QotD: Chicago's view of Canada

Happy Dominion Day! In la belle province, the concept of Canada may be regarded with indifference and contempt and dismissed as a weak sickly thing, but here in Chicago Canada is the baddest-@#! mutha ever to come swaggering in town.

For four months, the prosecution have regaled the jury with horror stories of the wild lawless swamplands to the north. You thought it was just one big wimp-o 24/7 Benetton ad celebrating diversity and UN peacekeeping and socialized healthcare and confiscatory taxation and all that other wimpy stuff? Hah! Get real. It's an offshore tax haven to which the world's executives stampede en masse because in Canada you don't have to pay any tax. It's a land beyond the rule of law where predatory thugs sporting sinister colours of terrifying gangs like the "barristers" and "Queen's Counsels" fall on helpless US trial-lawyers, eat 'em up and spit 'em out all over Larry King Live. Marauding hordes of corporate vice-presidents ride down across the 49th Parallel to lay waste to American boardrooms like Albanian Mafiosi pillaging Italy.

Innocent unworldly types such as secretaries of state, four-term governors, Pentagon advisors and chief nuclear-arms negotiators who think nothing of going mano a mano with the Soviet Politburo, the ChiComs and the PLO are forced to concede they're way out of their league with these ruthless Canadians. A maple-drenched godfather simply has to put the word out, and an apparently innocuous sentence such as "Toronto wants it" is enough to strike fear and terror into the hearts of big-time execs all over Illinois. And that's before they send in the enforcers from the badlands of "the Maritime Province".

Mark Steyn, "Canada Day in the Northern District of Illinois", Maclean's, 2007-07-01