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welcome to the eh team: on canadian humour, identity, and the complicated love of a country (with special guest Charlie Demers)
1 Playsin 11 hours
This week on a very special episode of Friendless, your pal James Avramenko is joined by Charlie Demers.
Charlie Demers is a comedian, broadcaster, author, and 20-year veteran of CBC's The Debaters — and somehow all of that is just the warm-up. Recorded live at Book Warehouse on Main Street, this conversation starts with his new Canadian lexicon book The A-Team (a celebration of the words and phrases that mark you as one of us), takes a hard left into French immersion class politics, and ends up somewhere genuinely surprising: what treaty actually means, why Canadian humor is tender instead of cruel, and what it looks like to love a country you have complicated feelings about.
Along the way: house hippos, English muffins vs. french fries, the roast of Kevin Hart as a culture clash, and why writing to a word count might be the most freeing thing a writer can do.
If you've ever said "toque" in the United States and watched a room go silent, this one's for you.
Charlie's new children's picture book I Sure Do is out this summer from Trade Wind Books. Season 2 of Superteam Canada drops on Crave. Find him at charliedemers.com and on Instagram.
📩 friendlesspod@gmail.com📱 @friendlesspod on Instagram and TikTok 🌐 friendlesspod.com
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Transcript
Introduction of Charlie Demers and New Book Launch
00:00:08
Speaker
This week in the book Warehouse, I am here live with Charlie Demers. That's correct. Beautiful pronunciation. Demers, if you will. So you are amongst a myriad of things. You are a comedian, you are a broadcaster, ah you are an author of multiple genres, yeah including the book ah we had brought you in to talk about, The A-Team. But you also, just before we hit record, you said you've got a brand new book coming out as well. So this one will be a very new endeavor for me. This is a children's picture book. So it's a a picture book really for for littles and kind of imagine sort of like written content in the kind of maybe almost even in a board book kind of world, but it's and with these sort of beautiful pictures, illustrations by Dorothy Leung from Toronto, who's just done an incredible job. The book is coming out from Tradewind Books and it's called i Sure Do. i sort of wrote it. The bulk of it I wrote, I was on vacation in in Dublin with my with my family and and i don't anybody who loves literature should go to Dublin. it's it's a i mean and it's a It's a UNESCO world literature city.
00:01:15
Speaker
It's also like Canada. it's a it's a it's It's a place that has a complicated relationship with the English language. Sure, yeah. But then it has these people that, you know, had the English language kind of foisted about on them and then and then just mastered it and and became these just kind of incredible producers of the English language. And everywhere you go in Dublin, it's... The writers are being celebrated, like, you know, every kind of theater and in in in poetry and in fiction. And and and i just kind of, I don't know. it's Like, i I really feel like it sort of, it seeped in. I was on vacation. I was not trying to write. I was not trying to do any...
00:01:57
Speaker
work, but I was just, I was talking with my daughter while I was pushing my son's stroller. We have, we have very spaced out kids, not spaced out age space. And, and this sort of playful kind of talk with my daughter sort turned into a little sort of, and I just sat down and wrote this little poem on my phone. And, and that comes out beautifully illustrated by this incredible artist in a couple of weeks. So we're really excited about it. Totally exciting. I love it. I have to backtrack. You're really throwing me a curveball here because that sounds like a fantastic thing to talk about. This is the opposite of gotcha journalism. Like when the subject comes in and goes, you know, I had an affair. How did you scoop me?
00:02:40
Speaker
But where I like to start interviews is is, you know, if listeners are maybe not familiar with who you are, you know, i realize I gave you a very brief chyron, but I always like to ask my guest, you know, who the hell are you?
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, i so I think like if people do know me, where they tend to know me from is from a ah ah show on CBC Radio called The Debaters. This is our 20th year now of doing that show, and so we're celebrating our 20th anniversary, and that's a show that I've been doing from the from the beginning, and and i actually think it's a that's a great place to know me from, if you're
Charlie's Role on CBC Radio's 'The Debaters'
00:03:18
Speaker
going to know me. because i i feel like that show is kind of, hits all my kind of, because it's a comedy show, but it's also a show about writing. Like there's a lot of writing that goes into that show and there's a lot of, so I would say like,
00:03:33
Speaker
When I'm answering the question of who I am, particularly in a kind of forward-facing way that's relevant to, sort of say more relevant to the the book buying public than my children or my partner.
00:03:48
Speaker
Or the esoteric introspection. and That kind of esoteric introspection. I don't think I could begin to answer. And so I think that's the you know sort of Socratic ignorance, sign of the first true sign of wisdom. I would say like i am I'm...
00:04:03
Speaker
I, in, when I was in high school, I took one of those proficiency and and it actually gave me as an option, humorist. I would say like that's, and I, and a lot of comedians and I'm a standup comedian as well.
