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The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.

 

Margaret Atwood

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There is no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian. What could be more absurd than the concept of an "all Canadian" boy or girl? A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.

 

Pierre Trudeau

 

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.

 

Haruki Murakami

 

I think the Canadian people have a right to know: Why, when your primary objective was to get unfettered and secure access into the American Market we didn't get it. Why you didn't put clauses in to protect our social programs in this negotiation we'll have on the definition of subsidies where the heavy weight of the American Republic will be put in against us. Why did that not happen? Why also, did we get a situation where we surrendered our Energy policy to the United States, something which they'd been trying to achieve since 1956? Why did we abandon our farmers? Why did we open our Capital Markets so that a Canadian Bank can be bought up and we don't have reciprocal rights into the American Market at all? And why did you remove any ability to control the Canadian ownership of our businesses? These are questions that Canadians deserve to have an answer to, and we have not had an opportunity in six hours to deal with them in a way that would make you come out of your shell!

 

John Turner

 

The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.

 

Gore Vidal

 

All our confidence in our ability to act collectively is being undermined, with the subtext message Whatever it is, the private sector can do it better. Never mind that there's no evidence for this. Never mind, for instance, that the private US health-care system is 40 percent more expensive per capita than the Canadian public system, even though the Canadian system provides full coverage for all Canadians and the American system leaves some forty-three million without any coverage at all. This isn't because Canadians are smarter than Americans - it's because we have a public system and they don't.

 

Linda McQuaig