The World Needs More Canada

Or so announced the big sign in the bookshop. Given that, in terms of land-mass, Canada is the second largest country on the planet, I found the claim unpersuasive. However, on inspection they seemed to have personalities more than acrage in mind, as the backdrop was made up of the names of hundreds of famous Canadians. At least, I assume they are all Canadians. Otherwise it is was just a rather puzzling list of famous people.
Of course everyone knows about Glenn Gould and Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies. But David Cronenberg? Saul Bellow? Oscar Peterson? My own prejudices will be obvious, as the list doubtless also contained the names of renowned geologists, software designers, Nobel-winning Economists and the like, none of which I would have recognised or remembered. But it was a long and impressive list for a "new" country (and I didn't notice mant Inuit-looking names up there) of only thirty million people. Incidentally, of these 30m, 10m live in the Greater Toronto Area. This means fully a third of the nation is using the same two off-licences.
One thing I found strange was that the names were printed in fonts of varying sizes, whether to reflect the (supposed) magnitude of their fame and achievements, or as a purely aesthetic exercise, I couldn't say. In any case, I was quite put out to see the wonderful Alice Munro in only the second-biggest font (anyone unfamiliar with her work should acquaint themselves with it as a matter of urgency) and thought of engaging the bookseller in an Atwood v. Munro face-off. On balance I decided he would be more likely to respond to critical remarks from people actually buying something, which I wasn't: books are expensive here, ironically for a nation of loggers. And of writers, indeed.