You know you are Canadian when the following names have some kind of deep meaning for you: Terry Fox, Paul Henderson, Tommy Douglas, Mike Weir, Russ Jackson, Bianca Andreescu, Sidney Crosby, Gord Downie, Rick Hansen, Peter Gzowski.
There are more.
There are so many more.
Moe Norman and Marlene Stewart Streit. Alexander Graham Bell and Dr. Frederick Banting. Lloyd Robertson and Lisa LaFlamme. Ken Dryden and Guy Lafleur. Ferguson Jenkins and Larry Walker. Steve Nash and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Mike O’Shea and Pinball Clemons. Bob Cole and Danny Gallavan.
tap here to see other videos from our team.
We could list nothing but names here of influential Canadians and fill pages. Canada and the U.S. may look a lot the same, with an American president’s view of manifest destiny, but we are not Americans
We have never been Americans. We will never be Americans. We are our own country, our own people, with two official languages, about 10 other ones, with too many volatile regions, with some of the most beautiful places on earth — from Vancouver and Whistler to Banff and Lake Louise. To the summer lakes of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario. To the greatest cities in Canada, Toronto and Montreal, and that fabulous trip to Quebec City, the closest thing to vacationing In Europe without having to leave the continent. To playing golf in Cape Breton or getting screeched in the fabulous place that is Newfoundland.
We aren’t Americans. We can never be Americans. I’m 67 years old. I’ve never owned a gun. I’ve never held a gun. I’ve never believed it was my right to have a gun.
When my late mother spent her winters in Florida, she played in a weekly bridge game. She was the only Canadian in the game. The women were all over the age of 75.
She was the only one of the five who didn’t carry a pistol in her purse.
These were not crazy people, much as it may be out of our sensibilities to be that way. These are people who grew up differently than we did, with different laws and beliefs, thoughts and constitutional amendments.
It’s not a question of right or wrong in most cases: It’s a matter of what you know and believe in your heart and mostly what you’ve grown up with.
Canada has shaped me — whether I always care for it or not — no matter who I am or where I am or what I happen to believe in. It has influenced how I think, what I think, what I watch, what I listen to, what I read, what I’ve come to appreciate over the years, what makes sense to me.
You know you are Canadian if you’ve seen The Tragically Hip or the Barenaked Ladies in concert. And you’ve probably done it more than once. My concert body count here is eight. You know you are Canadian when the first hip hop song you remember was brought to you by Maestro Fresh Wes and it let your backbone slide.
You know you are Canadian when you know most of the words to Gordon Lightfoot’s greatest hits and take a certain glee from the fact the great sportswriter Scott Young was father to the great songwriter and entertainer, Neil Young.
You know you are Canadian when you watched SCTV in the years it was funnier than Saturday Night Live and you still search online for clips of Andrea Martin or Dave Thomas or Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd or Guy Caballero.
But you also took a certain pride when Eugene Levy and his son took over American television, the way Lorne Michaels has, the way Martin Short has and Michel J. Fox has.
We’re a damn funny place, this messed up country of ours. Pound for pound, probably the funniest country in the world. Jim Carrey and Mike Myers. Norm Macdonald and Dan Ackroyd. Daniel Levy and his dad with the bushy eyebrows. Rick Moranis and Catherine O’Hara. Russell Peters and John Candy.
Internationally funny. Nationally funny with Rick Mercer and Gerry Dee and Ron James and every hour we have has 22 Minutes. And the only King we truly care about is the King of Kensington.
And he lived nowhere near the town of Schitt’s Creek or that place where the Beachcombers lived out West. We shop at Kim’s Convenience and fill up at Corner Gas in our minds. We grew up on the Friendly Giant and Mr. Dressup and Chez Helene.
We spell words differently here. It’s colour not color. It’s honour, not honor. We ask for a favour, not a favor. We like the letter U.
