Perhaps there is something to what they say when they want to poke fun at Canada.
"Go for bronze!"
Certainly last night on the CBC's broadcast of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister it was the third-place finisher who had the only ear-catching thing to say.
What the next generation of leaders needs to be aiming for, said Kevin Royal, a recent business graduate of the University of Waterloo, is "A Canada that is amazing."
It sure isn't at the moment.
At a time when people all over the world are calling up YouTube to listen to presidential hopeful Barack Obama deliver this week's equivalent of the Gettysburg Address - or dance to the Black Eyed Peas' brilliant take on his "Yes, We Can" speech - the CBC turned to YouTube to find the Canadian equivalent of tomorrow's inspirational leader.
They say they got 250,000 hits - but after watching Canada's Next Great Prime Minister you'd have to conclude no home runs.
Asked to bring along with them "One Great Idea" to launch the program, the four well-educated and accomplished finalists showed up with ideas so lame it seemed, at times, that the three former prime ministers and the one premier doing the interviewing were embarrassed for the three young men and one young woman standing nervously on stage.
A quarter-million hits and someone at CBC thinks one of the four best new ideas offered up is looking for a free-trade agreement with ... India?
Nothing against India, but surely ...
So uninspiring were the four Great Ideas offered up that former prime minister John Turner could, at one point, only shrug, shake his head and comment that "Young people today don't have the idealism" that his generation had when he headed for Ottawa in the 1960s.
Nor, it appears, any of the energizing idealism of a young man hoping to reach Washington in 2008.
What was most interesting watching last evening's program was how good the former prime ministers looked in comparison to the young hopefuls. Paul Martin came across as endearing and funny. Kim Campbell was the sharpest mind on the stage. Turner had the most passionate voice.
Such a strange country, where the people start liking its leaders only after first putting the boots to them.
Also on hand was Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams, who surprised with a charming self-deprecation - at one point even poking fun at his own hair.
The four experienced leaders wasted little time in shooting down the four "One Great Ideas."
Saskatoon's Alika Lafontaine, a Métis physician, suggested a parallel Parliament for aboriginals, an idea that even Martin, the guardian of the aboriginal-friendly Kelowna Accord, found rather flabbergasting. Two Parliaments filled with irreconcilable factions - even within parties - is more than C-PAC could carry and the country could bear.
London's Pam Hrick, easily the most sophisticated of the four finalists, offered her Great Idea for "universal, affordable and quality post-secondary education." It sounds nice, and has sounded nice the many, many times it has been heard. It was left to Turner to politely raise the fundamental question of "accountability."
Royal, the business grad from Waterloo, pushed for tax cuts and incentives to kick start the knowledge economy, which Campbell quickly dismissed as an old idea and not such a great one - one that had, in fact, been tried and turned into a "boondoggle" by a government in which Turner had served.
As for the idea of free-trade agreements with such "strategically chosen countries" as India, Calgary lawyer Rahim Moloo was spared a fourth round of questioning when the audience ushered him off the stage with a dismal two-per-cent endorsement.
The voting, in fact, was by far the most intriguing part of the evening, with Lafontaine and Hrick bouncing about wildly from vote to vote until, finally, Lafontaine seemed to be named winner of the $50,000 prize almost by default.
Compas, the polling company, found voters "more volatile" and "fickle" than ever before - perhaps representative of the country at large and the current state of real, rather than pretend, politics.
This is a tough country to please. Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, after all, begs the question - when was the Last Great Prime Minister?
Certainly there are none - Pierre Trudeau and Sir John A. Macdonald included - that the country would ever agree on.
A country that difficult to satisfy, even in retrospect, is also hard to inspire - but it does happen every now and then.
It's just not happening now. And hasn't happened for some time.
In the past few months, this column has chased four provincial elections and each has had a distinctive personality: anger at Ottawa in Newfoundland and Labrador; anger at the opposition offerings in Ontario; boredom with the sitting government in Saskatchewan; and boredom with everything in Alberta.
You won't find "One Great Idea" in any of them, sad to say.
A country that could indeed be "amazing" is a country in desperate need these days.
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