|CHAPTER THREE|
“The Next Great Nation”
WHILE IT WAS CLEARLY America’s century, there was a brief time between 1967 and 1976 when Canadians faced their identity malaise head on. We sought to define ourselves by achieving greatness: greatness in the arts, in architecture, in urban design, and progressivism.
It was during this brief nine-year period that the Canadian government enacted far-reaching policies to individuate ourselves from Mother Europe and Brother America in the hopes of defining our identity and in that definition, perhaps, a mission statement. In 1967, I was four years old. In 1976, I was thirteen. These were my formative years, and the Next Great Nation era was Canada’s formative years.
Remarkably, at around the same time (1966), in Red China, Chairman Mao Zedong had also undertaken an ambitious governmental effort to redefine his country’s identity—the Cultural Revolution, in which several million Chinese people were killed. Canada’s cultural evolution was much less violent, resulting only in half a dozen terrible television shows. Sure, they were terrible, but they were our terrible television shows. For Americans, such big-government spending on culture is unthinkable, and, because of their clear mission statement, it’s unnecessary.
THE BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT OFFERS CANADIANS “PEACE, ORDER, AND GOOD GOVERNMENT.”
The Declaration of Independence clearly guarantees Americans “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The British North America Act offers Canadians “peace, order, and good government.” Not as sexy, and hardly a guarantee, but we do have a history of peace and order. Is this a good thing? I’m reminded of the speech that Orson Welles improvised for his character Harry Lime in the 1949 film The Third Man:
HARRY LIME:…In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Has Canada been relegated to “cuckoo clock” status? Can one legislate one’s way to an identity? Have civility and big government stunted our cultural growth?
Well, from 1967 to 1976, Canada was going to find out, because unlike our neighbours to the south, Canada has never had a fear of big government. One example is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which was created and paid for by the Canadian government in 1936. In 1967, the CBC began creating TV programs by and for Canadians.
The CBC is an enigma wrapped in a bureaucracy. However frustrating we who toil in the fields of comedy find the Ceeb, it does fulfill its mandate and has created a situation whereby Canadians interested in the television industry, and all of its related occupations, can learn. The great Canadian author Malcom Gladwell, in his book Outliers, makes the observation that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to master any given art form. For example, the Beatles became the Beatles by spending ten thousand hours in Hamburg, Germany, free from the scrutiny of British society. When they returned to Liverpool, they were ready to become the “four lads who shook the world.”
The CBC allows Canadians to master their craft before shaking the world. Case in point is the CBC show Dr. Zonk and the Zunkins (1974), which featured an as-yet-unknown Gilda Radner and soon-to-be-discovered John Candy. Then, a year later, another show, Coming Up Rosie (1975), starred the great Canadians Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O’Hara, both of whom were not yet famous. In the show, Dan Aykroyd played a character named Purvis Bickle, who was a Scottish superintendent. I loved this character. Purvis Bickle made me want to do Scottish characters. Dan Aykroyd is a brilliant character comedian whose attention to detail is next to none. One of my favourite Dan Aykroyd characters is Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute. Again, as a Canadian, I recognized his accent to be that of the Ottawa Valley. In my head, the Ottawa Valley accent is the Canadian accent. I worship him.
TV shows in Canada don’t pay in money, they pay in ten thousand hours of practice. And while there isn’t gold in them thar hills, there is the consolation that creative work done in Canada doesn’t count against your career. A list of Canadian actors, filmmakers, and producers who have benefited directly or indirectly from the CBC and all the other government-funded arts programs reads as follows: Wayne and Shuster, Mort Sahl, Lorne Greene, James Cameron, Norman Jewison, Dan Aykroyd, Ryan Gosling, Tommy Chong, David Steinberg, Rich Little, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, William Shatner (that’s right—Kirk is Canadian), Michael J. Fox, Howie Mandel, my dear friends Phil Hartman and Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson, Nia Vardalos, Ellen Page, Leslie Nielsen, Jim Carrey, Tom Green, Colin Mochrie, Norm Macdonald, Ryan Reynolds, Seth Rogen, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, and, last but not least, Mr. Lorne Michaels. I’m humbled to be part of this list and I feel like I have the great privilege to do what I do because of big government. That’s some list. That’s some cuckoo clock.
The governmental programs of the Next Great Nation era inspired all levels of Canadian society. We wanted to take our seat at the world table. In 1967, Canada turned 100. A wave of patriotism spread throughout the nation. It was an exciting time to be Canadian.
