Of course, there is the Queen too, with her Mona Lisa smile gleaming out from the hallmarked paper. But the monarchy has always been included on Canadian money - a remnant of our colonial past. If she weren't part of the family furniture, Elizabeth II would have been dropped years ago.

Other countries have liberators, scientists, authors, saints, war heroes - outstanding figures from the past who are supposed to represent the nation's greatness. We have the loon on our $20 bill, and William Lyon Mackenzie King on our $50 bill. King, prime minister for 22 years, may have been one of our better leaders (number one out of 20 on a recent ranking) but he is hardly the figure to make Canadian bosoms swell with national pride.

Why are we so hero-poor? At one level, the answers to this question are embedded in the nature of Canada itself. We live in a country that has a weak national culture and strong regional identities. As historian Daniel Francis pointed out in National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History, "In Canada, heroic figures have tended to emerge from the regions or from minority struggles against the status quo. By and large, they are sticks used by one part of the community to beat on another."

Louis Riel is a hero to métis and francophones, and a mad trouble-maker to anglophones. Even national figures are enmeshed in regional rivalries: Pierre Trudeau is the darling of Toronto's Liberal élite and a menace to Quebec nationalists and Alberta oilmen.

The majority of Canadians have only been in the country for two or three generations. Most of the first European arrivals carry far too much baggage. How can we glorify explorers like Jacques Cartier when they treated the First Nations as savages? Or military heroes like Generals Wolfe and Montcalm when they fought each other? Finding common ground for home-grown heroes is a challenge. Countries with homogenous populations and histories stretching back beyond the printed word can pickle their heroes in the sweet vinegar of centuries.

Easy for the Brits to accept Boadicea as a heroine, or for the French to revere the memory of Jeanne d'Arc: the mists of history have obscured Boadicea's murderous reputation and Jeanne d'Arc's psychiatric problems. Any women in Canadian history must stand much more brutal scrutiny, and measure up to 1990s values. So Susanna Moodie, whose Roughing It in the Bush is a vivid and gripping record of nineteenth-century pioneer life, fails as a hero because she expressed the snooty disdain of her class towards Irish immigrants. And Nellie McClung, the Western novelist who in the early years of this century fought for female suffrage, factory safety legislation and women's rights, doesn't cut it for contemporary feminists because she glorified the traditional family.

Most countries choose individuals with larger-than-life qualities to mythologize: extraordinary imagination, against-the-odds bravery, brilliant creativity. There are colourful characters in our collective past who embody such qualities - think of Sir Sandford Fleming, inventor of Standard Time; Dr. Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin; the fighter pilot Billy Bishop. Why aren't they on our money, instead of stuffy old Mackenzie King?

Fleming has never found an enthusiastic biographer, and Banting and Bishop are too damn controversial for Canada. Neither displayed the humility that is the first requisite of Canadian heroism. Prime Minister King, on the other hand, is respected (by those who respect him) for qualities that are seen as quintessentially Canadian - his skill at compromise, his success in keeping the country unified. "He was an unheroic leader," suggests historian Norman Hillmer, "who understood the contradictions of an unheroic country."

So we do heroes badly. Moreover, we do hero worship really badly. The United States has an idol industry for most of the founding fathers, plus a whole military-industrial complex for the Kennedys. British academics and writers churn out books on Churchill (and there is a blossoming Thatcher industry). France has myth-creation factories for both Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. Each of these national heroes has sparked several million feet of film and a gazillion written pages (over 15,000 books on Napoleon and still counting).

It is not only national leaders who are celebrated in these countries: university library shelves groan with mega-bios and unpublished theses on Rockefeller, the American robber-baron; Florence Nightingale, the autocrat Englishwoman who revolutionized nursing; or the French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre. Each of these characters incarnate a trait of which their countries are proud: American industry, British guts, French brains.

But anti-heroes like Mackenzie King don't spark such exuberant hero worship. Most Canadians are more interested in King's weird side - his interest in spiritualism, and his penchant for table-tapping - than in his determination to strengthen Canadian independence, or his intuitive grasp of how to make Canadians feel comfortable. In a fragmented country like Canada, successful leaders embody modest virtues. But biographers looking for titans aren't interested in modest virtues. Cultural consumers only embrace these virtues when they are accompanied by extraordinary athletic prowess (come in, number 99) or teeth-gritting tragedy (Terry Fox).

There have been attempts to establish a pantheon of heroes - iconic reflections of our past and our psyche. In the early years of this century, when we were still suffused with the Victorian assumption that bearded patriarchs made the best heroes, the Toronto publisher George Morang commissioned a series of volumes under the title, Makers of Canada. The "Makers" in this twenty-volume collection, published between 1908 and 1911, were all men, all either French or English-speaking, and almost all involved in public life, as governors, politicians and premiers. There were three fur traders, but no entrepreneurs until the late addition of Sir William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. There was not a single scholar, writer, artist, scientist or athlete.

Mr. Morang's reverential volumes never caught the public imagination. They were out of step with the emerging Canadian sensibility: their view of history was too restricted, and their style too prissy, for a young country hurtling towards a multicultural future.

The qualities that are celebrated in our national life today are collective virtues - the bravery of our peace-keepers, the compassion of all Canadians for Manitoba's flood victims. Our best known artists are the Group of Seven. When writers want to pump some adrenaline into our past or present, they capture groups rather than individuals. Pierre Berton wrote about the whole ruling class of Sir John A.'s day when he penned The Last Spike. Peter Newman has described the raw ambition and acquisitive urges of the business establishment as the twentieth century has unfolded. The heroes of other nations are usually fiercely individualistic - but individualism has never been celebrated in Canada. It is not a useful quality for a loose federation perched on a magnificent and inhospitable landscape - a nation that sees survival as a collective enterprise.