This week saw a couple of Americans engaging in Canada-bashing that may have been mild, but still made us sit up and take to Twitter. (And just when we'd gotten over Stephen Colbert's schtick about the perils of a hockey-stick toting, "eh"-dropping Canadian pope, too.) On Tuesday, BuzzFeed's Matt Kiebus posted "an exhaustive list" of "every single way to piss off a Canadian" - which turned out to consist of only two things: insulting hockey and insulting Canadian beer. How droll! But HuffPost staffers and readers set the record straight, coming up with dozens of other ways to piss off Canadians, including mocking our colourful money and asking us what the deal is with Tim Hortons. Speaking of which....
The ubiquitous donut chain was one of the many examples held up by writer Neil Steinberg the next day, in a Wednesday Chicago Sun Timescolumn, to prove that Toronto is hopelessly inferior to Chicago, despite now having a larger population. As HuffPost's Ron Nurwisah pointed out in an admirably gracious post about the column - and the angry Canuck Twitter response it evoked - it was perhaps "a little crass and insensitive [of Canadian Tweeters] to bring up the death of children [referring to Chicago's violent youth crime problem] to score a rhetorical point against a newspaper columnist." Yet, 1) it's hard to not to get some satisfaction out of Canadian being crass and insensitive in response to a column that faults them for being meek, humble and deferential to a fault; and 2) comparing Chicago to Toronto - and declaring Chicago the hands-down winner of a city - without even mentioning that there were 506 murders in Chicago last year as compared to 54 in Toronto, does seem a lot like ignoring the elephant in the room. (This year, Chicago has already exceeded Toronto's 2012 murder total, and it's only March.)
Maybe someday Americans will take us seriously and give us our due. In the mean time, there's always Europe. As of this writing, Irish online betting site Paddy Power was giving 10/1 odds on Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet becoming the next Pope. Take that, Mr. Colbert.