Ashamed? As a Canuck, I am puzzled by other Canucks who think they're somehow responsible for the idiot thugs who perpetrate such crimes. I hope the bad guys get caught. I know I'd do everything I could think of help catch 'em, or to catch someone I saw perpetrating such a crime. But ashamed? Gee, you didn't see Americans saying they were ashamed to live in America after the WTC hate-crime that killed 3,000 people did you? Shocked, yes, saddened yes, frightened, perhaps, righteously furious, yes, but ashamed? No way.

Sadly, in some ways Canada is getting more dangerous. You can't drive up to the front door of the parliament buildings anymore. For a few years, they closed the Governor General's gardens -- she's not even allowed to take a vacation without an escort of two police cars. I foresee a day when security guards are routinely armed; that'd be scary.

Canada has a better reputation than it deserves; the clan was very numerous up here (250,000? strong, but after the first court case, they just weren't allowed to go around wearing masks.) In World War 2, we not only confiscated Japanese-Canadians' property, we sent them to internment/concentration camps and kept the men separated from their families for the duration of the war. I think native-status Canadians didn't get the vote until the 60s. In the 50s, many natives had their children forcibly removed and sent to distant prison-like schools. As late as 1970, I think a black neighbourhood was unfairly expropriated (effectively wiping it out) in Halifax.

But I'm pretty confident about Canadians. I haven't known as many people as some, but I think it's significant that I can only think of three people who might not immediately report such a hate crime, and two of them were born around 1900 and have been dead over a dozen years.