I am, however, dressed like a lumberjack, in a plaid shirt, jeans and boots. If I don't want people to think I'm just in from Kenora, I have an odd way of showing it. In fact, many Canadians are gainfully employed in the resource sectors, or live in the north, and it's not clear why I should find the idea so shaming. Except that I and everyone else involved in producing this ad live in Toronto, work in the media, and would like nothing better than to be taken for New Yorkers.

Indeed, for all its overt nationalism, this ad was directed by an American, for an American agency, and is set to a tune by a British composer: Had it been proposed for a subsidy as Canadian content, it would very likely have been ruled ineligible. Likewise, when I say that "I speak English and French, not American," I am not being entirely truthful. Very few Canadians actually speak English and French, and a good many speak neither. The language I speak is much closer to that of the Americans than of the English, though it is a foreign tongue to many of my fellow Canadians. Newfoundlanders, for instance.

I don't know Jimmy, Sally or Susie from Canada, although I'm certain -- wait a minute.

Susie? Susie Henderson? Dark hair, went to Queen's? Okay, I do know her. In fact, the circle of those who create and promote the officially approved stereotypes of Canadians - - that we are polite, or shy, or innately collectivist -- is exceedingly small and self- contained. By and large, it is made up of journalists, and academics, and people who "work in the arts," most of whom live within a few miles' radius of downtown Toronto: people who are neither polite nor especially shy, but collectivist down to their shorts.

As one of them, I am able to persuade myself of a lot of things that are patently untrue, and, what is more, to believe that others believe them as fervently as I do. I believe in peacekeeping, for example, "not policing," notwithstanding our proud record of savagery in two world wars, and without even beginning to explore how peacekeeping and policing are opposed.

I believe in diversity, not assimilation, though in truth my country is not noticeably more diverse than any other, least of all the United States. I think myself terribly cosmopolitan for having two official languages, when some countries have dozens. True, I look around me and see faces of all different colours. But then, as I mentioned, I live in Toronto. The majority of Canadians who live outside our four or five largest cities may never see a person of African or Asian descent, except on American TV.

Oh, but there's more. I believe that the maple leaf is a fitting national symbol, though the maple tree does not grow over much of the country. I believe our nation is held together by a railroad nobody rides and a network nobody watches. I believe medicare is what makes us Canadian, though we were Canadians long before we had medicare (and we stole the name from the Americans). I believe, in the words of Pierre Berton, that a Canadian is someone who can make love in a canoe, when not more than one in a thousand Canadians has ever been near a canoe, much less copulated in one. I believe, indeed, in many of the same outdated cliches about Canadians that I find so offensive in others. Why do you think I get so misty about farmers and fishermen?

But then, if there is anything that I believe in, it is in being offended. That's why my nationalism invariably emerges, not as a quiet confidence in my countrymen, but as a chippy, resentful whine about other people and their failure to recognize my "distinctiveness." I fetishize difference, elevate being different into a national raison d'etre, yet am equally convinced that whatever makes me unique is so weak and insignificant as to disappear in a puff of imported magazines.

I tell myself that what Canadians really suffer from is a national inferiority complex. Yet I prattle on endlessly about how much nicer we are than Americans, how much more caring, and decent, and kind. Oh, and modest. I extol our national virtues of compromise and conciliation, even as the various regions are perpetually at each others' throats. I read Margaret Atwood, for heaven's sake, though even I do not go to Canadian films.

In my neuroses and self-delusion, I am easy prey for those who would exploit my latent nationalist yearnings for their own ends, from beer bottlers to airlines to the Minister of Heritage. I exist in a state of permanent crisis, forever told I must consent to private monopolies and public extortion as "the price of being Canadian." Yet somehow I never notice that for those who are telling me this, "being Canadian" has in fact proved rather lucrative.

My name is Joe, and I am a Canadian nationalist.