Who wouldn't expect great things from the second largest landmass on the planet? This is a country with enough prosperity, natural beauty and curling talent to serve a population a hundred times its size.
But Canada is about more than elbow room, good roads, respectable banks, tourism posters of mounted horsemen, gorgeous views of Niagara Falls and tiresome media obsessing over a peculiar, crack-smoking mayor.
This is a country that could boast about everything that truly sets it apart. Whether it ever will is another matter.
Partner links: booking through them supports the blog at no extra cost to you.
Self-satisfied modesty is one of the most endearing Canadian virtues, right up there with these 10 national treasures that really do put the "O" in Canada:
Apologies
In most of the world, a simple apology is hard to come by. You get shoved in India. Someone steps on your foot in Greece. A door isn't held open for you in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. It's just part of the restless business of living.
In Canada, apologies come thick and fast, "sorries" flying in from every direction like swarms of friendly killer bees.
Apologies aren't offered only for minor slip-ups, but even for having the audacity to be on the receiving end of an apology in the first place.
A Queen's University survey titled "Sorry... I'm Canadian" found that 90% of Canadians aged 18 to 25 would apologize immediately if a stranger bumped into them.
Still, while it may be true that some of Canada's most vicious brawls have broken out over who gets to apologize more, travelers should beware of such courtesies, notes another Canadian apologist: "Sometimes we really are expressing sympathy for your shortcomings."
Lakes and "cottage country"
Canada has more lakes than any other country, around 3 million of them. The province of Ontario alone holds roughly a third of the world's fresh water, spread across 250,000 lakes.
No wonder "heading up to the lake" is more than just a beloved national phrase.
It's Canada's sacred take on getting away from it all, but with cottages furnished in Muskoka chairs, Kevlar canoes and competing soundtracks of Gordon Lightfoot and the mating calls of loons.
Ontario's premier lake district, Muskoka, was recently named the world's best summer destination by National Geographic Traveler.
Oh yeah? The beauty is up there.
Movie locations
Even if you've never set foot in Vancouver, Halifax or any of the cities in between, you've often looked straight at them without ever realizing it. Why?
Because Hollywood loves shooting films in Canada, big films, passing off the locations as New York, Wyoming, ancient Persia or the bow of the worst ocean liner in history.
Basically anywhere but Canada:
- If you watched "The Incredible Hulk," you visited Toronto's Yonge Street, on celluloid at least.
- "Brokeback Mountain"? That's not the American West, friend. That's southern Alberta, Rocky Mountain country.
- "Capote"? You're not in Kansas, Dorothy. You're in Winnipeg.
- "Twilight"? Vancouver.
- "Blades of Glory"? Montreal.
- "Titanic"? Most of it was filmed off the coast of Halifax.
And where in the world was Morgan Freeman's cabin in "Unforgiven"? Just up the road from Calgary, in the Drumheller valley, a lunar landscape that has doubled for Egypt, Persia, Armenia and East Africa in several films and TV movies.
The air
In a recent national air-quality study by the World Health Organization, Canada came in third for the cleanest air on the planet.
Until first and second place (Estonia and Mauritius) get their turn in the CNN Travel series "Better Than Anywhere," we'd like to draw your attention to Canadian cities that average just 13 micrograms of PM10 particles per cubic meter.
Comedy
Canadians are strange, sometimes even deliberately so, as proven again and again over the years by celebrated comedians like Jim Carrey, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Dan Aykroyd, Seth Rogen, Mike Myers, Phil Hartman, Michael Cera, Leslie Nielsen and many more.
So what makes Canadians so wildly funny?
The question has been the subject of sociological research, none of it funny.
But even if you've never watched SCTV, can't name a single member of The Kids in the Hall, and didn't know that SNL was created and produced by a Torontonian, or that Montreal's Just for Laughs is the world's largest comedy festival, or that the most lethally funny scene ever filmed (the "Serpentine!" bit from the 1979 movie "The In-Laws") was shot by a guy from Edmonton, then know this:
If there's one thing Canada does brilliantly both at home and abroad, for whatever tedious reason, it's laughter.
Chocolate bars
Just a handful of giant corporations churn out most of the mass-market chocolate bars, but the same familiar wrapper doesn't always hide the same product.
"Canadian chocolate has more fat and a larger particle size," a senior Hershey's chocolate expert noted recently in the National Post, adding that Hershey's now offers a separate recipe for the more discerning Canadian palate.
"Americans tend to gravitate toward a grittier or even cheesier flavor."
That's why biting into any of these universal chocolate bars, or local Canadian favorites like Caramilk, Aero, Mr. Big, and even a Sweet Marie in Saskatoon, is a creamy, velvety experience.
And why a KitKat elsewhere is grit, cheese, polyglycerol and polyricinoleate.
Ski country
Just across the border, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Vermont have intimidated most countries as they promote their powdery slopes.
But not Canada, which can boast some of the best reasons to haul your skis or snowboard a little farther north.
Out west there's Lake Louise, tucked right inside stunning Banff National Park, and over in eastern British Columbia a whole chain of powder runs. Whistler Blackcomb is one of the world's leading ski resorts, named "the best in North America" by SKI Magazine last year.
Over in eastern Quebec are the beery, commercially cheerful Laurentians, where apres-ski needs no translation.
Heli-skiing? It all started in Canada's Bugaboos, which remains one of the best places on earth to do it.
National branding
No national symbol is as omnipresent as Canada's maple leaf.
From Newfoundland to Victoria it's everywhere, a proud, relentless reminder of where you are. Not the United States. Not Australia. Not Nigeria. Canada.
The most obsessive love affair with the leaf plays out abroad, where generations of flag-toting Canadian backpackers have become famous for sewing maple-leaf patches onto their bags so everyone can tell at a glance exactly who they are.
Not American. Not German. Not Rarotongan. Canadian. See the leaf? Canadian.
"No other country on earth seems to feel such a need to identify itself," writes one traveler from an unnamed country.
Highway food
Road trips are all about the food.
At least in places like Alberta or Manitoba, where nothing works up an appetite quite like hours of sitting behind the wheel on one of the longest, straightest roads known to non-Australian humankind, with nothing to do but count the Petro-Canada stations and pull over at rest stops to sample the best comfort food any pit stop has to offer.
Tim Hortons. Harvey's. Swiss Chalet ...
If these names mean nothing to you, it's time to look beyond the Golden Arches.
McNuggets can be eaten anywhere.
On the Trans-Canada Highway, nothing says taste-bud bliss like a burger with real smoked bacon, or a plate of half a chicken with Chalet sauce, or a box of Timbits with a double-double.
Better grab a butter tart and a Nanaimo bar. It's a long way from Red Deer to Flin Flon.
Adorable terms and phrases
While you'll be hard-pressed to find a real-life local in a toque who has ever called anyone a "hoser" or told them to "take off," Canadians in polite company call their two-dollar coins "toonies," cases of beer "two-fours," and couches "chesterfields."
Nowhere else will you be called a "rink rat" for loitering around ice arenas.
Or have someone "give you the gears" if you do something silly. Or get asked, "How much do you pay for hydro?" Or get warned that your pass is a little too loose.
