Canada claiming a Kiwi

The Herald reports:

Canada has claimed Eleanor Catton as its own after she won the Man Booker prize yesterday.

Canadian media, which has reported widely on her success, noted Catton was born in Ontario.

The National Post described her as “the first Canadian author to win one of the world’s foremost literary awards in over a decade”. The paper’s review of the novel described it as stylistically “as solid as the brick it physically resembles”.

The Globe and Mail went with the more diplomatic “Canadian-born author”, and said: “Despite its length, there isn’t a sentence that feels weak or lazy, and by all objective criteria, The Luminaries is a remarkable accomplishment.”

Canadian-born is more correct than Canadian.

But we can’t take the moral high ground here. New Zealanders lead the world in claiming someone is a Kiwi because they may have been born here, lived here for a couple of years or even once made a fleeting visit and said something nice about us.