A Continentalist Manifesto

I have recently been teaching my students W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. The novel reads like a long love letter to American culture, ideal for foreign students hoping to enter university in the US. 

But it is written by a Canadian.

At the same time, I see a reference to The Band as the originators back in the 1970s of a new musical genre, “Americana.” Their albums are a celebration of everything American: “Up on Cripple Creek.” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Yet four of the five, including their two chief songwriters, are from London, Ontario.

It is not just The Band or W.P. Kinsella, either. Neil Young, from Toronto via Winnipeg, is also deep Americana. Leonard Cohen has a love affair with American country music. The most hyper-patriotic American Youtubers and political commentators seem to be Canadian refugees: Gad Saad, Steven Crowder, Mark Steyn, Gavin MacInnis, David Freiberg (“Viva Frei”), David Frum, “Clyde Do Something,” Jordan Peterson. Joe Schuster created Superman, who fights for “truth, justice, and the American way.” Schuster was Canadian.

Which leads me to the obvious conclusion: within every Canadian, there is an American screaming to get out.

Most Canadians, to be sure, define their Canadianness by not being American. But that makes the point. It is a textbook case of denial. The only thing that makes us not American is the mere assertion that we are not. By any objective measure, we are the same people, the same culture, the same nation, founded on the same principles: the same language, leaving aside French Canada; a shared geography, a shared home; a shared history; a shared legal system, the English common law; a shared form of government, liberal representative democracy and federalism; a shared patrimony in the UK; exposure to virtually all the same influences in our childhoods, Dr. Seuss and Disney, Sesame Street and Pixar; a shared religion, Christianity, with more or less the same mix of Protestant denominations and Catholicism. We play and have always played the same sports, often across our shared border: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, lacrosse. All have deep roots in both countries--sports often unfamiliar in the rest of the world. Even our standard accents, let alone our language, are indistinguishable to outsiders and usually to ourselves. It is rare to find a Canadian, if not a recent immigrant, without known relatives in the US.

For Canadians, therefore, to criticize America or American culture amounts to self-hate. It is a poison that enfeebles us. Without our Americanness, we have no culture; for we are Americans.

For those brave few who embrace our Americanness, like Kinsella or The Bend, it is visibly exciting, dizzying. You can witness the enthusiasm. It is at last meeting our true selves, discovering our heritage, spreading our wings, and breathing free.

The best thing for Canadians is probably joining the US. Even without the economic benefits—we pay a premium in higher prices and lost opportunities by keeping our independence. Even without the security benefits—with the rise of China, it is reckless not to join forces. And Canada is too vast and underpopulated to defend itself.

For political reasons, the US would not want a full union. That would skew their electoral map leftward; Republicans would never agree.

Kevin O’Leary has the solution. Keep our pretty passports. Canadians do not vote in the US, and the Americans do not vote here. So the Americans can keep their electoral balance, and we can keep our Medicare. But full freedom of movement over the border, like going state to state or province to province. No tariffs, and the right to live and work in either country. Our militaries should be fully integrated, and so should tariffs on anything coming from abroad. We should have the same currency. 

We would be richer, our quality of life would be better, and we would be happier.

 

Don't Defund the CBC

 

Many on the right have called for the defunding of the CBC. It is, after all, a propaganda arm of the government; is that proper in a democracy? Is it fair to ask everyone to pay for something many will not watch? And it competes unfairly with private channels and YouTubers.

I don’t think it is wrong to have a propaganda arm of the government. There is a place for public education. It is more that as the CBC exists now, its purpose is unclear and its mission muddled.

Rather than defund, I’d make it more purely and unambiguously propaganda.

It is a legitimate job of government to promote a sense of Canadian unity and Canadian identity. And Canada needs this urgently. Canadian identity and unity are tenuous at best, being a bilingual country, close to another much larger and culturally similar country, geographically very widely scattered, and, due to catastrophic recent government policies, full of recent immigrants who have been encouraged not to assimilate. 

We have a problem here, and a properly directed CBC can be a part of the solution.

There should be no programs on CBC produced in other countries. Leave that to the free market. Nor should the focus be entertainment. Leave that to the free market. As a propaganda arm, it should be one long advertisement for Canada, and an education for immigrants on Canadian culture. 

Shows on classic, traditional, and new Canadian books, movies, music, art. Shows on traditional Canadian foods and how to prepare them. Shows on Canadian history, always in a positive light. Shows on Canadian civics: how parliament works, how elections work, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadian law and legal traditions; how the court system works. Stories of Canadian inventors and inventions; of important Canadian industries. How is Canadian whisky made? How is Oka cheese made? How are trees turned into paper? Shows on Canadian folk traditions, traditional celebrations, traditional sports and games. Canadian accents, Canadian vocabulary and idioms. Travelogues on different parts of Canada. 

Celebrate this country. Inspire immigrants to love it and to integrate.

Nor would this be all that costly, in this era when an individual can run their own broadcast channel on the Internet. And putting this up on the Internet makes it accessible not just in every corner of Canada, but globally.

It is, after all, to Canada’s advantage to promote the Canadian brand abroad. This is good for our economy, and generates soft power.

I think it would be a good investment.

The Lost Promised Land

 

I saw him once in a subway station.

There was a wonderful flowering of Canadian culture in Montreal when I was young. It was a magic time. There was Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Hugh MacLennan. There was Aislin. There was the NFB.

And that flowering wilted and died. 

I believe it was killed, first, by Quebec separatism, which made life difficult for Anglophones, and caused many of the best and brightest to head for Ontario. So the centre in Montreal was broken up.

