I have known one or two couples who spend much of their time apart, living in different spots on the continent, and they appear to be quite happy.  Nonetheless, I don’t think I have ever had a discussion with a woman who has said that she was looking forward to being married to a man who was never around.  Certainly no woman who would have considered marrying me would have expressed such a sentiment.  Even if someone had, I personally believe that marriage is far more enjoyable and fun if one lives in the same house as one’s spouse.  If that isn’t possible, you should at the very least live in the same country.

Since I wished to live under the same roof as my Canadian wife, I had to go through the process of obtaining permanent residence.  Of course, my wife could have moved to the United States, but Canadians tend to hold some funny views of the United States.[1]  It was a long and expensive procedure that required me to prove that I was worthy of a Canadian woman.  The final steps in getting permanent residence status involved acquiring official documents.  These documents required photographs.  In every case, my “green” card, my health card and my driver’s license, I was told explicitly not to smile.  If there was even a hint of a smile in my eyes, the photograph had to be retaken.  This was very different from the States when the person taking my driver’s license photograph insisted that I put on my happy face.

It wasn’t always this way for the Canadians.  There was a time when all official Canadian documents had photographs of a smiling citizenry.  But that changed during the Bush-Dick Cheney presidency.  Sometime after February 2006, the U.S. government told the Canadian government that they were going to stop accepting travel documents showing smiling Canadians.

On the Canadian side of the border, it isn’t exactly clear why the Bush-Dick Cheney administration wanted to rid the world of happy looking Canadians.  True, the Canadians had refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq.  However, the Canadians had shown total friendship and support for the United States by flying cover for the U.S. during the days following 9/11 and had sent troops into one of the most dangerous and violent areas in Afghanistan to die in the war on terror.  Despite these facts, the Bush-Dick Cheney government had one of their little hissy fits and took several steps to punish the Canadians economically.[2]  Their actions ultimately contributed to the collapse of Paul Martin’s liberal government and the rise of Stephen Harper’s conservative government.[3]

The reticence of the Canadians to die in Iraq as well as Afghanistan is unlikely to have had anything to do with the Bush-Dick Cheney “no smiling Canadians” policy.  The Canadians had already been punished for their refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq and Stephen Harper’s government was already established when the U.S. government informed the Canadian government that they didn’t want to see any happy Canadians.

So why aren’t Canadians allowed to smile anymore?  None of the officials who took the photographs for my Canadian papers knew the answer to that question.

It is possible that the Bush-Dick Cheney administration may have simply wanted to protect the American people.

If you recall, at the beginning of the Bush-Dick Cheney presidency, the tech bubble had finally burst.  This quite possibly wouldn’t have had any devastating impact upon the economy.  However, the energy industry had also helped to destabilize the U.S. economy with their price-fixing shenanigans.  So by the summer of 2001, when the Bush-Cheney administration had finally gained its footing and was ready to take up the grand battle in the Cold War with the Soviet Union[4], the U.S. economy was beginning to move towards a recession.

The Bush-Dick Cheney administration denied the existence of any recession.  I think they were trying to help Americans by tapping into “children’s magic.”  You know, the old, “If I close my eyes and say that it doesn’t exist; then it doesn’t.”  Of course, cynics at that time were claiming that the American people preferred a government that denies ugly facts.

The Bush-Dick Cheney White House weren’t a bunch of simple-minded fools.  They did much more than deny the existence of facts.  They encouraged the American people to treat each day like it was payday[5].  Then they distracted the American people from their economic frailty by invading one country to go after a real villain whose threats they had ignored, then stopping halfway through and well before completing the original mission, they spun around to invade another country to go after a guy who had been the villain du jour a decade earlier in another Bush administration.  Bear in mind that that guy’s big sins[6] as they affected the United States were to fight a war of attrition with the Iranians, the sworn enemy of the United States, and he invaded Kuwait, a country packed full of rich and spoiled people.[7]

It was clear that the Bush-Dick Cheney administration were students of history.  They had seen the 1920s and they knew that voters would be happy if they were encouraged to live like there was no tomorrow.  They had seen the Roman Empire and they knew that the path to the rabble’s heart, I’m sorry, the citizens’ hearts, was through blood sport.  No one looking at the administration’s actions could really deny that the Bush-Dick Cheney gang was truly concerned about the happiness and welfare of the common people.

