Sunday Telegraph Article: Salute to a Brave and Modest Nation -
Kevin Myers, The Sunday Telegraph LONDON -
 
 Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan , probably
 almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian
 troops are deployed in the region.  And as always Canada will bury its
 dead, just as the rest of the world, as always will forget its
 sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.
 
 It seems that Canada 's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid
 both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis
 is over, to be well and truly ignored.
 
 Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall,
 waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance.  A fire breaks out,
 she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers
 serious injuries.  But when the hall is repaired and the dancing
 resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once
 helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet
 again.
 
 That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent
 with the United States , and for being a selfless friend of Britain in
 two global conflicts.  For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in
 two different directions:  it seemed to be a part of the old world, yet
 had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it
 never fully got the gratitude it deserved. Yet its purely voluntary
 contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the
 greatest of any democracy.
 
 Almost 10% of Canada 's entire population of seven million people served
 in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died.
 The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops,
 perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.
 
 Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, it's
 unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular Memory as
 somehow or other the work of the "British."
 
 The Second World War provided a re-run.  The Canadian navy began the war
 with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the
 Atlantic against U-boat attack.  More than 120 Canadian warships
 participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian
 soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone.  Canada finished the war with the
 third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.
 
 The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had
 the previous time.  Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged
 in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a
 campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated - a
 touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned,
 as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.
 
 So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood
 keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary
 Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William
 Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter
 and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and
 Christopher Plummer, British.
 
 It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be
 Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian
 as a moose, or Celine Dion....
 
 Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements
 of it's sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely
 unaware of them.  The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are
 unheard by anyone else - that 1% of the world's population has provided
 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces.  Canadian soldiers in the past
 half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth - in 39
 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from
 Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.
 
 Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular on-Canadian
 imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia , in which out-of-control
 paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then
 disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for
 which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.
 
So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless
friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?  Rather
like Cyrano de Bergerac , Canada repeatedly does honourable things for
honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains
something of a figure of fun.

It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such
honour comes at a high cost.  This past year more grieving Canadian
families knew that cost all too tragically well.

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