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TWO How Winter Has Shaped Canadian Identity from Literature to Art

What is a Canadian? It’s an open-ended question that inevitably generates as many answers as there are people considering it. Responses have changed over the years, as Canadian identity has shifted throughout the decades.

One of the more recent ways of describing a Canadian, however, is contrasting the differences between them and their influential neighbours directly to the south. If you continue that dialogue though, eventually and inevitably, the conversation reverts to a time-honoured self-identifier. Pressed hard enough, most will declare it is a Canadian’s relationship with winter. Snow, sleet, blinding blizzards, and ice are all symbols of the Canadian experience, and the telling images of who we are.

Winter is not simply one of four seasons to a Canadian. It’s not merely the time separating fall from the spring. It’s much more. Winter in Canada is a force. Its power has made Canadians who they are, in the same way the Declaration of Independence defines Americans and soccer-playing connotes the Brazilians. It’s what we’re known for whether we like it or not. Take winter away and would we still be Canadians? Perhaps our own self-image would adjust, but the rest of the world might have trouble responding to this lost cliché.

Robertson Davies claimed that “cold breeds caution,” suggesting not too subtly the relationship between the winter climate and the psyche of Canadians as a whole. Canada is in a winterized state for a major part of the calendar year. In certain areas of Canada, winter is extreme, debilitating, and fierce. The calendar definition of the season running from just before Christmas through late March is one of the more misleading markers. Davies argues that because of the cold climate Canadians are perhaps more cynical and paranoid. This receives added credence in the way it contributes to the Canadian desire to separate themselves from Americans.

The blending of American and Canadian cultures has become more pronounced in recent years. Canadians are offended by this development and rely on critical sustenance for their ability to differentiate themselves from Americans by virtue of being winter warriors.

This bond between Canada and winter is best described by French-Canadian singer Gilles Vigneault, who succinctly remarked, “My country’s not a country, it’s winter.” His country, however, was not necessarily Canada. It is symptomatic of the complex nature of Canadian identity that Vigneault is described as a poet, publisher, singer-songwriter, and well-known Quebec nationalist and sovereignist.

So, no sooner do Canadians find an artist who expresses his people’s attitude to their relationship with winter then he disavows his interest in such an identity.

Still, Canadians wear this relationship between themselves and climate as a badge of honour. Canadians travelling abroad check into international hostels with maple leaves attached to their backpacks and proudly tell a traveller from Spain, “If I can take a Canadian winter, I can certainly rough it in this hostel.” The Canadian then proudly annoys his indifferent host by describing his survival of major snowfalls. His host, on the other hand, wonders why he can find nothing to say about Canada’s cuisine or its major musical artists.

Canadians have no choice. They embrace the frigid winters as something that makes them unique. Blinding snow, extreme windchill, freezing rain, and blizzards are hazards they tolerate every year, something that is foreign to the majority of other countries. A Canadian traveller would be at a loss if someone checked into the same hostel and was from Iceland. They would feel somewhat emasculated.

Horse racing on a frozen river.

American comedic writer Dave Barry famously wrote: “The problem with winter sports is that — follow me closely here — they generally take place in winter.” Canadians, however, embrace winter sports because for far too many months there simply is no other choice.

Of course, a Canadian could declare a disaffection with the season and many do by fleeing south during its harsher months, but in so doing there’s a sneaking suspicion that they must be less than a “real Canadian.” Winter culture surrounds Canadians, telling them that hockey, snowmobiling, and ice fishing are their activities. Basketball may have been created by a Canadian, but being a basketball fan does not make you a Canadian. Basketball is now too connected with American culture to qualify as Canadian.

Canadians must embrace their sports to be truly genuine, and they do, but, of course, with a caveat that it is what is expected of them. The outsider will quickly know they are in Canada once they turn on a television and investigate the country’s sports stations. Two will be showing hockey games, a third will have aging veterans of the game talking about hockey games and prattling on about how necessary fighting is to the game’s definition, while a fourth station will be showing a curling match.

Those from other countries are of course baffled by this strange cultural abnormality. A caller to a Geneva, Switzerland, sports talk show in the year 2000, having spent some time in Canada watching television, inquired of the bemused host whether Canadian parents, as a rite of passage for children, removed all their child’s front teeth before putting them into the game as the loss was inevitable in any case. The host was unable to contradict this apparent European urban myth.

The most promising basketball tandem in Toronto in the early twenty-first century, featuring the mercurial Vince Carter and his cousin Tracy McGrady, was broken up by McGrady’s protest that he needed to get out of Canada because not only was the American sports station ESPN not available but its alternative, TSN, only covered curling — hour after hour of Vic Rauter proclaiming the mystery of draws, and rocks, and buttons, which McGrady found culturally baffling. The promise of a National Basketball Association dynasty in Toronto was thus shattered by the country’s bizarre winter sports fixation.

