Maybe you figure the reason you didn't hear so much about this before is that Canadians are famously self-effacing. Don't believe it. Michael Ignatieff, the international affairs darling of the New York Times and a Canadian now roosting at Harvard, boasts that his home and native land has, of all the nations on earth, done the best at solving civil unrest by negotiating the delicate balance between group rights and individual ones.

And Joseph Heath hardly holds back. Canada isn't just the efficient society. It is "perhaps the most efficient on Earth," which is why "life in Canada is so good." It's a hot brand these days, Cool Canada, sold by a slick new Web site called CanadianAlternative.com. Its slogan: "Progressive. Prosperous. Inclusive. Feel at home in Canada."

I guess what I'm driving at is, when you get here, don't bring the typical American attitude that I hastily unpacked and wore to social gatherings. I'm talking about believing Canada is lucky to have you. Your American pluck, verve, swagger, whatever. It doesn't wear well, especially now that Bush has worn it out. A more Canadian credo: Power grows out of a barrel of passive aggression. As the new Yank in town, your route to popularity lies in just making a lot of fun of your backward origins and expressing a latent but suddenly blossoming fascination with hockey.

Don't point out, either, Canada's complicity in America's global reach. To harp on the fact that Canada depends on America to buy more of its exports than anyone else, or that America's massive military has, in unseemly ways, enforced global economic arrangements that benefit Canada is to really cast a pall over a salmon barbecue party.

It's kind of embarrassing for Canadians that they buy a lot of their military gear secondhand (a rusty old submarine fobbed off on them by the Brits recently caught fire, killing a sailor off the U.K.) And, true, by leaving it to America to run up the big weapons tab, Canada has forfeited much chance of being a real player when the world gets carved up at the big security summits. But then, that leaves a hell of a lot of public funds for spending more, er, efficiently on that ongoing Switzerlandization project.

I guess the last point I'd make, despite all the exciting stuff at the top of this note, is that I hope you're not expecting to arrive here and settle into some kind of relaxing political hot tub. It's more like ice fishing a tad too late in the spring. The bluish surface keeps shifting beneath your feet, and you never can feel sure it's not about to give way.

Canada's got its right-wing media barons, its right-wing think tanks, its tax revolters and Bible Belters. Its biggest province by far, Ontario, is digging out from a nine-year neoconservative reign sold as "the Common Sense Revolution," which left infrastructure crumbling, social programs slashed, homeless ranks swelling after welfare rolls were purged. Even before that, if you didn't like Reagan, you wouldn't have liked his Irish conservative soul mate of the same era, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

When I moved to British Columbia in 1992, imagine my surprise that the birthplace of Greenpeace had elected as its leader a Christian fundamentalist who owned a theme park called Fantasy Gardens. Scandal cleared the way for his replacement: a real live social democratic government. For a decade, the New Democrats survived relentlessly negative media, infighting and a rough economy until scandal cleared the way for a neoconservative government. Which immediately plunged itself into massive debt by issuing a huge tax cut to the rich. Sound familiar?

Over the last three years, I, California child of Reagan, have been forced to endure Laffer curve déjà vu, to watch British Columbia's true-believer neocons hand over publicly owned, profitable assets, including a whole railroad, to private companies, many of them with names you will recognize, for many are American. Homeless and food-bank numbers are up, and B.C.'s "Super Natural" forests are being mowed down at a record rate, their raw logs shipped posthaste south of the border to U.S. mills.

"It's like going from Texas to Sweden to Texas," I told mystified American friends on a recent visit. "I'm developing political whiplash."

So no, don't arrive here expecting refuge from the battles waged and lost so devastatingly this time around in the United States of America. The same battles rage, in their own Canadian way, right here. And the fate of the American expat can be to feel like the canary in the coal mine, constantly wanting to sound the alarm that Canadians, having made such precious gains, seem determined to fumble them away out of restlessness, inattention or pique.

Tempering that cold reality (and did I mention Canada can be damn cold?) is a spirit more deliberative, more accommodating -- yes, more civil -- living in the Canadian political soul. It means that while Democrats search America today for any sign of hope, they would find in Canada many, many reasons for optimism.

Anyway, the key's under the mat. Get yourself a good lawyer and let yourself in.

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