If I’m feeling grief over Tim Hortons backsliding, then be sure the toilers on land and sea and in the oilpatch are feeling the pain double-double.
— Rex Murphy on the Tim Hortons-Enbridge brouhaha,
Ah, Timmys, Timmys, Timmys! If inside this wretched Boston-creamed carcass of mine there were the beating organ of affection and sensibility, that heart would be broken now. And if I’m feeling grief over Tim Hortons backsliding, then be sure friends of mine, those who do real work in honest occupations, the toilers on land and sea and in the oil patch, are feeling the pain double-double.
I cry out: “Forgive them, Ron Joyce — they know not what they do.”
For the very few who have missed it: Timmys caved in to some online pressure and cancelled one of the TV ads they run in some of their stores in Alberta. It was an ad by Enbridge — one of the dark, sinister, shameless, jobcreating companies who daily grind on in the business of trying to bring our green and free-range planet to a toasty end in the slow planetary fever some people (speciously, in my view) assert as apocalyptic global warming.
In an almost Starbucksian burst of Social Justice, Tims received a blitz of emails and tweets — not spontaneously generated I would hazard a guess — and on the strength of that “consumer agitation” announced to the whole caffeine-sodden world it would no longer run such vile videos. Enbridge was just the occasion here — a stand-in for all Alberta oil, the whole industry, workers and executives and its associated industries: the truckers, suppliers, engineers, cafeteria and fast food workers, mechanics, gasoline attendants … Tim Hortons was, in effect, saying any association with that industry was a besmirchment of their corporate ethos.
For so long, we saw Tims as a rock-solid, friend of the common man, iconic Canadian company. In this new mode it effectively announced it was joining the likes of the yuppie tree-hugger cosmetic companies, or the hippie tycoons Ben & Jerry’s, who mix their merchandise with a sackful of eco-preachiness and savethe-earth sanctimony.
But oh, what a falling off is here. Tim Hortons was started by the great and tragic hockey player, Mr. Horton, and an ex-cop, Ron Joyce. In the beginning — silly boys — they had no time for anything but putting out fresh doughnuts (ah, history!) and cheap coffee. Their target audience was the nine-to-fivers, the road-gypsy truck-drivers, the hard-hat construction gangs fixing roads and building skyscrapers, the jacks of all trade, and another great class — the retirees, who’d often gather of a morning to hold cheerful seminars on the bottomless outrage of each day’s political folly.
In short, their customers, by and large, were the people who do much of the work of the country — who never sit on political panels, or attend international conferences on the plight of the six-tailed lizard of Tasmania, and who never troubled themselves with sculpting tofu into a likeness of Al Gore or writing manifestos on the threatened lifestyle of the delta smelt or the Bolivian tic-mouse. (Some of these are, of course, from my own private zoology.) They were people who built things and drank a lot of coffee. They went to Tim Hortons. And they saw that it was good.
Well, what now? Now that Tims has declared itself fully in step with the new consciousness, now that they see themselves not merely as pedlars of doughnuts and double-doubles but are implicitly putting moral stickers on what they ideologically approve of — and by example urging their customers to do likewise — what are we to make of it? By purging Enbridge they are, by synecdoche, blasting the whole Alberta oil industry, and — this is key — the tens of thousands of workers, from every prov-
By purging Enbridge they are, by synecdoche, blasting the whole Alberta oil industry and its workers
ince, in the oilfields. They are saying these sons and daughters of honest toil are not worthy to uncurl the rim
Now I should make it clear I am a supporter of the Newfoundland and Alberta oil industry. And very much, in particular, a supporter of the employment and jobs they have brought into being. I have a multitude of friends who have been working in one or the other. I’ve given a speech to Enbridge and a more pleasant bunch of men and women you are unlikely to meet.
But just as important to disclose I have been going to Tim Hortons since I had a dime for a doughnut and little feet to take me there, and even now look upon a row of Boston Creams with the same appetency as a anaconda coming off a hunger strike. On air, I’ve defended in the most vigorous terms a Tim Hortons drive-thru in St. John’s from the meddling of an obnoxious city council trying to shut it down.
So you see, this is a dilemma for me, or was. Loyal to both for so long. But with this latest corporate gutlessness, their implicit rebuke of all the workers who have by their loyalty given the company its hyper-profitable and iconic status, I take out my handkerchief, throttle a tear, silently weep for a moment and make the awful conversion: I’m off to Second Cup. Timmy, we hardly knew ye.
One final note. I’m not urging any boycott. I see no need of one and besides, boycotts are play toys of the activist juveniles. Nature will take its own course. And unlike the eco-campaigners, nature doesn’t wait upon Twitter campaigns or bulletins from Green HQ. People, working people, will just drift away. Sad really. As I said, if I had a heart, this would break it.