One of the peaks of that excitement was that Montreal hosted the 1967 world’s fair, known as Expo 67. Its motto was “Man and His World”—Canada had gone global. Each country had its own pavilion. America sported one of the world’s first Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes, an engineering marvel that still delights the eye and the intellect. Canada’s pavilion looked like an inverted pyramid. To this day, I try to understand the significance of that shape. I’m guessing the inverted pyramid is meant to represent some sort of elevation of the working class. My family and I gave the Canadian pavilion the nickname The Candy Dish.
“MICHAEL’S GONE INTO THE SOVIET PAVILION. I THINK HE’S GOING TO DEFECT!”
Much to my family’s terror, at the age of four, I got lost in the U.S.S.R. pavilion, to which my brother Paul exclaimed, “Michael’s gone into the Soviet pavilion. I think he’s going to defect!” While it’s true that Soviet defection was something I had been threatening to do, even as early as two years old, alas, my loyalties were, and continue to be, to the West. As I’ve said since Grade 1, “Big government is one thing, but a proletarian dictatorship is beyond the pale.” My family collected every possible souvenir connected to Expo 67. I still keep an Expo 67 coin in my wallet. I love Montreal and I love that it’s part of Canada.
That same year, 1967, Montreal gave Canada another gift. A young minister of justice, under Prime Minister Lester Pearson, announced that Canada was legalizing divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. When asked by the press, “Under what mandate can you propose such sweeping changes in Canadian social policy?” the young minister of justice responded confidently, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
That minister of justice, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was elected prime minister of Canada in the following year, 1968, and Canada was forever changed. As Kennedy was to America, Trudeau was to Canada, and in several ways, even more so. Due to the dynamic nature of our parliamentary system of government, Trudeau was able to enact much more progressive legislation immediately and without opposition.
In 1968, Trudeau’s government passed the Canadian content laws that required a certain percentage of media content seen or heard by Canadians to be at least partially created or produced by Canadians. It came to be known as CanCon. Literally, the government, in the name of creating a Canadian identity, would mandate what could or could not be seen or heard on television or radio. From an American standpoint, this is no different than Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But the vast majority of Canadians, swept up in “Trudeaumania,” felt a sense of urgency to begin to create a distinct cultural identity. It didn’t feel like tyranny, it felt like empowerment. Perhaps in Pierre Trudeau, Canada now had its long-awaited dramaturge.
CanCon dictated that radio stations had to play a percentage of “Canadian” music. CanCon supplied the definition of “Canadian” under the MAPL system. MAPL is an acronym of Music, Artist, Performance, and Lyrics. It meant that in order to qualify as Canadian content, music must have at least two of the following:
M: the music is written by a Canadian
A: the music is, or the lyrics are, performed by a Canadian artist
P: the musical selection consists of a performance that is:
• recorded in Canada, or
• performed in Canada and broadcast live in Canada
L: the lyrics are written by a Canadian
By now, freedom-loving Americans reading this have already put one of their many guns in their mouth, both because of the intention of a law by which a government would mandate culture, and certainly by the byzantine wording of that law. For Canadians, we felt a thrill that our collective voice could be heard over the din of our noisy neighbours to the south.
Even private companies got into the act. In the 1960s and ’70s, Sam the Record Man was a massive record store in Toronto. At the height of Sam the Record Man’s popularity, there were 130 stores across Canada. The flagship store in Toronto featured a pair of three-storey signs in the shape of vinyl records with sequenced neon lights that gave the illusion that these giant records were spinning. That alone, to a seven-year old, was enough. It felt like show business. It was exciting. There was a Canadian section in the store, and I often would buy albums sight unheard just to give them a chance because they were Canadian. One of those bands was the Stampeders, who ended up having a hit with the song “Sweet City Woman” (1973), which reached number 1 on the Canadian charts and number 8 on the U.S. charts. I even got into jazz by way of Sam the Record Man’s Canadian section. One day, I bought an album by the Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. I didn’t know anything about jazz, but Oscar Peterson was Canadian, so I bought it, and, by the way, loved it, even though at the time I was exclusively into rock.
The Sam in Sam the Record Man was Sam Sniderman. A Canadian hero who simply asked the question, “Why not from Canada?” And this question was spreading like wildfire in Canada. Even to the point of product promotions.
The Canadian subsidiary of the 7Up company had a promotion called Rock Caps. At the bottom of every specially marked can of 7Up, there was the name and face of a Canadian rock band member. The bands were Lighthouse, the Guess Who, April Wine, Crowbar, and Edward Bear. My brothers, Peter and Paul, and I were obsessed. We found ourselves rummaging through the garbage, looking for 7Up cans. Our hands were bloodied because of how hard it is to cut open the bottom of a pop can. We ran the risk of tetanus and other opportunistic infections, but in the end, we got Don DiNovo, the violinist of the rock band Lighthouse, and our collection was complete. We were looking inward, claiming and naming Canadian bands. Joni and Neil were already in the States planting the flag, but now it felt like their U.S. residency was less of an exile and more of a beachhead for these new Canadian recording artists.
