This is being posted on Commonwealth Day, so, Happy Commonwealth Day! Have a read of my previous post on here about the Commonwealth if you want to know more about that.
This post, though, is about my favourite Commonwealth Realm: Canada.
There is so much I would like to say about Canada: we’ve already had a post about place names in Victoria, and islands in Victoria, and the monarchy post addressed the topic of the Canadian Crown; I have plans for more Canadiana on this blog. But today we will address stereotypes, and assumptions generally, because there seems to be a lot of them associated with Canada.
These stereotypes and general assumptions might have to do with the weather, the environment, the language, the people…they tend, on the whole, to have been originally based on something factual, but some have then been twisted into something absurd, or blindly applied to the entire country with no regard for regional differences. Let us, therefore, unpack a few of the more common ones.
The snow: Does it snow in Canada? Yes. Does it snow a lot? Sometimes. Is this true of the entire country? No. Most of the country does experience very cold winters, which can involve a lot of snow. But the south-west coast of BC, where I’m from, has a very temperate climate, and it is very rare to have more than a few days of snow over the entire winter. In Victoria, for example, the blossoms on the trees bloom in January. Other parts of BC also have a warmer climate than the rest of the country. The first winter I was in York, it snowed very heavily, and people thought I, being from Canada, must be used to it, but I was not. Snow in November was just as weird for me as it was for everyone else. There is a lot of variety in the Canadian environment: mountains, prairies, tundra, many kilometres of coastline, temperate rainforest…all of it is magnificent, but not all of it necessarily sees snow.
The accent: No, no ones says ‘aboot’. No, you haven’t heard anyone say ‘aboot’. What you will have heard was more of an ‘a-boat’ sound. Any words where you might think the ‘ou’ was pronounced as ‘ow’ are pronounced with more of an ‘oh’ sound: about, out, doubt, etc are more like a-boat, oat, doat- not aboot, etc. Let’s put that misconception firmly to rest.
You will hear some people say ‘eh’, but I almost never say it myself, and it’s not like everyone liberally peppers their speech with it: let’s not get too caught up in that stereotype either.
As with the natural environment, there is some regional variation in accents across the country: Newfoundland has a very distinctive accent, while the French Canadian accent in Quebec is also very distinctive, just to give a couple of examples, while east coast and west coast accents sound slightly different.
We don’t all speak French, either. Officially Canada is a bilingual country, English and French, and everyone will unconsciously pick up some French from seeing instructions, ingredients on food packaging, signs in airports, etc in both languages. Every Canadian schoolchild learns some French (though speaking from my own experience in anglophone BC, how much we actually learn can really vary), and there are French-immersion schools across the country, but Quebec is really the only province where French is actually the main language, rather than English.
Spelling-wise, we keep the ‘u’s in words like colour and honour but use zeds instead of ‘s’s in words like organised and recognised – we’re midway between American and British spelling in a lot of ways. But’s that enough for now about languages and accents.
The obsession with hockey: sure, many people play it and get really into following it, but not everyone. I, personally, only really care about it during the Winter Olympics because I like seeing Canada do well on the world stage. It is technically the national winter sport (lacrosse being the national summer sport), but it does not follow that everyone plays it or watches it.
While we’re on the subject of things people associate with Canada, let’s talk about maple syrup and the beaver. I don’t actually keep maple syrup in the house, as it happens, but it is produced in (mainly eastern) Canada, from maple trees. The maple leaf, of course, is right there on the flag: did you know the red and white maple leaf flag has only been the national flag since 1965? O Canada has also only been the national anthem since 1980, though the tune, with French lyrics, had been around for a century before that. Anyway, back to symbols: beavers live in Canada, and were hunted, almost to extinction, as part of the fur trade in the late 17th-early 18th century, which played a role in shaping the settlement of (again, mainly eastern) Canada. The beaver also features on the 5 cent coin, for this reason. Maple leaves were on pennies as well, until the Royal Canadian Mint stopped minting pennies in 2012…These aren’t stereotypes though, just things people associate with Canada. Let’s get back on track here.
