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Playing the Canadian Game

Oh Canada. Happy Birthday.
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Oh Canada. Happy Birthday.

Having been a legal Canadian - but, as my Perfect Partner occasionally reminds me, not a Real Canadian - for a relatively short time, owing in no small account to genetic procrastination that left me comfortable with resident alien status for 28 of the 30 years I've lived on this side of the border, I take great relish in playing the Canadian Game on July 1 st every year. What, I hear you ask, is the Canadian Game?

It's a game I made up to appease my dim, latent desire to fit in with my surroundings. It largely amounts to asking, and answering, the question: What do I like about Canada? It is my own variation on the endlessly iterative game Real Canadians play, the national obsession with mining the depths of every possible answer to the question: what does it mean to be Canadian? Since I can never more than aspire to being a Real Canadian - notwithstanding a concerted effort to memorize all 463 verses of Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy - I feel constrained to butt in on that game. The fact that I find the game boring and pointless no doubt fuels that constraint. Hence, my own Canadian Game.

Every year - every day - seems to bring a new and different kaleidoscope of answers to my question. Just this week there was at least one new answer revealed when Deloitte & Touche released their forensic audit of the Canadian Mint's Great Gold Caper. If you're not up on current Canadiana Trivia, you may not be aware of this scandal. Allow me to burden you with it.

It seems there are 17,500 troy ounces of gold missing from the Mint. What, I hear you ask, is a troy ounce? Good question. Unfortunately, the answer is both too complicated to address superficially and, trust me, irrelevant to the Canadian Game. Suffice it to say you have to have an in-depth grasp of the Trojan War and a facile facility with ridiculously tiny fractions to even begin to understand. But trust me, 17,500 troy ounces is more gold than will fit in your mouth and it's worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of 19 million Loonies, also an amount that won't fit in your mouth, not that your dentist would ever give you a Loonie tooth.

In the overall scheme of things, the missing gold is but a trickle of all the gold the mint processes every year, some 5.4 million troy ounces. Some - notably the civil servants who run the Mint - take solace in that exercise in relativity. Others, myself included, liken it to a large hydroelectric dam leaking a small amount of water. Oh sure, it's nothing compared to the lake being held back, but it does leave one with an uncomfortable feeling.

At any rate, all that is simply background to the Canadian Game worthiness of this news item. The quintessentially Canadian aspect isn't the haphazard accounting and/or security practices employed by the Mint that lets $19 million worth of gold simply vanish like a fart in the wind. No. What's Canadian about this is the threat issued by Transport Minister John Baird and Minister of State (Transport) Rob Merrifield, the political masters whose portfolios inexplicably include the Mint. Not wanting to go out on a limb by themselves, they issued a joint statement, or maybe that was smoked a joint and issued a statement. Regardless, the statement said, "The Mint's still unexplained loss of precious metals is inexcusable... (they) will be held accountable."

And exactly how will the Mint's masters be held accountable? This is the real Canadian part: the executives' bonuses will be withheld until the matter is resolved.

That's right, boys and girls. If you run the Mint and screw up to the tune of $19 million you'll be sent to bed without your bonus. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to the fate that awaits you if, say, you're a retail clerk in Whistler and your float turns up $100 short at the end of your shift... by definition your last shift. But it is the very essence of Canadianism and its "Aw shucks, it could happen to anyone" quality is touching.

This year, more so than ever, the answer to the what-do-I-like-about-Canada question that tops the list is the same answer Real Canadians generally give: national health care. Canadian health care is, at times, infuriating. It's tautological to say it's underfunded - all health care everywhere in the world is underfunded relative to the technology, drugs and possible interventions that exist in the world of modern medicine. Waitlists are frustrating, though not generally the boogeyman they're made out to be, and the whole system can seem like a relentless, unfeeling meatgrinder once you find yourself caught up in it.

But in this year when a scary and life-threatening disease decided to squat at my house, my second thought was, "I'm glad I'm living here." My first thought, naturally, was it had the wrong house, but I couldn't convince the bastard of that.

Regardless of the shortcomings unique to health care in this country, treatment has been extensive and intensive and no one has ever asked for a credit card or an insurance policy. As this saga runs its course two things are certain: my Perfect Partner and I will not face financial ruin and our health insurance will not be cancelled because, ironically, we need it. I am profoundly grateful for the peace of mind that offers in this time when peace of mind has generally made itself a stranger to my home.

It definitely beats the first thing I decided I liked about Canada when I moved here 30 years ago. That thing was stubby beer bottles. You remember them, don't you? Short, squat and with no neck to speak of. All beer, at least in Quebec, came in them. All the breweries used them. It didn't matter which beer had been previously bottled in them when it came time for a refill. Some of them were so old they looked like pieces of glass that had been drifting in the ocean for years and had washed up on shore, sandblasted and opaque. The only difference between one beer and another, to my uneducated palate, was the label on the stubby brown bottle.

So environmentally friendly. So easy to recycle. I thought it was Canadian brilliance. I didn't realize it was just an outward manifestation of the fact Canadian brewers were way behind the curve when it came to product differentiation. When they finally figured out how infatuated people were with different shapes and colours of bottles, stubbies disappeared.

OK, so it's not like Canada's perfect. But then, you knew that.

Happy Birthday, eh?