More like ‘Hip Toronto’
Did you see that flaky New York Times style-section article that thrust forward Justin Trudeau as the “hunky” symbol of a newly hip Canada? The piece cites a long list of highly current Canadian celebrities, fashion mavens, and trendsetters, never really stopping to notice that a similar list could have been generated more or less anytime after 1900.
No evidence is presented that Canadian access to the world’s pop consciousness has changed recently, much less that it has anything to do with Justin Trudeau. Given that Trudeau was the leader of the third party in the House of Commons 14 weeks ago, and was struggling badly in the polls another 14 weeks before that, perhaps the Times’ Hip Canada should be read as a tribute to the Stephen Harper decade.
What I notice about the list, in comparison with ones that might have been drawn up in the past, is how Ontario-dominated it is — Toronto-dominated, really. The Times, blind to the intricacies of the country it is celebrating, pays passing tribute to older Canadian icons Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen — which is to say, two refugees from the west and the Pope of anglo Montreal.
The only person on the new list with any connection to the Prairies is the publisher Tyler Brûlé, born in Winnipeg while his father was playing for the Blue Bombers. Montreal is represented by director Xavier Dolan, and, in a understated way, by media magnate Shane Smith, whose Vice empire was originally founded upon a federally- subsidized hobo newspaper called Voice of Montreal. (I’m not criticizing, you understand: the ascent of Vice is a miracle of entrepreneurship still happening before our unbelieving eyes — pos- sibly the most incredible story of its kind since Napoleon Bonaparte’s.)
Is The New York Times accidentally documenting a shift of gravity within Canada, toward its centre? Toronto certainly seems to possess an increasing multicultural assertiveness, an influence within Canada that once seemed less axiomatic. “Toronto the Good,” the avatar of crabby Methodism, lives on mostly in old books; now it’s Toronto the NBA party capital.
Fifty or 60 years ago Montreal and Winnipeg seemed more like possible alternative poles of Canadian cultural power. Both are in precipitous decline, and have abandoned the rivalry. Calgary and Vancouver have hardly stepped up: Vancouver might even have gone backward — Gertrude Stein’s quip about her own Oakland (“There’s no there there”) seems germane.
Drake, who I take to be some kind of genius because his actual music is so flavourless and unassuming, is an interesting figure: he is of Toronto, emphatically non-American, in much the same way that Leonard Cohen was of Montreal. Drake has a mystique, which is worth any amount of talent. But most of the people who make the Times list of Canadians are traditional transplants to Hollywood or New York: typical Canadian celebrities, able to find success in the United States as leading men or singers because there is nothing really offputting or unfamiliar about a Canadian.
This highlights the puzzling absence of a Canadian national genius, a distinct collective personality or set of practical strengths of the kind the Australians or the Scots or the Swiss are understood to have. ( The Swiss may be dull, but no one mistakes them for Germans.) This is as true on the intellectual map, I think, as it is in popular culture. We perhaps like to think of ourselves as being Greeks to the Americans’ Romans, detached from their political affrays and ultra- perceptive about their foibles. And our unusual success in the specific field of sketch comedy — performative satire — suggests that there may be something to this.
But even that place in the cultural firmament is arguably slipping from us, and may have been a historical blip. (It might have been mostly a matter of Lorne Michaels existing.) The only comedian on the Times’ list is Samantha Bee, whose success on TBS we are surely pulling for all the harder because, at 46, she is hardly some youngster in the midst of a meteoric rise.
The meaning of Justin Trudeau in this context may also be different from the one suggested by The New York Times. It is natural for us to contrast Justin with his father, and the stylistic contrast is strong: Justin is often said to be his mother’s son. Pierre Trudeau represented a culmination of the French- Canadian destiny. Americans found him hard to fathom, and he found them hugely uncongenial. His dress and his ideas were taken from Western Europe, a precise balance of Paris and London: he was a deux-nations beau idéal.
One has to say that Justin Trudeau seems less rooted: he has a worldview but no intellectual heroes to speak of, no battlescars from a life of disputation and reading. He belongs to a generation more than to any particular place: he has never lived anywhere for too long, and even his spoken French has come under some fire, perhaps unfairly. Americans adore him on sight. He is above all earnest, and there are hints his emerging role as a head of government will be mostly to convey earnestness, to serve as a sort of emotional mascot, while his ministers do the work. The Liberal Party may be quite happy to see him in the style section of the newspaper, where he belongs.
THERE AREN’T MANY MONTREALERS OR WESTERNERS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ MUCHDISCUSSED LIST OF CANADIANS.