But the Bush-Dick Cheney administration wasn’t about to take half measures.  To make the American citizens feel even better, the administration lowered the taxes on the wealthiest following that old adage, “When the rich are happy, the whole world sings.”  They also continued the deregulation of the banking and financial sector that had begun during the Reagan years.  These steps made sense because it was these bankers and capital investors and the rich who were the true job creators.  Everyone knew that it would be their choices that would help America climb out of the recession that wasn’t really happening.  And I am sure that most people have a pretty good idea of what history will have to say about the Bush-Dick Cheney gang’s theory of economics.

In a further demonstration of their absolute love for the American people, the Bush-Dick Cheney administration took steps to help the American people avoid being bothered with a few pesky details, such as how to fund two wars, let alone fund other government responsibilities, after the tax cuts.  So, to keep the American people feeling good about themselves as well as to keep the economy moving while waiting for their economic seeds to grow, they borrowed hundreds of billions from the Chinese and created an artificial housing boom.

All in all, when looking back over the way the government handled its responsibilities during those eight years, one wants to be impressed with the brilliance of the Bush-Dick Cheney administration.  Every step of the way, the Bush-Dick Cheney gang showed how much they cared about the happiness of the typical American.  But there was a fly in the ointment.  And that fly was the damned smiling Canadians.  How were the American people to truly believe that they were the happiest people on the planet if they saw photographs of Canadians smiling?

True, the news organizations helped the administration by reporting on a daily basis about how all of the miserable Latino-types were trying to sneak across the border and snatch the food right from our children’s mouths.  As long as the American people looked southward, they would be assured that life could be worse.

But what if they began to look northward?  They would see 32 million people who were happy AND they weren’t Americans.  That simple fact could undermine all of the hard work that the Bush-Dick Cheney administration had done.  So, to help the American people, the Bush-Dick Cheney administration did what they could to wipe the smile off of the Canadian face.

And that is the reason that I believe the Canadian people are no longer allowed to smile.

The rule is that Canadians are not supposed to smile.

This is a tad problematic for the typical Canadian, since Canadians have a fondness for smiling.  Don’t get me wrong. Canadians also frown and they do so with the same energy as any other people.  My wife, for example, makes a serious effort to frown at things I say or do at least several times during the week. And then there is my adolescent son.  Somehow he is able to even make his smiles look like frowns.  Nonetheless, this capacity for frowning doesn’t change the fact that Canadians like to smile.

This is clearly evident when you drive across the border from the U.S. into Canada.  When you arrive at the checkpoint, you are greeted with a big welcoming smile.  Sure, Canadian border guards ask the same questions that border guards all over the world ask.  “What’s the purpose of your visit?”  “How long do you plan to stay?”  “Do you have anything to declare?”  “Are you a serial killer escaping justice?”    The difference is that they carry the official inquiry off as if you were long lost friends.

Contrast this with their American counterparts on the other side of the highway.  Unlike the Canadians, American border guards tend to shave their heads. It befuddles the imagination trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for this.  There are only two groups of people that I know of that have a culture of head shaving: those sympathetic to cancer victims and neo-Nazi youth organizations a.k.a. skinheads.  Perhaps the Homeland Security is affiliated with the American Cancer Society. This actually makes sense since devastating illnesses are a national security threat.  If everyone were to get sick, there would be no one to fight the wars.

Another major difference between U.S. and Canadian border guards is that, head shaven or not, the Americans always seem angry.  Not only that, but they are downright mean-spirited.  It doesn’t matter how many times one crosses the border; the American border guards do their best to make you feel like a criminal simply because you want to cross the border into the States.  And I’m an American.  Imagine what it would be like if I weren’t?  Actually, come to think of it, they do give my wife a much harder time of it[1].

I have a friend in Montana who used to hunt regularly in Canada until he became fed up with the rude treatment he received whenever he returned home to the States.  He has an explanation for the attitude of the American border guards.  His theory is that the Americans have a surly temperament because they are pissed off that they got stuck being stationed at the U.S. – Canadian border.  Really, how boring can it get?  You’ll be hard-pressed finding any Canadians trying to sneak illegally into the United States to find work[2].  As everyone knows, the real excitement is at the Mexican border.  It’s the southern border of the U.S. where all of the real action is.  What greater threat to U.S. sovereignty is there than those people, who, unlike the Canadians, aren’t even native English speakers, trying to enter through the Southwest so that they can steal all of those jobs that Americans are clamoring for.  I know how my fellow Americans feel about this situation.  I remember back in high school one summer, some friends and I got jobs picking vegetables on a farm for a couple of weeks.  It was great fun, great pay and great benefits.  Not only that, we got to work on our tans all day as well.  To this day, I’m not sure why we didn’t stick with it.  If we had, we may have become respected and valued members of our communities.  Then again, if we had stuck with it, we would have eventually been squeezed into the unemployment and welfare lines by all of those illegal aliens stealing our jobs.

