Tony and Julia want to turn this country into an insular, isolated, boat-rejecting, immigration-slashing, closed-bordered, closed-minded bastion of fortified rackkoffff-ness, and I think that's an excellent thing. I'm fully behind them, if only to keep out the Canadians. I've got no problem with refugees coming here from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kiwistan, but something must be done to curb the influx of Canadastanis flowing across our borders like thick insidious maple syrup smothering a helpless little butterball atop a compassionate pancake short-stack.

Those Canadians, they're desperate to come here: they look at Australia and go, "Oooo, it's so much like home, same laidback lifestyle, same laconic humour, same geo-political global insignificance. I want to live there, eh." But when they get here they make no effort to assimilate like other refugees or immerse themselves into Australian society. You see them walking our city streets in small intimidating Caribou-packs, offending everyone with their culturally insensitive Roots-brand Beaver-Canoe sweatshirts. You see them working out in our suburban gymnasiums, flashing their repulsively overdeveloped moose-pecs and humming Nickelback songs, unironically. You see them in our pancake eateries, throwing forks across the table in disgust and whining to waitresses: "The amberness of this maple syrup does not appear to be of an acceptable 60.5-74.9 per cent translucency! If I'm not very much mistaken, this is mock-maple! Bring me genuine syrup IMMEDIATELY in a proper glass bottle with an impractically tiny handle for my impossibly brawny Canadian fingers!"

Yeah, yeah, here we go, all the lefties and greenies and Julian Burnside-ees are going to start prattling about how we should accept asylum-seekers of EVERY nationality, that Canadians have fled lives of great hardship, suffering under the French-Canadian fundamentalists who brutally force supermarkets to have both English and French labelling on all their merchandise, so "ketchup" is also called "ketchuppe". That Canadians have escaped the barbaric Cirque du Soleil regime which indoctrinates innocent young people and teaches them to balance on tightropes with their teeth while dressed as freaky ladyboy whore-clowns - it's so degrading.

But how are we supposed to be compassionate when newly arrived Canadians insist on keeping their ethnic culture, language, religion? When they refuse to stop speaking in their native accents. They sound like a drunken American chewing on a Mintie that's caught in the back of their retainer.

Deport the Canadians, send them back to T'rono, and before you call me a hateful anti-Canuckist, let me confess that I'm a Canadian refugee! My family fled in the early '70s, crossed the seas on a decrepit old ship - that is, a Qantas airship with no movies and my window-shutter wouldn't go all the way down. I was smuggled into Australia under my father's lumberjack jacket, hidden in his burly Canadian chest hair, my sister hidden in my mother's. We began a new life of freedom here, but my parents refused to abandon their Canadianness, made me walk to school in snow-shoes, huge tennis-racket-shaped ones tied to each foot. They wouldn't let me sing the Australian national anthem, it always had to be the Canadian anthem, Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind. So now as an adult, even though I love this country deeply, I can only speak fluent Canadian, only drink Canadian Club whiskey, only rock out to head-bangin' Canadian acts like Shania Twain and the Crash Test Dummies.

So Tony and Julia are right: immigration numbers should be slashed, but let the genuine refugees in and just stop the Canadians. And Tony and Julia, whichever of you vows to send me off to a detention centre in Nauru or East Timor - me and the only other Canadian-Australian that comes to mind, crime-writing supermodel Tara Moss, detained in a tiny isolation cell with one set of clothes and a single-bed mattress - whoever can promise that, you shall have my vote.

Danny Katz's column appears in The Age's MelbourneLife on Thursdays.