"Team Canada" and Other National Fairy Tales
Another existential crisis, and once again social media overflows with reasonable and considerate Canadian voices, this time advocating for a "Team Canada" approach to Donald Trump's tariff mania. And predictably most of them end up shitting on other Canadians while they're doing it, which exposes them as being neither reasonable nor considerate.
Most of the posts I've seen on this topic show that what these people are really interested in is not so much coming together and being united as a team, but rather slamming anyone who is not 100% in agreement with the way they think things ought to be done - precisely how it was during the covid panic. And big surprise: it's coming from the same people.
A prime example is this post that's been making the rounds on Facebook. For what it's worth, I'm not intending to attack the original poster here - I don't know anything about her. My point is simply to draw attention to the sentiments that people feel obliged to agree with and propagate without so much as even thinking about what they're agreeing with. The post is public, so I take that to mean it's okay for me to link to it.
It starts out like this:
Dear 77,301,997 Americans who voted for Trump (and to a few of our own MAGA-loving Canadians),
If this person would like to blame Donald Trump or the Republicans for this mess, fine - but how ‘bout we leave the “MAGA loving Canadians” out of it since what does that even mean?
Then comes the appeal to common decency and universal Canadian niceness:
See, being Canadian has never been about shouting the loudest or demanding attention. That’s not who we are. We’re the quiet ones — the ones who shovel our neighbour’s driveway without being asked, who hold the door open, who say “sorry” when you bump into us, and who believe that getting along is better than shouting each other down.
Yes, and here's a double-double for you to enjoy while you watch me shovel your driveway. I just got back from Timmy’s on my ski-doo. Had to deke out a deer or two the way too, eh….
There's more:
We believe in fairness, decency, and looking out for each other — not just here at home, but around the world. It’s part of why we’ve always been proud to be your greatest neighbour.
Well, we used to believe in fairness and decency - until about five years ago when we discovered that certain Canadians didn't appreciate the authoritarian measures that our government used in order to get people to take a “vaccine” that many didn't want or need. Then all of a sudden we found out that this group were second-class citizens at best, and deliberate Grandma killers at worst, with accusations of racist and misogynist thrown in for good measure.
What really got my toque in a bunch about this message was the part that was apparently addressed to me:
Now, to the Canadian MAGA cheerleaders telling me to “mind my own broken country” — let's take a moment and clear a few things up.
While I'm always thankful for a bit of clarity, the only clarity I got from this statement was that this person has identified not one enemy, but two. And the other one apparently resides in this country and may well be her next door neighbour.
However, mentioning that most of our current problems are of our own making in no way makes one a “MAGA cheerleader” and by extension, a Trump supporter. Sorry.
She goes on:
Canada isn’t broken. Do we have problems? Of course we do — name a country that doesn’t. But we’re not on the verge of civil war because we can’t even agree on basic facts. We don’t rally to round up immigrants or people who don’t look like us, or cheer when our leaders mock the disabled and vulnerable. We don’t vote convicted criminals into office — we vote them out. We don’t cling to political labels like they’re our whole identity. We’re Canadian first — not Liberal or Conservative first.
Really? I guess it's easy to forget the country-wide statue-topplings of our first Prime Minister and the church burnings which accompanied that after the fake news of 215 newly discovered indigenous children's graves blasted over the airwaves. And no, we don't “round up immigrants or people who don’t look like us”. Actually we invite them in and allow them to riot and burn Canadian flags in our streets while calling for death to Canada. For a full year our streets did indeed bare a striking resemblance to a country in civil war.
Add to that the mountain of scandals and rampant criminality in our own government over the last nine years, plus the fact that our 4th leading cause of death is euthanasia by our own government, and the statement "Canada is not broken" becomes very hard to swallow.
And then there's this, which has now become my lived experience:
Seems like something happened in Canada around 2015. Any guesses as to what that might have been? Here's a hint: it starts with Justin and ends with Trudeau.
Time for the comedic break. Here's the part that almost made me spit my Timmys out all over my phone:
We didn’t hand over the keys to our government to a bunch of unelected corporate tycoons and media personalities. We don’t cling to a 250-year-old gun law while innocent children are slaughtered in their classrooms, pretending nothing can be done.
Good grief, does this person even live here? After we had finally gotten rid of our drama teacher identifying as a prime minister, it was mere days ago that we literally did just "hand over the keys to our government to an unelected corporate tycoon." And as for the gun law thing, what we do in Canada is even more preposterous - here we cheer on our government for taking hunting rifles away from law-abiding Canadians, while allowing known criminals back on the street to use illegally obtained handguns to kill people and shoot up Jewish schools and synagogues - while actually doing nothing.
