The Christmas Sermon 2012 – “On Not Believing In Canada”

But Daniel: surely the true Canada – the only Canada that really matters – is inside the hearts each and everyone of us.

Happy Christmas.

You had cartoons on TV on Sunday? O, you lucky man!

This is a rather extreme version of the “No true Scotsman” argument isn’t it, something along the lines of “No true Scotsman would … exist?”

Exactly, soru. (Ironically, I am watching Hogfather right now.)

I don’t understand why you all believe in America, which is obviously a sound stage in southern France. I mean, look at those cowboy movies–they are obviously shot in Sicily…

Given that Canada doesn’t exist, it’s proven necessary to invent it?

I’ve always thought of belief in Canada in terms of Pascal’s Wager. Even if Canada doesn’t exist, wouldn’t we be better off anyway going about our lives as if it did exist?

Dear Brad @11
you seem to be missing the point. Rubbing our eyes in disbelief observing the USA is not what is at issue here. As jumped up monkeys, not believing in the USA would be decidedly non-adaptive, unfortunately

You have to think someone is just making this up.

It’s obviously Canadianists’ attempt to hijack the theology of the treacle mine.

It is a relief that someone has the courage to voice the terrible secret on which I stumbled over 30 years ago, and about which I have stayed silent until now. It was 1981 when I went in search of Canada, a naive young student looking for a place to pursue a postgraduate degree. They sent me brochures with gleaming towers of glass and concrete, told me stories of wealth and wide streets, showed me pictures of French-speaking mounties and girls with unbelievably straight, white teeth. I grabbed a plane to New York, hopped on a bus, and was on my way.

Alas, as soon as I alighted at Hamilton Bus Terminal at one o’clock in the morning, with its tatty benches, cheerless tiled walls, and drunks in the corner, it was obvious I was just another gullible rube. Oh, there were moments when I thought I caught a glimpse, just for a moment, of the Canada I had been promised. Walking down Toronto’s University Avenue on a warm summer’s night; listening to Oscar Peterson play piano on the shores of Lake Ontario; sitting by a dark and silent Muskoka lake; watching the first snowfall lie heavy on the branches of moonlit trees. But you will notice that these are all night-time visions, and they quickly vanished in Hamilton’s sulphurous morning air.

Oddly, I took to Hamilton with its very non-Canadian industrial grimness, and adjusted to the fact that “Canada” was obviously simply a phantom. But while I grew to love the place and the people where I was living, my journey into disbelief was only just beginning.

Growing up in Leeds, and as a student at Sussex University, “class” was as solid as the red brick of the buildings. But here, where everyone came from similar backgrounds, where I could not tell a person’s family from their voice, where nobody else seemed to care about the school one went to? I started to wonder. If Canada does not exist, then maybe class doesn’t either?

The university was not a good place for believing in the existence of things. On my side of campus we were all about things quantum, neither this nor that. At the time the dominant view was not to worry about the whole “wave or particle” thing, but simply to use the equations and calculate. Which I did, but it didn’t do much for my belief in the existence of things.

On the other side of the central square were the poststructuralists, whose nihilism appealed briefly, until it became clear that their world was constructed purposefully so that the only person who existed in any meaningful way was, not those who worked outside the narrow world of words (there being nothing behind the text), not the authors of the text (unprivileged), but these theorists of the text themselves, who stood at the centre of their own self-constructed universe: a stance so obviously self-interested that they disappeared up their own rear ends.

Between us, facing each other across the square in the other direction, sat the Medical Centre and the Religion/Philosophy building, where I listened to the neuroscientists and Buddhists who convinced me that even I, as a separate self, didn’t really exist, for two completely different sets of reasons.

But time went on and I left Hamilton, and as the years went by it looked like maybe there was something that existed after all. Money seemed to exist, and property, and banks. I thought I knew what a bank was: if it can be robbed, then it must exist, no? But in 2007 that too turned out to be an illusion. Not only huge institutions, but billions (whatever that means) of dollars just vanished like a puff of smoke. The illusion of the reality of money is strong (In an episode of MI5, thieves were digitally robbing a bank of millions of dollars. As the police charged into the building the thieves sat glued to the screen, waiting for the transfer of money to their account to complete. The screenwriters could not get past the idea that transferring millions of pounds must take longer, the numbers actually scrolling by on-screen, than
transferring hundreds of pounds) but was shattered in a few short weeks.

So here we are, reading pages that disappear at the flick of a switch written by people we have never met. Believing in Canada is surely the least of our problems.

