Canadians (10 page)

“… we stand on guard for theeeeeeeeee …”

Bert Raymond, distinguished, still at attention, gave the thumbs up to those standing across the room. We signalled back.

And then, before any of the proud, if slightly self-conscious, visitors from Canada could sit back down, something swept through the entire restaurant that took us completely by surprise.

Loud, prolonged applause from the Italians.

THIS RUSH OF
CANADIANISM
by Canadians no longer in Canada never emerges quite so vividly as during the Olympic Winter Games. It is here where Canada, which is normally thought of, if at all, as a reserved country—“almost incoherently polite,” travel writer Jan Morris once said—shows a most distinctive swagger.

The Winter Games provide uniforms for fans as well as athletes, which makes the bonding easier and the strutting more noticeable. It hardly matters whether the souvenir gear is supplied by Roots or HBC; the effect is always the same: red and white, head to toe, invariably with a red maple leaf tattooed on a cheek, painted on a bare chest or, at times, carved into a head of dyed electric-blue hair.

The official Canadian gear in Torino—mukluks, thick vests, knitted toques with ear flaps and chin ties and crown bobs—was semi-trapper,
quasi-voyageur, moderately goofy, and ubiquitous. The over-the-top clothing was purchased, invariably, in a rush of patriotism usually unfamiliar to Canadians, the sort of mad impulse that explains those red-faced Easterners you see walking through the Toronto airport holding, but not daring to wear, the white Stetson they picked up in the Calgary airport. Like the Mexican straw hat and the loud Hawaiian shirt, such items always seem like a good idea at the time. At the time. You realize only in the hours that follow that you'd never be caught dead actually wearing that cowboy hat anywhere but the shop in the Calgary airport, just as you'd be laughed off the street if you ever walked down Yonge or Ste-Catherine or Robson or stood at the corner of Portage and Main in the full red-and-white explosion of the official Canadian Olympic regalia.

In Nagano, eight years before Torino, a Canadian woman turned up at a hockey game wearing a hockey helmet and not much else. She had two tiny, strategically placed Canadian flags on her breasts and a red maple leaf painted on her bare back as she danced wildly about the Big Hat arena, periodically stopping to scream incoherently in the general direction of the ice surface. To the Japanese, whose idea of Canada had been shaped by Lucy Maud Montgomery's
Anne
books, this exuberant young woman—who did not appear to have any freckles at all, anywhere—was as baffling as Japanese toilet seats, heated and capable of taking blood pressure readings, were to the Canadian visitors.

The Strutting Canadian, seen only periodically and usually at sporting events, seems more to delight than offend. The reserved Japanese might have been stunned by the loud and colourful Canadians in Nagano but they were also oddly attracted to them, the Japanese fans increasingly outfitting themselves in Canadian paraphernalia and begging for Canadian pins. When the “
U!-S!-A!”
cheer went up in Big Hat it was solely American; when
“Ca-Na-Da!”
was the cheer it had as much Japanese behind it as Canadian.

Canadians are themselves delighted with these once-every-four-year personality shifts, as if to suggest that only in acting out of character do they reveal their real character. When curler Paul Savage dropped his pants in Nagano to prove to photographers that he did indeed have an Olympic tattoo on his butt,
women's curler Joan McCusker was quick to point out that this represented an illegal reproduction of the Olympic rings. He'd better be careful, she warned, or “they'll sue your ass off.”

In Torino eight years later I went down to the Medals Plaza at Piazza Castella with
Globe
columnist Christie Blatchford to watch the men's curling team—four Newfoundlanders and a middle-aged ringer from Ontario—receive their gold medals. With a small crowd, we stood at attention while the Canadian flag went up and “O Canada” played. It was a glorious moment, with tears shed and shivers felt throughout the gathering. When the official ceremony was over, Mike Adam, the team's alternative member, bounded off the stage, walked over to us, and lifted his gold medal up so that it almost touched his nose. “Jeez,” he said, “if they'd only put a magnet on the back, I could put 'er on me fridge.”

And curling, they say, is boring. Boring as Canadians are supposed to be. Boring as Canada—what British journalists like to call “The Great White Waste of Time”—is supposed to be.

