Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s 47-page booklet, A Look at Canada, is a Dick and Jane for people who yearn to be Canadian citizens. On its cover, my how the heavy fabric of the flag ripples-but in a sturdy way, as if it were made of wood. It’s a hard flag, tough to beat. The lyrics to O Canada streak like cirrus clouds across a gorgeous blue sky background, as they doubtless will this week on Canada Day.

For the sky is always blue as a jay in this land of moral and personable people devoted to their “parliamentary democracy,” unstinting in their “environmentally sound” stewardship of the “clean and prosperous” country that their children will live in, speaking as one in their respect for “cultural differences” and their faith in “international peacekeeping.”

No, seriously.

I’m not mocking the federal government’s rendition of national perfection for the vulnerable immigrants most likely to fall for it. I understand the impulse. Canada needs skilled immigrants. It’s the economic version of dating angst like, “Gosh, if we could just hook up with an emerging tech nation who has relatives who do plumbing on the side.”

The booklet is like a personal ad for all 31 million Canadians, most of whom have never gone out with anyone, at least that’s what the booklet makes it sound like. And the audience is ladies and gentlemen desperate to get the hell out of wherever they are. They know Canada has a rose in her lapel. “Can’t we be strangers in the night?” this ad calls out in its chaste way.

International date lines

What prospective citizens seek in a country is jobs, clean water, good schools and a place to call their own. Not wanted: uniformed men with whips on voting day, typhoons, religious courts. Won’t date: Guys like Italy which is edging toward fascism with its fingerprinting of all its Gypsy residents including children. Or countries with presidents named George whose lawyers won’t tell him it’s illegal to bury prisoners alive. What Canada is looking for in a citizenship date is someone who’ll play along with the illusion, I mean ad.

When you’re Canada at age 141, you have to play down the defects — our humourlessness, a pine beetle that is the national equivalent of chlamydia, our loathing of esthetics, e.g. socks with sandals, aluminum siding, our psychopathic brother in the RCMP, the way we’re always yelling at the immigrant kids to get off our lawn — and talk ourselves up.

Which is what the feds are doing in this booklet. We the teenagers are rolling our eyes. We are so not with this family.

‘Greatest best’

On the other hand, we are also so not with our neighbours to the south. A Fox News guy named Sean Hannity has been blowing hard lately about his love of country. “It is the greatest best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth,” he says. For this he wins fake praise from Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, who turns the statement into a pie chart and explains the lack of overlap by saying “Greatest? Best? Some great countries aren’t the best. And some of the best countries aren’t that great. Norway’s been coasting for years.”

I rather adore Canada, and at times when I am at Wickaninnish in British Columbia or skiing at Lake Louise, Alta., or eating Nova Scotia oysters or drinking a Bloody Caesar (Canadian invention), I am actively in love with it. But at no time do I think we are God’s gift to humanity. What arse would say it, or worse, believe it?

Strictly by the booklet

I’m not going to lie for Canada, especially not with the shamelessness that puffs the pages of A Look at Canada. My girlfriend, an American who fell in love with a hot Canadian guy, is memorizing this stuff for her test. And it’s my job to disabuse her.

The booklet says Canadian values include equality (ask Muslim-Canadians now regularly referred to in newspapers as “brown-skinned”), freedom (ask a pregnant woman running the Christian-right gauntlet at a Fredericton abortion clinic), peacekeeping (ask a soldier fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan), and law and order (ask those Muslim-Canadian teenagers on trial for terrorism instead of adolescence).

The booklet says we manufacture clothing and grow food. I cannot find a Made in Canada label on any garment and our stores are filled with foreign tomatoes we could easily grow here — without the salmonella. The booklet says we don’t litter. But Canadians litter with avidity; they put into it the same energy that Amy Winehouse devotes to smoking alternative substances. We have litter emphysema, and even I with a touch of what I keep calling my OECD (that’s really the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, but what I mean is my OCD: obsessive-compulsive disorder) can’t keep up with the weird muck like condoms on my street.

But there are good things about the booklet. The maps were helpful. I now know that Iqualuit is on Baffin Island; I had always assumed it was an inland capital like Yellowknife or Ottawa. I’m glad to hear that Atlantic Canada is doing fabulously well with its fishing and that the British Columbia forestry industry can foresee nothing but riches ahead, no mention of pine beetles. It’s great to know that Alberta’s tar sands are producing wealth. I’d heard some poisoned water table rumours; apparently they were wrong. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which is Canada.

Admire from afar

The Queen hasn’t died yet; that’s good. Because the day I swear allegiance to “His Majesty King Charles the Third, King of Canada” is the day I move to Spain. They have a king but he’s no Bewildered Big Ears. Spain’s a fine country with an attitude and a great soccer team.

The problem is that other countries always gleam from a distance. “Some things look better baby, just passing through,” Elton John sang, and it’s true — but I hate that pointless yearning that we know will never be tested. Countries are for life, not just for Christmas. “If this were a photograph instead of real life, it would be perfect,” is what we say when we’re unreasonably unhappy, and I suspect I would be if I left Canada. Or if I stayed.

I didn’t go to France this year. Something about Sarkozy-world and the advent of Starbucks in Paris unsettled me. I’m now casting about for another country to have a crush on. Canada’s a possibility, but judging by this booklet, it’s a little too good to be true.

This Week

Triumph! After decades of trying to find Christina Stead’s classic book, The Man Who Loved Children: A Novel, I tracked down a new edition by Picador. More or less out of print since 1940, the book leaves the reader ridden hard and put away wet. It’s the story of a family. Sam the father is a slack blond egotist. Henny, his thin, nervy wife is driven mad by his improvidence, and their great passel of children watch the ensuing war with adoration followed by incomprehension and then terror. It is a glimpse into the family interior, the boiling volcanic fury, and as Katha Pollitt wrote on Slate.com about the novel, “I don’t want to know. I just don’t want to know.” But we do know because we all live in families.