In Canada we tend not so much to be the rah, rah, ain't-we-wonderful kind of people that you might find in other parts of the world. We're more likely to consider ourselves lucky, or maybe privileged.
When you think of national pride, the United States of America ("You of America ("You Ess Ay! You Ess Ay!") jumps immediately to mind, but really, Americans aren't overly proud of themselves compared to the people of some other countries that frankly seem (from our western point of view, at least) to have a lot less to be proud of.
Some chalk up our Canadian pride-versus-privilege conundrum to a basic insecurity, while others prefer to believe that we are somehow naturally humble, which in a kind of oxymoronic way gives us a sense of pride.
And come to think of it, what peoples of other nations in the entire world would deign to seriously profess pride in their humility?
Indeed, that is perhaps the defining Canadian character trait that has eluded so many of our national character trait seekers over the years.
Our humble pride may just be exactly what defines us as a people.
Or to put it another way, as Canada Day rolls around once again: our delusions are what make us different from everyone else.
That is not to say that others have no delusions - national pride is pretty much always based on delusion. Our delusions are just different, definitive. Weird.
Rather than admitting pride in our country, we're more likely to consider ourselves lucky to be able to live in such a great and prosperous part of the world.
An admission of pure, dumb luck, after all, is so much more palatable than an intimation of pride, which is, after all, kissing cousin to arrogance. And whatever else we may be - whatever minor shortcomings we may fail to admit to ourselves - we most certainly are not arrogant.
So let's throw that all behind us. Let's give in to a little bit of well-deserved pride.
Let's puff up our chests and take a good, long look at what we have to be proud of.
With massive Canada Day celebrations planned for throughout the city, there is no better time to consider the luck that gave us our privileges, that earned us our pride.
Our luck started at the beginning. The ancestors of the majority of our current citizenry appropriated this country by rightful allotment from those who were unable to hold on to what they had. Our ancestors' technology was superior - we can certainly be proud of that.
And they had acquired, over the previous decades of colonization of other distant lands and people, a knack for subjugating natives, plus a willingness to exercise judgment on their behalf. They were skills that came in handy - and we should all be proud of our most effective skills.
We haven't lost those skills through the generations. Now, instead of subjugating new peoples, we are using those self-same skills to subjugate the land and to exercise our judgment on its behalf - to harvest energy the way our ancestors harvested cultures.
And to similar effect, the northern-most portions of the country - where much of our energetic pride is emerging - were actually given to us by Norway, whose explorers "discovered" the polar regions and decided they weren't really worth claiming.
We can be proud that our ancestors - equally unaware at the time - didn't turn it down.
We can also be proud of the irony that the global climate change we are helping to create by harvesting that energy will make the north more valuable still.
Bob Groeneveld is editor of the Burnaby NOW's sister paper, the Langley Advance.
