It was ten o’clock at night and I was riding my Toronto Bike Share bike towards a traffic light that turned red as I approached. I slowed enough to see that there were no cars in sight in either direction and decided to keep pedaling through the intersection. As I was about to enter the pedestrian crossing, I spotted a man, younger than me, crossing perpendicular to me with his dog. I turned the handle bars to pass behind him and as I did he said, “That’s illegal.”
“Oh,” I replied.
Then he called me an asshole.
Needless to say, I was taken aback. I considered Canada to be like Ivory Soap: gentle, clean, and trusted for generations. To be called an asshole for as minor a transgression as not stopping pointlessly at a traffic light seemed very un-Canadian.
I spoke with a native Torontonian friend about it a few days later. It’s a recent change, she said. As the city grows in population and gets more expensive, people feel the stress of summer heat, crowds, pollution, and working-their-asses-off just to tread water. Then they see a schmuck like you and call you an asshole.
Hmmm . . .
Several days earlier, as we waited in our car to cross the border from New York into Canada, I found myself daydreaming. Signs were posted all around telling us where to stop, what documents we needed, and what was illegal to bring into the country. The top portion of the sign was in English and the message was repeated below in French.
When it came to be our turn, I pulled up, and handed over our passports.
“Good afternoon,” said the Canadian border agent in perfect English. “Where are you going?”
I sat there stupidly for a moment. Because signs had been posted in French, I expected to be questioned in French. I had forgotten that the majority of Canadians speak English and that the whole dual language thing was an effort by the majority anglophones to make the minority francophones feel included and not try to start their own country. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but I didn’t have time to ponder the deeper socio-political aspects of the issue. I needed to get our asses into Canada.
“Good afternoon, sir.” I responded in my own perfect English. “We are going to Toronto.”
Canada - Searching for an Identity
That was actually a lie. We were going to Mississauga to visit with R’s cousins. Mississauga is Canada’s sixth largest municipality and it is possible that the agent had heard of it, but really it’s just a large and distant suburb of Toronto and Toronto was where we were planning to spend most of our time.
After we had been admitted entry and as we drove away on the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), I racked my brain for some heroic or noble thing about Canada. That they spoke English at least as well as Americans and many Mexicans had already been established. I knew of a few famous Canadians - Neil Young, and that cartoon moose dressed like a Royal Canadian Mountie. They like hockey. That was it. The only other Canadian thing I could come up with was an image of a big, bearded guy dressed like a lumberjack.
Shortly after we passed exits for Mark Twain Way and Nikola Tesla Drive - I still haven’t found a connection between these two guys and Canada - we pulled off the QEW and into “The Beer Store.” This is where you buy beer in Canada.
This is what I daydream about while driving in Canada.
After wandering around happily in the cooler for awhile - not even glancing at the shelves of beers imported from the U.S. - I found myself in the domestic beer aisle (in this case, that means brewed in Canada), and grabbed an American IPA. It had a cartoon drawing of a big, bearded guy dressed like a lumberjack on the front of the can and the words on the back of the can said something like, “yeah, we know it’s not cool for a nation searching for an identity to put a picture of everyone’s stereotype of what a Canadian is on a can of beer based on an American style of brew, but we did it anyway.”
Later, when we were staying at an AirBnB in a nice, residential neighborhood of Toronto called Greektown, I pulled a book off the shelf about Canada and opened to the chapter about Canadian history. It was a few pages long. In ten minutes I learned that Canada developed much the way the U.S. did - Europeans “discovered” it, settled there, killed the indigenous people while stealing their land and exploiting the natural resources, forced the Indians onto reservations, gained independence from England, and legalized marijuana.
The U.S. hasn’t accomplished this last feat yet, and maybe that is something that Canada can hang its red and white Maple Leaf hat on: Canada - the first North American country to legalize grass.
R’s Lifelong Dream to Become a Canadian Citizen
The other thing we found out about Canada is that it doesn’t like old people. I suspected this; every winter Mexico is overrun with hundreds of old, white Canadians who have been kicked out of their country for the season. We even have a saying for this in San Miguel de Allende, “When the Canadians are here.” This Canadian bias against mature humans subject to severe muscle pulls while washing dishes was conclusively and irrevocably confirmed during our visit to Toronto.
We arranged a tour of the University of Toronto because Coconut, who will be all set to burn through our lifetime savings in a few short years, has absolutely no idea what she might want to study in college, but thinks she might want to go to a school where all the buildings resemble Hogwarts.
A few hundred more of these babies will buy you a year of education at the University of Toronto .
The tuition is “fairly reasonable” at around CAN$40,000 a year, but becomes cheaper than an obstructed view seat to “Hamilton” if you are a Canadian citizen. Of course, when we learned this, R immediately remembered her dream formed that moment to become a Canadian citizen.
In order to get the ball rolling, R called her Canadian immigration lawyer friend to join us for a traditional Canadian lunch - Afghani food. Unlike many countries where you have to illegally cross the border packed in a sardine tin and then lay low for decades until a natural or man-made disaster in your native country might cause the government of the country you are in to pass legislation granting you protected status, Canada has sensible immigration laws.
To be eligible to emigrate to Canada you have to earn enough points based on six selection factors including language skills, education, work experience, age, and adaptability (i.e., how many consecutive hours of “SpongeBob SquarePants” you can tolerate before you “go postal.”)
We felt good about our chances because we both talk pretty good (R even talks in French), have professional degrees, know the value of 20 years worth of an honest days’ work, and I have been drinking Canadian beer since high school and know all the words to “I Was Born in Ontario.”
Unfortunately, as our muscles and joints have been hinting at for five or six years, we are too old. We scored zero points for having nearly reached the half-a-century milestone, and without any points from the age category, we can’t score enough to become Canadian citizens (unless we wanted to get jobs in Canada; but we aren’t yet old enough to be out of our minds.)
As we dejectedly left the restaurant - our slightly bloated bellies full of kofta and qorma - reality dawned on us. Canada, as reflected by Toronto (and the fact that it only officially became independent in 1867) is a young country. During our college tour, there wasn’t a single old person walking around campus. In the streets around campus, not too many old people.
Here, young people gather around an electronic device to plan how to remove old people from Canada.
All over the city there are young Asian women in skirts, mixed in with young, olive-skinned European women in tight shirts, mingling with young Canadian co-eds in short-shorts and boots. I mean, my head was on a swivel looking at all these young people. I bet the number one reason old Canadian men visit the emergency room is for whiplash. Good thing there’s socialized health care.
Even the crazy, homeless people are young. One shirtless, bearded young person who had obviously not been able to pace himself after cannabis had been legalized in Canada, approached me while I was standing on the corner marveling at all the young people and shouted, “I don’t like white people!”
And guess what generation are middle-aged men walking their poodles at night and calling careful and efficient bike-riders assholes? Young!
In fact, the only place we saw any old people in Toronto was at the naked beaches on Toronto Island. And, frankly, I have to admit, that should be illegal.