I Am Canadian

These days I struggle to come up with something to post on this blog.

The news is so terrible, swirling with malevolence and hatred for anyone who doesn’t bow to the Supreme Leader, and for women and LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants, and even those with perfectly valid documentation who are being whisked away by ICE in the late hours of the night to god knows where.

But I don’t need to rehash the decline of the US in minute detail. If you’re interested in good, reasoned political commentary on what’s happening, follow Heather Cox Richardson and Joyce Vance.

What I’m interested in is what it means to me to be a Canadian right now.

Being Canadian isn’t just about hockey and beavers, poutine and curling. Being Canadian is about our natural wonders, our heroes and musicians, our immigrants, our tolerance and sense of community. It’s a state of mind, and sometimes it’s a case of what we’re not. We’re not Americans. But we’re far from perfect. Our universal healthcare is staggering under the weight of a lack of doctors, nurses, and surgeons, and a growing population. Our housing prices are astronomical, and our inflation rate isn’t great. But many countries are struggling with the same problems. Being Canadian is about more than that, as Jeff Douglas says in his 2025 reprisal of the famous I Am Canadian Molson’s ad.

Being Canadian is about the great outdoors (though logging and mining remain huge issues).

I grew up in a small town northeast of Edmonton, Alberta. Our town of 12,000 residents was surrounded on one side by an industrial park that created air pollution on a scale larger than Chinese cities, on the other side by a medium security prison, and on the other two sides by farming country: fields and fields of canola and wheat, divided by gravel range roads and township roads on which I rode my bike.

When I left that town for university, I ended up on the west coast. I loved the ocean, the mild weather, the spring flowers. I rode my bike everywhere, even though there wasn’t the same cycling infrastructure they have now. It was quieter then, less traffic and gridlock.

From the coast I migrated back to Edmonton for my PhD. I enjoyed winter: cross-country skiing, outdoor skating, the sharp pain of the cold air freezing in my lungs. From Edmonton I did fieldwork on Ellesmere Island, at 79N. We could look across Nares Strait and see Greenland, a dark smudge on the horizon. It was thrilling to be so close to it, just one more indicator of how remote our research was.

After three summers in the Arctic I worked in the north Coast Mountains for a summer, the landscape white, black, and green from the glaciers, rock, and forests that covered the area. Andrei Glacier was fairly remote, named by a Russian glaciologist in the 1970s after one of his sons.

I’ve worked in north-central BC on snow/forest research, I’ve worked in Canada’s southern Rockies (Crowsnest Pass region) on post-wildfire hydrology. I’ve done fieldwork in the Canadian Rockies, quantifying hydrology and water quality at Hilda Glacier at the north end of Banff National Park. Though the Icefields Parkway teemed with tourists, no one took the side trail to Hilda, so we had the place to ourselves.

When I went back to the Arctic in 2008, I was on a different kind of glacier than I’d been on Ellesmere. For one thing it was farther south, and was part of a larger ice cap, but it was a glacier that terminated in the ocean, calving huge chunks of ice into the water in front of it. There were only two of us in camp, and I felt the vastness of the glacier spreading around me, wider and longer than the glacier I’d worked on in Ellesmere.

These days I don’t visit such remote places, but I do take advantage of the greenspace around me, especially Cobble Hill Mountain.

Being Canadian is about family history—and our shared history.

I’m a first generation Canadian—my parents immigrated from Holland; my mom is Surinamese. I can recall my mom saying to me when I was a child “you’re so Canadian!” and it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I liked my ketchup and cheese slices, my Cheez Whiz and hot dogs. Maybe what she meant was that I was so “westernized.” I was less enamoured of the greens she cooked up from what I saw as weeds in the garden, or the beef tongue she said was roast beef.

My sister has traced my family’s history back from Canada all the way to the Surinamese cotton plantations, where our ancestors laboured for plantation owners. We were slaves, but now we are Canadian.

Many Canadians are immigrants—we are settlers on First Nations lands who arrived here looking for a better, different life or fleeing persecution.

Being Canadian is about our shared icons.

All of us know about Terry Fox and his Marathon of Hope. Diagnosed with cancer and having had one leg amputated, Fox decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He started in Newfoundland, and made it to Thunder Bay before he couldn’t continue. Every September, communities across the country honour his memory and raise money for cancer research with the Terry Fox Run—I remember participating in it every year in elementary school. For the 45^th anniversary of his run, the Terry Fox Foundation released this video with music from Canada’s iconic band, The Tragically Hip.

The Tragically Hip first got together in 1984. When their lead singer, Gord Downie, was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2016, they planned a farewell tour across Canada. Their last show, in Kingston, Ontario, was broadcast live on CBC without commercials, and statistics indicate that over 11 million Canadians watched it. We loved The Hip, and it showed.

There are other Canadians who stand out in our history: Tommy Douglas, the founder of universal healthcare; Joni Mitchell, folk singer; Neil Young, singer. And don’t forget Frederick Banting, who isolated insulin and was awarded a Nobel Prize for it. In typical Canadian fashion, Banting shared the honours and funding with the student who had worked with him on the research—Charles Best. I’m sure others have many names they would add to this list.

Being Canadian is about opening our homes to strangers.

During 9/11, 256 planes were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, and the small community took in 7,000 passengers for several days. Fast friendships were formed, and to this day some of the passengers and Gander residents still keep in touch.

By 2025, Canada had welcomed over 300,000 Ukrainian immigrants, pushed out of their homeland because of the war with Russia.

When I was in graduate school, one of the profs opened his home to his graduate students and my supervisor’s students to play pond hockey—every weekend. There was always food and Scotch and lots of on-ice rivalry. It was one of my favourite things about graduate school. We also had rotating potluck dinners, for which some people always brought the same dish. It became a running joke that one guy always brought tabbouleh salad and another brought banoffee pie.  

Being Canadian is about tolerance and community.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, no one knew exactly what to do. Leaders at all levels of government weren’t sure what advice to give Canadians that they should or shouldn’t do to avoid getting sick. In the end, they settled on wearing N95 masks, social distancing to prevent spread, and vaccinations once they were available. In some cases, like at hospitals, workers were required to have the vaccine in order to work.

Unfortunately, the pandemic sparked the decidedly un-Canadian “Freedom Convoy,” a motley crew of disaffected Canadians who said that the government was taking away their freedom by mandating vaccination and masking. They settled themselves in downtown Ottawa in their semi-trucks and pickup trucks, honking at all hours of the day and even having a live stage. For many people, the Freedom Convoy and its message tarnished the Canadian flag, which the Convoy brandished widely to support their cause.

But the recent talk about Canada becoming the 51^st state has reinstated the flag as a symbol of our country as a whole, and not just one small subset of its population.

We are Canadian. #ElbowsUp!