Iwas surprised to receive an email chain letter which reported that someone in Pakistan had advertised in a newspaper a reward to anyone who killed a Canadian - any Canadian.

Canadians are not generally the targets of hatred, so I did a bit of research and discovered the piece was written by Peter Ferrara, a professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Virginia, and first published in the National Review right after 9/11. The reward he claims to have read about was for killing an American, which I find more believable. Internet urban legends never die; they just morph and morph. Still the email raised an intriguing question. How would an assassin know a Canadian when they found one?

If you just pulled out your pistol and shot the nearest one, you might hit an American draft dodger. I was among some 150,000 who immigrated to Canada during the war in Vietnam. Or your victim might be one of the waves of Vietnamese who immigrated here or were adopted as babes after war's end.

The Pakistani who offered the reward might wind up paying for the death of a fellow Muslim, since there are more of them in Canada than Afghanistan. But the shooting might just as likely leave the world with one less Christian, or Jew, or Buddhist, or Agnostic, or Atheist.

Through WWII the Canadian immigration department was run by an 'old boy's' club bent on keeping the blood lines pure. There was a time when our assassin would pretty likely hit a Frenchman or Brit, but those days are over. Now even in this remote country town of Shelburne my neighbours include Indians, Chinese, Jamaicans, Africans, Koreans, and Tamil, like the family running the variety store next door who came here to escape the violence in Sri Lanka.

If our dissident wanted to get more technically precise, he'd settle his sights on a Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwa, or other First Nations folk who were here the longest.

The Two Thousand Year Old Man (Mel Brooks in a comedy routine with Carl Reiner) was asked if they had national anthems back then. "Yes," he emphatically replied.

"Do you remember it?"

"Of course," he said. "It's not something you forget in a minute."

He went on to sing: Let 'em all go to hell,

Except Cave 76

The danger in identifying one's nationality is that in doing so one often automatically identifies one's enemies. As the world gets smaller it becomes more and more obvious to me at least that these distinctions of culture are ones we create; and we can un-create the fear that accompanies them.Canada prides itself on the mythos that we are a 'mozaic' of cultures rather than the 'melting pot' to the south.

The system only works as long as we celebrate and not denigrate the distinctions. eric@ericnagler.com