What It Really Means to Be Canadian

Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor and genial political loony, has recently suggested building a wall along the border between Canada and the U.S. The cost, by one estimate, would be $18 billion dollars, not including protective measures along the Great Lakes. The wall would be pointless. Even Donald Trump agrees. In 2013, U.S. officials arrested 822 Canadians for illegally entering the country. The larger question is whether anyone would even notice if America was overrun with Canadians.

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In a sense, of course, America is already overrun. Over a million Canadians already live there. Robert Cohen's new documentary, Being Canadian (in theaters and available on streaming this weekend), is an examination of what that fact might mean. Cohen is a TV writer, having worked on shows like The Big Bang Theory and According to Jim. and in that particular industry, Canadians are ludicrously overrepresented. The Canadian celebrities Cohen interviews include Seth Rogen, Mike Myers, Eugene Levy, Michael J. Fox, and nearly a dozen others. Arguably the biggest name in comedy production over the last 40 years has been Lorne Michaels, a Canadian comedy pipeline.

Not only are the celebrities Cohen interviews Canadian, they are proud Canadians. Even though they've lived outside of the country, and for most of their lives, Canada remains deeply, fiercely important to them, even when nobody notices. Sometimes their Canadian-ness matters to their careers and sometimes it doesn't. Nobody would know that Will Arnett is Canadian. But Mike Myers' comedy, to me, a Canadian, has always seemed like an elaborate national in-joke, and I have never understood why a character like Wayne from Wayne's World would mean anything to an American audience, since he is a type that is unique to Ontario suburbs. Myers' elaborate parodies of the British—in So I Married an Axe Murderer or the Austin Powers movies—are creations of a culture still recovering from a colonial existence.

Other Canadians whom Cohen interviews are quick to point out that this marginal position is exactly what gives Canadians their special gift. "It goes back to the McCarthy thing," Michael J. Fox says. "They look like us, they talk like us, they move like us, but they're other." And that is indeed true. But the interesting question, and the one difficult to answer, is what specifically all these Canadians living in America are proud of. If being Canadian is an ethnic identity, what are its defining traits? There is no identifiable Canadian cuisine, though there are defining ingredients: maple syrup, back bacon. There is a national sport, hockey, which is truly a unifying force. There are social features that have emerged pretty clearly from history. The Canadian politeness, which is both charmingly "nice" and also maddeningly passive-aggressive, is obviously a legacy of being a colony—an attempt to be more British than the British and resenting the fact.

But the key to being Canadian is the relationship to the United States. Cohen interviews successful Canadians in the United States and he interviews regular Canadians in Canada. That distinction is, in itself, highly revealing. There's a famous story about John Candy that Mike Myers tells in Being Canadian. Candy was flying into the Toronto airport after he'd starred in several huge movies, and a baggage handler asked him reproachfully, "Why don't any of you guys buy houses in Toronto when you make it big?" Candy replied that he had bought himself a big house in Toronto. He was heading to it. The baggage handler apologized. "Sorry, I thought you'd made it big."

All nationalities tend to gain force by life outside the country of origin. There is no Cinco de Mayo in Mexico, for instance, only in the United States. The largest Saint Patrick's Day parade, by far, is in New York. But Canadians are unique in this regard: In the U.S. the country they define themselves against, they can automatically pass. There is no accent. There is no physical distinction. Someone like Russell Peters, whose comedy is 100-percent Canadian, has conquered the world with his entirely Northern point of view, but nobody outside of Canada would know it. This seems to me the defining feature of Canadian ethnicity: It is invisible.

About nine percent of Canadians live outside the country. That makes them one of the world's most dispersed peoples. But of all the immigrant groups, it causes the least fuss. Being Canadian is a documentary, but it's also a comedy: What other country would find the pursuit of its identity to be, ultimately, a joke? Canada almost always tops the list of favorite foreign countries in the United States. The reason is obvious. Canadians make the best kind of foreigners. You can barely tell they're there. And when you do notice them, they just make you laugh.