by JULIET WATERS

In her essay “Cowboys vs. Mounties,” Sarah Vowell writes: “A person keen on all things French is called a Francophile. One who has a thing for England is called an Anglophile. An admirer of Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is called Pat Buchanan. But no word has been coined to describe Americans obsessed with Canada, not that dictionary publishers have been swamped with requests.”

Not that Vowell is really obsessed with Canada. On the eve of Canada Day I called her at her apartment in New York, mostly to grill her on her knowledge of the 1775 American invasion of Montreal. She confessed to knowing as much about this as most Americans—“which is zip,” she says. “In the U.S. the fact that I know who Lucien Bouchard is qualifies me as ‘obsessed with Canada.’”

She sweetly tried to change the subject—to no avail. I’m a huge admirer of Vowell, and rarely all that obsessed with Canada myself, but her essay has been driving me crazy ever since I read it. It must be that her theory of the Canadian identity hinges on that stereotype of the nice, law-abiding Canuck. She probably won’t be reading this essay for the Just for Laughs Festival—though not because I gave her a hard time about it. “I’ll probably read a shortened version of my essay about Bush’s inauguration,” she says. “I read it in a bar in Toronto once and they lapped it up. I don’t like him either, but it was like throwing raw meat to a dog. I almost started feeling bad for him, so I had to read my Lincoln story as punishment.”

All of these essays are in her latest book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot. “There are some good jokes in the essay ’bout Canada,” Vowell says, “but this is a comedy festival, and it’s kind of long and not all that funny.”

She’s wrong. It’s very funny, even if her idea of Canadians is limited. Given that it’s drawn mostly from listening to the CBC, her misconceptions are understandable. Obviously if all we ever knew of Americans was learned from listening to NPR, we’d have a distorted impression of them too. CBC host Iain Brown wasn’t much help when Vowell asked him, “How on earth could one teach Canadian schoolchildren their history in a way that could be remotely inspiring?” His answer: “It isn’t inspiring.”

After some research she comes to the conclusion that the Canadian identity is typified by that moment in 1873 when John A. MacDonald created the Mounties and sent them out west before the settlers could start killing Indians. “It’s a mindset of ‘Here I come to save the day’ versus ‘Yippee-ki-yay, mother fucker,’” she explains.

A typical Montrealer, I cringe when my national identity is summed up by the RCMP. (Let’s not forget that two years after MacDonald created the Mounties, Montreal created organized hockey.) So I punish Vowell by dragging her back to that time when American revolutionaries invaded Montreal in mid-November, 1775, claiming they were here to bring us “true liberty.” Of course we invited them to stay the winter. Then we politely watched as Quebec City kicked their frostbitten asses back to Boston. Because that’s the kind of nice we are.

Canadians became different from Americans, I believe, from the moment we realized there was always something a little fishy about these neighbours who wanted to colonize our country before they’d even officially started their own. As the years went by our skepticism blossomed into the ambivalence that is the lifeblood of our confederation. Being ambivalent herself, Vowell agrees this might be what attracts her to Canada. And as I ponder her question to Ian Brown, I think, “Even if we didn’t have an inspiring history, we’d always be united by the most violent, lawless national sport ever created. That and the CBC, motherfucker.

Sarah Vowell will read as part of Just For Laughs’ On the Edge show Reading It!, at the Centaur (453 St François-Xavier), July 17–18, 7pm, $25.50