And we always say sorry. Not that we need to. That’s who we are. The first words out of our mouths when we’re born are usually mama or dada. For Canadians, the next word is sorry.
And then probably hockey. Saturday night in our house was for Hockey Night In Canada. My dad didn’t care for hockey. My mom didn’t care for sports. My brother and sisters never took to it much. I was consumed by it. And somehow we still wound up in front of the television on Saturday night, most of us, to watch whatever game was on: The best came when the Leafs played the Canadiens. Still does. That was us, that’s still us.
Who had mini sticks? Who wore sleepers or pyjamas with NHL logos on them? Who waited outside an arena for autographs? Who went to see the local old-timers game because the names still meant something to you?
Who bought their first hockey stick or skates or baseball gloves or bat at Canadian Tire?
We use different terminology here. Mario Lemieux played center in Pittsburgh, Connor McDavid plays centre in Edmonton. Lanny McDonald was a winger in Calgary and Toronto. He played wing in Colorado. Our words are different, they belong to us.
Their football, which we tend to like better than our football, has four downs and 11 players and a smaller field. Our football, with a more exciting game, has 12 players and three downs and a quaint single-point rule known as a rouge.
We are Canadian. Growing up, if you’re my age, the CFL had nine teams, two of them the Roughriders and Rough Riders, the NHL only had six. Today, the CFL is still nine teams and the NHL has 32. The Super Bowl is the biggest television show every year in Canada. Grey Cup tends to be in the top three.
We are Canadian and we happen to love football. And Blue Jays baseball on television. And the new and growing tradition of great players in the NBA and skill players in the NFL. And the Olympics — we do adore the Olympics here.
Before there was Internet and before there was information everywhere, I used to scour the agate pages of my daily newspaper. They would take me through boxscores to every ballpark in the big leagues and you could check the small print to see how George Knudson or Al Balding was doing in any golf tournament and we could check to the same with Sandra Post and most recently Brooke Henderson. Now we do all that online.
The small print back then could tell us which Canadians lost in which round of tennis, who won horse races yesterday and which horses are racing today. It would tell us which downhill skier was finishing where and we grabbed on to so much of this because they were ours. That wasn’t something I was taught to do: It was that just built in curiosity as a kid.
Everything about Canada mattered. Our country. Our identity. Our heroes and goats, our athletic achievements and how great would it have been had George Chuvalo been able to win one of those giant fights against Muhammad Ali or George Foreman or Joe Frazier. But we still cheered him on, through all his tragedy, because he was us on the world stage that we otherwise wouldn’t know.
We love being noticed and appreciated, Canadians do. We love people to know where Ryan Reynolds and Justin Bieber and Celine Dion and Bret Hart are from. We want people to read books by Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler and the remarkable trilogy from Robertson Davies.
We may not have the best weather. We will never have that. We don’t have the most crime, although it is getting worse with each passing year. We don’t have enough affordable housing or high-paying jobs. We don’t have the right people in the right offices to fix the right things. But we’re not for sale. We can’t be for sale.
We can never be bought because you can’t buy a nationality and the number of cultures across this land. You can’t buy who we are, 10 provinces that never act as one. Alberta and Quebec always thinking they’re owed something more than the rest of the country. With Toronto looking down upon everyone who isn’t Toronto — while the rest of the country is sneering back. That always has been part of our difficulties and part of our charm.
We’re like a family, Canadians. Sometimes dysfunctional. Sometimes disagreeing. But when something really matters for the family, it comes together. We have to be there for each other.
It’s most important now to be like that under the worst of circumstances. And these might be the worst of circumstances. We don’t really have a leader at a time when the President of the most powerful nation on earth — our former friend — wants to eat us for lunch.
We have no choice but to take a stand and fight back. We have to pull our own Terry Fox here. We have to take our punches but keep on fighting back. Always fighting.
We’re Canadian. We always punch above our weight. We always will.
x.com/simmonssteve