Sun­set on the Ottawa River

After liv­ing in Canada for almost 6 years now, this is my best shot at a soci­ol­ogy study: “Stuff Cana­di­ans Like.”

Extreme weather: For most immi­grants, Canada’s two sea­sons can be illus­trated by the fol­low­ing words—“fucking hot” and “fuck­ing cold.” And Cana­di­ans loudly com­plain about it too. Too much snow to shovel in the morn­ing, free­way buried under bliz­zard and ice storms in win­ter, drought and floods in the sum­mer. But deep down, I know Cana­di­ans enjoy the extreme weather. Why else would I see peo­ple jog­ging dur­ing a bliz­zard? Canoe to work? Sure, a few might escape to Florida but most Cana­di­ans want to retain brag­ging rights over tem­per­ate coun­tries. There­fore, they spend win­ter at home, anx­iously watch­ing The Weather Net­work just to make sure they—not the neigh­bour­ing province—get the most severe snow­storm. Wimps. They only got two meters of snow!

Tim Hor­tons: Do you know what the head­line of the news­pa­pers was the other day? Nope, not Burma. A story about a Tim Hor­tons employee who got fired after giv­ing a tim­bit for free to a baby. The nation was in shock: the woman was fired unfairly, sure, but… a baby got a free tim­bit? That’s how addicted Cana­di­ans are. Even though Tim­mies cof­fee tastes like brown­ish hot water, even though their pas­tries are just fried dough with sugar, even though there’s always a line-up even at 2 a.m.… well, there’s always a line-up even at 2 a.m. Go figure.

Going into the wild: One can’t help notic­ing that Canada is a huge coun­try with, all in all, a small pop­u­la­tion. One also can’t help notic­ing that Cana­di­ans spend a great deal of time avoid­ing each other by going “into the wild.” On one hand, you have fam­i­lies who move out of the city to the coun­try­side. Even though cities have a very low crime rate (we’re not talk­ing of Toronto here) and that cities cores are not exactly cramped (we’re not talk­ing of Hong Kong either), fam­i­lies rou­tinely move in the mid­dle of nowhere to “escape from the city”. Of course, they hap­pily drive every day to the city to work (have you ever tried to find a job in bum­fuck nowhere?), drop the kids to school, shop, go to movies etc. The only time they are at home is basi­cally when they sleep. But, who cares, when you have such a great qual­ity of life out­side the city! The sec­ond group of peo­ple addicted to life in the wild are the vaca­tion­ists who, instead of going all-inclusive like every­body else, enjoy camp­ing trips up North where they carry their canoe over­land (Cana­dian even have a verb for the place where the car­ry­ing occurs: “portage”) and sleep out­doors. Whereas there are per­fectly fine hotels around. Canadians…!

The Cana­dian Dol­lar: First of all, it’s pretty, unlike the US dol­lar. We have fun colour­ful ban­knotes (some fea­ture kids play­ing hockey) that you can actu­ally tell apart. We also have cool slang for our coins: there’s the “toonie” and the “loonie”. But the best part about the Cana­dian dol­lar is its cur­rent strength. After an all-time low in the 90s and early 2000s, the value has risen sharply in 2007, mostly thanks to Alberta cow­boys’ oil. This can only mean one thing for Cana­di­ans: Amer­i­cans are weak, we are strong. Doesn’t mat­ter that we get ripped off every day by pay­ing too much. See, even though the $CA is stronger than the $US, we keep on pay­ing the Cana­dian price, not the Amer­i­can price (this is espe­cially true for books, which are typ­i­cally priced at CA$9.99 but US$7.99). Who cares, as long as we are bet­ter than Amer­i­cans! Worth the price, doesn’t it?

Roots and Lul­ule­mon Stores: In case you’re won­der­ing, both are extremely pop­u­lar Cana­dian clothes retail­ers. Even though Roots isn’t the offi­cial Olympic out­fit­ter any­more (used to be from 1998 to 2004), the com­pany clothes and acces­sories are worn by mil­lions of Cana­dian, either casu­ally, either to actu­ally exer­cise (er… in the wild??). Is it the cute beaver logo? The Lycra pants? The over­price leather bags? Lul­ule­mon ath­letic clothes are equally pop­u­lar (but often even more over­priced). Its yoga-lovers cus­tomers are well known for lin­ing up all night in sub-zero tem­per­a­tures for the annual sale and the chance to buy $200 pants (it hap­pened not that long ago in Ottawa). Woohoo. It’s not the clothes—it’s the lifestyle.

Warn­ing: this post is not to be taken seri­ously. Please, don’t report me to Cit­i­zen­ship & Immi­gra­tion. Oth­er­wise, I won’t be able to write part 2.

Related arti­cles:

1. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Don’t Like (Part 1)
2. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Like (Part 2)
3. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Don’t Like (Part II)
4. Free Stuff in Ottawa… and in Canada!
5. 10 Facts About Canadians