I have long argued that Canadian heroes - the few who have retained that state of grace - share one essential qualification: they're dead.

In our peculiar way, we do not salute living heroes, even when they deserve to be recognised, because that hints of boasting. This country is fuelled by envy and deference, qualities that rank heroism as an emotional extravagance, reserved for Italian tenors and one-album country-and-western singers. If God had meant us to be heroic, he wouldn't have made us Canadians. This is the only country on Earth whose citizens dream of being Clark Kent, instead of Superman.

A good example is our reticence in decorating our military heroes. Ottawa has actually struck three Canadian medals for bravery - our own versions of the Victoria Cross, the Star of Military Valour and the Medal of Military Valour - but none have ever been awarded.

From the beginning of Canadian history, there have been some curious lapses in our choices. The St. Malo navigator Jacques Cartier is credited with Canada's "discovery" and is widely hailed, but John Cabot, that silk-clad Venetian dandy who had immigrated to England, made his landfall in Newfoundland or Cape Breton thirty-seven years earlier. Until the recent celebration of the anniversary of his voyage, the only memorials to Cabot were the scenic trail looping northern Cape Breton Island and the plaque on a drafty baronial tower on Signal Hill in St. John's, better known as the location of Guglielmo Marconi's earliest trans-Atlantic signal transmission. If Cabot had only landed in what is now the United States, he would have been as famous as Christopher Columbus. (The Americans celebrate the befuddled Spanish navigator as their discoverer, though he didn't even sight North America's coastline and mistook Haiti for Japan.)

James Wolfe, Louis Joseph de Montcalm, and Isaac Brock were more appropriate Canadian heroes, since they died in battles without knowing their outcomes. And the memory of our most daring privateer, Antoine Laumet, dit de Lamothe Cadillac, the privateer and fur trader who flourished in Quebec in 1691 and later founded Detroit, is perpetuated only by General Motors.

Except for Louis Riel, few of our deities have personified ideals central to their time and place. Riel belongs to a category all his own. He became Canada's presiding martyr by refusing, at his trial for high treason, to hide behind a justified plea of insanity that might have saved his life. He thus personified the quintessential Canadian hero: a deluded mystic who died prematurely by pretending to be sane.

There is little consensus on the nature of Canadian heroes, except that they're not politicians. We do not even officially mark the anniversary of our founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald, but celebrate instead Queen Victoria's birthday - long after it has been forgotten in the mother country. Of the modern crop, Pierre Trudeau, who most closely approached heroic status when he first boogied onto the scene in 1968, was quickly revealed as having an icicle for a heart, and was defeated in the 1979 election. By who? That's right - Joe Clark.

No Canadian politician ever lost his heroic aura faster than Brian Mulroney - the man with the Gucci smile - who harvested more votes than Trudeau ever did, when he swept the nation in 1984. Within months, Mulroney was being blamed for every sparrow that fell from the sky, while mothers were using his name as a threat to force their kids to eat spinach.

A rare exemption to our anti-hero worship is the Group of Seven, those determined hikers who glorified Ontario cottage country by turning it into derivative landscapes. (Most Canadians assume the Group of Seven was fronted by Tom Thomson - an authentic Canadian hero because he drowned under mysterious circumstances at the height of his fame. In fact, Thomson died three years before the Group was formed.)

Our anti-hero attitude extends even to our entertainers. If they're successful, they can't be real. Anne Murray, one of our first world-class popular singing stars, received this back-handed tribute from the music critic, Larry LeBlanc, in Saturday Night magazine: "If you close your eyes, and think of a naked Anne Murray, parts of her always come up airbrushed."

The most conspicuously heroic Canadian of recent times was, of course, Terry Fox, the young British Columbia athlete, ravaged by cancer, who in 1981 hobbled half-way between our coasts, before he collapsed. His heroic stature was confirmed when he was pinned with the Order of Canada on his deathbed. (What's-his-name, who followed Fox's path while suffering from the same affliction, actually completed his trek, and raised millions for cancer research. But Steve Fonyo lived to tell the tale and has since been relegated to obscurity so chilling that he has felt compelled to commit a series of misdemeanours, just to stay in print.)

Similarly, no one made much fuss about Dr. Norman Bethune until 1939, when he was sanctified in his heroic status by dying from neglecting a cut finger after operating on an infected patient as a member of Mao Tse Tung's Communist forces. (Wayne Gretzky retains his heroic stature only because he saw what was coming, and left the country.)

At another level, Canadians did not celebrate Ambassador Ken Taylor's heroism in smuggling six US diplomats out of the Ayatollah's reach during the American-Persian confrontation. Ottawa exacted revenge on the unconventional diplomat, who broke the rules by taking a risk on behalf of freedom, by refusing to offer him an appropriately senior posting following his stint as Consul-General in New York, thus forcing his resignation.

One of the few Canadians who took advantage of how shabbily we treat our living heroes was Marshall McLuhan, who richly earned iconic status. He maintained his poise amid the customary slaughter dished out to our most thoughtful writers by the butchers who pass for book reviewers in these frosty latitudes (while becoming the dahling of New York's literati). But it didn't bother him.

"I experience a great deal of liberty here in Canada," McLuhan once told me. "I wouldn't get that in the States, because I'm taken quite seriously there. The fact that Canadians don't take me seriously is a huge advantage. It makes me a free man."

McLuhan was wise enough to realize that being a hero in Canada is an existential state with a shorter shelf life than boysenberry yogurt. We have little talent for excess and no patience with anyone who believes that heroism is worth achieving, except perhaps by inadvertence. There is a vague but valid link between our heroes and our weather, which remains Canada's most essential reality. Our frigid climate reflects the selectivity of how we pick our heroes: many are cold, but few are frozen.