The other day I was helping my 9-year-old son with his homework, trying to teach him the component parts of a sentence. When we came to a sentence about Canada (I don't recall what it actually was) I asked him to identify the verb in the sentence. After a moment of intense thought, my son replied, "Is Canada the verb?"
A brief fatherly chuckle later I gave him the correct answer, but his first response started me thinking. Being Canadian occasionally means agonizing over what it means to be Canadian, and what exactly Canada is. It occurred to me that perhaps Canada is a verb. All this running around like headless chickens trying to define Canada, this agonizing over what we are, this argument and discussion is in fact what Canada is. We are creating Canada every day by merely going about our business, being Canadian, and doing whatever it is that we do.
I suppose this is not unlike what goes on in other countries (eg. the United States of America), but being a typical self-centred Canadian, I prefer to believe that it is a uniquely Canadian trait.