From childhood, young boys in the long winters have little choice but to embrace the games of ice and snow. There are few facilities that can accommodate children playing football or baseball indoors during the long winter months, so thousands of children travel to the closest rink, or to a frozen pond or homemade rink, and join their friends.

It’s an upbringing that is unavoidable. The relationship between Canadians and the winter has created a culture that almost exclusively holds winter events as the defining moments in the country’s sports history. Some of the best-defined cultural events of the past fifty years have involved the game of hockey. Arguably none was more significant than Paul Henderson’s goal to win the Summit Series with Russia (okay, they called themselves the Soviet Union, but to Canadians they were Russians) in 1972. Canadians also recall the collective joy of the nation following Mario Lemieux’s goal for Team Canada in 1987 in the penultimate match with those same Russians.

Hockey defines Canadians so much now that politicians use the winter sport as a benchmark to create new legislation.

One has only to consider a proposed Federal holiday brought forward in February 2009 by Linda Duncan, an Edmonton MP. In her proposal, Duncan argued that the third Friday of February be declared, as one might have already guessed, “Hockey Day.”

Duncan’s proposal, not surprisingly, was quick fodder for the national media. Any story involving hockey and politics gets the attention of Canadians. Its presence on websites inspired a flurry of comments and sparked vigorous debates from Canadians throughout the nation. Some comments by Canadians online spoke directly to the state of Canada’s culture. Some wondered how Canadians have got to the point where the nation, once joked about as being a hockey-playing, beer-drinking, parka-wearing fraternity, now had politicians proposing holidays directly catering to some of these oversimplifications. Had we become a country requiring a holiday to tell us what we already knew to be our story? Duncan defended her proposal, saying, “Hockey has served as a unifying force throughout our history and it is a significant facet of our national identity.”

Duncan tapped into a distinctly Canadian myth that we are somehow uniquely strong and capable of living with, and even prospering in, long winters, as opposed to the easier ability of people in warmer climates to address their challenges. The holiday would help ease the Canadian difficulty in surviving long, harsh winters.

“People need days off in the winter to fight the blues, and what better holiday could there be than one that would celebrate our national game?” Duncan explained.

This is not a new concept. Winter has been a major influence on the comments and actions of prominent Canadian statesmen and politicians. In 1866, Nova Scotia statesman Joseph Howe cheekily viewed Canada as not being able to fully loosen its shackles.

“[We] may be pardoned if we prefer London under the Dominion of John Bull to Ottawa under the domination of Jack Frost,” he remarked.

Prominent politicians, like popular Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, also noted Canada’s relationship with its unique weather patterns. “Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain,” he said.

A curling team sponsored by Sangster, circa 1915.

Trudeau’s political counterpart, conservative politician Joe Clark, joined the fray of characterizing Canada as a winter wonderland in his description of Canada as “The Winter half of North America.”

Politicians seemingly have no problem creating sound bites signifying a long-standing overexaggeration of Canada’s climate, even if their comments don’t necessarily apply to the majority of Canadians who live in somewhat more temperate regions of the country.

Generalizing Canada’s identity as a winter nation has its roots in the ways Canadians define their country. While cold winters certainly affect northern Canada, and cities such as Edmonton or Calgary, frosty, unbearable winters are not as applicable to residents of Windsor, Toronto, and Vancouver, which contain the majority of Canadians.

Torontonians share a climate similar to Buffalo, New York (but with less snow), and Detroit (but with less laid-off auto workers) for the majority of the year. Being Canadian, however, allows them to travel abroad and proudly declare that they are like winter soldiers who are able to endure the roughest of Canadian winters, while reassuring southerners, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that they don’t live in igloos, as their new house was built with bricks and mortar.

It’s a misconception of sorts that Canadians love to exploit in the manner of people who have lived so long with an ironic self-image they now believe it to be fact. Rick Mercer, a popular Canadian CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) comic, famously went to the United States to prey on unsuspecting Americans in a series of basic knowledge questions about Canada. Broadcast throughout Canada, the show Talking to Americans tickled many Canadian funny bones, as Americans unknowingly took Mercer’s questions to be legitimate. And many of the questions focused on Canada being a frozen tundra.