But why couldn’t it have simply re-formed in Toronto? Toronto has never been able to match Montreal’s creative ferment of the forties to sixties.

I believe this is due to the dogma of multiculturalism, which suppresses the development of Canadian culture. Toronto is the centre of the multicult. The multicult will not publish Canadians; only writers celebrating their alienation from Canadian culture.

But there seems to be another factor. See how many of those Montreal names are Jewish. Montreal in those years had the largest concentration of Jews in Canada. Toronto, it is true, now has more, but as part of a much larger population—not as concentrated.

And some of the brightest lights of Toronto culture are also Jewish: Wayne and Schuster; Sharon, Lois and Bram; Lorne Michaels.

For Jews really are a light unto the nations, a leaven commissioned by God to spread culture wherever they go.

Any nation that wants a rich culture should encourage Jews to immigrate and to stay.

As immigrants, Canada should give absolute priority to Jews. This would vastly enrich Canada, and at the same time, reduce tensions in the Middle East, where Jews are apparently not welcome. The more fools they. It’s a win-win situation.

Of course, many resent the success of Jews. This is the sin of envy, and should be condemned whenever encountered. It is obviously to the benefit of all that the best rise to the top.

If the Jewish population of Canada were large enough, it would be that much harder for other ethnic groups to oppress them. It would be a protection for them.

I think even now, they would be safer in Canada than in Israel.

Canadian Content

 

The people of Europe are now rising up against mass immigration, primarily because they see it overwhelming their own cultures. 

There is as yet no similar resistance in Canada, even though our immigration levels are higher. 

This is because the average Canadian is under the tragic misapprehension that he has no culture to protect.

And this is a spectacular failure of our governments and our education system. It is their job to promote distinct Canadian culture, as a matter of both national unity and of quality of life. For centuries, they have been doing the opposite, and flooding out our culture with “multiculturalism” is just the final stage. 

Justin Trudeau has publicly announced, “there is no Canadian mainstream.” Once a colony, always a colony. Canadians are conditioned to imagine that culture is always something that must be imported. We are here to hew wood and draw water.

When I was going through school, I chafed that almost everything we read in literature was written in the UK; an English major did not include a single course in Canadian literature. It felt almost subversive to be keeping tabs on Canadian literature in my free time. Now, seamlessly, the Britlit has been replaced with aboriginal literature, alienated immigrant literature, post-colonial literature from the Third World, anything but Canadian literature, on the transparently false premise that these, and not the Canadian voice, are the voices previously unheard in Canada and suppressed.

Canada actually has an impressive and productive artistic culture, and everyone knows it except Canadians. When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature, the reaction from the average Canadian was probably, “Who is Alice Munro?”

This is criminal malpractice by our governments and our educational systems. It is as though they have deliberately set out to destroy Canada.

Canada has no mainstream? 

We have Anne of Green Gables, which is as fine a piece of writing as has ever been done anywhere. It is the founding document for a proud Canadian tradition of children’s literature and children’s culture. This needs to be celebrated, as Denmark celebrates Hans Christian Andersen. 

We have Robert W. Service, who is the most successful poet in the English language. We are especially powerful in poetry, with Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Al Purdy. Related to this, we have a special strength in lyrical songwriting, which made Canadians especially prominent in the 60s folk revival: Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Ian Tyson, Stan Rogers, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robbie Robertson. We were and are the best.

We have a rich and beautiful tradition of humour, and of the sympathetic portrayal of small town life. We have Stephen Leacock, especially Sunshine Sketches. We have Thomas Chandler Haliburton. And that tradition stretches on through W.O. Mitchell, Wayne and Schuster, to Norm MacDonald, Corner Gas, and Schitt’s Creek. 

We have great visual art. Everybody knows about Krieghoff, the Group of Seven and Emily Carr; maybe Paul Kane. But they are not the best. They seem more like tokens, cliches: “look, they painted Canadian landscapes.” Big deal. Tom Thompson was the man. And we should be celebrating William Kurelek, Douglas Coupland, and Alex Colville; painters who painted Canadians and Canadian life, not just postcards of the place. And when we speak of Canadian art, we must cite Yousef Karsh, the greatest portrait photographer ever. And we have great architects: Safdie, Gehry, Erickson, I guess I must also mention Cardinal, although I find his work appalling.

We are great at design; the Canadian flag is the best in the world, and that reflects a wider tradition of Canadian heraldry. In Sofia, Bulgaria, I was shown with immense pride a block of buildings they believed was the pinnacle of architectural style. These were buildings that would not have stood out in Montreal or Quebec City.

And, yeah, there’s hockey, a Canadian sport that has become a world sport. There are not many countries that have that level of cultural prestige, that their pastimes become international. As well as hockey, we have given the world the canoe, the kayak, the snow shoe. 

And we have great culinary traditions: poutine, of course; it really is available now all over the world. Our tradition of cheddar cheese used to be the world’s best, not to mention Oka and other regional cheeses, until it was destroyed by the government’s cartel system, which shut it out from world markets. We developed the McIntosh apple. We developed the Montreal bagel and Montreal smoked meat. We decided to put pineapple on pizza, but anyone is entitled to at least one mistake. Canadian rye whisky is world-renowned. We gave the world maple syrup!

And all this despite our government and our schools working against us. Despite the mobs tearing down our statues and our monuments and denigrating our founders. It is worth preserving. It is worth rising up for.

