We're Number Two!

Canadians are always looking for something to be proud of. How about this? [link via Newmark's Door]

Dominion of Canada
Canada is a subunit of the British Commonwealth and, as an independent state, the second largest on earth at this time.

And what country, you might ask, is number one? Russia.

Even in its reduced state, it is still by far the largest single state on the planet.

Somehow I get the feeling Mark Steyn [registration required] would find meaning in that ranking [thanks to London Fog for the pointer].

In a one-party state, the one party in power attracts not those interested in the party, but those interested in power. “Philosophy” hardly enters into it. For all the Grits’ invocation of “da Canadian values,” their most obvious feature is that there’s nothing especially Canadian about them: government health care, gun control, shrivelled defence budgets, radical secularism . . .