Eh?: How Canadian Television Reifies Hegemonic Social Ideals

These are the founding principles of the stereotypical Canadian "identity," if one can call it that. We are good, sweet, diverse and peace-loving people, smugly smarter than our American brethren but, like the younger sibling on the school yard, desperate for a wink and a wave from big brother down south. The veracity of these claims is fundamentally irrelevant when faced with the reality that, true or not, this is what we believe of ourselves. And our television willingly serves this image to us. But the image, fundamentally, is not a particularly positive one. If we accept the stereotypes that the media is peddling, we’re bland, we’re smug, and we have self-esteem problems. We’re that guy no one likes in grad school. But on a national level, we repeatedly choose to buy into it. Why?

Let’s turn first to one of the most popular television series in Canadian history: Due South. For those who were too busy watching polished American dramas in the mid-to-late-nineties, allow me to recap. Due South was a series based on the life and adventures of Benton Fraser (played by closest-thing-to-a-national-heartthrob Paul Gross), a Mountie who first travelled to Chicago on the trail of the killers of his father but for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, he remained, attached as a liaison with the Canadian consulate. With his partner, a Chicago cop named Ray, Fraser solved crimes and caught murderers on the mean streets of America. The show was set up as a sort of odd couple of the 49th parallel: Ray was a loud, brash American who shot first and asked questions later, and Fraser was a polite and gentle Canadian who didn’t even carry a gun into a drug den.

The show premiered on CBS as the first Canadian show to ever clinch a primetime slot on American television, and it ran for two seasons. It was clever, light and funny. Fraser’s antics were meant to confuse and delight American viewers, with his gosh-darn Canadianness intended to appeal to a bygone era in American society upheld by the sweetness of Canada. When Due South’s major booster in the CBS boardroom quit, however, the show lost its only champion on the network and disappeared. For two seasons, Due South had been self-consciously about the differences between Canadians and Americans. It was a natural good cop-bad cop dichotomy, allowing for a heavy-handed metaphor lampooning those differences, and was thought largely to have run its course. But fans wanted more, and demanded a return of the series. Through a UK-Canada co-production, the show returned to the airwaves on CTV in Canada.

What is fascinating about this revival is not that it happened, necessarily. It was a good show, clever in premise and outlook, with solid writing and a lot of humour. There was action, too, and a sweetness that carried the premise effectively. What is interesting is the who of the revival. It was Canadian fans who demanded the return of the show. Due South dealt with some of our most abiding stereotypes. Fraser never carried a gun, said please and thank you to the felons he apprehended, and would abandon whatever he was doing to help an old lady across the road. He was a Canadian Icon in the most non-ironic sense of the term – he was even a Mountie! – and we, as viewers, fought to keep him on the air.

Is the dirty little secret of the Canadian identity that we really like to be viewed as caricatures of ourselves? Or is it that we have come to believe our own hype?

This is a motif in Canadian broadcasting that has carried through to this day. In recent years, high-rated CBC specials like Rick Mercer’s Talking To Americans revive the cleverer-than-thou sense of ourselves in relation to our southern neighbours. We seem to revel in a smug satisfaction over our ability to pick out 50 stupid people in a country of 300 million and poke at them with sticks. The Us vs. Them (Americans) premise is widely relied upon in Canadian stand-up, and has been the feature of Just For Laughs/Juste Pour Rire specials for years.

In the contemporary age, the most popular Canadian shows have tended to be those current events parodies (like Royal Canadian Air Farce) and satires (like This Hour Has 22 Minutes and The Rick Mercer Report). Comedies, especially parody and satire, necessarily depend upon the use of stereotypes. Think of the classic Air Farce scene: four hosers sitting around a Timmy Ho’s drinking coffee and eating donuts and complaining about the Americans. More satirical programming tends to be less overt in its stereotyping, but comedy necessarily depends on opposition, and it seems that the easiest go-to move in Canada is to contrast ourselves to the US; and naturally, we always come out as nicer, smarter, friendlier, more peaceful, and kinder than our neighbours to the south.

What about the three most buzzed about Canadian sitcoms since the year 2000? Trailer Park Boys, Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie all represent an interesting sea change in stories by and about Canadians. TPB, as its fan community calls it, reverses the law-and-order stereotype by making all the main characters criminals. Corner Gas has problematized our relationship with others and outsiders on numerous occasions, especially in the episode where Mark McKinney comes to town as an American tourist. And Little Mosque on the Prairie challenges our notions of cultural diversity by showing the response to a Muslim community in small-town Canada that is met with fear and trepidation from Anglo-Saxon residents.

But all of these shows also work simultaneously to reify the same ideas that Due South did. They are all primarily about sweet guys and good people – consider the touching Trailer Park Boys Christmas special – who uphold Canadian values of tolerance and diversity. Even on Little Mosque, the intolerance of the townspeople is so absurd in its reliance on assumptions of terrorism and violence that it is rendered ridiculous, and the racists themselves are "other" to the sympathetic main characters. And on Corner Gas, while Hank is made to look stupid for the assumptions he makes about the ignorance of Americans about Canada, the distrust of Toronto replaces it; for example, Lacey’s mean friend from the big city is universally loathed.

In fact, this seems to be the uniting force in all popular Canadian television – or at least of successful sitcoms. Theses sitcoms seem to be universally set in small-town or rural Canada, or at least there are certainly no big cities to speak of in the current crop of Canadian sitcoms. This is a phenomenon last seen in the modernist period of Canadian literature, during which anxiety about Canadian urbanization led to the belief that we would lose our identities as a result. Clutching to the small town or rural image of Canada is a way of reifying that we are sweet, neighbourly people intent on resolving our differences. Despite the fact that more and more of us move to cities every year, there is a sense that the heart and soul of this country lives in the rural part of it. Crime happens in big cities, but Canada happens in the small towns.

What does all of this mean?

The Canada we want to be and the Canada we are may never actually be the same. That’s what national mythology is all about. What is interesting is that our television, while still largely reifying the hegemonic philosophies of Canadianness, is starting to problematize the assumptions that we make. Perhaps the message here is that it is okay to strive towards a specific ideal of Canada, as long as we are willing to question why, and as long as the ideal opens and shift with social pressures and changes.

That’s what it’s all a-boot, eh?

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment

Email Name		Title Comment smaller | bigger
		I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage. Write the displayed characters Add Comment