so much as it misses the fact that because Canada is so big, we have a slightly different notion of where the "country" begins. Maciej is roughly seven or eight hours, by car, from the U.S. border and he still hasn't even hit the 49th parallel. I don't have the exact numbers, but probably 90+ percent of the country lives South of that line. If you look at a map you will see that Canada runs off at the mouth for a considerable distance North of it. Just to put things in some perspective, Poland is smaller than France (or looks it) and the province of Québec, alone, is seven times the size of France. There were real serious plans on the books during the 80's to flood about one seventh of the province's land mass (as part of the James Bay 2 hydro-electric project) which in a European context would make for a lot of soggy cheese. I mention that to demonstrate that Canadians have a radically different, and privileged, sense of space not shared by anyone else on the planet, except maybe the Russians. Anyway, all that stuff up there, covered in ice ten months of the year and black flies the other two: that is the "country".
