Richard John Neuhaus on Canada

From the First Things blog:

Meaning no offense, Canadian politics has been something of a circus since Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, reigning until 1984, and in many ways dominating the political culture until his death in 2000. Trudeau worked very hard at demonstrating that Canada, too, could produce a celebrity and encouraged an ordinarily sensible people to devote themselves to the earnest intellectual and cultural industry of crafting a distinct Canadian identity, meaning the determined celebration of the ways in which Canadians are not like Americans, meaning, in fact, the ways in which Canadians, too, can be liberal Democrats. To the outsider–and, despite all, I suppose I am that–it was depressingly imitative, but many Canadians seemed to find it quite exciting. With Stephen Harper, one has a sense of government being returned to the grownups.