You would never know anything was amiss in downtown Toronto.

Everywhere there are bustling crowds of people going to work, shopping at the various malls and boutiques and streaming into the subway.

In my experience in the Big Smoke last week, you wouldn’t have seen any indication that Canadians were paying heed to Public Security Minister Anne McLellan or Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness Executive Director Adrian Gordon’s urgings toward thinking the unthinkable — when the current terrorist campaign hits Canada — and what the response should be.

I saw no increase in security anywhere in the downtown area, or on the subway. In fact, it seems the most secure place in the GTA may be the CN Tower with its bomb sniffing devices that goose the unsuspecting with puffs of air up our backsides.

There was an incident on the TTC when a malfunctioning car on the southbound yellow line just past Dundas lurched to a stop a few feet into the tunnel.

I looked around at faces continuing conversations or buried in newspapers and iPods. If there was concern, I didn’t see it. The train was in trouble, however, and had to be vacated at Union station for repairs. Everyone seemed to take it in stride if not with detached boredom.

Nor, as an American, did I see or experience any degree of rudeness on the part of Torontonians, which I was also on the lookout for.

While my family did not adopt the obnoxiousness that Toronto Star columnist David Bruser used in his jaunt as an American through the city a few weeks back, my son’s shirt (“You Don’t Know Me” — Federal Witness Protection Program with the Seal of the U.S.) and our insistence on ordering real iced tea in restaurants (“The telltale mark of an American,” a waiter told us) had us pegged well enough.

I did run into one New Yorker in Eaton Centre with a beaded American flag purse. I asked her if anyone had made any mention of the purse. She replied that she hadn’t even given the purse a second thought until she saw her reflection in a store window and now was somewhat self-conscious of the bag.

I thought it interesting that not more than a few feet from where we were having this conversation, a T-shirt shop selling “Canada kicks ass” shirts, among other slogans, was doing brisk business. I thought of buying one, but don’t generally relish getting challenged to fistfights in the states, so I let it pass.

The woman with the purse had only been in town a few hours and had not received any comments. I doubted she would and bade her as good a time as my family had been having.

I then returned to consuming my first ever bowl of poutine (which I loved) and mulled over the situation. A member of the Canadian Forces in battle fatigues walked in front of the food court, jarringly out of place in the surroundings but as unnoticed as a U.S. soldier might have been in similar circumstances.

If there was any consideration that the people I was rubbing elbows with were thinking of anything outside the confines of the mall, it wasn’t present in their demeanor.

Maybe that is as it should be.

In Britain, we read of roving bands of armed plainclothes police with shoot-to-kill orders who do, indeed, shoot to kill. At the same time, transit police in New York City are searching every fifth bag as a prerequisite to riding the subway.

On CFRB radio the next day, talk show host John Moore discussed having similar bag searches on the TTC. Most of his callers questioned the logic and effectiveness of such gestures. I smiled at Moore’s soft-pedalled conservatism and lack of stridency, which would seem too civil by U.S. talk radio standards.

Canada may seem as complacent as McLellan thinks it is. But as someone who recently took a walking tour of the Mall in Washington DC and had heavily armed ninja-clad storm troopers checking me over as I walked within 200 yards of the Capitol dome, I would not say “complacent.”

There seems to be, at least where I was and with whom I talked, a consciousness that recognizes that while no society is ultimately safe from attack, that spending one’s waking hours fussing about evacuation routes and bag searches is no way to live.

And so I departed for the land of perpetual patriotic fervor and preparedness, in a car stacked with Tim Horton’s coffee, Ontario wine, Canadian beer, all-dressed chips, Cadbury chocolates, Roots clothing and more souvenirs than were probably necessary.

I felt in some strange way that I was leaving the kind of place that, at least in spirit, the U.S. had been in another time — prior to colour-coded alerts, scenes of towers crumbling, midnight anti-terror laws and everywhere the pervasive selling of fear and vigilance. I could almost feel that fear leave me crossing the bridge to Sarnia and returning in some fashion, crossing to Niagara Falls, New York.

My wish for my friends in Canada is that you ever remain untouched by the scourges of our modern terror war as well as mindful of the price one pays when sacrificing essential liberty for phantom security.

And in the meantime, I’d appreciate a good recipe for making poutine.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...