When the Americans started an economic war with Canada, there was a surge in Canadians looking for information about the Geneva Conventions.

Yes, those Geneva Conventions. The international law around humanitarian treatment in war: protecting the wounded, how to treat prisoners of war, whether civilians could be a target.

That spike probably happened because many people believe that Canada is secretly one of history's most violent militaries, so violent that the world had to invent the Geneva Conventions just to contain us.

Earlier this week I did a video introducing my new line of Nasty merch, and lots of people commented with things like "Just wait until they hear about the Geneva Conventions."

What apparently started as a meme has become a compelling story for a nation feeling like an underdog.

Except…

The first Geneva Convention was signed in 1864. Canada became a country in 1867. You can't be blamed for a crime committed three years before you were born.

But the myth usually isn't about 1864; it's about the wars people actually think of when they hear "Geneva Convention," the ones with our great-grandfathers in them. The claim goes like this: Canadian troops were so savage in the First and Second World Wars that the rules of war got rewritten specifically to rein us in.

Canadian troops did earn a genuinely fearsome reputation in the First World War. German staff reports called the Canadian Corps magnificently trained and treated our appearance on any front as a warning sign an attack was coming.

One British war correspondent watched us empty entire trenches in nighttime raids and called it “butcher's work,” quick and skilful. One of the stories has Canadians throwing tins of beef into German trenches, waiting for the hungry soldiers to come out for it, then following up with grenades.

It's horrifying, but it wasn't a war crime. It was just war.

Every single historian who has actually studied this, on either side of the debate, says that our reputation never once shaped a word of the Geneva Conventions.

The 1929 update to the rules — the one that actually deals with how prisoners of war get treated, the one people usually picture when they say "the Geneva Convention," — came out of general lessons learned across the entire war, shared by every army that fought in it. Canada wasn't singled out. Actually, Canada wasn't even mentioned.

The rules around the torture and killing of prisoners came out of 1949, drafted as a response to the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities across Europe. And yes, sometimes things that the Allies, including Canadians, did.

That amendment was led by the Red Cross, and 59 nations participated.

They weren't thinking about terrible moments between armies; they were thinking about death camps.

Historians who study this, including the late Tim Cook, one of the most respected military historians this country has produced, are clear that battlefield killing of prisoners, as horrifying as that was, happened in every army in the wars. British units did it. German units did it. Despite the mythology, Canadians weren't the exception.

Our record is not unblemished. Canadian soldiers shot and killed an unarmed Somali man in 1993 after he tried to break into their camp, and a week later, our soldiers tortured and killed a 16 year old who had also entered their base. The soldiers were court-martialled and the government completely disbanded the Canadian Airborne Regiment two years later.

We make mistakes too. Sometimes horrible ones.

So here's the actual sequence of events: Switzerland built the rules in 1864. We didn't exist yet. The world rebuilt the rules in 1949 because of Nazi Germany, not because a corporal from Manitoba threw a tin of beef into a trench 30 years earlier.

The Canadian military is respected around the world as one of the most well-trained, disciplined armed forces on the planet. As much as Trump and his sycophants think they're being funny saying we don't have a military, the fact is we train their military. Routinely.

So why does this myth about Canadians and the Geneva Convention persist?

I think two things.

Except we don't need fake war stories to prove it. We've got real ones. Ridges we took against all odds, beaches we stormed, relatives — some of them in their teens who three months earlier were farmhands — who knowingly ran right into machine gun fire and never came home.

Most of our history isn't filled with winning against adversaries in flashy moves; it's about outlasting them. Doubling-down. Digging in. Like we're doing with the boycott on American products.

When the dust settles on this dumb-ass trade war, the circus down south finally goes home, one of us will still be here with a functioning democracy, a stronger and more diverse economy, a nation that opens its doors to people in trouble, a healthcare system that doesn't bankrupt anyone, and a nation of people defined not by military crimes, but by never letting our neighbours down.

We don't need stories.

We've got Canada.

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