Dear Jonah,

Pay no attention to the gibbering of my anti-American countryment up here in the Great White North. Most of them who are venting their spleen at you are just burbling the cliches they’ve heard all their lives. They jeer at “34 million Americans without health care” and then avert their eyes from the “health care” in this country that leaves cancer patients waiting almost a year for their operations. Most Canadians are like the British, mindlessly reciting the cliche that our health service is “the envy of the world” for years, until they finally look up and realize that the hospitals are filthy and understaffed, the doctors who haven’t fled are demoralized, a trip to Emergency with your child for a few stitches will last 14 hours, and the rest of the world has long since left us in the dust. I just returned to Canada from five years in the U.S., and no one is permitted to insult Americans in front of me. Canada is my country, but you are my people. And if the U.S. Army ever comes over to “rampage” through Canada the way they did through Afghanistan, let me tell you, I’ll be out there flying a kite in celebration too.