And, of course, atop our national to-do list remains the unfinished business of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

Yet among our many blessings is the durability of our democratic institutions. With a federal election in the offing, Canadians will have another chance this fall to shape the country they wish to be.

What we are, by and large, is largely what was promised at Confederation, a place of peace, order and good(-ish) government.

A recent report by the Spectator Index listed Canada as the ninth happiest country in the world. Earlier of its studies said we’re the 15th most generous, the 12th best for travelling alone, the sixth most peaceful, and that we have the third most 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees.

In all, the old saying likely holds, that if we put our problems on a table along with the problems of all other nations, we’d be happy – seeing what others deal with – to take back our own.

Gratitude is a balm for complaint. And a country is a never-ending work in progress.

It defies the laws nature and evolution – despite promises by political mountebanks to make this or that great again – to think that any cultural moment can be frozen in perpetuity.

Coping with change, adapting to new realities and demands is the only way forward.

Back in Lunenburg, Michael Higgins lives in a town so lovely it is a UNESCO World Heritage Centre. But it is so for reasons tender to today’s sensibilities.

It was a British colonial settlement populated with newcomers intended to replace Mi’kmaqs and Acadians.

In Lunenburg Bound, however, much of the loquacious owner’s enthusiasm is given over to the boom in Indigenous literature, in the celebrated recent works of the Star’s Tanya Talaga and Tanya Tagaq.

Then he’s on to the splendid novels of Miriam Toews and her plumbing of the Mennonite soul.

At one of Lunenburg’s top three bookshops, it’s easy to see that, whatever the past, the diversity so rich in Canada is – just as diversity is in nature — the promise of a healthier tomorrow.

So happy birthday, Canada.

Arguably, one of the happiest and top 200 or so countries on the planet.

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