This is not to say we should be against immigrants. Many of the greatest aspects of Canadian culture have been produced by first or second-generation immigrants. The best culture comes from the mix of cultures. But it must be a melting pot; the idea must be that we are making something new and distinctly Canadian here, and we are all in this together.

Multiculturalism is colonialism. Multiculturalism is the enemy.

Multicultism

 

In 1897, Leonard Cohen’s grandfather founded the Jewish Times in Montreal, Canada’s first English-language Jewish-interest newspaper. 

“The paper had a clear mandate: to help Canadianize the teeming influx of Yiddish-speaking Jews arriving from Eastern Europe…. Essentially the journal sought to promote the adoption of mainstream non-Jewish social customs that, religious observance aside, would make Jews indistinguishable from their gentile neighbours” (Michael Posner, Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories. The Early Years).

 

 

This is the attitude past waves of Canadian immigrants took: the task was integration, Canadianization.

Now imagine if Leonard Cohen’s family, and the rest of Montreal’s Jewish community, had instead embraced the modern cult of multiculturalism, and decided the imperative was instead to cling to their Jewish and European traditions. Imagine Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, A.M. Klein, Mordecai Richler publishing only in Yiddish, in small-circulation Yiddish-language journals, writing of Ashkenazi ethnic culture and concerns. Or, if writing in English, writing only of Jewish life. Imagine how much poorer Canadian, and indeed world, culture would be. And imagine how much worse this would have been for them. They would not have had a career.

That gives some sense of the harm done by multiculturalism. It is, not to split hairs, pure evil. It is pandemonium. We need the melting pot. We need e pluribus unum.

I am, by family tradition, part Mohawk (“Haudenosaunee”), if mostly Irish. Some of my in-laws and cousins have their Indian cards; although I would never consent to carry one. I am Canadian, and all Canadians are Metis. 

Growing up largely in an immigrant area of Montreal, I studied world religions and literatures to the doctoral level. I have spent half my adult life in Asia. My wife is East Asian; my kids are tri-racial. Yet I have no place in a “multicultural” Canada, because I am too multicultural. I do not fit into any convenient, mutually hostile, ethnic ghetto. Canadians have no place in modern Canada. We are discriminated against.

Cultures belong to people, not people to cultures. Cultures have no rights; they are not alive. People have rights. Multiculturalism is a violation of human equality; an insult to human dignity. It promotes hatred of your neighbour, because he is different from you. It is racism. It is corrosive of Canadian society and culture.

It is harmful, most of all, to more recent immigrants. Anyone who has lived in a new culture knows the dangers. Culture shock is the common reaction. The unwise retreat into their own world, fearing and hating those around them. Their daily lives become hellish; nothing around them makes sense. Some literally go mad. Others become aggressively antisocial. 

The cure, as old hands always tell the newcomers, is to get out and engage with the culture. Learn how things work here. 

Multiculturalism thus encourages exactly the wrong attitude and the worst behaviour.

Life in a ghetto, which it demands, also limits economic opportunities. Ask Martin Luther King; such segregation is what he fought so hard against. It is why Canadian First Nations are so poor—that is, those who have stayed on the reserves. Why did we decide apartheid and segregation was a good idea?

Multiculturalism also condemns the immigrant to live his life in exile. Home is forever far away, in the land he left; Canada remains forever foreign. Our patriotic task as Canadians, and what we owe our neighbours, is to build a sense of common home here, in this land, among these people.

Culture is a series of tools, strategies and knowledges, if you will allow the plural, for a good life. As with any other technology, it ought to evolve and improve over time. If it does not, it is failing; it is dying. It needs to be abandoned for a better tool. Only a fool sticks with a poor tool simply because it is the one he is familiar with. 

As an immigrant nation, Canada has the perfect opportunity to assimilate the best elements of all the world’s cultures. This should make Canadian culture the strongest and best the world has ever known. That is what the Canadian “mainstream” is, and what it has always done.

To encourage us instead to stick with a horse and buggy, because our ancestors drove one,  is spectacularly stupid. Or intentionally malicious.

Canada and the Irish

 

The Black Rock, Montreal

Enjoying reading Apartment Seven, a collection of essays—partly memoirs—by Canadian poet Miriam Waddington. She writes at length about her alienation from the Canadian mainstream, growing up as a Jew.

It makes me think of my own ambiguous relation to the Canadian mainstream, as an Irish Catholic. 

Significantly, I notice being invisible to Waddington. To Waddington, other than Jews, there were two groups in Canada: the French and the English. Both were “Christian.”

Yet since before Confedertation, and up until her time, there would have been more Irish than English in “English Canada”; and the last thing they would have seen themselves as is “English.” Even if most of them spoke the language--as Waddington herself did. Not to mention the 25% or so of “French-Canadians” who were Irish.

And to them—to us—the dividing line between Protestant and Catholic was far more significant in our thoughts, in our lives, and in our politics than Christian and Jew.

Waddington here is typical. It is the signature experience of the Irish in Canada. We are not acknowledged to exist. We are the invisible people.

There is a Black Rock in Montreal, dredged up during the construction of the Victoria Bridge. It now marks the unmarked mass grave of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Irish immigrants who died there and were hastily buried where they died in 1847, without service or acknowledgement; as they did in Quebec, in Ottawa, in Kingston, in Toronto, where there are similar mass graves. The Black Rock is now considered the premiere monument to the Irish experience in Canada.

And on it, the Irish are not mentioned. Just “immigrants.” It was consecrated by an Anglican bishop. No Catholic priests were invited to attend.

