When people speak of how peace-loving Canadians have always been, I think of the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal in 1849 by an anglo-Montrealer mob -- which probably was what prevented the city from being the capital after Confederation. I think of the desperate battles of the First World War, when Canadians won victories on the battlefields that Britons and Frenchmen could not, when our best general, Arthur Currie, was knighted on the battlefield by King George V and later took possession of Kaiser Wilhelm's suite in the Palais Schaumburg (in Bonn). I think of the battles in Northern France in the Second World War, when Canadians ended up in a grudge match with the Panzer SS division that contained the Hitler Youth, when neither side would take prisoners (they started it -- they murdered fifty Canadian POWs on D-Day), and the Germans labelled our troops "the British SS".

Canada was once a country that looked out to the rest of the world and brought our best to it. We had a history of "punching above our weight". We no longer can do that -- unless we are in the flyweight division.