text: Kingwell cautions against a facile, self-satisfied assumption regarding Canada’s virtue.  There’s a broader context.
  
  We’re shaped by uncommon conditions.  We rarely face hostile forces at our borders but live in the shadow of the US and earlier the UK.  We have no dominant cultural group but have had at least two such groups claiming the right to pre-eminence or autonomy during our history.  We are a geographically dispersed society with an urban-rural divide. Etc.
  
   Consequently, domestic attitudes have swung between two two poles over time but often strike an equitable middle balance.  One is the exceptionalism of the article.  
  
  The other is a depressed reactionary exclusionary miasma that occasionally dominates a region or cultural group and sometimes Canada as a whole. Think of the Orange Order and its Catholic counterparts during the 19th and early 20th century (and also more recent examples).  Isn’t this analogous to the factors that birthed the Trump Presidency?