Similarly, Shell gas stations in Canada offered commemorative medallions featuring the prime ministers of Canada. The goal was to collect all (at that time) fifteen prime ministers. My favourite prime minister was Charles Tupper. The only thing I knew about Tupper was that he had giant Brooklyn-style mutton chops. To this day, if my brother Paul and I see a guy with mutton chops we will say, “He’s sporting a fine Tupper.”
Neil Young. A fine Tupper.
Previous to 1967, the only time you learned about Canadian history was in a classroom. We were attempting to do what Americans do, sewing history into culture.
In 1970, Esso Canada created a hockey card promotion called Esso Power Players. Whenever you filled up your tank, you received a packet of Power Player hockey stickers to fill a Power Player album. Power Players were a phenomenon. I was addicted. And while some of the NHL players were American, and I think there was one European (a Finn named Juha Widing), the vast majority of the players were from Canada. These were Canadian heroes, and you could only get these stickers in Canada. Americans had baseball cards; we had Power Players.
One of my strongest Canadian childhood memories involved Power Players. A friend and I were waiting by the pumps of an Esso gas station at the corner of Sheppard Avenue and Don Mills Road in North York. It was freezing, mid-December, there was a sheet of snow on the ground, and we could see the Christmas lights at Fairview Mall across the way. On the balconies of the rental apartments that surrounded us, tenants had strung together numerous strands of Christmas-tree lights into the shape of seven-storey-high martini glasses. It was one of those inky, dark, silent winter nights that you only get in Canada. Falling snow made cones of light from the streetlights above.
I was starting to lose feeling in my toes in my moon boots. My GWG jeans were frozen solid and my checked bomber jacket was starting to let in the cold. My Toronto Maple Leafs toque was the only thing keeping me in the game.
We hid behind the gas pumps so that the attendant couldn’t see us. He was inside, watching the Leafs game, surrounded by delicious silver bags of Hostess ketchup-flavoured potato chips. I had a Cherry Blossom chocolate bar (yes, chocolate bar, not candy bar) in my coat for the walk home later.
A car pulled up and the driver bought gas. The attendant left, and before the car pulled away, we descended on the car.
“Hey, sir, do you have kids?”
The driver answered, “No, why?”
“Can we have your Power Players?” Can we have your Power Players. That winter, I must have asked, “Can we have your Power Players?” at least a hundred times.
The driver handed over his stack of Power Players, and before he drove off, he said, “Hold on, boys.” He reached into his glove compartment and gave us another forty stacks of Power Players. We bolted home, and in the sugar rush of my Cherry Blossom and the safety of my family’s warm apartment, we filled up our Power Players album. I still have it.
Even in December of 1970, at the age of seven, I knew that during that moment at the Esso station, I was having a Canadian experience. Although I had nothing to compare it to, I felt Canadian. A pride came over me.
The spirit of the Next Great Nation era extended to industry. In 1968, under the Trudeau government, Canada got into the nuclear reactor business. The government had subsidized the major technological achievement of building the CANDU nuclear reactor. I always thought it was ironic that a country that struggled with entrepreneurship had thrown its hat into such a complicated business and called those reactors, of all things, CANDU. America was a “can-do” country; Canada was a “might-do” country. Unfortunately, it’s theorized that the CANDU reactor may be where Pakistan got its nuclear weapons program from, but that’s for another book. (Sorey, eh?)
In 1969, Montreal once again did us right by getting the first Canadian team in Major League Baseball, the Montreal Expos. The name, of course, was an homage to the highly successful Expo 67. Everything about the Expos franchise was not American. From the name, to the softball-style uniforms, to the multicoloured caps, all the way to the weird M logo. The Expos had their first franchise player in Daniel Joseph “Rusty” Staub, a right fielder with bright red hair. Staub made the classy choice of learning French, and the French Canadian Montreal fans responded with delight, giving him the nickname le Grand Orange.
I remember watching Expos games on Toronto’s French-language CBC channel, CBLFT. The French translations for baseball terms were awesome. For example, baseball was le baseball. The batter was le frappeur, a baserunner was un coureur. A foul ball was une fausse balle, a fly ball was un ballon, a pop-up was une chandelle, an infield pop-up was une mini-chandelle. My favourite was the French term for a sacrifice bunt: un amorti sacrifice. It sounds like a cross between a suicide pact and an orgasm.
In the 1968 Winter Olympics, Canadian skier Nancy Greene won a gold medal, an event so rare that she was hired to do a commercial for Mars bars. In the commercial, Nancy Greene is in front of her trophy case, and someone teases her. In her thick Canadian accent, she says “Hey, no-oh jo-ohking in the tro-ohphy room.” We thought it was the most Canadian sentence in the world.
