Day 3 at Sea - Don't you lecture me, mister!

The ship provides information on ports of call and other topics of interest, in the library and in the showroom which occasionally transforms into a lecture hall. Today, I took a seat in the showroom where an American professor was giving a lecture titled, “Canada, Our Sister to the North.” The promotional literature for the lecture said “Canada is the most similar country to the US in the Western Hemisphere and its closest neighbor, yet many people do not know very much about this important country.”

Had the audience been mostly American (who are the majority of passengers on this Panama Cruise) this might have been a very informative lecture, but the majority of passengers who chose to attend this lecture on Canada, were Canadians.

The professor told the crowd that Americans don't know much about Canada, even though we are their largest trading partner and share a long border. Canadian and American governments, he said, have a good relationship and disputes are settled through amicable means. He pointed out that Canada and the US don't go to war over trade issues. We settle them in courts or through diplomatic means and that is obviously preferred method.

Perhaps this lecturer over-simplified the process when he explained that when a dispute arises, the US Secretary of State phones up the Canadian Foreign Minister; they have a little chat and work it out in everybody's best interest. Still, I got his point.

I suspect most of the audience disagreed with the professor's claim that the Canadian electoral system is far superior to the US method, mainly because “Canadian politicians do not promise the moon just to get elected.” Canadians trust their elected officials, he claimed, because Canadian politicians actually do what they say they are going to do on the campaign trail.

But things started to go awry when he reported that Canada had 9 provinces and 3 territories, the Canadian dollar is worth about 65 cents US and we have a population of 44 million. Canadians are heavy smokers and drinkers, too. (He was not joking)

Needless to say, some Canadians took issue during the question and answer period, pointing out to the speaker the error of his ways. Any notions he may have had about polite Canadians went out the window. A Brit in the audience was offended that the lecturer said Canada was the US's biggest ally in the fight against terrorism, when that title so clearly belonged to Great Britain.

Perhaps the professor got his information from an out-dated internet site. I could have been offended, but in fairness, I probably don't know as much as I think I do about the United States. I feel confident I could list all fifty states, but I doubt I could place all of them correctly on a map.

Ironically, what the professor inadvertently managed to do was prove his own point – that we really do not know much about each other.