Most Canadians are oblivious to this; including the Irish themselves. But growing up in Quebec, the Francophones always identified me as “Anglais.” An outsider. The English were, at the same time, generally well aware that I was Irish, and Catholic, and therefore not one of them, and suspect. In either case, an outsider in my own country.

Widely dispersed and largely in the countryside, without cultural power, we had little intercommunication. Therefore our actual numbers were largely invisible even to ourselves. Most of us probably assumed we were a small minority. And at the same time, most of us probably identified optimistically as "Canadian," not "Irish."

But it is also true that being Irish in Canada has always meant keeping your head down and often hiding or denying your ethnic ties and trying to “pass.” The English openly despised us, and they were in command. As we and they read of constant rebellions against English rule in Ireland, and as the Fenians raided, it did not do to admit you were Irish or openly fly that ethnic flag.

Yet the Irish in Canada did not rebel. They agitated for representative government, but the moment that took on the character of rebellion, the Irish, to a man, withdrew. They kept silent, and tried to appear model citizens. For they had nowhere else to go if Canada did not work out. They had escaped a hellish condition in Ireland. They had no money for further immigration. Most came over on “coffin ships,” followed by sharks hoping to dine on the next Irish corpse jettisoned. Those who did not die on the docks had to seek any paying work they could get. 

In Canada, while not treated as equals, while still facing “no Irish need apply” attitudes, they could own land, could vote and run for office, could build churches, educate their children, practice their faith, pass inheritance to their children; and they probably would not starve. Some who managed the money moved on to the US, but those who did found anti-Catholic attitudes stronger there; in Canada they were protected in part by the need for the British to keep quiescent the large French Catholic presence.

Knowing far worse, this was not an applecart the Canadian Irish wanted to overturn. They kept their mouths shut and heads down, and sought opportunities, as in World War I, to prove their loyalty.

Their inevitable strategy was to seek here a distinctive new identity: not Irish, not French, and not English. Canada was largely their project. This was the great project of D’Arcy McGee, and this for him and them was the ultimate objective of Confederation.

This project always struggled against the colonial mentality. Waddington laments that, in her day, members of English faculties were always either English or American, not Canadian, and they scoffed at the idea of including Canadian writing on the curriculum. They looked down on anything produced by mere locals. I experienced the same going through English Lit at Queen’s in the seventies. There were no courses available in Canadian literature, even as electives, and no Canadian writing was included in any of the courses offered. The message was that no decent literature had been or could be written in Canada, by Canadians.

Yet at about that time, it looked as though we might soon break through. We had a generation of writers who seemed to be getting things going: Waddington’s generation. We had almost-famous names like Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findlay, Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, … A distinctive Canadian literature in English seemed to be emerging.

And then the empire struck back. The colonial mentality is hard to overcome. Now the only writers allowed on the curriculum are indigenous, or, again, have been born abroad. And they do not write about Canada; they write only of their own ethnicity and its differences and difficulties. No “mainstream” Canadian culture is recognized to exist.

The Irish still seem, as always, to get it in the ear.

I had a chat with a relatively prominent Canadian poet recently. He had never heard of Emile Nelligan or Al Purdy. He might have known of other Canadian poets of a previous generation; I do not know. These are the only two Canadian poets who happened to come up.

He wrote mostly about Iran, the country of his birth.

As a Canadian, as an Irish Canadian, I still wait for Canada to be born.

A Quickie CanLit Canon

 

A Kiwi friend has asked me what the essential canon of Canadian literature is, for the sake of teaching a Chinese high schooler.

These are the pillars of Canadian literature, which are the foundation for everything else. 

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. The character of Anne reappears constantly in Canadian literature. And this book established children’s literature as the most Canadian genre.

2. Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. This established humour as the essential Canadian tone. And, with Anne, the small town as the essential Canadian setting.

3. Robert W. Service, Songs of a Sourdough. Especially the two poems “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The essential Canadian experience of the north, and the theme of survival in the face of an overwhelming climate and geography. And a focus on ordinary working people and their problems. Canadian culture is a folk culture, not “high art.” 

4. John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields.” The First World War was Canada’s coming of age.

5. Roch Carrier, “The Hockey Sweater,” aka “The Sweater.” Although more recent than other selections, a universally beloved, lighthearted analysis of Canada’s culturally binary nature.

Not that much to read, and not hard reading, but this is what anyone needs to understand Canadian literature.

Other important books worth considering, if and when you get through these:

Al Purdy, “The Country North of Belleville.” That one contains a lot of the Canadian experience.

Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Richler’s short story “The Street” would be a good shorter alternative. The essential Canadian immigrant experience.

Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute.

W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind?

Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

Alice Munro is a good choice too. First Canadian to win the Nobel for Literature, and her “small town gothic” is a deep expression of the Canadian soul.

Happy Empire Day

 

This year, unusually, the 24th of May falls on the 24th of May.

It is a day hallowed to all Canadians, although few remember why we celebrate. It is Queen Victoria’s Birthday. In one sense Canada’s founder, this woman presided over the greatest empire the world has ever known for an unprecedentedly long time, as though she were as certain a feature of the cosmos as the North Pole. Little Alexandrina Victoria Hanover was born on May 24, 1819, as the first steamship was crossing the Atlantic. She died in 1901, just before the world went to hell.

Traditionally, her birthday was one of Canada’s two “national” days. This is Empire Day, on which we celebrated our birthright as British subjects, paired with Dominion Day on July 1st, on which we celebrated ourselves as Canadian citizens.

