Getting hard to tell where US of A ends and Canada begins
It began like an American horror story. Police say a man armed with a gun slammed his huge black truck into the gates of Rideau Hall, skulked and then hid in a greenhouse. After talking to police for about two hours, he was arrested.
As is often the case in Canadian government and policing, few details were immediately released — not even the suspect’s name. As the Star’s Alex Boutilier reported, sources identified him as Corey Hurren, a sausage-maker and Canadian Forces reservist who had apparently been following American COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He appears to be heavy, bearded, devoted to making and selling his Ring of Fire hot sausages and, from his online posts, appears to think COVID-19 is the product of a global conspiracy.
Luckily the Governor-General and the Trudeau family had not been present, for it sounded like an American news report and could well have ended badly.
Previously in Canada, if you wanted to speak to the prime minister, you’d go to one of his town hall meetings. This is the Canadian way.
Have we fallen into the sleep of reason and produced monsters? In a time of great stress and fear, are more of us becoming more American?
The CBC reports that in the past six months, some Canadians have been posting on Facebook Boogaloo pages. It’s a horrible world view that celebrates the American pro-gun movement, and discusses killing #BlackLivesMatter protesters and RCMP officers. One page popular with Canadians discussed “pink-misting” protesters, referring to the JFK-like pink mist that follows a shot to the head.
Boogaloos criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his anti-racism stance and upcoming tougher gun rules. Guns and racism are the fuel of Trump world, the essence of American hate.
Canadian media are filled with U.S. stories, partly because of thinning newsrooms seizing on easily available news, the explosion in American tragedies and the fact that the American cultural invasion is over. Canada lost.
Almost all our pop culture is American. If we didn’t have CBC Gem, we’d have almost nothing. Our local literacy faded; Disney and Netflix guaranteed that. Arts journalists don’t bother to describe movies, books and games as American any more; the reader must simply assume this is so. The hunt for eyeballs means that stories about violent American grotesquerie are often posted online without locale mentioned in the headline.
A Canadian cop claimed there was a used tampon in his Starbucks coffee? No, he was American, it was L.A. and it wasn’t a tampon, didn’t even look like one. A Walmart employee killed and four wounded? Saskatchewan? No, that was last week in California.
Some local police forces hope to militarize just as U.S. police have done in grand style and the Nova Scotia RCMP, postmassacre, are revealed to be as viciously incompetent as the Sheriff’s Office in Cook County, Georgia. As men fail to help at home, women are losing jobs as no provision is made for free daycare and schooling. We think this an American phenomenon; it is not.
Premier Jason Kenney is doing his level best to turn Alberta into a red state for no reason beyond ideology and personal spite. Our Parliament has become Americanized, with stupid questions and assertions being hurled. They call it debate, but it’s just loud childish arguing.
Canada did not have slavery or civil war followed by 150 years of white retribution. #BlackLivesMatter lifts my heart. I yearn to see Americans celebrate Juneteenth next year. But in Canada, #BlackLivesMatter is a wonderful renewed call for fair treatment and non-violent policing, a call that has, I say cynically, failed Indigenous people repeatedly. I hope we’re not so overwhelmed by the avalanche of American racism that we underrate our impulse to fight for justice.
As for the U.S. Battle of the Masks, the phenomenon of two Canadian groups rarely wearing masks (men and young people) is very strange. U.S. news flows so fast through me that I sometimes feel like an oyster flushed with ocean water. For this reason, I try not to ask unmasked men in case I get punched in the head, American-style.
Americans turn everything into a fight. Here we use judicious silences.
I ask a middle-aged Benjamin Moore paint store clerk in Toronto why he isn’t masked. He is annoyed. He deplores masks. He tells me about a woman his wife met at her hair salon. She put sanitizer on her hands and then mopped them with paper towels! OMG, what a stupid lady, he says. Can you believe it?
I displease him by refusing to laugh.
I am greatly relieved when I ask two young men in the Eaton Centre basement why they are unmasked. Their answer boils down to “We don’t have any.” They are friendly. I know they will soon be given masks in a store. We exchange warm goodbyes. This is still Canada.
The American cultural invasion is over. Canada lost. If we didn’t have CBC Gem, we’d have almost nothing