Last week a clip from the show late night comedy show Red Eye was posted on YouTube. The segment poked fun at the Canadian military’s planned 1 year break from deployments after we finish our commitments in Afghanistan.

With rather good reason Canadians have responded with virtually universal disgust over the whole thing. Obviously Canadians would be offended when someone implies that even though we’ve been supporting US war efforts for 8 years that they weren’t even aware we were at war. Canada is 1/10th the size of the US population-wise, so our 184 casualties would be comparable to 1840 US casualties, so demeaning our war efforts really tends sit rather poorly with Canadians. This is especially true given many Canadians feel that we’ve been left holding the bag, so to speak, in Afghanistan while the US went to pick a fight in another country.

But I’m not writing this blog to register my moral outrage on the matter. I’m writing it because I’m proud of how Canadians have reacted. Us Canucks are a rather passive bunch. We don’t get too fired up for anything collectively as a nation outside of hockey and yeah, well hockey. We generally have a good, self-deprecating sense of humour with regards to our national identity. There are so many pockets of Canada that are different and diverse culturally that we are rarely, if ever on the same page. So when someone manages to light a fire in the bellies of 30 million Canadians you know you really did something wrong. When you get a reaction like this out of someone like Tom Green, who is rarely, if ever serious, you can definitely say you managed to cross a line.

So to my fellow Canadians, I salute you. I never knew we had so much collective moral outrage.