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Is The New York Times accidentally documenting a shift of gravity within Canada, toward its centre? Toronto certainly seems to possess an increasing multicultural assertiveness, an influence within Canada that once seemed less axiomatic. “Toronto the Good,” the avatar of crabby Methodism, lives on mostly in old books; now it’s Toronto the NBA party capital.

Fifty or 60 years ago Montreal and Winnipeg seemed more like possible alternative poles of Canadian cultural power. Both are in precipitous decline, and have abandoned the rivalry. Calgary and Vancouver have hardly stepped up: Vancouver might even have gone backward — Gertrude Stein’s quip about her own Oakland (“There’s no there there”) seems germane.

Drake, who I take to be some kind of genius because his actual music is so flavourless and unassuming, is an interesting figure: He is of Toronto, emphatically non-American, in much the same way that Leonard Cohen was of Montreal. Drake has a mystique, which is worth any amount of talent. But most of the people who make the Times list of Canadians are traditional transplants to Hollywood or New York: typical Canadian celebrities, able to find success in the United States as leading men or singers because there is nothing really offputting or unfamiliar about a Canadian.

This highlights the puzzling absence of a Canadian national genius, a distinct collective personality or set of practical strengths of the kind the Australians or the Scots or the Swiss are understood to have. (The Swiss may be dull, but no one mistakes them for Germans.) This is as true on the intellectual map, I think, as it is in popular culture. We perhaps like to think of ourselves as being Greeks to the Americans’ Romans, detached from their political affrays and ultra-perceptive about their foibles. And our unusual success in the specific field of sketch comedy — performative satire — suggests that there may be something to this.