Canada is a weird cold semi-socialist backwater pockmarked with Francophonic hostility and saddled with a ridiculous monarchy, a national wheat monopoly, and the pinko health-care system that Barack Obama really, really wants deep down inside. It’s basically a sprawling, low-ambition Sweden with a miniature France growing like an udder out of its soft underbelly. So why are les têtes carrées doing so well in comparison with, e.g., us U.S.A.–type Americans?

Canada’s economy is growing roughly twice as fast as ours, and we’re in a bug-eyed unemployment panic down here, one so severe that Obama’s economic team has fled the White House …