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O Canhahada. (News from the North).

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When Pat Buchanan referred to Canada recently as Canuckistan and called it a training ground for terrorists, we Canuckistani had to laugh. Alternatively, we could have sharpened sticks and made punitive raids across the famous "longest undefended border in the world." But laughing seemed the better option. Followed, of course, by the aggressive manufacturing of T-shirts featuring an angry beaver in a turban. Our idea of a hostile retaliation.

There is an old Canadian proverb: when you are sleeping next to an elephant, wear sturdy pyjamas. Well, if there isn't such a proverb, there ought to be. And that's pyjamas with a y, by the way. We spell funny; or you do. For instance, we still put the extra u in humour. And in colour and neighbour, too; we have a lot of us to go around.

If you take the sharpened stick mentioned above and poke around at the roots of Canadian humorous writing, you won't take long to discover Stephen Leacock. He was a professor of political science and economics at McGill University in the early part of this century, but that wasn't all that was funny about him. He filled his off-hours writing hundreds of very amusing stories and essays. It is an article of citizenship up here that one knows, if nothing else, the quote from his parody Gertrude the Governess concerning Lord Ronald, who "flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions." He is our Mark Twain, mustaches and all. Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, first published in 1912, has never been out of print, and it is still fresh and hilarious to this day. I mention Leacock at this point with reference to a lecture tour of England in which he was introduced, on one occasion, by the editor of Punch magazine, who spoke of Leacock's special position as a Canadian, with one foot in Britain and the other in North America. Now that's tiring work. And awkward. What's more, you run a great risk of tearing your trousers (or pants, depending on where you're from). The point here, however, is that, as Robertson Davies puts it, Leacock's humor is "British by heredity, but American by association."

Most Canadians, I would guess, do not feel the tug of their British heritage, if they had one to begin with. We do still recognize the queen. (It's not hard, the crown being a dead giveaway.) But immigration from the "old country" has long been superseded by immigration from lots of other old countries and from the far corners of the world, so that among our literary lights these days are not only Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood but also Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry. Our greater struggle, culturally, would seem to be in the "association" mentioned above with that elephantine friend to the south. While our literature flourishes in its own quiet way, there is always the sense of being engulfed, the fear that our pyjamas will not prove sturdy enough. Our precarious sense of self is often spoken of in terms of being distinguishable from America.

We aren't much into flag-waving. Heck, it might obscure the view for the person sitting behind you. This is a stereotype: the polite Canadian. There was a skit recently on the popular Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television show, "This Hour Has 22 Minutes," in which contestants were competing in the Canadian version of "Fear Factor." The challenge: to bump into somebody in a crowd and not apologize. The contestants shuddered at the thought. As Claire MacKay says in the prologue to her First Folks and Vile Voyageurs, "Some people ... think that Canadians are too polite to have any history." MacKay is a very funny writer who has taken upon herself the monumental task of making Canadian history entertaining for children. That she has succeeded says more about MacKay than it does about the subject.

A Canadian only places his hand on his heart when he's checking to make sure his nametag hasn't peeled off. We take pride in our diffidence, even if it's just to set us apart from the stereotypically boastful Yankee. But there was an international event not so long ago that had a lot of Canadian kids feeling a...

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