Canada Reborn

Andrew Coyne has an interesting column in the Olympic print edition of Macleans (can't find a link on-line)in which he suggests that the aspirational aims of Own the Podium have always been part of the Canadian psyche, but for the most of the past century, "it went underground."

"Go back to the first half of the last century, before the nationalists started remaking us in their own image, and you see a different Canada: the Canada of Laurier and Leacock, when it was not just a goal, but an assumption, that this country, two steps out of the woods though it was, would be the next great power. By the end of the 20th century, the "century of Canada," we would have 100 million people. World leaders? Top of the medals? Of course. This is what we were supposed to be."

The entire article is worth a read, but I particularly resonated with Coyne's closing.

"For me, this Olympics, and its effect on our sense of self is summed up in two of our first gold medal winners. Alexandre Bilodeau and Jon Montgomery: the ego and the id of our national psyche. Bilodeau with his manifest decency and humility, whose first thought on winning was of his disabled brother, is who we would like to be. Montgomery, the muscle-flexing, beer-swilling skeleton dare-devil, who only took up the sport as a way to get to the Olympics, is who we are.
Or maybe there's no contradiction between the two. Maybe what we have learned is that we can hold fast to those traditional Canadian virtues of compassion, generosity and fairness, and still be aggressive, ambitions, and competitive as all get out. If that offends a few visiting British sportswriters, that is just a chance we are going to have to take.

Well said. And as one of my colleagues pointed out in forwarding this article to me, another way of describing what Michael Van Pelt and I tried to point out in suggesting the replacement of the pan-Canadian consensus with something new.