As used by most Panamanians, "norteamericanos" is terribly imprecise. The three countries that comprise North America are each very different, and within them they include many different ethnic and cultural groups, but due to the influences of American popular culture, a long association with only a few US subcultures (the Zonians, the Armed Forces, that part of the Afro-Antillean diaspora that emigrated but maintains its ties to Panama), and the corporate homogeneity exemplified by McDonald's, the distinct identities, histories and cultures of the United States and Canada are not all that well understood here.

So, are Canadians just like Americans, except they don't invade Panama or its neighbors?

Canadians and Americans have a lot in common --- generally free societies, they both have English-speaking majorities and the world's longest unprotected border. However, they got to where they are by very different routes.

The British colonies that broke away to become the United States were in many cases Protestant England's dumping ground for religious dissidents --- Puritans and factions breaking away therefrom in New England, Catholics in Maryland, Quakers and other religious pacifists in Pennsylvania, outcast criminal elements in Georgia and so on. Meanwhile, the initial European colonization of Canada was under the auspices of an ossified French monarchy that was serious about Catholicism being its official religion and banned Protestants among the colonial settlers.

In a few decades of idiocy under a king slowly going mad, the British Parliament got the bright idea that it could use its American colonies as an imperial cash cow, yet at the same time retard the prospects for that policy's success by Navigation Acts that strictly limited the colonies' industry, commerce and territorial growth. When the usual Masonic connections for back channel communications that kept such foolishness in check broke down, the Americans revolted. The shooting had already started, and George Washington was already at the head of a growing army in the field, when the Americans declared independence on July 4, 1776.

But not all of them. In the embellished history of the American Revolution that's taught in most US schools, they don't emphasize the fact that what happened was in large part a vicious civil war between about one-third of society that was dead set on independence --- sometimes because that was the only alternative to absolute financial ruin --- another third or so of the population loyal to the British, with a large wavering group in the middle and the redcoats being but one of the several foreign forces arrayed on either side. The loyalists who took up arms along with the British and German mercenaries lost to the rebel forces, their French allies and a collection of international volunteers that included a Pole, one Thaddeus Kosciusko, who founded the US Army Corps of Engineers that would go on to play such an important role in Panama.

And the loyalists? Some were suffered to stay, but the massive loyalist emigration to the north was by and large the population base for the foundation of English Canada.

Thus began the most pervasive and enduring division in Canadian life, that between its francophone and anglophone societies. Meanwhile to the south, the revolution wrought in the name of freedom fell short of that concept, with the continuation of African slavery. Eighty-some years later, the slavery issue would be resolved in a bloody civil war that cost more than 600,000 lives and yet still didn't erase the racial divide, which remains the most pervasive and enduring division in US life.

Canada, as part of the British Empire, dealt with the slavery issue long before that and the most desperate, daring and ambitious US slaves followed the North Star and conductors such as the legendary Harriet Tubman to the land of freedom to the north. About the time that the United States was tearing itself apart in the Civil War, Canada was peacefully moving toward self-rule as a dominion under the British crown, which was made official on Dominion Day, July 1, 1867.

Sometimes as partners, sometimes as competitors, but generally as neighbors comfortable with one another, the United States and Canada spread westward and, despite the occasional policy difference along the way, ended up on the same sides in the major conflicts of the turbulent 20th century.

And so it came to pass that on July 1, members of the Canadian Association and friends gathered in San Francisco to celebrate Canada Day, and two days later at the US ambassador's residence Americans and friends gathered on the eve of US Independence Day. A careful listener would notice the different accents and understand that not all North Americans are the same. But in each case, these were gatherings of free peoples to count their blessings and observe the milestones on their different roads to civilization.