Go Canada Go!

My wife is amazing. She doesn’t work in advertising but she is completely supportive of me – the late nights, stress, job insecurity and everything. Of course she doesn’t actually understand the business. She thinks it’s crazy. I try to explain but with limited success.

It happened recently while we watching the TV around the time of the Olympics. This Audi ad came on said Canada was “Land of Quattro”. This is the sort of thing that gets my wife riled up.

“But Audi’s a German car. Why are they saying they're Canadian? Is that allowed?”

Before she got on her phone to email the ASC I explained that the ad wasn’t saying it was Canadian just that it was built for Canadian conditions. She looked dubious but I might have got away with it if I hadn’t decided to try to push my point home.

“Besides it’s part of a worldwide campaign. They’re running similar ads in Britain and other countries”. And I pulled up the UK version on my iPad to show her. It was a mistake. (By the way there’s also Jamaica, Italy, Germany, china, Finland etc.)

“So it’s not even made for Canada. It’s made for everywhere. It’s worse than I thought. I hate it when foreign companies pretend to be Canadian. Take Target for example. I love Target. You know I insist we go to one when we visit the US. So why do they want to wrap themselves in Canadian imagery in their ads. I just reminds me I can’t get the same choice and the same prices here. And then there’s that Samsung ad….”

I admit I started to tune out here.  I did catch a something about how it was OK for Tim Horton’s. I was going to mention that Timmies Canadianness wasn’t quite that straightforward but decided I’d leave that to another day.

“Oh look the match is about to start”. It was Canada – USA in women’s hockey. At least that turned out OK.

A Tale of Two Cities

Is Canada really the multicultural mosaic we want to believe it is? Well yes and no.

I moved to Toronto ten years ago from the UK. And there it’s true. My dentist is an Asian from the Caribbean. In my daughters’ elementary school the majority of children didn’t have English as their first language – their friends came from Latvia, Jamaica, Sri Lanka amongst many others. Locally I have a choice of food from anywhere from Poland to Ethiopia. We celebrate the Ukrainian Festival, Caribbana, the Taste of the Danforth. According to the 2006 Census 43% of the population belongs to a visible minority.

But I also have a cottage in Haliburton. There, according to the Census, there are 165 people who belong to a visible minority, or 1% of the population. Yes 1% vs. 43%. As they say, you don’t see too many black faces on the dock. But don’t get me wrong. The people of Haliburton are not unsophisticated – there has been an explosion of high quality restaurants; the local radio station, if sometimes delightfully amateur, is more intelligent than most Toronto alternatives; there is a thriving local arts scene.

But it is not multicultural. Ethnic food is hard to find. The artists are mostly white. You rarely hear other languages spoken.

The fact is there are two Canadas. Not French speaking vs. English. Montreal has its own thriving multiculturalism, albeit not as pronounced as Toronto or Vancouver. The Laurentians are ethnically as white as Haliburton.

The real split is cities vs. rural Canada.

One, the cities, where the majority of the media live, where 96% of all visible minorities live, where the great multiculturalism experiment is happening; and the other, rural Canada, where 2% of the population is a visible minority, where the media visit but don’t live, where non-white people stand out as different.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we shouldn’t believe our own mythology about Canada being the great cultural mosaic.