If America looms across the world, then it broods over Canada. To be a peacetime neighbour of America is to win a lottery in destiny's stakes. To be a neighbour when America has been wounded in war, is a test of nerve. The brooding has become a glower ever since Canada wafted out of Washington's familiar embrace and refused to send troops to help America's occupation of Iraq. The Bush administration has been either sulking or fretting ever since. Geography makes no difference to America's inability to appreciate that others may have genuine reasons for their stance. Washington is as clueless about Ottawa as it is about Timbuktoo. Canada's Iraq policy is a manifestation of not what America has become as about what Canada has become. This nation is reinventing itself, once again, as a warm experiment in multi-culturalism, or even multinationalism, as it becomes home to a hundred different displaced communities from around the globe. It is a slow fusion perhaps, but the Canadian government is determined to represent the ethnic rainbow that now nestles among the branches of the national maple. Its Iraq policy is driven by an internal dynamic. But here also lies an extraordinary opportunity, for Canada can become the bridge between Washington and the world that Washington has lost through haste, ignorance and overreach.

IRAQ hovers over every conversation like Banquo's ghost; and sprawled across the table is the subject of Islam in all its dimensions. Larger issues are being worked through the collective consciousness, conscientiously. In the short run, Canada is relieved that its soldiers are not on the daily roll call of death that permeates the news from Iraq. There is relief but no joy, for time will make the 2,000 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan vulnerable. Ottawa watches with perplexed anxiety as a traditional friend and neighbour is trapped by misconceptions, and the best and brightest in Washington take recourse to inanity as policy begins to crumble. On more than one occasion I hear a reference to Colin Powell's "evidence" for the return of normalcy to Iraq:

he claimed that Parent-Teacher Associations were opening up in schools in Baghdad! Even more outlandish is the fact that some eight billion dollars, or nearly one third of the reconstruction budget that George Bush seeks for Iraq, is slotted to be spent on Iraq's postal service. I wonder who thought up the formula: if you keep the Iraqis busy writing letters they won't shoot. One of Frank Sinatra's most famous songs was 'My way'. George Bush has a remix version titled, "My way -- or take the highway".

IT might seem odd that I am going to send you the latest about Afghanistan from Montreal, but this is September, the hunting season when the world's leaders choose the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly to make their fixed trip to the United States. President Pervez Musharraf happened to be in Ottawa this week, and happy to offer information and advice to the media. So here is the news, as delivered by Pakistan's Supremo:

Osama bin Laden is alive, well and taking long walks in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Yes, indeed. I am reasonably sure." How? Ahem... "technical means... we were getting close, we knew he was in the mountains. Either across or on our side. But he was in the mountains..." Who is 'we'? The ISI and the CIA, of course. So who is to blame for the fact that Osama is still as free as a bird. "Let it be clear to everyone: if I am to blame, if ISI is to blame, then the CIA is equally to blame... The border is porous, there is no doubt about it." So how did the doubts disappear? Intercepts of Al-Qaeda communications. By the way, free-as-a-bird Osama could have dropped in to visit Rawalpindi as well: "It's a possibility. I won't rule it out." And how about the Taliban? How were they doing in the war they had restarted against the United States? "They are far better than any other soldiers in the world. If you go into the mountains they will beat you. They will be faster. They know the routes.

They are more hardy." So what next? Send more troops, pals, or friend Hamid Karzai is toast while America gets burnt. Send the extra soldiers where? To the provinces, where the warlords still rule, and will turn to whichever side they find is winning the war.

And now to some domestic news. President Pervez is a firm believer in democracy, particularly of the sustained kind, and even more particularly if it empowers women. So when will he get out of the way of democracy? "The moment I see democracy stabilised and functioning I will remove my uniform." When could that happy day come? A few months? Chuckle. "No, not months. More than months." He also has "a system in place" to make sure that Islamic extremists never come to power, particularly through democracy.

None of this will ever be denied, but just in case: the quotes are from the interview and reports published in The Globe and Mail of Friday 26 September.

AND here is the news not delivered by President Musharraf. Canada is well-known for being a cold country, but it got positively frigid with President Musharraf. Apart from denying the Pakistan leader a visa it did what it could to be cool. No question of state honours and all that no flags, no black-tie dinner at Rideau Hall, just a private meal with Prime Minister Jean Chretian. The President's request to visit Toronto, which has the largest population of Pakistani-Canadians, was turned down. Reason? Security. Interesting. The Canadians clearly believe that President Musharraf needs to be protected from Pakistanis.

There were suppressed giggles at the rather desperate manner in which a programme was sought to be manufactured for the President's visit. He even wanted to appear before a parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and trade, and drop in on a conference on Canada and Islam in the 21st Century. President Musharraf gets a much warmer reception south of the snow-line, in America. Which internal hurricane drove him north?

There was much innovative imagery during the speeches at the conference in Montreal. One Canadian senator took out white, brown and black doughnuts from a bag, placed them on top of one another and declared that this was the harmony that made Canada unique. A feisty Thai-Muslim politician then took out three plastic forks and offered his own Theory of Three Forks to describe the world. This was the cutlery he had got on the airline coming to Canada, he declaimed, while the rest of the passengers got steel knives and forks. Why? Because he had asked for a Muslim meal. Muslim-mealwallahs could only be trusted with plastic; steel would be injurious to everyone else's health. Fortunately, there was a sensible interlocutor to break the deadly impasse between the Three Doughnuts and the Three Forks. He intervened to point out that since Air Canada was virtually broke, it provided no meals at all, so Canada was safe from all charges of bias.

Since every conference has to have an airline joke, here is the chestnut I heard in the lift. Passenger to airline ticket officer: "Could you please book me to Hawaii and my baggage to Singapore?" Ticket officer: "No, sir, we can't do that." Passenger: "Why not? You did it last year."

All right, maybe that is not the best joke of the year, but take it from me: any joke has its uses during an East-West conference on Islam.

CANADIANS are proud to tell you that they discovered the telephone, cellphone and personal computer. What they keep a closely guarded secret is the fact that no Canadian ever made money out of these inventions. Canadians got the idea and Americans made the money. On 25 September 1973 Mers Kutt, from Toronto, showed the world his invention, a typewriter-sized microcomputer called MCM-70 with between two and eight kilobytes of random memory and 14 kilobytes of read-only memory. This was arguably the world's first PC, and appeared four years before Apple bit into the game. But Kutt was squeezed out of his own company when he sought money to expand. He therefore is left with the memories while Bill Gates is left with the money. Another Canadian now says he has produced a cure for the common cold, and suggests you take nine tablets on the first day and six on the second if you see a cold coming. My first reaction is that this was probably just enough Vitamin C to stop any mild sniff. But the makers say that their secret formula is based on ginseng. If ginseng can cure impotence in Korea there is no reason why it can't cure the common cold in Canada.

Did you know that Queen Victoria's left hand was significantly shorter than her right one, and a bit withered as well? Neither did I, until I visited the splendidly colonial buildings that house the Parliament of Canada beside the Rideau river. No wonder all the great sculptors of the Empire concentrated on her nose, generally tilted about twenty degrees to the north.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.