Thirty-two years later, my brother Paul visited me in L.A. and teased me about my Teen Choice Award, which was a full-sized surfboard. Reflexively, I said, “Hey, Paul. No-oh jo-ohking in the tro-ohphy room, eh?” You can take the boy out of Canada…
In September 1969, it was Toronto’s turn to give Canada some glory when it held the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival, featuring the Doors, Alice Cooper, Little Richard, and surprise guests John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John and Yoko’s performance as the Plastic Ono Band was recorded and released that December. It was the first live album released by any member of the Beatles (together or separately). This is the concert where Alice Cooper famously threw a chicken into the crowd, which then, in turn, ripped the chicken apart and threw it back at him. That incident stole many of the headlines, despite the presence of John and Yoko. But for me, I was thrilled that John chose Canada.
In December 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono returned to Toronto to start their famous “War Is Over” campaign. In an attempt to end the Vietnam War, the Lennons had decided to use their celebrity to sell the concept of peace as if it were a product. They had hoped to begin their advertising-style protest in New York, but because of a trumped-up marijuana charge and a personal vendetta by Richard Nixon, John and Yoko were unable to get into America. So, as an alternative, John and Yoko chose Toronto with the help of Australian-born rock journalist and producer Ritchie Yorke. Ritchie was a tireless promoter of Canadian rock and one of the architects of CanCon. Thank you, Mr. Yorke.
The simple poster for the War Is Over campaign was designed by University of Toronto students, who also donated their time to post the posters all over Toronto. Ultimately, the campaign, which started in Toronto, had billboards all around the world.
Ritchie Yorke is a Canadian hero who happens to be Australian. He is a great man of peace who helped put the Canadian music industry on the map. I hail you, Ritchie.
I found out about the War Is Over protest in a traumatic way. On what was possibly the coldest day of my life, in December 1969, my brothers and I were tobogganing. Over the perpetual hum of the 401, we heard a buzzing sound in the sky. It was a skywriter spelling out the word WAR.
A little background into the Canadian psyche: Canadians had the misguided belief that America was preoccupied with invading Canada. It was only years later, when I lived in America, that I realized that Americans view the Great White North not so much as a country but more, as the popular meme suggests, as “America’s hat.”
After seeing WAR spelled out in the sky, my brother Paul came to the conclusion that, indeed, the Americans were invading. I began to cry uncontrollably out of terror. Every night, we had seen the Vietnam War on television, and now it seemed, Canada was next.
Richard Rohmer’s novel tells of a U.S. invasion of Canada, set against the energy crisis of the 1970s. Rohmer, a former Royal Canadian Air Force officer, has Canada defeat the Americans using the element of surprise. I read this book thirty times.
The skywriter then spelled IS OVER. My brother Peter said, with certainty, “War is over Canada right now. When we get home, we’ll have hot chocolate and begin to form resistance cells.”
Now it spelled out WAR IS OVER IF YOU. Peter said, “All right, here comes the ultimatum. Obviously, it’s ‘if you don’t give us your oil.’ ” Peter shouted to the sky, “Bring it on, you Yankee buggers!” I continued to weep. As we marched home, the skywriter completed the message. It read, WAR IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT HAPPY XMAS LOVE JOHN + YOKO. My crying changed from tears of fear to tears of pride. John Lennon and Yoko were in Toronto. They had personally sent Toronto a Christmas card in the sky. Later that week, we watched John Lennon and Prime Minister Trudeau hanging out in Ottawa. John thought our prime minister was cool. I couldn’t help but feel the reason John chose Canada was that he knew what we knew: Canada was going to be the Next Great Nation.
And if this nation was to be great, it needed to be fit. In the late 1960s it was observed that the average thirty-year-old Canadian had the same level of fitness of the average sixty-year-old Swede. For Trudeau, this would not stand. In 1970, he started the ParticipAction program, which was a government initiative to raise the fitness level of the nation. At school, ParticipAction created the Canada Fitness Test. Every child had to go through a series of physical tests and actions to determine their level of fitness, and they were issued an embroidered patch that let any and all know how they had performed. The highest performers received an Award of Excellence; below that was gold, then silver, and then the lowly bronze. My brain told me I was going to get the Award of Excellence. My body quickly informed me that I was to receive silver. People who won the Award of Excellence tended to put that patch on their denim jacket. We silvers tended to pretend that the patch had fallen through a sewer grate. Having said that, I still have my silver patch. I would have gotten gold, but I stumbled on the shuttle run. I don’t have to think about that anymore, right?
