Oh Canada

With Canada Day getting closer I expect we'll see more posts like the recent one about an American study that showed 23% of eighth graders in the U.S. think Canada is a dictatorship. CBC TV recently featured it. The national pride that gets displayed every July 1 always seems to be mixed with an insecurity about our American neighbors with whom we are joined at the hip. Canadians love to highlight American ignorance of things uniquely Canadian as a way of dealing with our national inferiority complex.

In late April of 2001, when Rick Mercer's "Talking to Americans" show was a brief but big hit on CBC TV, I was the producer of a radio talk show. Just for fun one day, I wrote out a bunch of questions for the host to ask our listeners what they knew about things American. This was in response to the Mercer gag-fest on Americans who thought Canada got FM radio for the first time in 2001 and is a country that has high-rise igloos. After all, it's Canadian to be fair, right? Here are some of the results of "Talking to Canadians". As it turned out, we weren't - and maybe still aren't - much better.

The show was two hours long and in the first hour it took four calls before someone could tell us the correct number of stars on the American flag. An American expatriate who phoned in didn't know that the stripes on Old Glory depicted the original 13 colonies and thought for sure Richard Nixon was impeached (Nixon quit before that happened). It took a while before someone guessed which century the War of Independence occurred in and a former local politician thought the colors of the American flag were blue and gold. Really. I'm not making this up.

The second hour featured questions about Canada. Oh boy. One caller thought our first Prime Minister was William Lyon Mackenzie King and our first (and only) woman Prime Minister was "Somebody Crosbie". Very few people knew about the new Canadian territory of Nunavut, which had already been around for two years, and one caller thought that Saint John (as in New Brunswick) was the capital city of Halifax (as in Nova Scotia). I remember the host sitting in somewhat stunned silence.

In the weeks leading up to this Canada Day, let's be careful about what stones we throw.