Ironically, a lot of the naïvete of Americans could be attributed to Canadians themselves, who export comedy oversimplifying Canada’s identity as a land mass of ice and snow. It’s a strange relationship, in which Canadians enjoy talking up the nastiness of Canadian winters, but then roll their eyes when the Americans take these claims at face value and repeat them as truisms. The story of the hapless American showing up at the border in July with skis attached to the top of his car and seeking directions to the snow fields is a Canadian urban myth that never fails to amuse despite the inability to actually identify such an occurrence.

Mercer, posing as a serious broadcaster for the CBC, parlayed the Canadian identity of a winter haven to comical results. One such exchange broadcast on his special showed him telling Americans the challenges faced by Canada’s capital building. Mercer explained to his bemused subjects that this Canadian building was essentially comparable to America’s Capitol building, however, it was slightly downscaled and made of ice. Mercer’s hope was that by appearing as a legitimate Canadian reporter, and feeding on America’s misconceptions about Canada, respondents wouldn’t blink an eye at this piece of news. There was much glee among Canadians at what Canadians most enjoy, namely seeing Americans make fools of themselves on our national television. Of course none of this ever makes its way to the American media so the joke loses its ability to humiliate.

Our national capital building — “It’s an igloo.” Or so Mercer explained to the Americans he talked to on the street. “Canadians are worried about global warming so we are considering putting a dome over it, to preserve our igloo.”

The segment showed Americans taking Mercer’s microphone and agreeing that the dome would be a splendid idea, and that in building the dome over the ice building, Canadians could create more revenue by making it a tourist destination.

In a major coup, Mercer was even able to get Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to appear on camera to say “Congratulations Canada on preserving your national igloo.”

Canadians throughout the country laughed at the ways major American politicians could be exposed as being so ignorant about Canadian culture. What Mercer really revealed, however, was exposing how successful Canadians had been in exporting the very image he was exploiting for humorous effect. It’s an identity Canadians are very comfortable perpetuating.

American comedians use the same formula as Mercer when they try to appease Canadians when visiting the country. The jokes almost follow the same “paint by number” creation. They cater to the Canadian audience, and allow the visitor to portray themselves as part of Canadian culture, by creating jokes about the winter, followed by jokes about airplane food, and bad drivers. Canadians can’t get enough of them.

When popular American late night talk show host Conan O’Brien brought his show to Toronto in February 2004, he put to good use this poking of fun at all things Canadian. Hockey, winter coats, and igloos came out in full force. O’Brien’s segments were full of winks and nudges to the cold weather, and to hockey, with sketches featuring members of the Toronto Maple Leafs. It made perfect sense.

Outdoor hockey in Alberta, pre–First World War.

Conan quickly discovered during his time in Toronto that Tie Domi, at the time arguably the most popular Maple Leafs hockey player, was one of the most significant cultural icons of the city. An unknown figure to anyone south of the border, Domi was an icon that was uniquely Canadian. Like Mr. Bean of Britain, or The Crocodile Hunter in Australia, Domi represented Canada. O’Brien was keen enough to discover that hockey was the defining characteristic of Canadian culture, and leaped at the opportunity of casting Domi in one of his sketches. Not surprisingly, the live Toronto audience lapped it up.

Not only did Conan’s live audience laugh, but at times proved these stereotypes true, as audience members would randomly chant “Go Leafs Go” during segments when Conan interviewed proud Canadian Mike Myers. Myers gleefully contrasted the differences between America and Canada, and embraced the crowd.

Despite dozens of stereotypical Canadian characterizations featuring cold weather dwellers, and igloo jokes, the only time Conan’s crew caught the ire of Canadians, and in particular Canadian politicians, was when his NBC crew went off the climate script, and did a segment involving a puppet dog poking fun at French culture in Quebec. The furor made its way to Parliament after the segment aired, further illustrating the point that Canadians will laugh, tolerate, and perpetuate jokes about their hockey-loving, cold-weather hoser image, but jokes about the more subtle tensions between Francophones and Anglophones are off limits.

While Canada is a nation made up of both French- and English-speaking Canadians, and has a unique culture, with their ancestors first fighting against one another and then living together, it’s not something to be rubbed too sharply or put at the forefront of discussion. It certainly isn’t something to be mocked. It’s a very delicate relationship, and one upon which politicians are leery about treading. A foreign comedian using a puppet dog to insult the French, put politicians from all sides, French and English, on a hot seat, and created a reaction the O’Brien crew simply could not anticipate. They eventually apologized having learned what humour was tolerated in Canada. In the world of comedy, it’s best to stick with something Canadians as a whole accommodate — the Canada identity as a Winter Wonderland. That’s funny.

The Queen of the Ice, 1903.