While Canada was getting fit, domestic issues took centre stage. In 1970, Prime Minister Trudeau had to deal with war and violence right here at home in Canada. Canada has always been a nation of two solitudes: English Canada, which comprises the vast majority in nine of the ten provinces, and French Canada, which is the predominant culture of the province of Quebec. The two traditions had forged an uneasy coexistence since the battle at the Plains of Abraham. Quebec was Catholic, English Canada mostly Protestant. United by hockey, divided by language.
In the 1960s, a Quebec separatist movement was slowly growing; although called the Quiet Revolution, there was some violence and loss of life in the form of bombings and armed robberies. I remember seeing mailboxes welded shut in Toronto as a way of combatting the rash of mailbox bombings.
In 1970, the Quiet Revolution got loud. In what is known as the October Crisis, a Quebec separatist terrorist organization called the Front de libération du Québec, or FLQ, kidnapped a British trade minister named James Cross and the deputy premier of Quebec, Pierre Laporte. In response to these kidnappings, a week later, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked what is known as the War Measures Act, giving the federal government sweeping powers of search and seizure and placing restrictions on freedom of the press. Literally overnight, Canada went from a democracy to a dictatorship. There were soldiers and tanks in the streets of Canada. When the press asked how far Prime Minister Trudeau would go with his suspension of civil liberties in order to defeat the FLQ, he responded, “Just watch me.”
Just watch me. Is this the mealy-mouthed language of a “weak progressive”? No. It was pure Trudeau.
Trudeau’s harsh, draconian response to the FLQ crisis seemed, to many, to be out of character for a progressive liberal, except to those who had read Trudeau’s writings on the nature of governance. Unlike many Conservatives who want to appear to be tough on matters of law and order, Trudeau actually was ruthless—not in the interest of offering red meat to the “law and order” set, but because the FLQ infuriated his sensibilities about the sanctity of the democratic process. Yes, of course he found the violence of the FLQ repugnant, but what he found equally repugnant was the FLQ’s barbaric defiling of the sanctity of democratic choice, whereby authority is granted only to the elected, the just, and the competent, and not to hoodlums, bullies, or fascists.
After Prime Minister Trudeau refused the FLQ’s demands, Pierre Laporte was apparently executed (though later it would be revealed that he was accidentally killed in a struggle). James Cross was released, fifty-eight days after his kidnapping, and although several of his captors were granted their freedom in exchange (six were later convicted upon their return to Canada), the FLQ was effectively destroyed. True to Prime Minister Trudeau’s word, the Bill of Rights and our tradition of democracy were restored.
For a seven-year-old, the crisis was both terrifying and thrilling. Before the October Crisis, I had never seen a Canadian soldier on the street, and up until then I wasn’t aware that we even had tanks. When the newspapers showed the bloody remains of Pierre Laporte in the trunk of a car, I was horrified. For many years afterward, my brother Paul “Makeshift Morgue” Myers would wince every time my dad opened the trunk of our car, expecting to find Pierre Laporte…again. In the schoolyards of North York, our tension was transmuted into a macabre game in which you would get sucker-punched in the back of the head, and when you turned around to see who hit you, the offender would simply say, “FLQ.” And then, in turn, you would “FLQ” somebody else. I had a bruise in the middle of my back, and when my mum asked me where I got it, I said, “FLQ.” My mum misheard that to be “Fuck you,” and she clocked me in the back of the head. We didn’t quite know what FLQ meant, but we knew it was bad. We also knew that Trudeau had protected us.
It’s the body of Pierre Laporte. In many ways the FLQ crisis was our 9/11. A very scary time in Canada.
My favourite Trudeau memory is the now-legendary “fuddle duddle” scandal. During Question Period, on the very formal floor of the House of Commons in Ottawa, Prime Minister Trudeau, in response to some particularly personal taunting, flipped a member of the Opposition the bird and mouthed the words “Fuck off.” This was seen by everybody in the House. It was like CSPAN “After Hours,” and the press went crazy.
They asked Trudeau, “What were you thinking…when you moved your lips?”
Trudeau responded, “What is the nature of your thoughts, gentlemen, when you say ‘fuddle duddle’ or something like that? God, you guys…” And then he walked off.
He was caught saying, “Fuck off,” and he claimed to have said, “Fuddle duddle.” That is a big set of nuts. The next day, a Canadian candy company put out a form of toffee called Fuddle Duddle with a caricature of Trudeau on the label.
Trudeau inspired us. We may not have had an interesting past, but we were sure as hell going to have an interesting future. Canada became future-crazy. There was even a very forward-thinking show about futurism called Here Come the ’70s that was shot in Toronto, and it featured a theme song played on a Moog synthesizer. Here Come the ’70s holds up to this day, not only in its prescience, but as a fascinating artifact of a time when futurism was a current concept and not something we now find ourselves nostalgic for.