It remains important, even though the sun has long set, as the traditional start of the cottaging season, bookended now with Labour Day in September. One had to get outside for a barbeque or a picnic on this Monday, damn the weather. I can remember years with coats and mittens and picnic sandwiches cruelly cold. It is not easy to eat a picnic sandwich in mittens.

The evening ended gloriously with fireworks, from Hands or Brock, bought in some shop on the main street that specialized in them seasonally. The finale always had to be the Burning Schoolhouse, to celebrate the coming end to the school year. You would stuff in all the duds in hopes of getting something spectacular, but most often, and perhaps most satisfyingly, it generally ended in a slow, quiet burn.

No more pencils, no more books… and the glorious summer stretching before us, on which the sun barely set.

Happy birthday, Queen Victoria; reminding us of a time when the world still made sense.

Schitt's Creek

 

Having been through the entire original run of Corner Gas, I’m now binge-watching Schitt’s Creek. After a couple of decades abroad, it is a good reorientation to Canadian culture.

Both follow the Canadian tradition of focusing on small town life; like Sunshine Sketches, Anne of Green Gables, or Alice Munro. But they are very different in tone. Corner Gas relies on a more distinctly Canadian sort of comedy: nobody is allowed to take themselves too seriously. Nobody is better than anybody else. There is no fourth wall. And it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Schitt’s Creek is more like an American comedy in having both straight men and clowns. You are supposed to laugh at some characters, not others. Some are serious. The overall tone is more serious; people can get hurt. And I have only been moved to laugh out loud once in the first season.

One element, however, besides the occasional place references, makes Schitt’s Creek feel Canadian. Formulaically in comedy, since the ancient Greeks, characters we are supposed to laugh at are from the lower class, and most often rural: “clown” originally meant a hayseed. 

Compare Green Acres, an old American sitcom built on a premise similar to Schitt’s Creek. We were expected to see it all from the point of view of the city people; the rurals were exotics. Or Beverley Hillbillies, a reverse of the Schitt’s Creek premise: the rurals were sympathetic characters, but odd and foolish.

Now look at Schitt’s Creek. The rurals are the straight men; we are to laugh at the odd and foolish upper class people from the city. The locals are more sensible, and always outsmart them.

This strikes me as an expression of the Canadian character. Culturally, we are profoundly democratic, and an essentially rural people.

Corner Gas

 

Being out of the country for many years, I have just discovered “Corner Gas,” a longtime runaway hit on Canadian TV. I believe it is the most popular Canadian scripted show of all time. Launched in 2004, it is still running as an animated series.

Brent Butt, creator and star, says he does not know why it was and is so popular. What is it about this particular troupe of eight characters? Butt is a brilliant writer, and has done several other projects, but none have approached the success of Corner Gas. What was the magic formula?

I think it is obvious; but a thing long forgotten. Comedies work best in a rural setting. This was something the ancient Greeks knew already. Comic characters, for them, were formulaically rural folk; the word “clown” literally means “rustic.” 

The reason, I believe, is that comedy works by releasing tensions; the punch line is a spring abruptly unsprung. More broadly it works by allowing us escape from our worries. A rural life implies that: a simple life away from our troubles. Most Shakespearean comedies involve retreat into a forest or wilderness, a “green world,” as Northrop Fry noted, which somehow resolves the problems of the protagonist.

For a time, American television conformed, perhaps by accident, to the old formula, and had a run of huge comedic hits based on rural life: Beverley Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction. Then the marketing mavens realized with alarm that they were not appealing to the most desirable market. Most Americans lived in cities, after all. Especially most Americans with money to spend. So the geniuses, in lock step, cancelled all the hillbilly opreys, though still the most popular shows, to reflect the real lives of their desired audience. The replacement sitcoms were all set relentlessly in suburbs or the city. Mary Tyler Moore was going to make it after all. 

They did fine; some were great. But they ran against no rural competition. If there was a thirst in the audience for such an escape from their dreary daily lives, it was not satisfied.

One notable exception: Gilligan’s Island. A show with a puerile premise and without good writing. Nevertheless, the escapist setting alone seems to have gained it, in the absence of any other non-urban competition, cultural immortality.

Overall, nobody in Hollywood seems to understand how comedy works. At least, nobody with money to fund a TV show. But here in Canada, Corner Gas hit upon that same ancient formula. Everyone in Toronto wanted to imagine themselves living in Dog River.

It is also the old Canadian formula. Dog River is a colony of Mariposa. Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town is, along with Anne of Green Gables and Songs of a Sourdough, one of the three founding documents of English Canadian literature. All three are about people living in isolated communities. It is the shared Canadian literary experience. Largely as a result, the soul of Canada is in its small towns. Largely as a result, the soul of Canada is comic, so that Canada keeps generating brilliant comics and comic writers like Brent Butt.

E Pluribus Multis

 

Here is an interesting and important op-ed by a Mount Royal University professor, that appeared in the Vancouver Sun, but reportedly was soon pulled down. True North further claims that ,because he wrote it, the author was refused entry into the Canadian Armed Forces.

Perhaps the most important passage:

social trust corresponds more closely than any other factor to predicting economic prosperity. Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and co-authors from a paper titled, Fractionalization, argued that greater diversity leads to stunted economic growth. In other words, diversity is a weakness as far as the economy is concerned.

In 1981 The World Values Survey began an investigation into cross-cultural beliefs, values and motivations, and has since shown that societies with high social trust are not only more economically productive but also happier. The most successful are homogeneous countries, not the diverse ones.

The bigger problem is not immigration, but multiculturalism. The goal must be to form a unified Canadian culture.

Important Parts of Canadian Culture You Might Have Missed

The Newfoundland ugly stick.