00:04:18
Speaker
and And a lot of comedians kind of say like, oh yeah, humorists are comedians who don't have to be funny all the time. Like it's kind of looked down on as but I do think humorist gets pretty close to the nub of, And I and i feel like as I'm getting older, i'm i'm purifying a little bit in terms of like when I was young, it was very important for me to not just be somebody who could be reducible to, oh, what he does is just funny or it sort like it's more complicated than or it's more interesting than that. And as I get older, i feel...
00:04:54
Speaker
grateful to have something like being funny to have and to be and feel like... Simplify for me. Simplify, yeah. yeah And I'm more interested actually ah in that at this stage of my life in kind of specializing sure and enjoying when other people do the things that I actually can't really do.
00:05:15
Speaker
so so the the The thing that's bringing us together today initially was the
Canadian Language and Humor in 'The A-Team'
00:05:21
Speaker
A-Team. Yeah. It was a book you've written about kind of Canadian language and like like lexicon and these kinds of things. And, and you know, as i was as I was reading it, I have to say, it's very rare for me to be to to laugh out loud when I'm alone. Yeah, And I think often, I find in a lot of different comedy settings, if I'm just by myself, it's it's a very like, uh-huh.
00:05:44
Speaker
But I found myself laughing out loud reading and like hearty big to the point where then I was also, i was reading it in a coffee shop earlier today. I was reading a few entries and embarrassing myself. I was laughing so hard at some of the stuff. yeah Well, this makes me very, like, I mean, I can't tell you how much that means. And it's like that that i i that's where I think some of that kind of condescension that i was alluding to earlier comes from about, you know, ah a humorist is a comedian that doesn't have to be funny all the time.
00:06:13
Speaker
i you know if you're If you're doing standup, you're you're performing, and this is less and less true, by the way, in the era of standup being something that people are mostly enjoying on Instagram. Of course, old the place the clip yeah the crowd work and the that. Yeah. But I mean, now you can watch stand-up and go, huh ran and then gone. on And then that's a successful and engagement. Yes. yeah if If in in sort of classic stand-up comedy, you need to make...
00:06:44
Speaker
The whole audience, they have to laugh. They can't just smile. They have to laugh. yeah And they also, they all have to laugh at about the same time. yeah Like they can't all be getting it at different times. And that's one of the things that's quite liberating about humor, text-based humor, right, Inker? Is like you you you're now released from that of like,
00:07:04
Speaker
the The reader can they can have whatever response is physiologically organic, but also they can take it at the pace that they are yeah because it's a totally one-on-one. It's their own personal timing. And I did find that, you know, we're already, haven't even gotten to my first question, but it's. Sorry. No, no, it's great. It's great. It's great. But it's, it's, you know, what I found about reading it was that you could, you could pick up your pace. You could figure out what your kind of cadence was.
00:07:32
Speaker
But if, that if you're not reading at that pace, it doesn't matter. You're still yeah yeah still following it. You still have your own personal flow, but you can see what you're going for as well. And it's, it's this beautiful candor and your asides absolutely slimy. Just like the, the, There's something about, it a it was the was the French immersion entry about, was it the Protestant schools? And there was something about only in practice, they don't actually nail their hallmark to the doors. you Right, right. it's Pretty good, right? Thank you. Thank you very much. That's as pretty good joke. right so I'm pretty happy to have that highlighted for the internet public. As somebody who was in, you know, I went to French immersion as well, right? You know mean? And so it's just, e
Cultural Identity and Education in Canada
00:08:11
Speaker
also the the relief of knowing that French fries and English muffins is like a universal thing.
00:08:16
Speaker
I was telling my partner about that. About like, there was like, at lunchtime, there was wars of catch. it was the English muffins versus the French fries. And she couldn't understand where these terms even came from. No, and my dad, who is in education, like, French fries and English muffins became a term of art in the education world. Oh, really? You'd be like, well, you know, there's the French fries and the English muffins. That's how you would describe the two strings for Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I mean, I was just talking about this with my brother, because, ironically, like, so our catchment school, like, the school we would have gone to if we'd just been kind of a regular old school, was quite a rough...
00:08:59
Speaker
it's cool sure But then we went instead to school with a lot of like quite middle class kids yeah yeah in the French immersion stream of what was then also a very rough school. And so the kids in the it like the English muffins yeah at my elementary school Like it was a very different thing to be a French fry or an English muffin at that school. I was scared.
00:09:28
Speaker
was scared. Yeah. the English kids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Scared the crap out of me. Yeah. But, of but, and I didn't, I never, I never knew. This is such a, we're so off track here, but, but I just, but I just, like I know it's not, this is the beauty good podcast. but Yeah. But I, I never knew the, the the sort of socioeconomic impacts of, of emergence until very recently. And I was learning about that and was like, Oh my God, this is like a whole other can of worms that I don't even know what to do about, you know? Yeah. It's weird because it's, it's this, it's this bizarre inversion of the,
00:10:04
Speaker
class and social dynamics of French and English in all the rest of Canadian his history where suddenly the the French thing is like the fancy thing. And of course, like the French immersion is not actually for French people. And in fact, it like so it's it's like, so might my daughter is, she's in the Francophone school system, which is the a whole other thing. Permutations. Yeah, exactly. And I was always very defensive of of French immersion.