By this point, Marshall McLuhan had moved back to Canada and was continuing his then controversial, pioneering study of mass media at the University of Toronto. It was here that he wrote From Cliché to Archetype. Under McLuhan, this new field of media studies eschewed the tired orthodoxy of print in favour of the new electronic media of television and satellite broadcasts. Though he spoke of the world as a “global village,” his futuristic revolutionary work was not being done in Paris or New York but in Canada.
Downtown Toronto, in the spirit of “new is better than old,” was going through a radical change: every day, another new, modern building. To make room for these new buildings, Toronto tore down many of its more beautiful, historic buildings. In its place were lots of concrete, jagged lines, as if inspired by Hitler’s Atlantic Wall or the Luftwaffe’s flak towers that ringed Berlin. In Toronto, at this time, the wrecking-ball business and the concrete industry were booming and we’re still paying the architectural price. Some old buildings survived because they were being repurposed. The Victorian houses were being made into neo-Victorian clothing stores. Toronto had embraced the new trend of psychedelia, and I remember going downtown, to Yorkville, “to see the hippies,” and feeling proud that Toronto had hippies. People were swimming nude in the Don River. We literally saw “bare-naked ladies.” We had arrived.
I REMEMBER GOING DOWNTOWN, TO YORKVILLE, “TO SEE THE HIPPIES.”
In 1971, not everyone rejected the old; the great Canadian historian Pierre Berton captured the fervour surrounding the Next Great Nation era with his smash hit book The Last Spike. Berton was the Ken Burns of his time, and The Last Spike told the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Pierre Berton is a hero to me. He taught us that we do have stories to tell. I used to love seeing him on Canadian TV and hearing him talk about the otherwise dry story of Canada in such an interesting way. He was…calming.
Equally calming was the 1972 TV series The Beachcombers, starring Bruno Gerussi. It was set in British Columbia, and it was about a coastal community that had to deal with the scourge of driftwood. I watched The Beachcombers every day after school for many years, and yet, I still cannot tell you what happens in any individual episode. The Beachcombers is inexplicable to non-Canadians. I shall not attempt to explain it. I have one word for you: YouTube. (Though that is really two words stuck together.)
Perhaps the most defining moment of the Next Great Nation era is the 1972 Summit Series, an eight-game hockey tournament between Canada and the Soviet Union.
For me, the story of the Summit Series really comes down to three moments when we felt that this hockey tournament was further proof of Canada’s inevitable emergence. The first was “The Speech,” the second was “The Chant,” and the third was “The Goal.”
I warn you that I cannot be a dispassionate historian when it comes to the ’72 series. This was very personal for me, and very meaningful and joyful. I love the game of hockey—how it looks, how it sounds, and in the good old days when Maple Leaf Gardens was still around, how it smelled, from the smell of the Gardens’ over-salted popcorn, to the smell of overly strong cologne, to the smell of electricity from the dubious, rickety escalators. I even remember the smell of the urinal pucks in the men’s room. And by the way, who takes a dump at a hockey game? But people definitely did, believe me. I guess, it was a case of dump and chase…but again, I digress.
Hockey, for me, is…home.
When we all heard that the series was going to happen, my brothers and I, like the rest of the country, thought it was going to be a cakewalk for Canada. We had seen the hilarious training films of the Soviets on Hockey Night in Canada, which showed them practising with oversized weighted sticks and parachutes on their backs when they ran suicide drills. It was the typical Soviet medicine ball–throwing exhibition-of-science-and-strength crap (think Rocky IV). My God, were we smug. We even felt a little bad for them, because they had drab C.C.C.P. uniforms and weird Jofa helmets that made them look like evil robots (ironically, Canada’s greatest player, Wayne Gretzky, would later wear a Jofa helmet).
My brothers and I saw Game 1 in eighty-degree weather on a colour television in the Better Living Centre building at the Canadian National Exhibition. On the way to the CNE, we saw a billboard for a Canadian vodka company called McGuinness Vodka. It read, in reference to the Soviets, “If they can play hockey, we can make vodka.” This was going to be funny.
By the end of Game 1, which Canada lost, 7–3, it wasn’t at all funny. A week later, in a stroke of advertising brilliance, McGuinness vodka had changed its billboard by crossing out the “If,” so that it now read, “they can play hockey, we can make vodka.” And boy, could they play hockey. They were great skaters—fit, disciplined, and they had weird, Harlem Globetrotter–type plays where they literally skated in circles around the Canadian team, who looked…hungover. And, worst of all, those Ruskies could stickhandle. Somehow, stickhandling felt like a Canadian skill—how dare they?
