Canada: Hippie Nation?
by Naomi Klein

Canadians can't quite believe it: Suddenly, we're interesting.

After months of making the news only with our various communicable diseases--SARS, mad cow and West Nile--we're now getting world famous for our cutting-edge laws on gay marriage and legalized drugs. The Bush conservatives are repulsed by our depravity. My friends in New York and San Francisco have been quietly inquiring about applying for citizenship.

And Canadians have been eating it up, filling the newspapers with giddy articles about our independence. "You're not the boss of us, George," Jim Coyle wrote in the Toronto Star. "So much for nice; we're getting interesting," wrote conservative columnist William Thorsell in the Globe and Mail. Polls are showing that it's not just that Canadians are becoming more forward-looking and groovier, it's also that the United States is lurching backward, retrenching into more conservative values. According to Canada's summer bestseller, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, by pollster Michael Adams, Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are twice as likely to worry about crime, "moral decline" and ethnic conflict as their Canadian counterparts.
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