This need to present a unique set of Canadian values is not without consequence. Consider just three recent episodes involving the governing Liberal Party. First, the communications director of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien called George W. Bush a "moron", and the prime minister at first declined her resignation. Then, an MP was caught on camera saying "Damn Americans! I hate those bastards." And, in an "open letter" to Condoleezza Rice, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy called the United States a "virtual one-party state", devoid of the checks and balances the country "once espoused before the days of empire." This, from someone whose own party has governed Canada for seventy of the past one hundred years!

More seriously, despite the promising reaction to the terrorism threat, the prevailing Canadian-values and anti-American paradigm has influenced government policy on security issues. The most recent example is Canada's confused decision on ballistic missile defense (BMD). The government of Paul Martin had given every indication that Canada would sign on to the development and deployment of BMD, even ensuring that NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian air defense system, would be used as a key component in the program. However, the opposition--and, again, elite opinion--relentlessly attacked BMD as America's "missile defense madness", as "the weaponization of space", and as something that would "harm Canada's international reputation." Canadians, who had not been asked to contribute financially to the development of the system, and who could one day be protected by it, had been favorably predisposed to join. After the onslaught of negative attacks, however, they changed their minds. The government, fearing that as many as twenty members of its own caucus would vote with the opposition, decided to opt out of the program.

TO UNDERSTAND how this anti-American bias is being strengthened by Canada's current political reality one must begin with Lord Durham's observation in 1839 that Canada was "two nations warring in the bosom of a single state." Some 165 years later, Canada remains a country where, in the words of historian H. V. Nelles, "unambiguous unity and a singular identity" still largely elude its inhabitants. Except that today, Canada is really three nations: Quebec, the West and the multicultural cities.

Quebec is already separate within Canada. To the average Quebecer, the Canadian federal government is essentially irrelevant. Quebecers make almost all their own political and social choices, and international markets are as influential an economic force in the province as is the rest of Canada, perhaps more so. Quebecers are more left-wing and statist than their English-Canadian counterparts and more culturally confident, too. The province has a thriving French-language magazine, book, film, web and TV industry that utterly dominates public tastes, as opposed to the American products that resonate widely in the rest of Canada. No serious people today think that Quebecers want to return to past political arrangements or that Quebec nationalism is a waning fad. The province has never signed the 1982 Canadian constitution (though it is bound by its provisions) and support for independence hovers around the 50 percent mark. Quebecers regularly elect secessionist parties to represent them in both the provincial assembly and the federal House of Commons.

More than one-third of Western Canadians (encompassing the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia) believe it is time to consider separating from Canada, according to 2005 survey data. Western Canadian alienation is nothing new, but it has lately taken a different form with the rise of the Canada's new Conservative Party, which dominates the region and is now the country's official opposition. The Conservative Party's intellectual roots owe more to the American conservative movement than to traditional Canadian Toryism: It is the party of smaller government, social conservatism and rural populism. Alberta, the engine of this new West, is Canada's wealthiest province, home to the country's galloping oil and gas industry, and enjoys a faster population growth than any other region. Nearly 60 percent of Albertans supported the Iraq War, while fewer than a quarter of Quebecers did.

This leaves Canada's increasingly multicultural cities. Five cities are home to 43 percent of Canadians, and Toronto alone accounts for 17 percent of the country's total population. Canada's cities are also the primary destination for immigrants and refugees to the country. About 20 percent of Canada's residents--and half of Toronto's--are foreign-born, compared to 11 percent in the United States, 5.6 percent in France and 4 percent in the UK. Cities are therefore the testing ground for Canada's multicultural experiment. However, multiculturalism rejects the idea that a single set of organized cultural beliefs and political principles are foundational to the nation's public life. So multicultural Canada cannot demand, as other countries can and do, that new arrivals adapt to the country's traditional cultural and political forms because, as the minister of citizenship and immigration has said, "we've developed, as a Canadian value, an appreciation of diversity--if not a complete nurturing of that diversity." Furthermore, multiculturalism has today become primarily an anti-Western impulse, specifically one that sees the United States as the locus of all manner of evil in the world. Therefore, large segments of Canada's urban areas should be seen to be, in effect if not in intention, hostile to the Western political tradition in general and to American ideals in particular.

In truth, Canada is now a country of three solitudes--four, if Canada's ever more assertive native population is included--where each has increasingly little in common with the others. Quebec's secessionist political parties obviously do not believe in trying to bridge these gaps. Significant portions of Canada's Conservative Party probably do not believe in doing so either, though the party will not acknowledge this publicly. This leaves the federal Liberals as the only major party attempting to be pan-Canadian in its appeal. And their only way of appealing to these disparate groups is by reference to the mythical "Canadian values" described earlier.

However, Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system and demographic reality (highly urban Ontario and Quebec represent 60 percent of the country's population) reduces Liberal pan-Canadianism to vote-getting among multicultural city-dwellers and non-secessionist Quebecers. So a typical Liberal election campaign preys on fears of the country's disintegration at the hands of Quebec's secessionists and the loss of its unique social character and diversity at the hands of the Conservatives and their "hidden agenda" of "U.S. style" policies. Ergo, the Liberals believe they are the only thing holding the country together and preventing its inevitable drift into the American orbit. Thus does the Liberal Party confuse its interests with those of Canada's citizens and use electoral politics to heighten anti-Americanism and Canadian regionalism. After all, a (small) majority of Canadians supported the Iraq War until well after the invasion. But Quebecers didn't. Neither, we may safely assume, did multicultural, urban Canadians. After months of delay, the federal government decided against joining the war because the UN hadn't authorized it.

Over the next few months Canadians will head to the polls to elect a new government. (The election was promised last June when a corruption and cronyism scandal over the misdirection of tax dollars to promote national unity in Quebec threatened to topple the Liberal government.) During the campaign, Liberals will tell Canadians that Quebec secessionists are out to destroy the great Canadian dream and that Conservatives will destroy Canada's unique social character and open the door to the country's "Americanization."

The election will most likely result in another Liberal minority government: Canada's regionalism--its solitudes--will see to that. However, given the Liberal electoral playbook and their probable parliamentary alliance with the leftist (and vocally anti-American) New Democrats to stay in power, don't expect Canada to ally itself too closely with the United States on any matter that doesn't directly affect Canada's economic interests.

PAUL MARTIN, the current Liberal prime minister, is fond of saying that Canada "will set the standard by which other nations judge themselves." Politicians are often called upon to say silly things, but it is generally a good idea not to let rhetoric stray too far from reality. But contemporary Canada--with the exception of its competent economic management--leaps precisely that gulf between rhetoric and reality, overcompensating for deep feelings of inferiority. It's a leap that too many Canadians have grown accustomed to hearing and by now enjoy believing. And it will persist until the status quo of Canadian federalism changes: either by devolving much, much more power to the regions and allowing each to make its own political, economic and social choices, or by breaking apart. Either way, the narcissistic and corrosive platitudes of "Canadian values" and "national unity" should cease.

There is no shame in fundamentally altering Canada's political arrangements. Unlike the United States, the country was not founded on an ecstatic commitment to a great cause but on the more pedestrian grounds of being a good idea. Such pragmatism should welcome change, if change is best. Canadians should be mature enough to question whether the country created in 1867 is still acting in the best interests of all its citizens in 2005.