A heritage minute
Amid threats to Canada's identity, a weekend up north serves as a reminder of some of the things this country is about
This past Saturday, I found myself standing by a fire, as one does in the winter in Canada.
It was at Arrowhead Provincial Park, hard by Hunstville, Ont., and I had just finished a loop of cross-country skiing. A voice came from behind me: “Excuse me?”
I turned around. A fellow was sitting on a bench looking confusedly at his skiis and boots. “Do you know how these work?”
That seemed like a very open-ended question. Friction? Physics? Horsepower? Then I realized that he wasn’t referring to the entire concept of skiing, he just didn’t know how to attach his boots to his skis.
This, I could help with. I showed him how his boots — they were rentals, but conveniently the same brand as mine — had a little silver bar at the toe that had to clip into the binding on the ski. The only trick was figuring out how to open the binding so the boot could clip in. I pushed various parts on the binding — these were not like mine — until something worked. Huzzah! He was eventually clipped in. He did not seem super confident about what to do next. He spoke with an Asian accent and was in, probably, his 30s.
“Have you done this before?”
“No,” he said.
“Have fun,” I said. It seemed like a more encouraging thing to say than “Good luck.”
This weekend in Huntsville, with long stretches spent at Arrowhead skiing and skating and hiking, happened to come as Canada was on the brink of one of the greatest shocks to its economy in memory. More than that, Donald Trump’s tariff threats, with a whiff of annexation talk thrown in, were a challenge to Canada’s very identity.
And, at the very time that people across this huge land were getting their collective back up in response to Trump’s ridiculous bluster, vowing retaliatory tariffs, swearing off American purchases — I took a bottle of Irish whiskey instead of bourbon on the trip, thank you very much — and booing The Star-Spangled Banner, it was impossible to escape the fact that a snapshot of Canadian identity was staring me back in the face at Arrowhead.
To ski there is to be constantly reminded of the people from all over the world who choose to make Canada home. There are the grandpas and grandmas resplendent in knitted skiing gear, speaking with Scandinavian accents and invariably whistling right past me on the trail. There were rosy-cheeked little kids, dragged away from their screens on a Saturday morning because winter in Huntsville means embracing the fact that you can get out on the snow and do more than just get stuck in traffic in it. There was, on this day at least, a group of eight or 10 South Asian couples in their 20s, speaking accented English and wearing the telltale rental ski boots. They were, and all power to them because it was bloody cold up there on the weekend, getting the full-on Canadian winter experience, non-hockey-arena division. There was an Orthodox Jewish family, with the boys wearing yarmulkes under their helmets that they put back on before heading out of the lodge and over to the outdoor skating trail.
It was an almost impossibly Canadian scene. That it came as much of the country was considering what it means to be Canadian, and recognizing that it was something worth fighting for, was of course just a coincidence. But it felt meaningful all the same. In the days since, many commentators have noted that Trump’s big fat glowering puss has given Canada a jolt out of its usual complacency. Suddenly, people are talking about defending Canada and standing up to bullies and not taking his bullshit any longer.
And, you know what, I couldn’t agree more.
An election about … something?
The Ontario provincial election is officially a week old today, and it has not been what you would call a cracker. It began amid the strum and drang of Trump’s tariff threats, which have now been pushed back until a start date of after the actual election day at the end of this month.
Does that mean the campaign will actually pivot to other issues? We shall see. For the Toronto Star, I wrote about the NDP’s shameless position on road tolls, and also about the symmetry in the proposed responses of all three major parties to Trump’s tariff threats.
Football!
It’s Super Bowl week, which means an absolutely flurry of football-related stuff is coming your way. For theScore, I considered the weird situation in which Tom Brady is sorta-kinda running the Las Vegas Raiders. Is retired-superstar-as-owner really going to become a thing?
Some additional Super Bowl-related stuff will hit your inboxes before the week is out, don’t you worry. (I suspect you were not worried.)