Politics & Power Quote by Mike Myers

Canada gets framed here as a punchline built out of absence, and that is exactly Myers' point. Instead of waving the flag, he does the more Canadian thing: he defines national identity as a set of careful negations. "Not English, not American" isn't a geography lesson; it's a cultural nervous system. Canada is imagined as a country that lives beside louder empires, fluent in their languages and media, yet reflexively suspicious of grand self-mythology. Calling it "the mathematic of not being" is Myers sharpening that insecurity into something almost elegant: identity as subtraction, as proof by what you aren't.

The celery line seals the joke because it's both insulting and weirdly affectionate. Celery isn't the meal, it disappears into the soup and still changes the taste. That's Canada as cultural ingredient: the accent you barely notice until it's missing, the sensibility that shows up as politeness, self-deprecation, procedural restraint. Myers, a Canadian who made his career in American comedy, is smuggling autobiography into the bit. He's describing how Canadians are trained to be legible abroad by minimizing themselves, by being adaptable, by letting other people take the spotlight.

The subtext is a critique disguised as comedy: when your identity is built on "not", you risk becoming permanently secondary. But Myers also suggests a quieter power. Celery doesn't need to dominate to register; it just has to be there, altering the whole pot.