Picture this: America, November 2004. Half the country, riled up over election results, threatens to move to Canada.
At the same time, Canadians were casting their votes. For what? To decide who is “The Greatest Canadian.” Were they just showing off? Trying to show us how awesome they were as we realized how lame we are?
Perhaps, but Canadians don’t need to prove to us how awesome they are. They know it and so do we.
Without Canadians, we wouldn’t have “Saturday Night Live,” Jack Bauer or more than one hockey franchise west of the Rockies.
While the jury’s still out on “loonies” and “toonies,” our relationship with Canada, on a popular cultural scale, is pretty much the opposite of the currency exchange. Every Canadian unit of cache is worth just a little more than ours.
But as I examined the results of the CBC’s landmark vote to decide upon “The Greatest Canadian,” I realized they’re really on to something up there.
Even beyond Bryan Adams, Seth Rogen and George Stroumboulopoulos, there have been some really tremendous Canadians. See the full list here.
The winner of the coveted title was Tommy Douglas, Canada’s “father of Medicare.” (Doesn’t that say something about Canadians, too? My guess would have been Wayne Gretzky, and he came in 10th!).
Take Terry Fox. Here, he was a one-off feature on a short-lived NBC show called “Real People,” but in Canada he was a national hero and second on the CBC’s list of Greatest Canadians. After a cancer scare that resulted in having his leg amputated, he ran across half of Canada to raise money for cancer research on a prosthetic leg.
He started his “Marathon of Hope” in April 1980 and made it just past halfway across the country (5,376 kilometers — which is, like, 9,000 miles!) in four and a half months.
His health took a bad turn and Fox died from cancer complications and he had to abandon his effort to run across the country, but he inspired a nation and reached his goal of raising $1 for every Canadian resident — reaching $24.17 million when the country’s population was at 24.1 million in February 1981. He died June 28, 1981, but his legacy lives on with races that are held in his honor every year in 60 countries.
Here’s the CBC’s complete Top 10, with links to their profiles on every one of them.
2. Terry Fox
5. David Suzuki
7. Don Cherry
10. Wayne Gretzky
We can’t have a Tommy Douglas or Terry Fox every week, but we’ll be looking to take note of a worthy Canadian each week and have a little fun in the process.
(Photo credit: CBC)
