Canada is increasingly becoming unrecognizable to me. I don’t mean this just in an abstract sense, when I read about shameful things like Ottawa trying to avoid taking in refugees who have been tortured, because they require extra medical care. Foreigners who wake up weeping, with bone chips floating around their spinal cords, I hear you, Stephen Harper, these people are costly.

No, I mean Canada is literally foreign. Alert reader Martin Foster had emailed me about the details of our new passport, and I hadn’t believed him. But he is right.

The passport, good for 10 years and packed with security features so novel they’ll be useless by 2015, is now being mailed out. But which nation issued it? It is a distant country of which I know little. It is Harperlandia.

The passport contains 22 visual watermarks portraying the essence, the uniqueness of Harperlandia. There are, by my count, 98 images of males, six of females. There are various landscapes, from the north, the Prairies and Newfoundland, plus Niagara Falls. There are football players and hockey players, a warship, three war memorials, the RCMP and a soldier. But there is no image of Toronto or Vancouver and no aboriginal Canadian. Apparently only one Canadian verging on our lifetime (Terry Fox) has ever distinguished himself.

According to the government, we are white guys, rural, warlike and sporty, but not literate. Our landscapes are bleak, our buildings drab, our statuary undistinguished. These are not propellant images. In most, we are either stationary or plodding.

Worse, not a single Canadian face is shown cracking a smile.

All the historical maps are blank, apparently sans Inuit or First Nations, and there are no modern maps including the border cities we favour. All the images of places where people arrived in Harperland, ready to be enthralled by this mighty terrain, are empty platforms, rocky outcroppings and featureless plains.

The late W.G. Sebald wrote about landscapes like this. A more depressing writer you could not find. I do love my Sebald but I could not live in the land he walks, and I believe I do not. My passport disputes this.

This morbid passport shoots out one message: what does anyone see in us? We are boring. Also we won’t be around long. With 16 men to every woman, our birth rate is deep in the negatives, which is understandable. I wouldn’t sleep with a Harperlandian. We are inert, actively and aggressively not ert.

This is Harper’s Canada, including the brutal and the banal, excluding the urban, the wild and the free. It is Canada put through Dull-Check,™ a policeman I fight daily.

Atwood has described this olden Canada: “a world of frozen corpses, dead gophers, snow, dead children, and the ever-present feeling of menace, not from an enemy set over against you but from everything surrounding you.”

Much of our literature, she says, “is a diagram of what is not desired.” She wrote this in 1972, 40 years before Harper produced a passport exemplifying precisely this.

My modern Canadian passport would look very different, as would yours. It would be as red as our flag, instead of metallic navy. It would include Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal, the cities I and most Canadians happily live in. It would be emotionally expressive.

Oh, we have so many images that sing out “Canada:” the Toronto skyline, the ROM, Sarah Polley in Avonlea, Alice Munro, Louis Riel, a Lawren Harris iceberg, a Joyce Wieland, the CBC logo, Vancouver’s harbour lights, Mount Royal, a Canada Goose parka, Banting, Gretzky, Roots boots, a backyard ice rink/perfectly shovelled driveway, a flock of glass condo towers, a wild snowboarder, Alligator Pie, a traffic jam, a Bloody Caesar, a lacerated refugee getting a flu shot.

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I’d choose the Arrivals level at Pearson’s Terminal 1. I have spent so many hours in that huge hall, finding the carousel, waiting for bags, getting ankled by the carts we pay for (nice touch), bickering, loudly losing heart in a passive-aggressive way to which staff remain indifferent. Oh what terrible times have I endured in that hellishly familiar room, all the while thinking, “And yet I am so very happy to be home.”