We won Game 2, we tied Game 3 (a tie? This series was so not designed by Americans), and in Vancouver we lost Game 4, 5–3. Some fans in the Pacific Coliseum booed Team Canada off the ice. I, however, was in Toronto, booing those Vancouver fans. This brings us to Moment Number 1, “The Speech.” Phil Esposito, an alternate captain of Team Canada, gave the most rousing postgame speech on nationwide TV:
Every one of us guys, thirty-five guys that came out and played for Team Canada, we did it because we love our country, and not for any other reason, no other reason. They can throw the money, uh, for the pension fund out the window. They can throw anything they want out the window. We came because we love Canada. And even though we play in the United States, and we earn money in the United States, Canada is still our home, and that’s the only reason we come. And I don’t think it’s fair that we should be booed.
Esposito’s speech made me proud to be Canadian, and I couldn’t help but think that a speech like that would never have happened before 1967. The Next Great Nation initiative was working.
Game 5 was in Russia, and Canada lost, 5–4. The series was 3–1, with one tie, in favour of the U.S.S.R. This leads me to Moment Number 2: “The Chant,” which happened in Game 6. There were three thousand Canadian fans who had travelled to Moscow, and the Soviets had seated them all together. The Soviet Union, of course, was a country in a permanent state of the War Measures Act. In a display of defiance and patriotism, the Canadian fans came up with a chant: “Nyet, nyet, Soviet! Da, da, Canada!” They could have been thrown in jail for this. I still can’t get “Nyet, nyet, Soviet! Da, da, Canada!” out of my head, and that was forty-four years ago. Canada eked out its first win in Russia, bringing the series to 3–2, still in favour of the U.S.S.R., with two games remaining.
In Game 7, Canada won, 4–3, evening up the series. It all came down to Game 8. I was nine years old, school was back in session, and just like when the Americans landed on the moon, we were all taken to the gym to watch the game on three Canadian-made Electrohome televisions that were on these tall, wheeled stands. The gym was packed. We were given little Canadian flags. All of us kids were amped, as if we had all had ten Cherry Blossom chocolate bars and a six-pack of Dominion Cola.
Soviets up 1–0.
Esposito ties 1–1
First period ends 2–2.
Soviets up 5–3 by the end of the second period.
Esposito saves a goal, and then goes on to score to make it 5–4 for Russia.
Yvan “The Roadrunner” Cournoyer scores to tie it at five.
And this brings us to Moment Number 3: “The Goal.” As Paul Henderson puts it, “I jumped on the ice and rushed straight for their net. I had this strange feeling that I could score the winning goal.” The Canadians advanced, and with thirty-four seconds left, the great Canadian hockey announcer Foster Hewitt described it: “Cournoyer has it on that wing. Here’s a shot. Henderson made a wild stab for it and fell. Here’s another shot. Right in front. They score! Henderson has scored for Canada!”
In the gym, coats went flying. Henderson, who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs, had scored the winning goal. Canada had beaten the Soviet Union. Canada had taken on the mighty Russian bear by itself, and won. Teachers were crying and hugging. Parents spontaneously came to pick up their children. I was the last to leave the gym, and as the AV squad closed the metal doors on the Electrohome televisions to put them away in the AV closet, I sat on my coat by myself and prayed, “Please, God, never let me forget this moment.” If we could beat the Soviets, we could do anything. We were number 1. No more number 2. There was no going back. Maybe we were already the Next Great Nation. But, alas, there was more building to come.
Specifically, the world’s tallest building, the CN Tower. In 1973, the Canadian National Railway, or CN, began building a tower on its property in downtown Toronto, for the purpose of transmitting radio and TV signals. It was to be the world’s tallest building, but in typical fashion, Canadians feel compelled to describe it more accurately as the world’s tallest free-standing structure. It was completed in 1976, and I remember watching with great pride as a Sikorsky lift helicopter put the last piece of the tower in place. My parents bought souvenir CN Tower whisky. The whisky was polished off right away, but we kept the bottle. I still have it.
In the shadow of the new CN Tower, across the street from where John Lennon had performed at the 1969 Rock and Roll Revival festival, there was a dance studio called the Roland and Romaine School of Dance. It was run by the choreographers of a Canadian TV variety show called The Pig and Whistle, which was set in a mock-English pub and featured English-oriented entertainment. The dancers did the sort of cheeky-chappy dancing you would see in Mary Poppins.
I told my parents that that’s what I wanted to do for a living, and they, to their credit, enrolled me in the Roland and Romaine School of Dance. I took tap dancing lessons there. My ever-supportive brothers decided, much to my horror, that my new nickname should become Twinkletoes. I owe a debt of gratitude to the nickname, because it was how I learned to fist-fight.
