Actor Jon Hamm and some American NHL players poke fun at Canada in a new NBC commercial to showcase its coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
For about a year, Canada has been getting slapped around by the United States on about a million fronts.
Fine. You fight a guy 10 times your size, the object isn’t to win. It’s to stay on your feet and keep swinging until he wanders off to pick on someone else.
At first, we took it stoically. We’re still doing that. Maybe we think that acting dignified will save us.
This would assume that America cares about our feelings. They don’t care about the feelings of their own citizens. Why would they give a damn about ours?
Instead, we ought to be deploying the only effective weapon in our cultural arsenal – comedy.
The simplest way to end our parasitic relationship with America is to mock it so ruthlessly that it might eventually seem ridiculous that any Canadian care what it thinks, does or says. As a condition of survival, this is the national project of the 21st century.
Be upset about tariffs, and all that does make us feel sad and trapped. Be funny about them, and that’s the beginnings of a movement.
In the absence of any wise, amusing public figures (when did we stop producing those?) with big ideas, we have to look elsewhere. Who else we got? It’s not exactly a French talk show out there. All we’ve got is hockey players.
We’ve all seen the old-timey reels. Your Gordie Howes and Rocket Richards weren’t exactly Dean Martin, but they had personality. Today? Forget it.
This isn’t just a sports issue. It’s a Canada problem. We cannot be funny about ourselves any more, which is the requisite first step to being funny about someone else. We’re putting all our energy into moping.
Canada head coach Jon Cooper behind the bench with Nathan MacKinnon, Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid at the 4 Nations Face-Off in Montreal.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
The world’s 10th biggest economy, and nobody fresh out of school can buy a three-bedroom house downtown in one of the most desirable cities on Earth. Poor us.
At February’s 4 Nations, reporters tried every trick they have to get the Canadian team bantering with the U.S. one. In fairness, it’s not many tricks. They got nothing. Completely missed opportunity.
What they got was Brad Marchand chiding Canadians for booing the The Star-Spangled Banner because that’s “off limits.” This is a guy who licks people at work. Now that is funny, but it’s not constructive for our purposes here.
Canada won the tournament, acted like it was no big deal, and that it would be bad manners to rub it in. Another strikeout looking.
Now America’s beaten us to it. It seems like the only ones who can make hockey players even mildly interesting are advertising people. They must be dream clients – zero personality, weak sense of self, conditioned to follow orders.
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NBC’s done an ad promoting its coverage of the Milan Olympics. It features actor Jon Hamm – who, per the terms of USMCA, must appear in 20 per cent of all Canadian TV advertisements – as a guest speaker in the U.S. locker room.
He rallies the players – including the Tkachuk brothers and Auston Matthews – with a call to bring home “the greatest prize of all.”
“Canadian tears,” says Jack Eichel.
Hamm gets confused because Canadians are “so polite.” The players laugh like Bond villains. Matthews gets his own emotional monologue: “No.”
It’s not Duck Soup, but it looks good and by the low-bottom standards of sports humour, it’s hilarious. It actually gives you a feeling. Not that you might care, but that they might care, which is new news to me.
How did America become the funnier, looser, less-stuck-up-its-own-rear-entrance one in this unhappy marriage, while we turned into the brittle, affectless, perpetually annoyed one? And in hockey? What happened to us?
The free-firing, not-much-gets-to-us Canada that once was would have had an absolute field day with Wayne Gretzky’s recent meltdown at the World Cup draw.
Shredding Gretzky is easy, and there was plenty of that. But shredding Canada, Canadian pieties and Canadian institutions is where the real fun happens. Where were the interviews with Gretzky’s grade-school teacher, or the jibes from current Canadian NHLers, or the prime minister piping up with something that might convince us he is something more than a tight smile in a nice suit? He has writers on staff, doesn’t he?
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Instead, we did what we do now – seethe.
Enough with the hurt feelings. A free-trading, visa-less, connected world has made us soft. During 35 years of peace, we’ve lost our sense of who we are and begun to fight ourselves.
At our best, we are good, but we’re also vicious. We have a highly developed ability to locate hypocrisy. We don’t care what others think of us. We mock our friends and ourselves, because we want to save the people we care about from the deprivations of self-congratulation.
We like to work, but not too much. We think everyone should deserves a fair shot, but nobody deserves a fairer shot than anyone else. Whatever happens, we don’t whine. We suck it up, get the stitches and get back out there for the next shift.
It’s not the basis for a world-spanning empire, but it makes for a decent place to grow up.
We are never going to be the best at everything, or many things. I wonder if any of us actually aspire to that, or whether it’s a destructive mind worm implanted by American media.
The countries that devote the most effort to clawing their way to the top aren’t on my list of alternative places to live.
The key to all of this is comedy. If you’re not in it to win, then you must be in it for a laugh.
Before we beat them at anything else – and I’m including Milan, hockey, tariffs and the land grab to come – we have to reclaim our world-leading sense of humour.
They’re the stuck up ones. We’re the funny ones. As long as we’re not shooting at each other, that could be an arrangement both sides can live with.