Canada, Triumphant!

In November of 2004, the CBC married a series of documentaries to a viewer vote-in to determine the identity of The Greatest Canadian. While I was not on the edge of my seat to see who The Greatest Canadian would be, the series held my attention to the end. I was certainly not disappointed when they announced Tommy Douglas as the winner.

Tommy Douglas was probably born in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or possibly Nova Scotia before its admittance into the Canadian Federation by the Queen in 1967 (this event led to the naming of the Washington Nationals baseball team). There seems to be considerable evidence that Tommy Douglas was either a 1930s Prairie Socialist or a country singer who performed old Nashville standards in a poorly-constructed set that bore little resemblance to the ‘down home’ kitchen that it purported to be. Tommy Douglas may have worn glasses, but this seems odd given that according to some, Tommy Douglas also managed to serve as an ace airman during the First World War.

Tommy Douglas clearly is The Greatest Canadian and quite multi-talented to boot. It’s not hard to see how he won.

In the same week, the Dan Rather/CBS News scandal broke in the US when it was confirmed that a bunch of people probably lied about some papers that really didn’t matter to an electorate who had already voted. Lamentably, more Canadians could tell me the details of Rathergate than could tell me that Tommy Douglas was the father of the Canadian Medicare system.

It turns out that next to Douglas’ Medicare, the most universal thing in Canada is television from America. We are steeped in it as a nation and its pop culture has become our own. Most of us have watched enough Law & Order that we could not only pass the New York State Bar exam without cracking a textbook, but we could probably empanel our own grand jury to indict whoever it was who abducted that pretty white girl on CNN. I know people who will argue about whether or not the pigeon-like Jack McCoy correctly applied the rules of evidence discovery but think that the Court of Queen’s Bench is a place for gay guys to hang out.

We may not be sure who our Governor-General is, but half of us know the name of the chef who screams ‘Bam!’ on the Food Network.

As you may have guessed, this is central to our ongoing attempt to find some form of representative government here in Soviet Canuckistan.

Really.

Around mid-December the American ambassador to Canada complained that some candidates in this federal election, and most regrettably our Prime Minister were using public animus towards the United States to curry electoral favor with the Canadian people. Earlier, a member of the Canadian Cabinet commented, “I hate those bastards” in reference to our American pals. I’m genuinely pro-American as a rule, but I can see how this kind of thing happens. Other than telling our political leaders to shut up, the American ambassador has been sending us gift cards from Hallmark telling us that we are jerks for not sending troops to Iraq and bad neighbors who actively encourage terrorists to cross our borders. The complaints of our politicians and general populace seem fairly forgivable in that light. In one respect this is much like blaming a bear for fertilizing the forest. If asked, the bear would very likely inform that such is the reason that the trees are there in the first place.

This story even got some coverage on the American news channels, so this way we can be guaranteed that some Canadians have actually seen it. More importantly, it gave American commentators like Tucker “fading fast” Carlson another reason to call us “retarded and pointless.” Ann Coulter, that cornerstone of wisdom has previously reasoned that “Canada is lucky that we (the US) allow them to exist…”

Thanks, Ann. You are the wind beneath my wings.

Which side of this equation is more depressing, though: a nation at war whose pundits take the time to belittle us or a nation in the midst of an election that needs to pile on the American President to unify its base? Since Carlson and Coulter are paid to go around and give the rest of us the intellectual equivalent of pinkeye, I am saddened to say that it might be us.

Canada suffered through an election about a year and a half ago when the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada was making a serious run at forming at least a minority government. It never came to pass and the Liberals moved into their second decade of uninterrupted power. This time we are reviewing many of the same issues, a slightly varied bunch of bribes to the electorate (perennial loser Jack Layton is offering every Canadian a hot-oil massage) and a scandal that doesn’t really blame anyone who’s still in office. The CPC has surged recently in the polls, but everyone recognizes that this is a function of Liberal implosion rather than new-found love of the party led by the autonomic Stephen Harper.

With twenty percent of our electoral seats tied up by the lazy threat of separatism, it’s hard to imagine the rule-set that will allow either side to definitively win this game in the foreseeable future. Certainly, if they do the other side will be reduced to such national penury that they will cease to function as an effective opposition party. This is our new dynamic; we are plagued by ineffective coalitions or saddled with an unchallenged majority. Given the lethargy of Canadian governments free from an impending vote and the desperate, middle-child earnestness of the short-lived coalitions I can’t say that any of our prospects are very good.

The energy has been sucked out of the process and we are left with the unsightly scrum of a Prime Minister desperate to win his own mandate, and a challenger painfully aware that the two previous iterations of his party failed to become a legitimate national entity. Both are then blocked from electoral transcendence by a gaggle of Parliamentarians who will never hold power, but throw untold spanners into the works in the name of representing a constituency that is either nation-wide but ethereal or rock-solid and entirely regional.

Assuming that Ann Coulter and her army of undead McCarthyites don’t take us over first, whoever serves as the lightning rod to raise us up from this puddle will get my vote as The Greatest Canadian on the next ballot.