by the mile, whereas in England it is by the foot. In England there is a great wealth of 'pretty bits'. In Canada there is a great lack of them. But there are grandeur, vastness and expansive views. Canada's climate is nine months winter and three months late in the fall. The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference. He wants to be different from everyone else and daydreams of winning the global race, Parents unmarried and living abroad, relatives keen to bag the estate, schizophrenia not excluded, will he learn to grow up before it's too late? To be Canadian is to live in relative calm and with great dignity. John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. Canadians have been accustomed to define themselves by saying what they are not. I know that through the grace of God, I am the founder of Manitoba. Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation. Canadians are generally indistinguishable from Americans, and the surest way of telling the two apart is to make the observation to a Canadian. A Torontonian is a man who leaves culture to his wife. Toronto has no social classes - only the Masseys and the masses. TheSc ots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis. Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale. One man out of every five who lands on our shores is a foreigner- i.e. non-Anglo-Saxon. He comes here with a foreign tongue, foreign ideals, foreign religion, with centuries of ignorance and oppression behind him, often bringing with him problems that the best statesmen of Europe have failed to solve. I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen chickens, is good quality. The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive. If we can find out why the idea rather than the nation of Canada can win a growing loyalty rather than commanding it, then, it seems to me, we shall have come very near to trapping the elusive creature, the Canadian Identity. Beneath their work the moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. If ever Confederation fails, it will not be because Quebec - the political voice of French Canada - has separated from it. It will be because the way to keep Quebec in it has not been found. When the white man came, we had the land and they had the bibles. Now they have the land and we have the bibles. We shall be Canadians first, foremost, and always, and our policies will be decided in Canada and not dictated by any other country. The situation is one something like living with your wife. Sometimes it is difficult and even irritating to live with her, but it is always impossible to live without her. The Ottawa river flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. The twentieth century belongs to Canada. We often say that we fear no invasion from the south, but the armies of the south have already crossed the border - American enterprise, American capital is taking rapid possession of our mines and our water power, our oil areas and our timber limits. The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary. The habitant is the true Canadian, for he has no other country. The immigrant who comes to Canada really sees the country much more as a whole. He doesn't know the nuances which are so important and so dearly beloved by the Torontonian or the Montrealer. Give us men to match our mountains, Give us men to match our plains: Men with empires in their purpose And new eras in their brains. Ottawa is a city where nobody lives, though some of us may die there. Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind. The trouble with this whole country is that it's divided up into little puddles with big fish in each one of them. Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution. belongs anywhere, even the Rocky Mountains are still moving. Let us be French as the Americans are English. Confederation is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone. You are a big country now, but you still tend to feel small and fragile. If the United States gets a cold, you get pneumonia. I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit. You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources. Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary. Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line, they prepared for the worst. Canadian nationalism was systematically encouraged and exploited by American capital. Canada moved from colony to nation to colony. Ours is a sovereign nation Bows to no foreign will But whenever they cough in Washington They spit on Parliament Hill. Of course, Canadians are different. There is no malice in us. We are the family doctor whom no one has called in for consultation. We are the children of the midday who see all in the clear, shallow light. I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union. 
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