Yes - I am Canadian and I live in Canada
OK, you probably know this, but because I have seen some visitors which caused me to run to my Goggle Maps I will save anyone who flunked geography the effort of looking up Canada on a map.
We Canadian's believe that we have a pretty distinctive culture and quite dissimilar to those folks who live south of us in the United States of America. Try telling a Canadian that they come from America and they will correct you. Canada is in North America, but Canada is not in America.
What does it mean to be Canadian? I have in mind an essay on that topic, but in the meantime I found some good stuff on the Internet which will give you a chuckle and also help you to understand what we are/are not.
I am not a well enough experienced beer drinker to know if this is unusual, but we in Canada do have a beer which is named for our country, which actually is fairly popular. (I haven't heard of any beer with the brand name like "American" or "English" - but maybe there are other countries which allow beer companies to use the country as a brand name. The Molson's Brewing Company have made some pretty funny commercials playing off our vision of being Canadian and some dead wrong stereotypes and this one - I am Canadian, went viral here in Canada.
Variations on a theme - William Shatner is Canadian!
In the video following, with it's catchy tune, "Canadian, Please" has the singers Julia and Andrew wearing the dress uniform of the Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties are the police force which provides law enforcement to those areas within the country who do not have city, municipal or provincial police force as well as where cross jurisdictional enforcement is required. Ontario has it's Ontario Provincial Police Force (OPP)as does Quebec but not all provinces have provincial police forces and in those provinces the Mounties provide all rural policing.
CREDIT:
Song & video produced by
Julia Bentley & Andrew Gunadie
The Arrogant Worms recorded a song and made a great Canadian Pride Video which sings about and shows some Canadiana.
What would a blog about being Canadian be without something relating to our Anthem? Of course, if you watch any amount of North American Hockey you will have heard it before as they play the anthems of both countries before each game and of course, we are a big hockey country.
Nikki Yanofsky (a Canadian from Quebec) did a great version of our anthem at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The Olympics last year did a lot to raise the Canadian profile within the world.
This is kind of interesting hip hop version by Classified and contains a lot of true Canadianisms and at the end has a little bit of fun with the fact we don't do so well at Basketball, unlike our American neighbours to the south. (Goes equally for soccer)
Ok, so I owe this blog a bit of original content: Peggy's view of what it means to be Canadian and I intend to add that essay to the end of this blog at some point in the coming months.
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