One day, I got a call from Romaine (I never really knew her name). A company producing a television commercial was looking for child dancers. They asked if I wanted to audition, I said yes, and, to my surprise, I got hired. It was a commercial set in the fifties, and a young family broke into dance. I was the son; I had a sister, a father, and a mother, who was played by Gilda Radner. Gilda had not yet been hired for Saturday Night Live (in fact, Saturday Night Live didn’t exist yet).
It was a four-day shoot, and I, like every other human being who met her, fell in love with Gilda. And on the last day of the shoot, we said our goodbyes in the parking lot. I cried like a baby. My whole family came to pick me up, and upon seeing me crying, my brothers gave me a new nickname to replace Twinkletoes. I was hereby called Sucky Baby, because of the emotion I had displayed upon my cruel separation from Ms. Gilda Radner, who became known in my house as “your girlfriend.” I was Sucky Baby for ten years. Even in my twenties, if I displayed any intellectual precociousness, I was immediately brought down to earth with “Wow, that’s really smart, Sucky Baby.” I went on to do about seventeen commercials, and several movies made for TV (thanks, CanCon!). And in the process, I ended up working with Bruno Gerussi, Lee Remick, and Lois Maxwell, who played Moneypenny in the James Bond movies.
One day in 1975, I came home and my brother said to me, “Hey, Sucky Baby, your girlfriend [Gilda Radner] is gonna be on this stupid show on Saturday. It’s a live comedy show that doesn’t even have a name. It’s just called Saturday Night.” That week, Saturday came and we gathered around the television. Our minds were blown. This was a show unlike any other show we had ever seen. It was rock and roll. It was dangerous. It was created by a Canadian! Lorne Michaels! I had been a fan of Lorne’s since 1970, when I saw him on his CBC comedy show with Hart Pomerantz, The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour (thanks again, CanCon). Gilda entered one of the sketches and I fell in love with her all over again. As the cast gathered onstage for the closing credits, a feeling came over me, and in an outrageous act of unearned confidence, I turned to my brothers and said, “I’m going to be on that show one day.” My brothers were immediately encouraging: “Yeah right. Dream on, Sucky Baby.”
SATURDAY CAME AND WE GATHERED AROUND THE TELEVISION. OUR MINDS WERE BLOWN.
Here was the coolest show on American TV, created by a Canadian, co-starring Dan Aykroyd. These are the fruits of the dreaded big government. In fact, a case could be made that American big government also played a hand in the creation of Saturday Night Live. SNL owes as much to the CBC as it does to FDR and the WPA. And here’s the link: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under the New Deal, created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was a make-work project during The Depression. The WPA hired a dramatist, Viola Spolin, to teach immigrant children English through the use of improvisational theatre games. Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought these improv games to Chicago in the 1950s, and he, with David Shepherd, formed the improv sketch troupe the Compass Players. Enter Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Bernie Sahlins, and thus the Second City Theater Company was born. The Second City franchised to Toronto, where a young Lorne Michaels met Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, and, in Chicago, John Belushi and Bill Murray. They formed the nucleus of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, and Saturday Night Live was born. No FDR? No SNL.
Lorne Michaels and Hart Pomerantz on their CBC show, The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour. Another great reason to give thanks for CanCon.
The Next Great Nation era reached its climax at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. It was the first Olympics after the Munich Massacre, and the flamboyant mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, had a lot riding on its success.
Trouble began to brew before the Games even started, when construction fell behind schedule and ran way over budget, despite Mayor Drapeau’s overconfidence in 1970 when he declared, “The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.” The Games started on schedule, though there were construction problems throughout. And, thankfully, there was no bloodshed, but Canada performed miserably, becoming the only host country in the history of the Olympics not to earn a gold medal. In fact, when Canadian broadcasters changed the film that ran alongside the national anthem at the end of the broadcast day, they included a clip of the 1976 Montreal Olympics: Canadian high jumper Greg Joy successfully clearing the bar. What’s not made clear in the footage is that Greg Joy only won a silver medal. Imagine the Americans putting a silver medal winner in a montage like this. And in an ironic twist, Greg Joy was actually born in the States.
The 1976 Montreal Olympics racked up a one-billion-dollar debt that took thirty years to pay off. In 1977, Mayor Drapeau gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.
For Canada, 1976 was a foreboding year after what had felt like a fantastic roll since Expo 67: we’d had the Centennial, Trudeau, John Lennon, CanCon, the ’72 Summit Series, a flourishing culture, and national pride was at an all-time high. But had the wave crested?
We had come so close. Would Canada ever get a mission statement? An identity?
