Ghost of a flea

Culturally, Canada does not hold a candle to Britain. Its museums and orchestras are resoundingly second tier, though it may have an edge in country music festivals. This is, after all, the home of Shania Twain, whose full-throated warblings make Dolly Parton sound sophisticated. In the dramatic arts, Canada's greatest recent contribution - unless you include Jim Carrey and Pamela Anderson - is the incomprehensible, semi-nude contortion act of Cirque du Soleil. And as for its newspapers, they are lifeless and hobbled by the provincialism which divides the country.
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As the Canadian poet Irving Layton once said, the Canadian political and intellectual communities' have a tendency to regard ' cowardice as wisdom, philistinism as Olympian serenity and the spitefulness of the weak as moral indignation'.