I didn’t give much thought to Canada for the first 18 years of my life. Many Americans would not see this as a problem – Americans who think of Canada as ‘America’s hat’. But when I found myself in a bar with hundreds of Canadian strangers on my first night at university in Montreal (a city where I could legally go to a bar at 18), I realized that this had been a tremendous oversight.

“Who’s the prime minister of Canada?” someone asked me, when I confessed my American-ness. I had no idea, and it hit me like a hockey puck smashed into an unguarded net: my ignorance of Canada was an awful oversight. For my whole life all of these Canadians had been living in Canada, not wanting to be American, drinking milk from bags.

Perhaps that’s why I was particularly moved by the sympathetic message sent south this week by some lovely northern neighbors: America, they say, you guys are already great. Designed by a Toronto-based creative agency, the video and accompanying social media campaign aims to help Canadians to “make a positive contribution to an election season that has been downright depressing”.

Like an ignored younger sibling reaching out to give a gentle squeeze of the hand to a pompous, bullying older one in a time of sudden vulnerability, it’s a most Canadian acknowledgment of our current predicament. Polite. Sensitive. Cheerful. Gently overlooking the fact that Canada rarely crosses the mind of many Americans unless they’re looking for a way to easily emigrate if national leadership is passed into the hands of a despotic, racist egomaniac by a bonkers electorate.

Americans often speak as if “moving to Canada” to escape the worst of the United States is a decision that can be made casually. We discuss the idea as though we believe that Canada is but a giant, pleasant, snowy backyard that we can wander into when we feel like it.

That’s far from the case, and not just because you do have to complete a rigorous visa application process. As I learned that night so many years ago, many Canadians do live up to their national stereotypes of being friendly cuddlers of panda bears, and people who will apologize with genuine feeling if you step on their foot. But despite 75% of Canadians living 100 miles (or fewer) from our northern border, they’re proud of their distinctly non-American national identity and don’t regard us with particular envy – ever, not only when we’re in dire circumstances.

Is there a note of smugness to the #tellamericaitsgreat campaign? Perhaps just a touch. But I learned from my years in Canada not to hold a grudge. After all, that country, too, is far from perfect – from Vancouver to St John’s, there’s plenty of tussling between right and left over the same issues that cripple our government, from crime to climate change to healthcare.

But the debate is undergirded by a level of stability most Americans can only dream about. There’s a public healthcare system in place. There’s a federal government commitment to work on climate change. And contrary to rumor, Canada has far fewer guns per capita than the US, and far fewer gun-related deaths (one study found that ‘you’re more likely to be shot to death in the US than to die in a car accident in Canada’). In 2009, the inauguration of President Obama made some people speculate that Canadians would no longer be able to look down on their southern neighbors the way they once did.

They shouldn’t have worried. If, indeed, not being American is a defining part of Canadian identity, is there any better time to be Canadian than the autumn of 2016?