03-01 Canada

A Newfoundlander was talking to a business colleague in Halifax. He said to make sure the first time he travelled to St John’s to try some Newfoundland Scrod, that is was truly delicious. So that is what he did. And after booking into the St John’s Hotel, he went out and called a cab. “Tell me”, he said to the taxi driver, “Where can I get Scrod?” The taxi driver said, “You know? I have been driving a cab for 10 years and have been asked that question a hundred times, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
That joke was told to me by a Newfoundland director of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, who owned the St John’s Hotel. It is pure Newfoundland humour and part of our distinctive Canadian culture.
Growing up, I never thought Canada had a culture different from the United States. Both countries spoke the same language, watched the same TV programs and enjoyed hockey and baseball.
And yet, in my senior years, spending winters in Florida and California, or visiting my daughter in Boston, I noticed that people honked at me in Boston and Florida and never honked at me in California or back home in Canada. A little simplistic as a cultural test, perhaps. But I think there are similarities in culture between Canada and parts of the US.
To me, Canadian culture is about tolerance and accommodation.
With a father from Belfast and a mother that was Jewish, I assumed I would understand myself better after visiting Ireland and Israel.
My first surprise was the anti-Catholic sentiment in the Protestant North, something that was so foreign to Canadians who have lived with the French-English and Protestant-Catholic differences for over 100 years.
A real shock was visiting Israel, which was a nation of immigrants. But sadly, a country with young people walking around with rifles over their shoulders. And a taxi driver telling us that he was not allowed to use a seat belt because a Palestinian could too easily put the belt around his neck.
After these trips, I knew I was a Canadian and living in a society with its own culture. And my experiences as the founder of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business reinforced this culture.
There was an employee born in Quebec that was thirteen generations Canadian. How many people can make that boast? Then there were employees hired from rural Quebec where no one spoke a word of English.
Will I ever forget meeting Premiers of Quebec over the years? There was the Liberal Premier Bourassa who asked me if I would be more comfortable if our meeting were conducted in English.
And, then there was a meeting with the separatist Premier Rene Levesque who was fully bilingual but conducted our meeting in French. I could understand about half of what he said.
Certainly, as public school students, we learned about our indigenous peoples, what they call First Nations, Metis and Inuit populations. And that Canada was an Iroquois word meaning “village”.
And the big cities of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa being real cultural mixtures. As a child, I remember being in grade one in a downtown Toronto public school, where most of the children did not even speak English.
And yet Canada works. I got some insight visiting over 40 nations with histories marked more by conflict than cooperation. Our history is about building a national rail system to link us economically. It actually connected us culturally.
Perhaps it is our system of health care. Canadians love their public health system. They also love the CBC, the publicly-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
There is just something pragmatic, non-ideological and accommodating about our Canadian culture. Not sexy. But, I just love it.