And me? Well I claim to live in this “Canada” in one “city” with two names. Kitchener-Waterloo, where there just happens be a street named after me: first and last name both. How likely is that? More proof, if it were needed after Daniel Davies, that Canada is make believe.

Speaking as a lapsed Canadian surrounded by practicing Canadians, I thank you for this post.

You’ve missed one of the best bits of evidence for the thesis, namely the late lamented (and mysteriously unavailable on dvd) tv series Due South, allegedly produced Canadians but manifestly a bit of mythmaking intended both to promote the idealised image of the unfailingly courteous Canadian as ideal man and to demonstrate the necessity of flawed Chicago humanity for actual day-to-day existence. Essentially a police dramedy version of Also spracht Zarathustra.

Everyone knows that Canada was invented by Nouvelle France as an emotional proxy for the dreaded USA. A denim- and plaid-swaddled voodoo doll designed to hear, but politely endure, much guff about the unjust hegemony of English North America.

The greatest trick Canada ever pulled was convincing the world it doesn’t exist….

/Bwahahahaha

Patient is female, aged 40. She was referred to the University Psychiatric Service on account of her repeated claims that there exists a place called “Canada”. Patient has no history of drug abuse, does not exhibit any suicidal ideation or intent to harm others, and does not report any hallucinations. However, throughout the interview she persisted in maintaining that “Canada” exists, sometimes becoming agitated when its non-existence was pointed out to her.

Diagnosis was Delusional Disorder – Unspecified Type. Risperidone was prescribed.

Previous holiday Davies stuff, to save other people trawling through the archives:

closing the books on 2007

on death rates and statistics

on conspiracy and relativism

“The Great Homeopathic Cocktail Bar”

heroes and villains

This is pretty rich coming from someone claiming to be from “Wales”, a fantasy backdrop created to give atmosphere to a series of young adult fantasy novels by Susan Cooper. Was claiming to be from “the Shire” a little too common for you? You had to go to the more obscure reference?

I’m a Fungimentalist Canadianist who follows the mind-expanding work of Carlos-Neri Cascanada.

Oh, dear! War on Canada again!

I feel that this might be a supportive community – one in which I can admit my own secret disbeliefs. Ahheemm.

I do not believe in either North or South Dakota.

There, said it.

One can at least meet people who claim to have ‘been born in’ Canada. Has anyone ever met a person who claimed to hail from ‘the Dakotas’? No.

My company’s UK dealer was based in Cardiff, headed by someone named Davies, of course. I could not convince my fellow Californians that he might be annoyed if they called him English. Disbelief in Wales is clearly widespread. (It may not have helped that we later hired a head of international sales, also named Davies, who actually was English.)

The hardest thing for me to believe about Canada is that it managed to stay out of both Vietnam and Iraq. I’ve been to Canada many times, and found it perceptibly if subtly different from the U.S., but entirely credible except for its national politics. It’s as though they had a different definition of sanity.

ChrisTS–My best friend (RIP) was from No Dak–the antithesis of So Dak. Hegel posited Syn Dak, of course. Nor Continental philosophy of course.

Let’s torture this analogy and see if anyone worships it:

A large and powerful minority in my country claims that it was it was founded as a Canadian nation and that its exceptional position among all other nations is the result of its ardent embrace of its Canadian identity, and that as a consequence we must strictly prohibit not only measures to control reproduction but also measures to prevent diseases of the organs involved, and mandate that students be instructed that satellite photography and the cartography of Jacques Cartier may be considered equally accurate.

Most don’t go so far, but we still mention Canada on our currency and generally require students in public schools to make daily obeisance to Canada, expect civic spaces to host seasonal tributes to Canadian culture and history, and insist that candidates for public office proclaim their Canadian allegiance.

But I have stripped and swum, in the company of a Frenchman no less, which I recall clearly though decades ago, in a Great Lake, and I can assure you that what we were immersed in was Superior. And if one doubts the existence of this Superior place, there is also… Sudbury- let none doubt that.

When my childhood pet died, my parents told me it had gone to Canada. I asked them if I’d see him again if I went to Canada, and they said yes, I would. Three weeks later, I’m wandering through Halifax shouting “Horace!” at the top of my lungs. Got sent home under guard in the back of a bus. Learned my lesson, though. Only fools go to Canada for comfort.

A Dan, a con. No Canada!

I love me some anagrams, and this is sheer and utter genius. Made my day.