Surf's up off Bonavista!

Hey, Kids, Let's Put on a Canadian National Exhibition!

 

Thanks to COVID-19, there was no CNE this summer: a depressing absence of a grand old end-of-summer Toronto tradition. Rumours are that it may fold forever from that financial hit. The fair that I attended in 2019 may be the last one. And even it was a smaller and less energetic affair than five years ago.

The CNE has mostly lost its reason to be: introducing the locals to the latest snappy consumer products. For years, the new car models were its centerpiece.

That seems no longer necessary. Television killed as lot of it; but at least TV was too expensive for many products. Advertising on the Internet, or finding products on the Internet, is in reach of all.

The CNE reinvented itself once. It began as an agricultural fair; as Toronto industrialized, it shifted to an industrial exhibition. If it is to survive, it needs to reinvent itself again.

Some will suggest that it needs to become more multicultural, to reflect the new face of Canada. It was all a relic of the “white” settler past. But another festival used to do that: Caravan. It died out due to lack of interest. Portuguese-Canadians do not need to go downtown to learn about their Portuguese heritage; and it began to feel a little too much like a human zoo.

I had a Greek-Canadian girlfriend. She would not let me go near the Greek pavilion. She found it too embarrassing. I had a Dutch-Canadian girlfriend. She would not let me go near an exhibitor at the local market wearing wooden shoes.

Here’s an idea: make it the Canadian National Exhibition.

What Torontonians most need now is better awareness of Canada. Most of Toronto today was born elsewhere. The government has put a lot of money into fostering “multiculturalism,” celebrating differences, and little into integrating new arrivals into Canadian culture, or fostering a sense of unity. Why not an annual celebration of Canada? It isn’t happening anywhere else.

This also means no exhibits celebrating only one ethnic group: no aboriginal pavilion, for example, and no francophone pavilion. Only those things we all at least potentially share.

The centerpiece could be a debate competition, featuring high school and university students. The traditions of civil debate, after all, are the foundation of our system of government.

The various political parties could sponsor exhibits around this.

There could be, in the same vein, a mock court, featuring law students or even working lawyers, presenting and arguing famous cases from Canadian history as a spectator sport. This could be a good way for newcomers to be introduced to Canadian legal norms and traditions, another essential part of our culture. It is often overlooked that, along with a common language, the various English-speaking democracies also share a common-law legal tradition.

The armed forces could exhibit their equipment and techniques, as they have been doing at the CNE. Nothing more fun for boys than sitting in a cockpit or climbing on a tank.

There should also be a shared police pavilion: federal, provincial, municipal. Nothing is more central to the Canadian identity than the Mounties; policing in general is central to the Canadian ideal of “peace, order, and good government.” And it is in everyone’s interest to foster good feelings between the police and the urban populace. Young people need to believe that the police are not their enemies.

There ought to be a royal pavilion. Canada is a monarchy, after all, the Queen is supposed to be a unifying symbol, and every immigrant in their oath of citizenship pledges her loyalty.

For the sake of our shared literary cultural heritage, there ought to be a Green Gables exhibit, a Mariposa exhibit, and a Klondike pavilion. Anne of Green Gables should be strolling around the grounds. Green Gables could reproduce sets and show costumes from the latest TV series; Mariposa could present dioramas and scale models of the imaginary town, and exhibits of small town Ontario life circa 1912. The possibilities for a Klondike pavilion are endless.

“Mon pays, c’est l’hiver”: one pavilion might be dedicated to the traditions of winter. Margaret Atwood identified winter as the essential unifying Canadian experience, and a “winter” pavilion was a standout at Montreal’s old Terre des Hommes exhibition. Hockey and hockey history should of course be a large part of it. Ideas for recreational opportunities in the winter, and how to make the most of the season: recent arrivals from other climes may have no idea.

There should be an exhibit on maple syrup: how it is made, and a selection of cuisine for sale. This might be part of a larger “Spring” pavilion, including something on identifying common local wildflowers and edible plants.

There ought to be a humour pavilion. Humour, for anyone who has not noticed, has always been a Canadian specialty. The “Just for Laughs” festival in Montreal is a wildly successful model. And getting the jokes is an essential part of fitting in, for a newcomer. Exhibits could feature classic political cartoons. Anthologized clips of Canadian humourists of the past could be shown: Mack Sennett, Wayne and Schuster, Dan Ackroyd, NFB animated shorts, and on and on. And, of course, live stand-up performances by young comics.

An art pavilion could feature the works of one important Canadian artist each year, assembled from various collections. Such exhibits could then go on the road to other municipal galleries in Canada throughout the subsequent year.

A music pavilion could showcase traditional Canadian folk songs, music, and dancing. Visitors could be given basic instruction in how to folk dance. A sing-along display could encourage attendees to “follow the bouncing ball” on folk songs, Canadian standards, and campfire songs, reviving an old summer tradition. This was Canadian karaoke before there was karaoke; a lot of Asian-born Canadians will take to it naturally.




An outdoor screen could show classic and recent Canadian movies.

A resources pavilion might feature a display of Canadian minerals, something on the long history of forestry and the fur trade, exhibits on oil and hydro-electric power. Canada, with its huge territory, has always been all about natural resources, after all.

The grounds might be tied together, and footsore attendees accommodated, by a miniature railroad, in part commemorating the importance of the railroads in unifying Canada. Logos of various historic and present rail systems could be featured on the cars. Canadian Pacific, Grant Trunk, Kettle Valley Railroad, and so on.

