If you've done any tisk-tisk-ing or issued any weary sighs about the U.S. response to hurricane Katrina and thought how lucky you are to be in Canada, do yourself favour and read Anthony Keller's column from the Sunday Star.

Some excerpts:

Are we ready for a New Orleans-sized disaster? Before you hurt yourself throwing stones at the Bush administration for its mishandling of the crisis, consider the lovely glass house we Canadians live in.

Remember the heavy snowfall Toronto got in 1999? An emergency so small it wasn't even minor league. But remember how mayor Mel Lastman panicked, and called in the army? Remember how few troops came, and how little they could do? ...

The Bush administration, with help from bickering local and state governments, badly mismanaged the crucial first days after Katrina. Led until Friday by Michael Brown the Federal Emergency Management Agency didn't grasp the scale of the disaster, and didn't move quickly. But once it finally swung into action, the U.S. government had an almost unimaginably large tool chest at its disposal.

Our governments can't call on anything like American-scale resources. To make up for that, we've going to have to depend on Prime Minister Dithers & Co., along with their provincial counterparts, being much smarter than their American cousins. I feel safer already.

Consider: As of the middle of last week, 43,000 National Guard and 18,000 regular soldiers were on active duty across the four states affected by Katrina. That's larger than the entire Canadian military. The U.S. Coast Guard alone had 43 helicopters plucking people from rooftops and carrying them to shelters — almost twice as many choppers as the entire Canadian Coast Guard. As for the rest of the U.S. military, it now has 360 helicopters in the hurricane zone. That's twice as many helicopters as the entire Canadian Armed Forces.