Trump’s tariff thing recently has kickstarted a whole Cold War between Canada and America. Canadians are “buying local” more than ever, and there’s all this talk lately of how we have to band together and work as a community to fight the bully that is America. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this much patriotism before, and I’ve lived in Canada all my life. I’ve sat through a million Terry Fox assemblies at school, and still don’t remember this much patriotism. Something has been awakened.
This is a positive thing obviously, and I myself have changed my spending habits a bit. I mean, I’m just some guy and won’t have much of an effect here, but I am certainly avoiding giving my money to American interests now if I don’t have to. I bought a pretty rad pair of boots from Winnipeg recently (and I was almost about to go with an American company, but Trump just wouldn’t shut his whore fucking mouth). Presumably, what America wants to do to us is destroy our economy to the point where we depend on them, and the 51st state thing looks like a great option. It’s sort of like how you used to be able to get a quality cup of coffee at a small mom and pop cafe, but then Starbucks entered the picture and started raping every possible location they could with one of their shitty coffee shops, and now you don’t have as much choice and you’re stuck with only them. Canadians are trying to fight back against this Starbucks phenomenon happening to us I guess. The 51st state stuff is funny to me because Trump is famously anti-immigrant, and what will happen if America inherits Canada overnight is they will inherit 900000 million trillion Indians. Just picturing that is funny to me, I’m sure Americans will love that. The other thing I’ve been thinking about is how will employment work? Can I just head over to California, hit up the Comedy Store and tell them I wanna work there with no work visa and paperwork? But anyway, that’s another topic for another time.
Something I can’t help wondering is why it took a morbidly obese orange retard to get us to be so patriotic all of a sudden? This is a good thing of course, but why did it take him for Canadians to actually give a shit about where our money goes and who we are as a country? Where is our self-respect? Specifically, you can see this concept clearly when it comes to our entertainment industry. Something I feel Canadians inherently lack is an arrogance that Americans have when it comes to investing in ourselves and creating industries. We could be so much better than we are, but we choose to think of ourselves as a sort of humble little brother to America. There’s a reason why every famous Canadian person eventually leaves Canada to work in the states: they have set things up to simply be better than our industry. Or at least that’s how things are perceived. And what I’m saying is it doesn’t have to be that way. If people could just stop being pussies about investing in Canadian content and so forth, we could be considered just as important. Think about if Lorne Michaels had created SNL in a studio downtown Toronto instead of being such a cuck for New York culture and worshipping Americans. We’d have our own cultural institution here.
To give you an idea of what it’s like here: in my early 20s I tried many times to get funding from Canadian corporations to make small movies (the scripts for some of these projects are on this website). Of course, this process shouldn’t be easy and money shouldn’t be given away to anyone freely who asks for it. Although that would be cool, that is not what I am saying should happen. But there should be some kind of process that is more encouraging and open for Canadian creators to submit for. In my experience, the system here is almost designed to find ways to tell you “No” before you’ve even tried. I feel like in America they would probably be more interested in making cool shit, whereas here we are still lacking in our ability to think of ourselves as an industry.
The funny thing about this is that, for all our differences in the news lately, Canada and the states are fairly similar in a lot of ways. To give you an idea of what I mean: I was recently looking up this Canadian movie on a Torrent site called “Scarborough,” a film about a place in Toronto. Someone made the comment that, no, this is the wrong film. This one is not about the place in England that they were looking for, it’s about a “redneck” place in the states. I found this funny for a couple reasons: 1. Because they were so mistaken and thought a Canadian place was an American place. And 2. Because they had never heard of the Canadian place, when it has been a home to people like Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, and so on. I’m not saying it’s the greatest place in the world, I’m just saying there is no reason we should not think of ourselves in this way. What we have is a failure to think big, and possibly an issue with marketing. There is zero reason for this to go on.