Canada. It's Spelled With a "C"

Canadians have shown a lack of pride in terms of civic and historical matters in the past and this year is no different.

Only forty-two percent of respondents in a recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey knew that Canada has three territories (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut).

Fewer knew the correct year of Confederation (1867).

How did this happen? How did we get from understanding basic spelling rules and knowing where Saskatchewan is to complete ignorance? Is there a (L) liberal agenda to blame? Are parents not infusing children with a basic pride and knowledge of their homeland? Are teachers more concerned with leaving at three PM than imparting the most basic knowledge about a country their students are told to love because it has Tim Horton's? How did we become so pathetic?

When I worked for the school system, I overheard a Grade Eight teacher describe Canada as Great Britain's "buddy" and that's why we went to war in 1914. The teacher didn't make the effort to impart on his students how we, as a colony, were obliged to go to war and how some Canadians actually felt it was their duty to go. By reducing Canada to a mere "buddy", he reduced the impact his students might have felt when they learned (hopefully, not from him) how we went to war for the second time on our own. Pure intellectual laziness stunted these minds. What a dink.

Go to the Dominion Institute website and take the icons challenge. How well did you do?

In other news:

You have to laugh at this. Toronto's unionised garbage workers are on strike. The town stinks (in every sense of the word). The city has spared no expense for the over-inflated "Pride Week" but will pare down Canada Day celebrations because, apparently, there are more body-painted pervs than there are Canadians. Now, with only a handful of private workers to clean up the dreadful (and I suspect, biohazardous) mess, the unionised garbage workers are "unhappy".

I am so glad I'm not in Toronto now.

A recount has declared the election in Iran valid. In a way, it's no surprise, given whatever other irregularities might exist there. It is also no surprise that 3,000 were beaten. Don't let anything else remove this issue from the radar.

I don't understand. Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega want another leftist politician to re-take his former country because it is the lawful thing to do? There is a joke in here somewhere.