The politeness: Yes, we are a good bunch (apart from the rotten apples you get anywhere in the world). We are polite and kind, generally, and I think that stereotype is an alright one, but I’m not sure where this nonsense about being sorry for everything comes from.
The American comparisons: We are often compared to Americans. We are often mistaken for Americans. We are often conflated with Americans. The first of these makes some sense: as neighbours, there are some cultural similarities, similar words for things that we use, similar concepts of distance, etc. The second of these also makes sense: the two accents can sometimes be tricky to tell apart with certainty. But that third one…this seriously annoys me. Saying, even just in jest, that Canadians and Americans are ‘basically the same’ is tiresome and incorrect. American culture is more visible and recognisable in the wider world, and Canada is a bit quieter and more subtle on this front, which is where some of this lumping-Canada-in-with-the-USA must come from: people just don’t know Canada as well as they might, compared to the USA.
One crucial US-Canada difference is that Canada is part of the Commonwealth. We have a Prime Minister who is our head of government, and a monarch who is our head of state. We share this head of state with the UK, and as Canada has developed as a country, it has retained a close, familial, relationship with the UK, one which really needs to be better recognised. As someone from Canada living in the UK, am I ‘from overseas’? Yes, obviously. Am I ‘foreign’, though? No: how can I be, when our two countries are such close relatives?
A few last things…
‘Is that near Toronto?’ There are other places in Canada besides Toronto! If something makes the news in Toronto, I cannot guarantee the rest of Canada will automatically know or care, because Canada is very big and Toronto is several hours away for people in much of the country. It’s a bit like when I tell people in Canada that I live in England and they ask if (or sometimes assume!) I’m near London when I’m actually up north. Toronto probably is one of the best-known places in Canada to people from elsewhere, and it is the biggest city in Canada, like London is with the UK, and as such tends, understandably, to be people’s main point of reference, but Toronto is not always the centre of the Canadian universe. I’ve never been there myself, in fact (Toronto, I mean. I have been to London. I would like to visit Toronto, though).
On the national holiday: Canada Day is not just an ‘independence day’: it is a bit more nuanced than that. Celebrated on 1 July, it celebrates the anniversary of Confederation in 1867: this was the beginning of ‘Canada’ as we know it today, moving away from being a colony within the British Empire to being a self-governing dominion. ‘Dominion Day’ might actually be a more accurate name for this holiday, and indeed it was called that for a while until 1982, when it became known as Canada Day. It wasn’t about ‘independence’ specifically, just moving to a more self-governing status within the Empire.
Another Canadian holiday is Victoria Day. Observed on 24 May or the Monday before that date, Victoria Day is sort of like the Canadian equivalent of the Queen’s official birthday in the UK, except it is an actual day-off holiday like a bank holiday. It started as a holiday to mark Queen Victoria’s birthday (which was 24 May), as Victoria was our monarch at the time of Confederation, but subsequent sovereigns’ birthdays have always been observed on that date ever since. So if you’ve ever wondered what Victoria Day is, that’s what it’s all about. I think a lot of people just see it as a long weekend, but there is more to it than that.
So there we are: Canada, a diverse and well-mannered Commonwealth Realm with more to it than hockey and snow. There is still so much of my own homeland I have not yet seen, and I hope, in the future, to change that. The experience of Canada is going to be different wherever you happen to be in the country, but wherever you are, I hope that experience is a good one.
Further Reading
Not much further reading this time around, just this page, which I have recently found very interesting: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/provincial-territorial-symbols-canada/about.html It is informative, but also fascinating just to see how an official government website presents the country. This page talks a lot about the symbols for each province and territory, which has made it a useful reference point for a challenge I’ve set myself on Instagram (@leaf_on_letter_designs – totally unrelated to this blog) where I draw, and post, a provincial or territorial floral emblem every Monday, just because I can, just because I want to put that kind of under-the-radar Canadian content out there.
How It Was Because 