Headliners at the stadium should of course be the biggest current Canadian acts. A tent on the grounds could feature a Cirque du Soleil performance nightly.

Another pavilion should promote the national and provincial parks: reminders for city dwellers of opportunities to escape into the great Canadian outdoors. Given the timing of the exhibition, at the end of summer, seeing fall colours could be the theme. Along with fishing, camping, woodcraft, and canoeing exhibits.

Concessions might offer any sort of food, but we might also have a food pavilion, as does the current CNE, featuring strictly Canadian specialties immigrants may never have tried. Pate Chinois, Jiggs’ dinner, Montreal bagels, fiddleheads, and so forth.

Essential funding could legitimately come from government, to undo some of the harm of multiculturalism policies over the years. Promoting national unity and a sense of citizenship is their legitimate concern. Private sponsors might also be interested in hosting many aspects of the exhibition: Canadian-branded companies like Hudson’s Bay Company, Tim Horton’s, Vachon, CP Rail, and so forth. Not to mention any other company who would like to be seen by Canadians as Canadian. Which is just about any company selling to consumers.

Living as I have for most of my adult life with immigrants and others hoping to move to Canada, I bet that such a CNE would be wildly popular, in particular, with more recent immigrants. It could also, unlike the current version of the CNE, be an immense draw for foreign tourists.

Happy Empire Day!

Queen Victoria,
My father and all his tobacco loved you,
I love you too in all your forms,
The slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
The mean governess of the huge pink maps,
The solitary mourner of a prince. 

Queen Victoria,
I am cold and rainy,
I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station,
I feel like an empty cast iron exhibition,
I want ornaments on everything,
Because my love, she gone with other boys. 

Queen Victoria,
I'm not much nourished by modern love,
Will you come into my life
With your sorrow and your black carriages,
And your perfect
Memories. 

Queen Victoria,
The Twentieth Century belongs to you and me.
Let us be two severe giants not less lonely for our partnership,
Who discolor test tubes in the halls of Science,
Who turn up unwelcome at every World's Fair,
Heavy with proverbs and corrections,
Confusing the star-dazed tourists
With our incomparable sense of loss.

 -- Leonard Cohen

Leacock

Mr. Smith in front of Smith's Hotel

When I was a kid, I was crazy about Stephen Leacock. I borrowed and read every book they had by him at the Fraser-Hickson Library. They were in the adult section, so I had to smuggle them out using my mother’s library card. 

I recently re-read some of his stuff. No, it was not as funny as I remembered. I found the beginning of his “My Discovery of England” still laugh-out-loud funny. Sunshine Sketches is still wonderful. But a lot of the rest seemed a swing and a miss.

When I was a kid, I also thought Wayne and Schuster were brilliant. But when I see their stuff on YouTube now, they’re mostly not good at all. Corny. Hammy.

The problem is that comedy relies on a reversal of expectations. It requires surprise. This makes it more easily and quickly dated than other forms. Everything that is really good is going to look corny in a few years, because you heard it before, and because, if it is really good, it has been imitated. And so there is no longer any reversal of expectations.

There have to be periodic revolutions in humour to overcome this. Leacock looks stiff and predictable post-Python.

A friend complains that Leacock uses too many American references; as though he’s pandering for the wider audience.

I don’t have any problems with Leacock’s American references, and I don’t think he was selling out. There is a lot of that in My Discovery of England, and he was not writing for an American audience, but a British one. The truth is, we ARE Americans, indistinguishable from other North Americans to Europeans or Asians or South Americans, barely distinguishable to Yanks. It is artificial to ignore the similarities and stress the differences. I like Neil Young’s attitude, in his album “Americana.” Which he ends with “God Save the Queen.” We are British North America. This is the cultural background we legitimately grew up with, mostly the same as the US, cowboys and Indians and the frontier and the gold rush, with a few more things on top.

One thing we share with our southern neighbours is a heritage of innumerable small towns. But here Leacock illustrates the vital difference. I’ve read the classic US small town novels: Lewis’s Main Street and Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio. Very unlike Leacock’s Mariposa. The Mi-guk literary small town is a place of despair, a place you feel trapped and alienated, a dead end. The Canadian small town is remembered fondly, as real life as it ought to be lived; in Sunshine Sketches, in Munro’s short stories, in Anne’s Avonlea. The city is the place of exile.

Have you ever read Al Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville”?

Now Is the Time for All Good People ...

I certainly can’t say for sure, because Google’s sinister algorithms pre-screen everything so that it conforms to what it thinks are our pre-existing prejudices. But it seems the coverage of the Don Cherry firing has changed.

For the first day or two, it was all, “why did it take so long to fire Don Cherry?” And “Canada has at last outgrown Don Cherry.”

Now the story seems to have shifted to “the Don Cherry controversy.” And “the Don Cherry controversy just won’t die.” One online petition is nearing 200,000 signatures, and apparently there was a demonstration this afternoon in front of the SportsNet offices.

I gather the media expected the public to take this sitting down. Seems awfully naïve of them. But it has been clear for some time that they don’t get out much.

What Have We Been Missing?

I love Alex Colville. I believe his painting usually have a distinct spiritual message. I took a lot of photos at a Colville exhibition in Ottawa a few years ago.

This one perhaps best sums up them all: what have we been missing? What are we forgetting?

Or this one: Death is our hitchhiker. We are about to cross that bridge. Hadn't we better look in the rear-view mirror?

You start to get the picture, so to speak.

Canadian Versus American Culture

American (US) and Canadian culture are similar in their democratic and popular attitude. Yet they are also very different, almost opposite. Here's the difference in two aphorisms:

America: "Every man a king!"