Comedy is not the only place in which the winter climate and Canadian culture meld. It abounds in literature. With poems and stories detailing Canadian winters, the country’s cold vast landscape is a source of wonderment, and inspiration to writers who travel throughout its length (and width).

It inspired Canadian novelist and poet George Bowering to write: “This is a country of silent wind piling drift snow in Rocky Mountains, trenches of quiet death, lonely desolation.”

Bowering is far from being the only writer to note the cold openness of the vast Canadian landscape. Early British settlers wrote about their first experiences coming to Canada and noted with horror how Canada’s winters set the country apart from the more forgiving British weather. Writers would lament Canada’s frozen, frigid, and inhospitable terrain.

Many failed to foresee that Canada could ever be a developed nation, much less one to which native Brits would flee. There might be lots of open land, but how could it be valuable if it was covered in snow for much of the year? Early accounts of British writers encountering Canada in the late 1700s included their lament that this was a land rendering inhabitants “void of thought” and impairing mental powers. This unforgiving, frigid landscape would drive people to drinking, gambling, and ultimately breaking down. The moral fibre of society would collapse under such conditions. Winter of such ferociousness would destroy humanity.

Cold and winter have been used to inspire other forms of depressing poetry. It has been unrepentant about the general dreadfulness of Canadian winters. Throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s writers produced works reading like horror stories of a barren, cold wasteland.

In 1946, Patrick Anderson wrote a poem about Canada, which he concluded by stating that the country was a nation that had untapped potential — despite the cold. In his concluding line in “Poem on Canada,” he makes reference to Canada’s unique climate, calling it “A Cold Kingdom.”

America’s attic, an empty room

a something possible, a chance, a dance

that is not danced. A cold kingdom.

Conversely, the cold and winter has also been used in poetry as a punchline. In 1971, poet Alden Nowlan, may have been ahead of his time, in combining poetic prose with a Canadian climate jab. He created a poem suggesting that the winter of Canada had unparalleled danger, simply because it is a Canadian winter.

Innocently titled “Canadian January Night,” Nowlan’s poem reads:

This is a country

where a man can die

simply from being

Caught outside

Likewise, Roch Carrier’s famous hockey sweater story incorporates all facets of Canada’s winter culture, from both a French and English perspective and the horror of having to wear the uniform of one’s dreaded rival in an unsympathetic public place. Winter shrivels in its impact besides such humiliation.

First Peoples curling five, possibly at Washakada Indian School in Elkhorn, circa 1898.

Perhaps the relationship between Canadians and the winter is best understood by Canadians transplanted from their homeland. It is now common for Canadian entertainers to head to the United States exporting their talents to a larger audience, but intriguingly, it appears that many of these entertainers can’t help sharing stories about their Canadian upbringing in interviews. Comedians such as Howie Mandell and Mike Myers are notorious for going off topic in interviews with stories about their Canadian childhoods. Myers’s connection with Canada resulted in a movie project based entirely on his love of Canada’s national game. Myers’s film, The Love Guru, centred around the main character helping to turn around the career of a hockey player on his favourite team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. The movie was a critical and commercial bust, but it affirmed the idea that while Myers hasn’t lived in Canada for years, his upbringing certainly remains influential in his writing and producing.

It’s a sentiment that is echoed by Canadian writer Blanche Howard who remarked:

To tell you the truth, in California I missed the wildness of the Canadian winter. There is something stirring about a blizzard, something elemental about pitting oneself against driving, stinging snow in below zero temperatures. I often think it accounts for the general peacefulness of the Canadian character, all the aggressive energy has been used up in battling and surviving nature.

On the other hand, Jack Kent Cooke, owner of the expansion Los Angeles Kings, who entered the National Hockey League in the fall of 1967, was convinced that with 2 million ex pat Canadians in California he’d have no problem selling out his games. Full houses, however, proved hard to come by and a puzzled Cooke finally concluded that the 2 million Canucks had moved there because they hated hockey and by extension that memory of the wildness of the Canadian winter.

Humans are bound by their relationship with nature. Canadian culture stems from decades of long, harsh winters, from unrelenting snowfalls, and short summers. It’s simply a reaction to the country’s geographic location. It’s something that has evolved naturally.

While Canadians have adopted the story of theirs being a land of immigrants, the country still has a collective culture defining the nation as a whole, and that collective cultural identifier has been the harsh Canadian winter. It comes up in conversations wherever Canadians travel. It’s something synonymous with Canada, like the British and their tea, or the Spanish with salsa.

Despite the threat that winters will become balmier, for now Canadians still have a collective culture binding them together — a common bond of fighting the frigid winter, of making use of the cold elements, and embracing them, and ultimately of becoming identified with them.