One of the first, and hardest things I learned about being a Canadian was to stop being an American. I know that sounds simplistic — and heaven knows there are plenty of you who have accused me of being simplistic — but it's true.
Like Canadian singer/songwriters or comedians or actors who have had to move to the U.S. to discover how great they are, I had to move to Canada to discover what an American I was. When I lived in the U.S., it never dawned on me I was an American. This may sound foolish — op.cit., and heaven knows... — but in Canada, Canadians are acutely aware they are Canadian. It's evident in how they struggle, endlessly, to define exactly what that means and how they proudly display their Canadian-ness when they leave the country, albeit more as a shield of self-deprecation than a sword of emphatic pride, pride being a highly un-Canadian sin.
The key was to step out of my American environment and be conscious of how different I was compared to those around me. It's hard to notice one mushroom in a mushroom patch, but hang it on a tree with some apples and it stands out like a tortured metaphor in an otherwise struggling paragraph. Or something like that.
I stood out partly out of ignorance. This was pointed out to me by a precocious 11-year-old waiting for a bus. In Montreal, where I lived, and Toronto, where I lived next, people line up for busses in neat lines, except they call them queues, ostensibly because they're Canadian. Americans call them lines. There's no real difference except lines is an easier word to spell than queue, which looks nothing like it sounds and repeats identical letters for no good reason. Of course, that's an American attitude; Canadians just learn how to spell it and proudly queue up for just about everything.
On the other hand, Americans hate to line up for anything other than Black Friday sales and I hate to line up for anything other than powder runs. In my case, it stems from my aversion to military order and general antsiness. I prefer to pace, wander, and chat up people in queues, something else Canadians tend not to do unless they know the person to whom they speak and even then, generally use hushed tones as though they were discussing troop movements during times of war or their most recent outbreak of genital herpes.
It took a bold Canadian youth, dressed in the fine clothes of a Westmount private school, clothes more befitting someone firmly in middle-age since that's what Westmount private schools try to turn out, to set me straight. "You're supposed to line up," he said to me in a tone generally used when one addresses a servant or underling, something I could understand since I looked a bit clownish in oversized running shoes, thick wool sox and a muffler long enough to cozy the necks of most of the people in the queue.
"I prefer to pace," I said politely.
"But you won't know when to get on the bus," he said, with what seemed like genuine concern.
"It's okay. I'll get on last," I said.
"But you're supposed to get on ahead of the people who got here after you," he said, emphatically.
Being a newly-transplanted American, I almost suggested the kid needed more bran in his diet. But, in what was possibly my first step to becoming Canadian, I actually tried to understand where he was coming from. I failed; but I tried.
Finally, I told him if he were really worried, I'd just get on ahead of him. His expression said that was a totally inappropriate compromise, but I got on ahead of him anyway.
For all I know, that kid could have been Justin Trudeau and that encounter may have set him on a course of coarse behaviour culminating in his use of totally appropriate language on the last day of Parliament.
In a news moment most people missed, suffering as they were through the early stages of shortbread poisoning, Justin used unparliamentary — and, I might add, unCanadian — language to describe either Environment Minister Peter Kent or his sophomoric display of obfuscation.
Peter, fresh off his shame-the-nation performance at the UN climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, was being unchivalrous toward NDP environment critic Megan Leslie, claiming her ill-informed attack on his defence of, among other things, "ethical" oil was ill informed because she hadn't attended the conference. This might have been a valid rhetorical tool had it not been for the fact Harpo's cons did everything it could to block opposition MPs from attending the conference in the first place.
Being his father's son, Justin was overheard to say, although he didn't hold the floor at the time, "You piece of shit," thus slandering feces everywhere and breaching parliamentary protocol, which prefers members, refrain from telling the truth in matters scatological.
Personally, I think Peter Kent is more a dickhead but I understand such outbursts are generally not entirely well thought out and therefore defer to Justin's snap judgment, French Canadians being so much more likely to prefer excremental expletives anyway.
There is no question Peter Kent, and the rest of the Conservative party, would be perfectly happy to wallow in excrement if it meant they could turn a buck by doing so. They've proven over and over, in their brief stint as majority party, they're willing to put the boots to working people in order to save The Economy the outrageous hardships of having to cope with collective bargaining.
There is no body of water, no breath of atmosphere and no untouched wilderness they're not willing to foul and despoil in order to help the energy industry suck every last drop of oil out of the ground and get it to market by any means possible.
They'll spend billions of dollars to fight "unreported" — read, imaginary — crime and build thousands of new jail cells to house the criminals. But they won't spend a dime more than they absolutely have to for social housing.
And miraculously, many, if not most, Canadians are just fine with that.
Justin apologized to the Commons though I suspect he still believes Peter Kent is exactly what he called him. I think he was too kind and I hope 2012 brings renewed attacks on this rogue government as they continue to execute their plan to convert this country into something most of the people who live here would prefer not to be. Let us not lose sight of the fact they gained majority status with a tiny slice of the public's support.
While it may seem very unCanadian, I suspect if they keep doing what they've been doing there'll be a whole lot fewer young Canadians sewing maple leafs on their backpacks... though I don't think they'd go so far as to pretend to be Americans.