At Nagano the Australians, of all people, complained about the Canadian partiers, claiming they were unable to sleep for all the carousing going on in the Canadian section of the village. “How do you know they were the Canadians?” I asked one of the Aussies riding the media bus. The man turned in his seat and sighed as if explaining to a child. “When they're carrying a big Canadian flag and yelling at Americans to get off,” he said, “what do you
think
they'd be?”

I would think they'd be Canadians out of their element—which is when Canadians often seem to be most Canadian of all.

Whether it's overcompensation for insecurity abroad or release from some unwritten rule back home that you Do Not Shout Out Who You Are hardly matters; it happens. You find this Canadian boast plastered on backpacks heading through Europe and across Asia. You find it in foreign airports at gates holding passengers for flights back to Canada. You find it on distant streets and in far-off restaurants where a logo on a ball cap, a city name on a sweatshirt, or the tacking on of an “eh?” at the end of the sentence sparks instant recognition. The ensuing conversation is filled with the familiar touchstones of residence and weather, the names that
arise—prime minister and premiers, politicians, hockey players, criminals, newscasters, minor and major personalities in arts and business—known only to those who live in what has been called the cold and empty attic over the United States of America.

The Canadian Identity, it seems, is truly elusive only at home. Beyond the borders Canadians know exactly who they are; within them they see themselves as part of a family, a street, a neighbourhood, a community, a province, a region and, on special occasions like Canada Day and Grey Cup weekend and, of course, during the Winter Olympics, a country called Canada.

Beyond the borders, they pine; within the borders, they more often whine.

Again, the contradiction that is Canada.

THIS ABIDING PASSION for the red maple leaf is all the more remarkable given what a difficult time it had getting up the flagpole in the first place. While there remains a smattering of Canadians who rue that day in 1965 when the new flag was first raised—largely those who fought under the Red Ensign, plus the odd curmudgeon who'd still rather crank his telephone—the vast, vast majority of the country embraces the national flag.

Such was not always the case.

It took Canada forty years to adopt its own flag—relatively quick work considering the 115 years it took to get its own Constitution.

And as for its national anthem, the tune took a hundred years from the first performance—at, ironically, a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebration— to formal adoption in 1980 by Parliament. By one count the song has been reworked twenty-one times since its debut—the only words not to be tinkered with being “O” and “Canada”—the result being that the only way most of us can get through it is to mumble.

The flag's history has its own bizarre twists. According to Rick Archbold's delightful
I Stand for Canada: The Story of the Maple Leaf Flag,
a special committee was struck first in 1925 and then again in 1946 to come up with something new. The members picked through thousands of potential designs, but the suggestions either depressed or
offended so many of them that both times they decided to just drop the notion altogether.

The wave of nationalism that preceded Centennial Year, 1967, produced yet another push for a flag to call our own. Whether by design or folly, Prime Minister Lester Pearson chose to announce his intentions in front of a Winnipeg convention of the Royal Canadian Legion. He knew it would be a tough crowd, and it was. They applauded when he called for “a patriotism that will put Canada ahead of its parts”—yet booed the idea of a maple leaf and cheered wildly every time the traditional Red Ensign got mention.

It's unlikely, given the times, that the crowd included angry naturalists, but the fact of the matter is that the symbol then being considered, three maple leaves together, involved a species of maple not found west of Ontario. Crabgrass, found in every region and province, would hardly be suitable for a national flag.

Pearson was accused of “selling us out to the pea-soupers” by those who saw the new flag, lacking any British connection, as a sop to Quebec. He was told to “Go home!” But he kept speaking, and by the time he was finished, reports say, the crowd was largely split on the issue, with virtually as many now cheering as booing the national leader. Encouraged by his Winnipeg reception, Pearson soldiered on.

There was such resistance to the idea in Parliament, however, that Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker, the day's most eloquent defender of all connections British, was able to use a filibuster to force Pearson to send the idea off to another parliamentary committee. Diefenbaker likely presumed that if committees could kill the idea twice before, it could happen a third time.