I believe. Help thou my unbelief, Tim Horton’s.

I don’t believe in the concept of the United States of America

I find believing in the concept of a country that accepts that the solution to gun violence is to arm everyone with an assault rifle beggars credulity.

Back when I spent four years living in “Canada”, I saw a news report about a demonstration in which protesters waved signs reading, “Canada is a real country! Canada is not invisible!” Which certainly suggests that the whole Canada thing is up for debate, even in “Canada” itself.

Here’s a different version of the joke at 59–one that I heard in Australia.

Q: How do tell the difference between a Canadian and an American?
A: Ask him a question about American history. If he knows the answer, he’s a Canadian.

My four-year-old son goes to an “ecumenical” school. He tells me “Canada is America with bears”.

I will confess to being inordinately pleased when the palindrome.
Variant forms:

A Dan, a con. O Canada!
A Dan, a con. Aha! No Canada!

OuLiPo has defined apparent but false adherence to a rule as “Canada Dry”.

Similarly, Ontario is Canada through and through:

Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Burlington, Windsor, London, Niagara Falls, Sarnia, Brampton, Brantford, Sudbury, North Bay, Algonquin Provincial Park, Oshawa, Kingston, just about all Toronto suburbs.

Buffalo is obviously in fact part of Canada.
But combining Port Arthur/Fort William into Thunder Bay was criminal.

Also historians, journalists, politicians and so on.

A little story about the non-existence of North Dakota: Some years ago, my mother was listening to a radio talk show (in New York City) where the host was having some fun convincing the callers that there was no such place as North Dakota. This was all very amusing until my mother realized that one of the callers was her sister– and talk show host had persuaded her that North Dakota didn’t exist.

[Bursting into song]:
Noooooorth Dakota, where the snow comes sweeping down the plains!
You’re doing fine, North Dakota! North Dakota, no way!

My rabbi is from Canada. Well, he says he’s from Canada. But I have to take his word for it, right? I mean, he is the rabbi.

Image Hosted by tripod

Anticanadapologist conspirators suppressed Antonio Conseheiro’s photographic evidence!

Who are the… ‘tripod’?

A Buddhist neuroscientist of my acquintance [*] says that Westerners tend to reify the self. I have diverse sense impressions: the orange-red of the leaves; the sweetness of the maple syrup I bought in the market, in a one-litre can; the amusing hand-written sign in a language that was not quite French, advertising a “grande vente de garage”.

How strange it is that we could reify these diverse sense impressions into an object, as if it were a table, or some other dry good of moderate size that was close enough to gesture at when your tutor made that kind of argument. (Unless your tutor was Wittgenstein; rumour had it that he kept a rhinoceros in this rooms for this purpose[**]).

Stranger still that this notional object could be the basis for an identity (as if anyone could possibly say, with a straight face, “I am a Canadian“), or worst of all, an agent, as in headlines like “Canada needs to make justice more accessible to the public”.

[*] This part of the story, at least, is true.

[**] Feel free to be skeptical about this part of the story. I am certainly not proposing to prove that it is true.

Credo quia absurdum est. Curling, seriously.

As a teenager, back before the Flood, I, too, was persuaded of the non-existence of North Dakota, a conclusion I’d carefully reasoned out from the absence of any postcards, etc., from there. Of course the movie “Fargo” did not shake my conviction since it was, after all, a movie.

However, a few years ago I had to sue a guy from (allegedly) North Dakota, and under oath he admitted there was one and he was from it. Unfortunately the jury believed him about everything else, so I must assume they believed him on that score as well. Since then, I’ve been a North Dakotagnostic.

Being kind of a rube, I sometimes make the same joke about New York City, except I come to the opposite conclusion, but then my daughter lives in New York City. “My” “daughter” “lives” in “New York City”.

Canada no koto wasure-nai.
Even if “Canada” doesn’t exist, or isn’t the kind of noun you’ld want to see as the direct object in a sentence without some sort of qualification, still less the subject.

A madman ran into an Ottawa marketplace. “Where is Canada?”, he cried. “Where is Canada?” The passers-by laughed. But then he continued, “I will tell you. Canada is dead. And we have killed it.”

They had forgotten that their customs, their morals, their famed prediliction for hockey and maple syrup, only made sense if Canada existed.

(With apologies to Nietzsche).

Happy Newtonmas, Daniel.

