President of Canada? Are you a loonie?
Sen. Obama, get beavering on this 49th parallel primer
Oops! Canada, like Britain and other Commonwealth countries, has a prime minister, not a president. Think former British colony and you'll usually know where there is a prime minister.
On behalf of my Canadian friends, I will give Sen. Obama a short primer which he will find handy if he becomes president:
Canada, that quiescent country to our north, is this country's largest, I repeat, largest trading partner with $212 billion worth of goods and resources flowing back and forth across the 49th parallel each year. They've got a lot of oil up there so we need to be really nice. They've also got the Arctic which the Russians are trying to claim and we certainly don't want that.
(AP)
The loonie is not named for a previous prime minister, although some of them -- like William Lyon Mackenzie King who conducted seances in the PM's official residence to conjure up his dead mother -- were really loony toons.
The coin was nicknamed after the loon, the water bird on one side of the brass-colored coin. (The "cu-cu-cu-cucaroo" sound made by the Mackenzie Brothers on SCTV is the call of a lonely loon on a granite-ridged Canadian lake.)
Canada's national emblem is nowhere near as majestic as the American bald eagle or Mexican golden eagle. Canada's symbol is the modest, buck-toothed, tree-chewing beaver. Canadians are obsessed with the beaver. A cute little beaver on a log is on one side of the Canadian nickel. Canadians even eat a type of doughnut they call the beaver tail. Roots, a popular clothing company in Canada, uses the beaver as its logo.
There are about 700,000 Canadians living in the United States but they are insidious. They look just like Americans and come in all shades and sizes and talk just like Americans. The only way to sniff them out is to ask them to say the word "about," which they pronounce as "aboot" and probably dates back to those burly Scots who emigrated in the 19th century to Montreal and Toronto.
Canada's Parliament is made up of four political parties at this time: the Conservatives (Tories), the Liberals, the New Democrats (a k a the Socialists) and the Bloc Quebecois. The once-extinct Rhino Party, with its emblem of a rhinoceros on a white flag, is being revived in Montreal, where it was born in 1963 as a federal party that promised to keep none of its promises.
Other registered political parties in Canada include: the Marijuana Party, the Christian Heritage Party, the Animal Alliance Environment Party and the Communist Party.
Canadians are not dull as is usually reported; they are really hilarious but no one knows this because Canadians look so much like Americans. Consider: Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live; John Candy; Dan Aykroyd; Jim Carrey; Mike Meyers; Leslie Nielsen; Michael J. Fox; Catherine O'Hara; Phil Hartman; Rick Moranis; Martin Short; Eugene Levy; etc., etc.
They can sing: Paul Anka, Neil Young, Joanie Mitchell, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, Avril Lavigne, Diana Krall.
Host game shows: Monty Hall ("Let's Make a Deal") and Alex Trebek ("Jeopardy!").
And report: the late Peter Jennings, Morley Safer, Robert MacNeil (formerly of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS), John Roberts of CNN, etc. etc.
Mary Pickford was Canadian. So were Walter Pidgeon, Walter Huston, Raymond Burr, Glenn Ford, Lorne Greene. Rachel McAdams is a Canuck, as are Sandra Oh, Brendan Fraser, Matthew Perry and to Canadian embarrassment, William Shatner, Robert Goulet and Pamela Lee Anderson.
And here is something the Illinois senator can use against Hillary Clinton in the next Democratic debate: Quebec-born chanteuse Celine Dion, who sings Hillary's campaign theme song, is on the list of top 10 Worst Canadians in History, recently chosen by readers of the Beaver, a Canadian historical magazine. That'll sting for sure, eh!