Canada is the lame, slow-talking cousin up north where people say 'golly', 'cripes' and 'geeezzz' and the men wear cellphones on their belts. The origin of the name is held to be significant; it is commonly thought to derive from a Spanish cartographer who wrote on the early map of the land mass 'Aca-Nada', or 'nothing here'...

Some 32 million people occupy a territory which is larger than Russia and is blessed with enormous natural resources...

Canadians are obsessed by two things - politics and national identity. I am on a book tour here and have been amazed how knowledgeably and intensely these things are discussed in ordinary conversation. Canadians are engaged in their politics in way that Americans aren't, and they read obsessively...

While a European may not feel entirely at home watching the news and reading the papers here, he does sense a familiar culture. On the news that serious fraud charges had been laid against Conrad Black in the US, it was quickly pointed out that since Lord Black had swapped his Canadian citizenship for a peerage and British naturalisation, he could well face expulsion from Canada because of the country's tough laws concerning those charged with indictable offences in other territories...

Someone once said Canadians were so busy explaining to the Americans that they weren't British and to the British that they weren't American that they hadn't found the time to be Canadian. I'm not sure that is true any longer and anyway an undue confidence in national identity and the mission that it suggests can get a country into an awful lot of trouble, as the British and Americans have found in the Middle East.