Canada is quietly becoming ever more American. I would object to this were it not that Americans are becoming increasingly Canadian, which is gracious of them. So now I am just embarrassed.

We are picking up the habits that smart Americans are discarding. Take gun control. Americans want it. I know this because of American reaction to a column I wrote about the gun murder of 20 children in Newtown, Conn., and in particular the open casket at the private family funeral of one particular victim, the beautiful beloved 6-year-old Noah Pozner.

For the first time in years, almost all my email was kind and encouraging.

This was unsettling. My foreign mail, especially when I write to the left, as they say, usually comes from hairy Fox News-watching gun collectors who call for my execution but not by guns. Nothing less than my halal livestock-style slaughter will satisfy them.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government recently killed the long gun registry set up after the Montreal Massacre of 14 women in 1989. As the Obama administration takes up gun control, I am now reduced to the pathetic request that we restore the thing. Oh, why can’t we be more like the Americans?

Now we, too, have throwback politicians seeking murder charges for women who have late-term abortions. Now we, too, have endless TV reality shows, but without the great American channels like HBO as compensation. The latest delivery of cultural swill is a University of Toronto online Survivor/Big Brother show run by students. They will face “mental and physical challenges” and vote each other off to find a winner.

What is wrong with these students? Has no one told them that university is already a mental and physical challenge that only the best-read, exam-acing intellectual athlete will win? You have to give yourself up to the spirit of the place and let your professors sift the idiocy out of your brain and replace it with quotes from the Iliad. If you have a BA in any subject and haven’t read all of Shakespeare, you need remedial classes.

Americans are now saying the same thing. They are appalled by declining university standards and write mournful screeds about diploma factories rolling out a generation of morons. It’s deliciously bleak. Americans are developing a Calvinistic self-blaming that is positively Canadian. Can we possibly keep up?

It’s more than guns, hillbilly reality shows and dumbed-down universities. Americans are welcoming immigration to the point where some young illegal immigrants are being invited to apply for work permits. Face it, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney would never invite a huge group of foreigners to move in, not unless they worked at 15-per-cent lower wages.

So Canada is at a low point in civil relations with the rest of the world. It is even planting billboards in Hungary warning that Canada rapidly expels failed asylum seekers.

The Star reports that the billboards, aimed at Roma refugees, have caused huge upset in a country where both Roma and Jews face prejudice. Last year the far right in Hungary’s fragile democracy called for lists of Jews to be drawn up. And Canada posts Keep Out signs?

Every day Stephen Harper looks more like a Nevada sheriff than a prime minister. But President Barack Obama looks statesmanlike — and brave on gun control.

On the plus side, Canada has achieved its aim. The billboards make Canadians look horrid, the Slytherin house of the international Hogwarts. Britain, on the other hand, remains the country it always was, self-deprecating to the point of comedy.

Next year EU rules will open British borders to Bulgaria and Romania. Figures — no, not taken from the Daily Mail — say 250,000 workers might arrive by 2019. So the British government is considering a PR campaign saying Britain is a rubbish country where it rains all the time.

Brits have leapt on the idea with great enthusiasm, pointing out the constant flooding, the binge-drinking, vomit in the streets, Prince Charles, the Daily Mail and so on.

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Don’t come here, Brits plead. We’re awful. And, I would cheerfully add, so is Canada. The U.S., though, is getting nicer. This planet’s out of whack.