Canada's Identity Problem

Near the beginning of his meditation on hockey, The Game, former professional goalie Ken Dryden describes a scene that typifies the Canadian imagination in action:

[W]e pass a construction site...surrounded by a high white plywood fence... On the fence, every seventy-five or a hundred feet, "POST NO BILLS" has been painted... About midway along the fence, painted above a section framed with molding to make it look like a large bulletin board, it reads "POST BILLS HERE." Scores of notices in tiny rows have been pasted up...completely filled. Along the half city-block of high white fence where several times it says "POST NO BILLS," no bills have been posted.

The tendency to romanticize the game of hockey is pandemic to the Canadian imagination. In terms of nostalgia, community memories, dreams of the future and obsessions with the "Americanization" of Canada, hockey takes centre stage - or, more appropriately, centre rink - in the thoughts of Canadian popular culture. This is not to denigrate either the game of hockey or the Canadian imagination: every culture has its myths - this is one of ours. The Americans to the south of us have the Cowboy and the West; never mind the fact that we have cowboys and a West, or that Mexican vaqueros actually were the majority of American cowboys. That is their myth, a part of their national identity - however illogical, non-exclusive or ahistorical. Hockey serves the same function in the Canadian sense of id

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"level playing field" aspect of all competitive sports. It was an appeal that went straight to the heart of middle-class sentiment, echoing as it did their upper-class pretensions and belief in their own abilities to rise by merit. But Eric Lindros is one of the few hockey players ever to understand that when the NHL does something for the good of the game it really means for the good of the owners (Cruise and Griffiths 356). Over this backdrop of apparent contrivance must be painted the very real portrait of hockey - and a certain aspect of the Canadian character - that was also to develop at the time the sport was organized: that of the game where, indeed, skill and raw ability do matter. There are no birthrights in the playing of the sport, just as there is no commercial hold over the weather of Canada. In order to develop professional hockey as a popular sport, the businessmen who owned the teams needed players who actually could rise above the pack. As with film acting, where a Jew could become a goyim matinee idol by changing his name to "John Garfield" and being damn good at what he does, hockey in play transcended the boundaries of class, space and dollar. It is an appeal and a democracy of play that extended beyo

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