With his portly frame, scruffy beard and rumpled clothes that look as if they were bought at his local Target store, Moore has made a name as a filmmaker for the common man. His movies, like Roger and Me, The Big One and now Bowling for Columbine, are heartfelt and genuine. But sometimes they can leave viewers scratching their heads. Take Moore’s love affair with Canada, for example.

Bowling for Columbine is Moore’s attempt to figure out why so many Americans are in love with firearms. Is it a history of foreign wars? The Yank’s passion for violent movies? After visiting the Michigan Militia and chatting with assorted gun nuts, Moore looks at other countries that love violent movies and oppressing foreigners. Germany? Something called WWII, but few gun homicides in recent years. The U.K., which once had a quarter of the world under its control? Not so many gun deaths there, either.

Then Moore trains his sights on the U.S.’s neighbour to the north, which has a high rate of gun ownership but comparatively few gun homicides.

This is where most Canadian viewers will begin to grit their teeth. Moore ambushes a group of stunned-looking, pimply-faced high-schoolers outside a Taco Bell in Sarnia. After a grilling by Moore, these dentally-challenged youths spout off about Canada being a tolerant society. Next is Sarnia’s mayor, an affable fellow with a bottle-blond hairdo straight out of Can-rock heroes Triumph. Hizzoner obligingly vomits up some pap about Canada’s generous welfare benefits—as an explanation for why so few Canucks end up staring at the wrong end of a Colt 45 on a lonely night in Kapuskasing.

Finally, Moore heads to Toronto. In a College St. bar, he stumbles across a guy who says Canadians don’t lock their doors because, somehow, that’s equivalent to self-imprisonment. Moore spends the rest of the afternoon walking around Toronto, opening unlocked doors and commenting on how nice things are here.

But his trip could have been cut short if he’d thought for a minute about what kind of guns Canadians own. Most of them are .22 calibre pea-shooters for killing gophers. Other Canadians own shotguns and rifles for game hunting. The gun club folk Moore spoke to are thin on the ground—they were people who had undergone the additional background checks and extra documentation to own a license for a handgun. Of all the hands you’ll shake on an average day, not one of them, I’d guess, has ever gripped a pistol.

It’s not our welfare policies that cut down on gun homicides in Canada—it’s our stringent gun control system, which makes it a very serious crime, complete with lengthy jail terms, to own anything like the automatic assault rifles and powerful handguns used in the Columbine massacre. But Moore’s theories have given his American viewers the same old stereotype of the Canadian—a friendly simpleton with a primitive haircut and a few missing molars, soothed by years of welfare and universal health care into a law-abiding citizen.