of major snowfalls. His host, on the other hand, wonders why he can find nothing to say about Canada’s cuisine or its major musical artists.
Canadians have no choice. They embrace the frigid winters as something that makes them unique. Blinding snow, extreme windchill, freezing rain, and blizzards are hazards they tolerate every year, something that is foreign to the majority of other countries. A Canadian traveller would be at a loss if someone checked into the same hostel and was from Iceland. They would feel somewhat emasculated.
Horse racing on a frozen river.
American comedic writer Dave Barry famously wrote: “The problem with winter sports is that — follow me closely here — they generally take place in winter.” Canadians, however, embrace winter sports because for far too many months there simply is no other choice.
Of course, a Canadian could declare a disaffection with the season and many do by fleeing south during its harsher months, but in so doing there’s a sneaking suspicion that they must be less than a “real Canadian.” Winter culture surrounds Canadians, telling them that hockey, snowmobiling, and ice fishing are their activities. Basketball may have been created by a Canadian, but being a basketball fan does not make you a Canadian. Basketball is now too connected with American culture to qualify as Canadian.
Canadians must embrace their sports to be truly genuine, and they do, but, of course, with a caveat that it is what is expected of them. The outsider will quickly know they are in Canada once they turn on a television and investigate the country’s sports stations. Two will be showing hockey games, a third will have aging veterans of the game talking about hockey games and prattling on about how necessary fighting is to the game’s definition, while a fourth station will be showing a curling match.
Those from other countries are of course baffled by this strange cultural abnormality. A caller to a Geneva, Switzerland, sports talk show in the year 2000, having spent some time in Canada watching television, inquired of the bemused host whether Canadian parents, as a rite of passage for children, removed all their child’s front teeth before putting them into the game as the loss was inevitable in any case. The host was unable to contradict this apparent European urban myth.
The most promising basketball tandem in Toronto in the early twenty-first century, featuring the mercurial Vince Carter and his cousin Tracy McGrady, was broken up by McGrady’s protest that he needed to get out of Canada because not only was the American sports station ESPN not available but its alternative, TSN, only covered curling — hour after hour of Vic Rauter proclaiming the mystery of draws, and rocks, and buttons, which McGrady found culturally baffling. The promise of a National Basketball Association dynasty in Toronto was thus shattered by the country’s bizarre winter sports fixation.
From childhood, young boys in the long winters have little choice but to embrace the games of ice and snow. There are few facilities that can accommodate children playing football or baseball indoors during the long winter months, so thousands of children travel to the closest rink, or to a frozen pond or homemade rink, and join their friends.
It’s an upbringing that is unavoidable. The relationship between Canadians and the winter has created a culture that almost exclusively holds winter events as the defining moments in the country’s sports history. Some of the best-defined cultural events of the past fifty years have involved the game of hockey. Arguably none was more significant than Paul Henderson’s goal to win the Summit Series with Russia (okay, they called themselves the Soviet Union, but to Canadians they were Russians) in 1972. Canadians also recall the collective joy of the nation following Mario Lemieux’s goal for Team Canada in 1987 in the penultimate match with those same Russians.
Hockey defines Canadians so much now that politicians use the winter sport as a benchmark to create new legislation.
One has only to consider a proposed Federal holiday brought forward in February 2009 by Linda Duncan, an Edmonton MP. In her proposal, Duncan argued that the third Friday of February be declared, as one might have already guessed, “Hockey Day.”
Duncan’s proposal, not surprisingly, was quick fodder for the national media. Any story involving hockey and politics gets the attention of Canadians. Its presence on websites inspired a flurry of comments and sparked vigorous debates from Canadians throughout the nation. Some comments by Canadians online spoke directly to the state of Canada’s culture. Some wondered how Canadians have got to the point where the nation, once joked about as being a hockey-playing, beer-drinking, parka-wearing fraternity, now had politicians proposing holidays directly catering to some of these oversimplifications. Had we become a country requiring a holiday to tell us what we already knew to be our story? Duncan defended her proposal, saying, “Hockey has served as a unifying force throughout our history and it is a significant facet of our national identity.”
Duncan tapped into a distinctly Canadian myth that we are somehow uniquely strong and capable of living with, and even prospering in, long winters, as opposed to the easier ability of people in warmer climates to address their challenges. The holiday would help ease the Canadian difficulty in surviving long, harsh winters.
“People need days off in the winter to fight the blues, and what better holiday could there be than one that would celebrate our national game?” Duncan explained.
This is not a new concept. Winter has been a major influence on the comments and actions of prominent Canadian statesmen and politicians. In 1866, Nova Scotia statesman Joseph Howe cheekily viewed Canada as not being able to fully loosen its shackles.
“[We] may be pardoned if we prefer London under the Dominion of John Bull to Ottawa under the domination of Jack Frost,” he remarked.
Prominent politicians, like popular Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, also noted Canada’s relationship with its unique weather patterns. “Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain,” he said.
A curling team sponsored by Sangster, circa 1915.
Trudeau’s political counterpart, conservative politician Joe Clark, joined the fray of characterizing Canada as a winter wonderland in his description of Canada as “The Winter half of North America.”
Politicians seemingly have no problem creating sound bites signifying a long-standing overexaggeration of Canada’s climate, even if their comments don’t necessarily apply to the majority of Canadians who live in somewhat more temperate regions of the country.
Generalizing Canada’s identity as a winter nation has its roots in the ways Canadians define their country. While cold winters certainly affect northern Canada, and cities such as Edmonton or Calgary, frosty, unbearable winters are not as applicable to residents of Windsor, Toronto, and Vancouver, which contain the majority of Canadians.
Torontonians share a climate similar to Buffalo, New York (but with less snow), and Detroit (but with less laid-off auto workers) for the majority of the year. Being Canadian, however, allows them to travel abroad and proudly declare that they are like winter soldiers who are able to endure the roughest of Canadian winters, while reassuring southerners, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that they don’t live in igloos, as their new house was built with bricks and mortar.
It’s a misconception of sorts that Canadians love to exploit in the manner of people who have lived so long with an ironic self-image they now believe it to be fact. Rick Mercer, a popular Canadian CBC (Canadian
