Peter Menzies: Canadian pride will swell during the Olympics, but then the Games will end
The cultural institutions we've created to protect us from American imperialism have failed
By: Peter Menzies
Canada’s biennial indulgence in patriotism is about to blossom once again.
For two weeks, beginning this weekend, we will wave flags, wear Maple Leaf toques and mittens and cheer on our athletes, often in sports we and our broadcasters haven’t watched for years. When the hockey games are on the pubs will fill up and all eyes will be glued to the television. Even though fewer families can afford to register their kids in the sport these days, our love for the game as a cultural identifier remains robust.
It will, for 16 days, not be our diversity that defines us but our shared passion. We will reconnect, through the endeavours of our athletes, with how it feels to be Canadian regardless of creed, colour, faith or language.
As Mediapolicy.ca’s Howard Law recently wrote, “If we ever were, Canadians are no longer happy to be cultural North Americans. The current U.S. administration’s plan is to reduce Canada to a vassal state, like Russia’s Belarus.
“Canadians have responded with fear, anger and pride. We are, the vast majority of us, resolved to defend our cultural sovereignty by any means necessary or available.”
If, as we did in Vancouver 2010, we own the podium in Milan, we will feel really good about ourselves — less North American and fiercely Canadian. But if the USA beats us in hockey, which it appears more than capable of doing, we will be less certain and wonder if we are already Belarus.
Such is our fragile, confused state of self-confidence and cultural comprehension. Indeed, some of our leading voices simply cannot imagine these 16 days of patriotic rapture taking place absent the reassuring presence of our prime minister, Mark Carney. He, like Superman, is here, there and everywhere these days. As the Globe and Mail’s Cathal Kelly gushed recently in his “With Carney in tow, Canada is taking no prisoners at the Milan Olympics” column:
“We have one out-of-the-box advantage – Carney.
“You don’t have to love the guy’s politics to see that he has become our primary national asset in our international struggle. He’s neither Justin Trudeau nor Donald Trump. He’s somewhere in that hard-to-find middle that we’ve been missing. There’s your flag bearer. Not literally, because I think he should be pushed out there much more than an actual flag holder. Hockey game? Carney. Cross-country skiing? Oh there’s Carney. Espresso at the Duomo? Carney again, speaking Italian almost as badly as he speaks French, but at least he’s trying.”
So comforted, the nation is poised to celebrate every Canadian victory and lustily relish every “U-S-A, U-S-A” defeat. We will be one.
And then, on Feb. 22, the Olympics will end and, once again, we won’t have a clue who we are because the truth is that the cultural institutions we created to protect us from American cultural imperialism have failed. Utterly.
A noticeable number of us have watched enough American programming, for instance, to think we have district attorneys and not Crown Attorneys. Others believe in our “Miranda” rights and think that, in a pinch, we can “plead the fifth.” When we drink too much, we no longer get convicted of impaired driving, we get busted for the American DUI. Our media regularly overlook the fact King Charles is King of Canada and the commander in chief of our military. When Quebec recently removed the Crown, loyalty to which was a founding principle for many parts of Canada, from its coat of arms, the symbol was referred to by the press only as “British.” The very American term “y’all” is frequently used by Canadians on social media.
The CBC, publicly funded to keep us informed about each other across a vast land, is regularly obsessed with news Americana and, as one of its former heads, Richard Stursberg, outlined in his recent book, Lament for Literature, the 12 largest publishers in Canada are all foreign-owned. Canadian-owned publishers account for a mere 5.3 per cent of domestic sales — a figure far below that recorded by comparable Western democracies. That’s a state of affairs that recently inspired Stursberg’s publisher, Ken Whyte, to invoke Margaret Attwood and lament that we are “a nation of cultural morons.” Six out of 10 Canadian fiction bestsellers, by the way, are concerned with gay hockey.
Broadcasting is also dominated by American content, rights for which can be purchased, last I checked, at a price far below what it costs to produce a basic Canadian program. Sports, which, as noted, are a cultural unifier, are a disaster. While TSN and Sportsnet pay for rights to show U.S. college sports, Canadian Usports rarely get so much as a mention let alone any investment. If professional domestic leagues and even national teams want their games shown (occasional exceptions apply, somewhat, for the CFL and Curling Canada) they have to pay their own production costs or even buy time. The bottom line is that more — a lot more — of your subscription money goes to support American athletes and organizations than Canadian. And, despite the nation’s apparently desperate need for Canadian identity, there is no evidence whatsoever that the CRTC cares. Our national soccer team, about to host a World Cup, expects that if its “home” opener in Toronto is against Italy, the crowd will mostly be cheering for the visitors.
Meanwhile, following a decade during which the Justin Trudeau government viewed Canada’s history as a source of national shame, the Carney government — according to Kelly our “primary national asset” — is making cuts to national museums and Parks Canada is shutting down is national historic sites website and its searchable data base of 13,500 locations important to the public’s knowledge of the nation’s evolution.
None of this is a pattern of behaviour consistent with a sovereign, confident nation proud of its cultural and intellectual traditions. On the contrary, much of it appears to confirm Tristin Hopper’s “darkly humorous” take on the state of the nation in his recent book Don’t Be Canada (How one country did everything wrong all at once.)
Which is all the more reason to look forward to the Olympics when, for 16 wonderful days, the people and organizations we generally ignore and underfund will make us feel a little less like, culturally, a sort of frozen Puerto Rico and more like a real country. Except, of course, for Sunday night when what is usually the most watched program on Canadian television, the Super Bowl, is played and most of those watching New England and Seattle fight it out will grumble and complain to the CRTC that they have to watch advertisements paid for by Canadian companies and not the good stuff we’d get to watch if only we were Americans.
Just don’t say that out loud.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.
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I consider myself a patriotic Canadian but I despise what usually passes for "Canadian patriotism".
It's like we have it upside down. We gush over sports, celebrities, and narrow, usually deeply misunderstood points of differentiation from the US. We marinate in nostalgia about our increasingly distant past as a solid contributor to the World Wars and mid-20th-century peacekeeping.
Meanwhile we allow massive and largely uncontrolled immigration without the expectation of assimilation, unchecked foreign interference, refuse to exploit our own vast resources, and tolerate being militarily powerless.
I know there are endless debates on whether culture is downstream of politics or vice versa, but in the case of Canadian resistance to American imperialism right now I really do think politics, and all the state institutional capacity, is downstream of culture.
We lost our national myths — conquering the North, hacking civilization out of an unforgiving climate, etc. We started feeling ashamed of our colonial past. In 2015-2022 we even stopped feeling proud of the Canadian Multicultural Miracle and replaced it with self flagellation about “systemic racism”.
And, sure, we have done shameful things, at times. All countries have. But if we only feel shame, everything downstream of that is going to decay. Top talent will leave for countries that want to grow, want to build. Public servants will punch a clock to get a pension, not devote themselves to building Canada. The list can go on. How can one imagine a national civil defence effort like Finland has, if the country itself is built on a foundation of genocide?
I don’t think we need to go back to a pre-1968 national myth of white Britishness. I liked the one that existed in my childhood in the 1980s-1990s, that included multiculturalism. But we need something big and meaningful to rally around. (Is it possible for us to have a national myth that includes Indigenous people but still leaves room for national pride?)
Otherwise, yeah, you just end up with sports.