But this committee was different. It opened the design to everyone from schoolkids to Group of Seven icon A.Y. Jackson. Had the committee swayed one way or another, Canadian backpacks might today have small patches showing a beaver surrounded by her ten kits (symbolizing the ten provinces, of course), a leaping salmon, the perennial moose or, my personal favourite, crossed hockey sticks over a single black puck.

The red maple leaf proved a popular motif, though Pearson was accused at the time—and I've seen this claim repeated in print as recently as a few years ago—
of a diabolical Liberal scheme to produce a flag that looked like “Liberal electioneering bunting.” It's an intriguing point. Each fall I look about the Precambrian Shield forest in which our little cabin sits, but I have yet to come across a Tory blue maple leaf in the cavalcade of colour that is autumn in those parts.

The flag debate, Archbold notes, was one of the nastiest in Canadian parliamentary history. Diefenbaker, sensing a groundswell against change, was magnificent, but his efforts came to an abrupt end when his own Quebec lieutenant, Léon Balcer, turned on him by asking the Liberal government to bring closure to debate and call a vote. On December 15, 1964, the House of Commons passed the bill 163–78, with many Conservatives, including Balcer, voting with the government.

Diefenbaker had his own small last laugh, though, in his instructions for his funeral, which took place in the summer of 1979. As stipulated, the Canadian flag draped his coffin but, in a sly symbol of dominance, the Red Ensign draped over a small portion of the red maple leaf.

Diefenbaker, much to his disappointment, was on the wrong side of this one. The effect of the new flag on the rest of the country was powerful and practically instantaneous. By 1967 Canada's pre-eminent historian Arthur Lower could say:

Since the adoption of the new flag, something very interesting has happened to the Canadian psyche, something that probably cannot yet be put into words.… There is nothing in this of turning backs on a hated past, nothing suggesting that old ties were irksome. The point is simply that the country is growing up, coming to see itself as an entity, taking the interest in itself that any organism, to be healthy, must. Each time that the average citizen looks at the new flag, he unconsciously says to himself, “That's me!”

WELL, NOT QUITE, SIR. If it were that simple, there would be no Great Canadian Identity Crisis, which would also mean no cottage industry for academics, no need for national and provincial royal commissions,
no panel discussions, no CBC town hall meetings—and this book would be about hockey-playing dogs.

Canadian patriotism is as fickle as Canadian weather. It was on display the day Pierre Trudeau took his final train journey; it flares periodically at sporting events, on certain holidays and, most assuredly, whenever tragedy strikes the Canadian armed forces.

There is some thought, though, that it has been on the rise in recent years, owing not so much to Canadian success at the Winter Games as to … beer ads.

The best example began in 2000 when Molson televised the first of its Great Canadian Rants, starring an actor who came to be known as “Joe Canadian.” Casually dressed and standing in front of a simple, squealing microphone, Joe railed against a string of American false assumptions about his country before closing off with the defiant shout “MY NAME IS JOE—AND I AM CANADIAN!”

The Joe Canadian ad became a national sensation, shown for months on arena scoreboards and as loudly cheered at hockey games as the three stars. A couple of years later Molson's sold out to Coors, the American beer company. Joe's Great Canadian Rant was, suddenly, just another American product.

EVEN SO, this notion of defining oneself in terms of what one isn't—the Joe Canadian rant readily boiling down to “I am
not
American”—remains the quickest and simplest reflection in the national mirror.

Author Pierre Berton is often credited with the most novel definition— “A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe”—and often argued that being not American does matter and shouldn't be dismissed, as others would have it, as some backward, negative notion that does more harm than good.

Not long before his death in late 2004, Berton talked to his old friend Peter Newman about the outrage he felt about the takeover of Canada's iconic CPR hotel chain—including Quebec's Château Frontenac, Ottawa's Château Laurier, and the world-famous Banff Springs Hotel— by the American-based Fairmont chain. It was important to preserve those
things that separate Canadians from Americans, he believed, whether it be public policy or culture. Canadians, he argued, are different in background and geography and even dreams, and it is important to protect these dreams “or we won't have a country at all.”