This article in The Tyee from the other day outlines some great Canadians as "exemplars of what this country is -- and could be."

Here is a short bit about the chosen ones. Go to the Tyee website (above) for the full story.

1) SHEILA WATT-CLOUTIER was born in Kuujjuaq, in northern Quebec, in 1953. Her mother was Inuit, her absentee father was a white RCMP officer, and she spent the first decade of her life on "the land" -- living in tents and travelling by dogsled. Today, Watt-Cloutier is one of Canada's most internationally influential politicians, having been elected president of the Canadian section of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in 1995 and chair of the entire Inuit Circumpolar Conference in 2002. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference is an international organization that draws the Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia together into a unified political force.

2)DAVID THOMAS is a journalist, author and technology entrepreneur from Montreal. A decade ago, he moved to the small town of Fernie, British Columbia, to escape the crowds and hassles of big-city life -- only to discover that his new home was subject to some of the same problems and issues he was trying to flee.

3)MONIA MAZIGH was born in Tunisia and came to Canada in 1991 to study. At McGill University she met Maher Arar, her future husband, who was born in Syria and had moved to Canada with his family at the age of seventeen. Mazigh and Arar have both been Canadians for more than a decade, though Arar is also still a Syrian national -- but only because that country refuses to accept renunciations of nationality.Arar has experienced some of the very worst treatment that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another. His horrors began on Sept. 26, 2002, when he was detained at New York's JFK Airport while returning to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia. After 12 days of questioning, he was deported to Jordan and then Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year without charge.

Were it not for Mazigh's determined efforts, her husband might still be in that tiny Syrian cell, or more likely, dead. I vividly remember hearing Mazigh being interviewed by Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC Radio's The Current on Feb. 12, 2003. By then, Arar had been imprisoned in Syria for 132 days. Mazigh's clearly articulated and controlled passion moved me, and, as it turned out, tens of thousands of other Canadians.

4) DOUGLAS ROCHE is a former member of Parliament from Edmonton who served as the Progressive Conservative Party's critic for external affairs during the late 1970s. In 1984, he was chosen by Brian Mulroney to be Canada's ambassador for disarmament to the United Nations. There, Roche served as chair of the Disarmament Commission, a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly that meets in New York City each spring. In 1998, Jean Chrétien appointed Roche to the Senate, where he chose to sit as an independent.

Roche has spent a lifetime campaigning to eliminate nuclear weapons, which he describes as "the paramount moral and legal problem of our time." It's a daunting task, since there are more than 20,000 nuclear weapons still in existence, enough to destroy life on Earth several times over. The weapons are held by a total of nine countries, five of which have ratified the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), three of which -- India, Pakistan and Israel -- have not, and one -- North Korea -- that ratified and then renounced the treaty. Of particular concern today is the possibility that a few nuclear weapons might fall into terrorist hands.

5)MATTHEW GILLARD. Many of my students at the University of British Columbia are also global citizens. They're remarkably international: roughly one in four was born outside Canada, and nearly everyone has at least one parent who was an immigrant. They're also incredibly engaged. Every fall, I teach a course called the Change the World Seminar, in which students strategically seek to influence public policy. Remarkably, more than half of them succeed in some discernible way. My most memorable experience from the seminar came courtesy of a young man from Newfoundland named Matthew Gillard. In September 2004, Gillard decided to investigate what the government of Canada was doing to stop the many rapes, killings and displacements that were -- and still are -- taking place in Darfur. In the course of his research, he came across a short report in the Kelowna Daily Courier about a federal cabinet meeting that had recently taken place there. According to the report, Paul Martin's Liberals were just days away from committing $20 million to the African Union (AU) peacekeeping mission in Darfur. But Matt was unable to find any further news reports on the $20 million, so he took it upon himself to track the money down.

I showed him how to use the government of Canada online telephone book, and I lent him my telephone. He proceeded to call every civil servant in Ottawa who might conceivably have known about the $20 million. Most knew nothing; others were evasive; some clearly did not believe that Matt was just a student working on a class project. Finally, after dozens of calls, Matt turned to me and said: "I have to phone Africa. Someone just told me that the Canadian High Commission in Addis Ababa might be able to help. Apparently they're responsible for Canadian interests in Sudan."

What do you think? Do these people exemplify what Canada is/should be?