Canada: "Every king a man."

Canadian Culture

Anne attacks Gilbert.

Canadian culture is fundamentally unserious.

Seriously.

Humor and kidlit are the two Canadian specialties. There is a reason for this.

It has to do with our democratic instincts. You start getting serious about things, and the Canadian instinct is to say “Get off your high horse!”

I recall that the rather good British 1960s series The Avengers tried to reboot as a British-Canadian co-production, featuring the intrepid Bond-like agents of Interpol operating from the environs of Toronto.

Perhaps it played well to a UK audience, but to a Canadian, it was unintentionally wildly comic. High intrigue in Mariposa? Get off your high horse!

Canadian culture is always about ordinary people in their ordinary lives, for the good and simple reason that this is all that really matters. Anything else is comic in its pretension.

And the most important events in life, as any sane person knows, take place in childhood.

Anne with an Eh?

Watching the second season of “Anne with an E” (Just “Anne” in Canada) with my kids. They love it. I am not happy with it. It is a travesty of the original.

The common observation is that it is darker than the books. That is not my problem. My problem is that it is so badly written. It shows no understanding of character, and especially of the original characters of the books. Plot turns often make no sense. It is often wildly historically inaccurate, although it claims this as something it worked especially hard at; historical authenticity. And it is prone to virtue signal, which is embarassing.

It regularly has characters do things without any good motive. Characters just fly of the handle, when it is useful to introduce some plot complication, without motivation and often out of character. In episode 4 (I think), they have a brothel madame toss one of her girls in the street, literally, in front of our heroes, just as the latter is about to give birth. Leave aside the stereotypical, melodramatic situation: where's the sensitivity to character? Right, so people are all black or all white, and the madame must be one of the bad ones, right? More than a bit hamfisted. The more so since there is, by comparison, no hint that the prostitute herself might bear any moral responsibility for anything. Trite and uninsightful as this is, this is not the worst. It is the absolute lack of suitable motivation. Narratively, why would any madame throw a girl out just as her water breaks, as opposed to once she has become visibly pregnant? It makes no narrative sense. And would the prostutite reallty have had no prior warning, so that she was unable to make any other arrangements?

Meantime, back in Avonlea, two grifters living at Green Gables have a falling out. One wants to take the money they've swindled out of just about everyone in town, the other wants to stay and use it to buy some land and set down roots.

What? So his neighbours are just going to forget all about his swindling their money?

And really, how plausible was it as a plot point in the first place to have everyone in Avolea give their money to a stranger for the sake of getting some supposed assessment of gold prospects on their lands? It's trite and implausible, surely. Even if there were gold, or likely to be gold, would the landowner really pay to find out, as opposed to some mining company doing so?

The series prides itself on being historically accurate—indeed, it claims this as one of its distinguishing features, in comparison to previous productions. Yet in a recent episode, it shows the young French Canadian farmhand, “Jerry,” offered alcohol, and refusing it, explaining, “We never drink at home. We're Catholic.”

Eh? Even given original invincible ignorance, shouldn't the writer or the show have checked whether abstinence from alcohol was indeed a Catholic practice? Would it have been so hard to Google it?

Another episode shows a scruffy, deperately poor Jewish pedlar who says he is from Germany, but had to leave because life is so difficult for Jews there. But this is happening in the last years of the nineteenth century. Jews in Germany at the time were fully enfranchised and, on average, better off and better educated than the general population. Jews from other lands were moving to Germany as a result. It is because of Jewish success and prosperity that Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism in the Twenties and Thirties stuck. Jews were provoking envy and suspicion with their growing power. They were supposedly in control of banking and so forth. Hardly impoverished pedlars with big scruffy beards. This guy came straight out of some stereotype factory, from someone whose knowledge of European Jewry came entirely from Fiddler on the Roof.

The point of the character's appearance is apparently only to virtue signal. It shows the poor foreigner as generous, first, and then demonstrates Mirilla's racism, as she chases him off her property. Trashing Mirilla's character, in the process; another arbitrary and motiveless act. Predictably, in the series, any identifiable character who is non-white, non-Anglo, or an immigrant is entirely good. Anyone who is white, Anglo, and non-immigrant (Brits and Americans do not count here as immigrants; in fact, it is good and righteous to bash Brits or Americans) is basically bad and stupid. You can read anyone's character at a glance.

That's called racism.

Anne's character is also repeatedly violated: something especially vile for a character who has become so generally beloved. It is all like those illustrations of Mickey Mouse and Minne performing sex acts. Bad luck for her: she is white and Anglo, after all. Here, Anne has no consideration for the feelings of others. She frequently acts like a spoiled child, completely out of character for an abused orphan. She is shown exploding in anger towards the Francophone farmhand, Jerry, for example, who is a sympathetic character who has done nothing to her—as though only her feelings matter. And she is shown first opening and reading Matthew's mail, then, discovering he is getting letters from an old flame, writing love letters back to her in his name.

This is the sort of thing only a confirmed narcissist would do. It refuses to acknowedge either Matthew or his female correspondent as real human beings, with the right to exist as separate and apart from Anne's own fantasies. It shows callous disregard for their feelings. There is no way Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne Shirley would do such a thing. And worse, when this Anne does it, the series itself seems to show no understanding of how morally wrong and cruel it is.

Another really annoying addition is an amaterish computer-generated fox that keeps appearing as Anne's bush soul. This is gritty realism?

The good news is, perhaps it will at least inspire kids to read the books.