It seems appropriate, given recent events, to pass this one along. Especially after these last couple of weeks, watching Canadians go into full meltdown, with plenty of them scrambling to defend their own Liberal Party while blaming Donald Trump for his entirely proper reaction to how Canada's been treating us. It's a remarkable bit of theater, watching a country insist it's the injured party while its own government keeps supplying the injury.
I'll admit that I have real sympathy for most ordinary Canadians after watching the shenanigans coming out of their federal government, both at home and on the world stage. Pierre Poilievre looks like the one genuine source of hope for a country suffering under the leadership it's currently stuck with. I truly hope they manage to get their act together. There's really only one way that happens, and I won't bother spelling it out, because I suspect they already know exactly what it is.
Meanwhile, it's worth looking back to the early '70s, to a moment when at least one Canadian — a broadcaster, no less — looked at what was happening around him and stood up for what was right, loudly, publicly, and without apology.
The response to what he said was nothing short of earth-shaking, both in Canada and here in the States. There was even a hit record made from a reading of his words, and it sold like hotcakes on both sides of the border.
As it happens, I was home from school that day with a rotten cold. A nice June day, summer vacation just weeks off, and naturally I came down sick. Figures.
It seems funny; I was just discussing my radio hobby with Chris Queen yesterday morning. As I told him, one of my favorite pastimes as a kid was scanning the AM dial for out-of-town stations. Toronto sits well within earshot of my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., directly across the lake, so I panned across the dial and landed on 50,000-watt CFRB just as Gordon Sinclair was delivering a piece he called "The Americans." I'd heard him give editorials before. I don't recall ever hearing him quite that angry. It immediately got my attention.
He'd woken up that morning, or so says the story that's been told since, to a wall of bad news — the U.S. dollar taking a beating on foreign exchanges, and word that the American Red Cross had run flat out of money trying to fund disaster relief. Vietnam had just wound down into an ugly stalemate, and the whole world seemed to be piling onto America simultaneously — allies included — for every sin real or imagined, while conveniently forgetting who'd shown up to rebuild half the planet after two world wars and never once collected on most of the debt.
Sinclair sat down in the booth at CFRB that morning and, by his own later account, banged the whole thing out in about twenty minutes flat. Two pages. Straight fury, delivered with a Canadian's particular gift for saying something devastating in the calmest possible voice. He ran through it point by point — floods on the Yangtze, the Nile, the Ganges, all of them met by American money and American hands, while the same countries taking that help spent their spare time mocking the people who sent it. He wasn't gentle about it, and he wasn't supposed to be. I wonder whether the typewriter survived the ordeal.
Nobody at the station thought much of it in the moment — just another item for "Let's Be Personal," his regular segment. Then U.S. News & World Report printed the full transcript, and the switchboard lit up. A D.C. radio station started airing a recording of it set against "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Sinclair told a reporter that fall he'd received something like 8,000 letters over it. Somebody pressed it as a single, with every dollar of profit going straight to the Red Cross, and it climbed all the way to No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 — making a 73-year-old Canadian radio commentator one of the oldest people ever to land a hit single in America. Ronald Reagan himself, years later, credited the piece with lifting the country's spirits at a moment it badly needed lifting.
That's the part worth sitting with. A Canadian said it. Not an American defending his own country, which anyone could dismiss as bias. A neighbor, looking at the pile-on from outside, decided enough was enough and said so, loudly, on the air, with his own name attached to every word.
Fifty-some years later, watching the current crop of Canadian officials fall over themselves either attacking Trump or making excuses for their own government's failures, I find myself wishing another Gordon Sinclair would show up north of the border. If we see that happen, I can tell you it will not be in the CBC, but one of the independents. Someone willing to look past the reflexive anti-American piling-on currently in fashion in Ottawa and just tell the truth plainly, the way Sinclair did, consequences be damned.
Maybe Poilievre turns out to be that voice, in his own way, for his own moment. I hope so, genuinely. Canada could use one. And honestly, so could we.
Here he is, with that op-ed. Most of the people alive today weren't back then, so consider this the history lesson for today. We'll let him tell the story.
