I didn't intend to do that. I realize you also have a growing right-wing that is on the same page as ours, and there are other excesses, along with insane housing issues.

I also feel like the ire of the world is not as strongly directed at you. We have decadea of negative stereotypes. It comes from being "in your face" for so long and having such outsize influence in the world.

I remember encountering several negative ideas during my term abroad in Europe during college and was very careful to avoid reinforcing any of them.

Yeah, i know. See my other reply from moments ago. I've never heard the term "ugly Canadian" or railing against their imperialist culture abroad. I've seen some latent sense of superiority over them (especially wrt frankophones) but not outright hatred. They aren't treated like a threat, from my limited experience, and that was before our government went Fascist.

It's an old tactic used by American travellers, put a Canadian flag cap or patch on the bag and present themselves as Canadian to avoid the negative stereotypes, I've personally talked to more than one American doing this in my life and read about it more often online too. I guess it's only gonna get more popular.

I'll pick them up in the tax-free section of the airport! :)

Mi vida, llevo 30 años viviendo en esta frontera, 0% falsa la historia; pasa todo el día en todas partes.

Both. Sure, the actual exchange might be made-up. The problem is that it's entirely plausible it is real. I've seen this kind of exchange happen on video (which of course could also be made up). It's common for television shows to do stories on what the "person on the street" knows about some topic. For local news stories, it's usually to showcase how poorly educated "the youths" are today.

Periodically a reporter will go to a public place and showcase how people answer questions that arguably should be fairly easy to answer with an elementary school education or if they check in with some news source regularly and actually understand the topic. The worst ones are where they are "confidently incorrect".

Jimmy Kimmel does this regularly for laughs. I've seen several examples going back decades from various local news programs. In all cases, I'm confident they are showing the 10% of interviewees that were the most clueless, and not showing the other 90%. Still, the level of cluelessness on the ones they do show is often truly frightening.