John Ivison: Canadians celebrate a Scotland long past TODAY sees Scotland Week in the US and Canada draw to a close. The Scotsman has partnered with Canada's National Post to bring you a Scot living in Canada's perspective on the Scottish Government's annual trade mission. John Ivison is a national columnist for the National Post based in Ottawa. Our own Erikka Askeland, a Canadian living in Scotland, is a guest writer in this weekend's National Post. Today sees Scotland Week in the US and Canada draw to a close. Guest writer John Ivison is a national columnist for the National Post based in Ottawa. Her column can also be read online at www.scotsman.com My FATHER was an educated man, but not what you would call cultivated. He loved his family, his dog, meat and potatoes and football, usually in that order. He also loved Canada. I recall him saying in his speech at my wedding how comfortable he felt in the country that's been home to me for since I left The Scotsman 14 years ago. It's small wonder he felt at home. The people he met in small-town Ontario were just like the people he knew in Dumfries, small-town Scotland. Five million Canadians lay claim to Scottish ancestry and the author Ken McGoogan was being only slightly preposterous when he wrote a book called How the Scots Invented Canada. Scotland's sons and daughters have left fingerprints all over this country. I'm writing this on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, in the shadow of a statue of Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A Macdonald, born in Glasgow in 1815. Of 22 Canadian prime ministers, 13 can claim Scottish heritage; more than half of the 36 Fathers of Confederation were Scottish Canadians, and Scots including George Simpson (of the Hudson Bay Company) and Donald Smith (Canadian Pacific Railway) ran the biggest companies and the banks. It may be a stretch for today's Canadians to claim Scottish heritage, generations after a distant ancestor departed the Auld Sod. But blood runs deep. The Canadian psyche bears remarkable similarities to the traits many Scots see in themselves: a lack of pretension or concern about class distinctions; an inferiority complex inspired by living next to a larger, richer neighbour; a fatalism born from formative years hacking out an existence from a harsh environment. Many Canadians would recognise themselves in Alastair Reid's shrewd snapshot of the Caledonian character in his poem, Scotland. The narrator is walking into town on a beautiful day when he meets the woman from the fish shop: "What a day it is!" cried I, like a sunstruck madman. And what did she have to say for it? Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves as she spoke with their ancient misery: We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it! For Scots and their Canadian cousins both, nothing good can last forever. But if Canadians have an innate understanding of, and affinity with, the Scots, they know next to nothing about 21st century Scotland. The waves of immigration that swept generations of ambitious Scots on to these shores crested in the 1960s. While 15 per cent of Canadians may claim Scots ancestry, they see themselves as the progeny of Walter Scott, not Alex Salmond. Castles, whisky, tartan, shortbread, Burns and golf loom large in any conversation with a Scots Canadian. This is little surprise since it is the image of itself Scotland markets abroad. Tartan Day and Scotland Week may be as authentic as the Jacobite shirts you see at weddings these days, but they do present a more hip, optimistic and vibrant Scottish face to the world. Scotland still has its challenges, but in my recent visits I've felt a sense of possibility about the future that may or may not have something to do with the drive for independence by the nationalist Scottish Government. My own feeling is that while in certain circumstances independence may be desirable, it is not necessary - and does not justify the ugly emotions that would be unleashed by renewed constitutional tinkering. Yet there is no denying the new sense of dynamism that threatens to create a Scotland that neither my father, nor most Canadians, would recognise. You used to know exactly where you stood with Scottish soccer teams, restaurants, politicians, buses and trains - they would always let you down. Now the Scots are ruled by a government so relentlessly upbeat, it promotes Arbroath Smokies as haute cuisine. Canadians may soon stand alone among the league of nations as an outpost of realism, governed by the knowledge that if things happen to turn out right, they'll pay for it later. jivison@nationalpost.com