And then there was the Usenet result from a couple decades back, from truncated Subject: header, that CANADA IS A PATHETIC PIE …

–Dave, a.r.k is still there and appreciates the mention

Of course Canada does not exist, except as the place whence, as a teenager in NJ, I could hear the French I was studying with fascination broadcast on my cheap radio late at night (how romantic for an adolescent girl!). Except as a place I have visited regularly in my body (hello wonderful Montreal, hello the exquisite Gaspay and its mosquitoes that drove us (me + daddy+4-month-old) from our tent to a motel, hello the New Brunswick coast. And hello Toronto (duller than the hype, but still), whence my lovely daughter-in-law of that Gaspay-mosquito-bitten baby boy (she was born in Iran, but that’s another story). And hello BC (where my junior high and high school best friend now lives, after years in Edmonton). I could go on.

Of course Canada does not exist except as the place I would go to (because, in fact, it is as insanely ill-regulated as the US actually is) if if if, e.g., Nixon got to run the US bicentennial in 1976 (instead, I got to watch amazing fireworks in Champagne-Urbana, for reasons obscure — stoned and wonderful — I recommend fireworks and Chinese food especially while stoned, and young). Canada as the US escape-hatch, deeply ironic, given Canada=Tory. Some weird Celtic v. Anglo game is getting played out here. Okay, so I’ll play. And many other games getting played out, too. I enjoy hearing the Canada angle from UK. (Could get refined. The Anglo/Celtic complexities of Canada/UK/US are interesting — best pursued via music and dance.)

Merry Christmas! And happy merry’s! The song and dance are where we play most happily!

The first time I encountered the phenomenon, I got on a plane at Logan, an in two hours I was in “Torono”. The crowd there looked about the same as Boston, except that everyone was smiling. And it wasn’t American forced grin, but a broad natural smile. It took me a whole two minutes to realize that I’d seen that smile before. They were all stoned.

And that’s all there is to it. You start drinking that water there, and soon you are smiling too. It all gets blurred. You get back, and soon it’s just a dream.

barebones at 91
But even in that case, the worst that can happen is worthless dollars.

Now if Canada does exist, you are awash in the real Canadian money of grateful Canaders. See? Now downsides in believing, only advantages. No upsides in non believing, except the risk of Canada Hell from angry disbelieved Canadians.

… Someone must have thought about that before.

I am really glad to see that everyone is on board with ice hockey being a fiction. You can’t play hockey on ice! It’s like “Swamp Cricket” or “Pogo Darts” or something.

Alain at 99:

Of course, it’s that simple. It doesn’t even take much clapping, at least compared to fairies.

Or:
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds….

Not believe in Canada! You might as well not believe in the Higgs particle! Did you ever see Higgs particles dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s not proof that they aren’t there…

If there is no Canada, then why did Mike Huckabee endorse the effort to save the Canadian national igloo?

Like Utopia – derived from the Greek meaning “no such place” – the name “Canada” derives from the German “Keine Da” (pronounced KenaDar in the local dialect), meaning, of course, “Nobody Lives There”.

Someone from a fictitious country called “Wales” says Canada doesn’t exist? Now that is funny.

Robertson Davies used to tell a story about a preacher from Manitoba who was getting on in years, and who told his congregation that soon he would be going to that place from which no man has ever returned. And how his congregation nodded solemnly, firm in the understanding that he was moving south of the border.

Not so: at least wales online says.

@103. This joke works for any country (as they’re all socially constructed/part imaginary), but works particularly well for Canada (and probably Wales too). Christianity has a “Death of God” problem not when atheists/other religions (Buddhists, etc) don’t believe it, but when even the people who call themselves Christians are starting to have difficulty taking it seriously/overreact to suggestions that it might not be true. Similarly, “Canada” has a potential problem if even the Canadians have their doubts. Strong cultural influence of a more powerful neighbour (US), mixed linguistic and cultural groups (First Nations, French-speaking European ancestry, English-speaking European ancestry) possibly saps ones confidence that there is a “Canadian” cultural identity.

I put “Welsh” as my ethnicity on census forms. But then, some people gave “Jedi Knight” as their religion in the census, so this is no reliable guide to it actually existing…

P.S. I’ve mentioned this before on another CT thread, but as a child I didn’t believe in Sweden. I first encountered “Sweden” in somewhat fantastical children’s books translated from the Swedish, and had no reason to distinguish it from other fantasy fiction with made-up places I was reading at the same time (Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, etc.) The place-names in some implausible language are the give-away. (Still have difficulty believing in in, despite having actually been there several times).