Writing on the Border

I WAS TWELVE WHEN I FIRST CROSSED THE BORDER FROM THE UNITEDSTATES into Canada. My American classmates viewed my departure to that country with a combination of envy and alarm. Like them I would not have been surprised to find igloos in the towns with the streets full of dog sleds. My ignorance about my new country was astounding.

But it was commonplace. I was reminded of this recently by an ongoing storyline in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) weekly television satire, This Hour has 22 Minutes. In a recurring episode entitled "Talking to Americans," Rick Mercer, Canada's most popular satirist and a caustic political commentator (mainstream enough to have hosted the 2000Geminis, Canada's film industry awards ceremony, and to have won Canada's top television comedy award with his 22 Minutes colleagues five times) travels to the United States and interviews Americans about Canada. Whether they are ordinary people on the street, venerable Ivy League academics, political staffers, or a presidential candidate, he turns their ignorance about their neighbor and largest trading partner into ludicrous jokes. In recent months we have witnessed friendly Americans congratulating Canada on the arrival of FM radio, personal fax machines, a second area code, and power steering. (They don't know that Canada houses some of the continent's largest automobile factories, generates significant innovations in communication technology, and remains their country's major trading partner. But of course we do.) ¹ They sent cheery messages to Canadian Prime Minister Tim Horton, congratulating him on his "double double," as though Canada might be the sort of country where that sounded like a prime ministerial accomplishment. (Tim Horton's, a popular doughnut shop chain wherein a "double double" translates both as a coffee with double sugar double cream, and a contest, was then running a television ad campaign in which customs officials distinguished returning Canadians from impostors by their knowledge of the contest). They begged the government not to close down Canada's last remaining university, Eaton's U. (Eaton's, a prominent family-owned department store chain and home catalogue publisher, was recently bankrupt.) They urged Canada to legalize VCRs (although a slightly larger percentage of Canadians own VCRs and telephones than their American counterpoints), ² allow the introduction of a daily newspaper (although Toronto, where I live, has five in English and several in other languages), and change their clocks, now supposedly set to a 20-hour cycle, to a 24-hour day to avoid disruption with American schedules. And a parade of camera-ready Americans urged the mayor of Toronto not to restore the Toronto Polar Bear Hunt, which, they feelingly insisted, would be a "naive and uneducated" act. (I hope I do not need to record that there are no polar bears in or near Toronto.)

On the much-publicized February 28, 2000 episode, Mercer interviewed U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush and the Governor of Michigan, John Engler, a key supporter of Bush's presidential campaign. Pausing in the midst of a crowd of cameras and microphones, both men gracefully acknowledged the endorsement of Prime Minister Jean Poutine ("poutine" is the name of a popular Quebec dish of fries, gravy, and melted cheese curds—or, pronounced slightly differently, Putin is the new president of Russia), despite the fact that Prime Minister Chretien shares his surname with Canada's then-ambassador to the United States, Raymond Chretien, his nephew.

Of course this all says something about Canada, as well. After all, it is Canadians who are watching, Canadians who are laughing, Canadians who are piling the cameras on the planes to fly home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 22 Minutes is produced. You don't have to be Canadian to get the joke, but you do need to be Canadian to understand it in all its ironic complexity. Many would argue that "getting it" in the fuller sense is what makes Canadians Canadian. ^3...