Here's another bit of disillusionment from that same post:
Canada is respected around the world — not pitied or laughed at. We believe in upholding all of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, not picking and choosing which rights apply based on political convenience. That's illegal, and morally reprehensible. What the actual what? Who even does something like that?
Respected around the world? Maybe a decade ago, but it's hardly the case now. In fact, we are probably the most laughed at first-world nation on the planet, thanks mainly to the drama teacher turned TikTok influencer who also happened to be running the show here for nine straight years.
And “upholding all of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms”? Please. That train left the station the day our Prime Minister invoked the Emergencies Act to terminate a street party and I don't anticipate it's return anytime soon.
And of course, no Team Canada monologue would be complete without the invocation of the National Sacred Cow of Universal Health Care:
We didn’t gut essential health care for millions of people with the stroke of a pen.
No we didn't, because we didn't have to, considering we've been doing that systematically for years, a little at a time. It's now to the point that Canadians often need to go to the United States to recieve life-saving treatment if they don't actually die here on the waiting list first. And then there's the fact that my wife and kids (along with 8,000,000 other Canadians) still don't have a family doctor.
And then the sign-off to further establish how nice and polite we all are:
Dear ones, south of the border. We’re your friend, your ally, and your neighbour — but we’re not blind, and we are definitely not fools. We’re polite. We’re fair. But we’re not pushovers. And right now? We’re watching. Closely.
Warmly, with kindness — and a whole lot of concern, Canada 🇨🇦 🇨🇦
Elbows up.
Just for the record, here are a few more things Canadians are these days:
Suckers for platitudes,
Gullible for fancy rhetoric and propaganda, and
Doormats for weak leaders - mainly our own.
At least one thing we don't have to be is a doormat for a foreign leader, so on that point I heartily agree with this person and I sincerely hope we can at least get ourselves out of that rut.
When I pointed out to a different Team Canada person the fact that in 2020 and 2021, a majority of Canadians were snitching on businesses that failed to implement a satisfactory covid regime for their customers, and were also in favor of ratting out their neighbors if they had one too many visitors coming to their doors, I received this response:
Everything you said there is idiotic.....Hope your loved ones have been vaccinated ...e.g. measles, smallpox etc.
And I imagine you do stand with Trump, good luck then and when your Healthcare bill comes in do not come running back to Canada....That is why we pay the taxes we do!
First of all, this response is precisely what I've come to expect from the self-righteous, pro-lockdown, vaccine mandate, bandwagon-hopping crowd (which as I mentioned has now morphed into the Team Canada crowd) and the severe irony of this comment so mercilessly making my point was another good laugh for me.
Second, this typifies the response to every other major societal issue we've seen in this country over the last five years. Think every form of “denialism” (which doesn't require one to actually deny anything other than the simplistic propaganda associated with whatever the current issue is); to anti-vaxxers, where being opposed to a mandating of a largely untested covid shot is enough to earn this label; to anything “anti-trans”, which requires only that one be against puberty blockers for 10-14 year-olds (so 68% of Americans).
Thirdly, if we got anywhere near what we actually paid for in this country regarding health care, then we undoubtedly would have the best health care in the world. The sad fact is we don't and it's not even close, and that's a big part of the problem, so simply saying it and believing it isn't enough to make it so.
In closing I just want to reiterate that in light of recent events, this sudden particular outbreak of patriotism rings a bit hollow to many of us. Not only that, but when most of these statements include obvious slights against other Canadians, it also seems to have come at the expense of already scant national unity, which pretty much disqualifies it in my books. This whole elbows up campaign seems terribly disingenuous to me - mainly posturing and virtue-signaling. And by the way, I had no idea what “elbows up” even meant until someone finally explained it to me. Now I'm assaulted with it daily in the form of ads featuring T-shirts, hats, and hoodies, among other things.
So, if you really want to be part of Team Canada, then I would strongly advise against comparing other Canadians to people you hate and slamming them for pointing out obvious truths about where we're at as a nation. Maybe instead you could start doing your part to solve some of those issues you’d rather not hear about by taking part in that grand old Canadian tradition of voting in the next federal election.
A great essay Ken which mirrors much of my own sentiments and thoughts on the matter. Over here in BC we have a fair amount of conservatives, however the radical left also exists and they are down right dangerous, imo.
The health care chart was a real eye-opener!