Separating gay penguins, removing Muslim face veils, erasing gun ownership data and tearing up international climate treaties.

These and other "tabloid"-worthy news items about Canada were tabulated this week by former Canadian writer Heather Mallick in a widely read blog post on the UK Guardian's website.

"Imagine being me," Mallick lamented, "being asked by the Guardian to explain why my nice country, famously full of people who spend their days hewing wood and drawing water amid a stream of apologies, has gone all, well, crap."

Mallick's tongue-in-cheek posting keyed off Canada's Monday announcement that it will become the first country to officially withdraw from the Kyoto Accord, a decision Mexico's environment minister warned could create international "despair."

"Imagine being Canada," Mallick wrote. "Imagine doing the international walk of shame from the Durban conference and later announcing, hungover with chunks in your hair, wearing whatever you picked off a stranger's floor, and a shoe missing, that you don't care, you are walking out of the Kyoto protocol and the rest of the world can go fry itself."

With close to a thousand Facebook "recommends" and hundreds of comments, it appears Mallick isn't the only one questioning Canada's newfound international belligerence.

Yet as Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders asked in late November: "How bad is Canada’s press in Britain, really?"

Of 294 British headlines mentioning Canada or Canadians in the past year, Saunders found only about nine of those stories were negative. And about half of the 129 reports on Alberta's oil sands portrayed Canada poorly.

"Interestingly, he noted, "the negative stories appear equally distributed across the left-leaning papers (The Guardian, The Independent and the Observer) and the conservative ones (The Times, The Telegraph and their Sunday counterparts)."

Geoff Dembicki reports on energy and climate issues for The Tyee.