But this isn’t a discussion about Americans.  Or illegal farm workers.  I want to talk about Canadians.  More specifically, why do Canadians smile?  Usually people smile because they are happy.  But what do Canadians have to be happy about?  They live in a land that is half frozen and filled with dangerous bears and coywolves.  With the possible exception of the First Nation, Canadians live here because nobody wanted their ancestors or their ancestors were tricked into coming.  The French-Canadians in Quebec owe their citizenship in Canada to the King of France.  Though they begged and petitioned him, he refused to allow the return of the French settlers to France after he lost the war to the British.  The Ukrainians, on the other hand, were promised rich farmland.  It wasn’t really a trick.  There was land.  But it was up in Manitoba, a place so desolate that the wildlife leaves every winter[3].

So what could Canadians have to be happy about?

For one thing, Canada has secure borders and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.  Of course, Canadian security is helped to an enormous degree by its close relationship with the United States, which has the most powerful military force on the planet.  Don’t get me wrong.  The Canadian military is hard-working, competent and heroic.  However, that doesn’t alter the fact that Canadians don’t have to spend much of their hard-earned incomes on defense because the Americans apportion a large part of their budget on military spending.

Another happiness factor is that Canada is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.  Its membership in the G8 is helped along by the fact that Canada is intimately associated with the British Commonwealth and the United States.  Because of their close ties to the U.S., Canadians get the perks of American industry without some of the associated costs.  While the Americans are investing in experiments to bring about improvements in their society, the Canadians kick back and wait.  Once the American have finished, the Canadians will take the lessons learned from the American successes and failures and apply them to their own society.  You can’t say that the Canadians aren’t a clever people.

Also, on any given day, thousands of Canadians cross the border to buy goods at a vastly cheaper rate than they would pay for the same product in Canada.  Nobody really understands why things are significantly less expensive in the States.  For example, why do books cost so much more in Canada.  This is particularly strange given the fact that Canada has very large forests from which to get the wood for the pulp needed to produce paper.  Thus they have more paper to produce books less expensively.  When asked, Canadian politicians always give convoluted answers that don’t make a bit of sense[4].  It does give a little sadistic glee to know that Canadians are afflicted with the same sort of political animals as everyone else is.

A major factor contributing to Canadian happiness is that all Canadians have the same health care as their politicians.  No matter where they work or for whom they work, their health care is covered.  Imagine collapsing at a street corner with a heart attack.  There’s no need to worry about whether you are insured or not.  No need to worry about whether cardiovascular disease is a pre-existing condition or familial trait so, even though you pay the same premiums and have the same deductible as everyone else, it is the one illness that the insurance companies deny you coverage for.

In Canada, all you have to do is lie on the hard concrete in agony and wait for the ambulance to arrive with its more than competent EMTs.  Then you’re off to the hospital where skilled medical professionals will attend to you.  Later, when the physician, rather than an insurance agent, says you have recovered, you’ll be released with a smile rather than a big whopping bill.  Instead of being stressed by a collection agency constantly phoning you about your $25,000 medical bill, you can rest assured that you are still insured for future illness. Really, what isn’t there to be happy about?  You get to avoid bankruptcy and keep your house.

Another thing that Canadians have to be happy about is that they have a government that does what governments are supposed to do.  True, like all governments, the Canadian government has plenty of flaws.  But most importantly, it stays out of its citizens’ personal lives while protecting citizens and their rights from villainous scoundrels.  There are no Wall Street bankers and financiers running amok and destroying the national economy with their unregulated greed.  There are no social conservatives using the government to regulate your bedroom behavior.

The final reason that Canadians have to be happy is that everyone likes Canadians.  What’s there not to like?  Canadians are nice to everyone.  Of course, it’s always the Canadians who seem to get killed in terrorist café bombings in Egypt and Bali.  I’m not sure what that’s about.  It could be that terrorists in Egypt and Bali hold some of the same fallacies as Americans.  Many Americans are under the impression that Canada is nothing more than an unofficial state vaguely north of where they reside.  Just because they’re terrorists, it doesn’t mean that these Egyptians and Balinese are any better at geography than the Americans.

It seems that Canadians have plenty to be happy about.  So why aren’t they supposed to smile?