00:10:39
Speaker
You know, my dad yeah was a special needs teacher who who started the first bilingual resource room in British Columbia. It was like a big, it was a... and And I still do really, I do defend French immersion. I think it's just something that should be made available to everyone who agree wants i know for me, like it's like, I haven't been able to lose it.
00:10:59
Speaker
You know know, like I haven't been in a French room essentially since grade nine. Yeah. And yet I can't lose it. No you know matter how hard I try, no matter how hard the drinking tries, you know. Well, my my my you know my unilingually French-speaking family in in in the suburban my the suburbs outside of Montreal, I mean, they still... i mean, I've been with my wife now for 20 years, 21 years, they...
00:11:24
Speaker
and they thing party I mean this is almost kind of insulting guess but like when she speaks to them yeah they'll they'll kind of mid-sentence still be kind of looking at me like just why does she speak French? Like yeah yeah why does this Chinese Canadian woman from Toronto who you married, how can she speak French?
00:11:46
Speaker
French this well. like this is And it's because her per you know and particularly her mom. I mean, this is also like a very special thing. like sure I always just think of like ah um you know the whole kind of American stereotype of like ah going on vacation and then being angry that they don't speak American. American. Where you land.
00:12:11
Speaker
Versus like my mother-in-law who like arrived in in her new country and thought I'm going to make sure my kids learn the language of like the minority yeah group lost a war 150 years ago. to the end then And then as it turns out her kid marries into a family where like she's speaking the language that she's going Francophone grandchildren. It's like, it's so it's a beautiful thing. That's wonderful. Yeah. So that actually, that really leads me to my first question. Okay. Awesome. I love, I love this. You know, and you know, you know, the book itself is, is, you know, it's a celebration of lexicon and language. Yeah. But it also really felt like it it's, it's, it it's also about recognition. It's about, you know, feeling almost like the feeling of hearing a word and and knowing that, you know, when these words are spoken, you're amongst your people. yeah yeah yeah and and And I'm curious, what was the sort of what was the emotional engine behind writing this book? Especially kind of as we talk you know we've already alluded to, you you know sort of beyond just comedy or humor. you know what is What's the sort of emotional engine behind that?
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, I love that question. um Great first question. Thank you. um I'm glad we warmed up before we got to it. um Because i like
Writing with Humor and Critical Awareness
00:13:26
Speaker
i I feel like a book like this, it could have been it could have been really corny or it could have been like there there are ways, I think, of writing a book like this A lot of winking mountains. Yeah, exactly. Exactly the book I'm talking about. You know, sold in a kind of, you know, tourist trap shops in Gastown something like that. And here's the thing, when you write something like this, it's it's like, this is the first time I've ever written a book that's been for sale in in like the pharmacies. and and like it's It's fun to see your book in a pharmacy. Like I will say after like, you know, I started publishing books in 2009. Hmm. This started as a commission. Like it was Jen Crowell, who's you know really one of the brighter publishing minds in our city. I mean, I think in in in you know Canadian letters, she's got a she's got a brilliant track record of of of procuring and and and nurturing books that are like
00:14:28
Speaker
creative and and unique, but also like find find an audience like, and you know she thought, you know look, we're obviously in the in the middle of this kind of moment of sort of reassessment and and you know yeah, what does it mean to be Canadian and and this sort of moment of sort of put upon patriotism. and Do you think it'd be fun to write this lexicon project?
00:14:56
Speaker
And, you know, just because somebody asks you to do something doesn't mean you have to do it. And, you know, you can also just be flattered and and say no thanks. and yeah And in fact, I can say, you know, this this went pretty well. And Jen and I, you know, we said, like, we want to do another lexicon. And she said, well, what? about this and i and I just thought you know what i I don't think that's the one like I so I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think there was something to uh to to to really kind of lean into and i think that's the beauty of the book is that there it's not just a surface reading it's a really you really dig into stuff well I'm really I'm really glad that that comes through I mean what I what I wanted to do in this moment was like one
00:15:38
Speaker
i thought I thought I could write something funny. Like I talked to Ruth, my you know, my wife is is, you know, the person who I have a lot of these, you know, first level conversations with her and and she's been a you know creative, I, i consultant and collaborator from the very beginning.
00:15:56
Speaker
You know, I thought, you know, I thought this could really work. Like this, this book could be like, it could be funny. It could be, and it could be thoughtful. And, and what I hope it is, is like kind of sort of thoughtfully patriotic in this moment that does need, that does need us to kind of find ourselves together in a kind of a first person plural without jettisoning the critical thinking and critical kind of awareness that really have to an to an extraordinary extent been sort of taken on board in sort of mainstream Canadian society over the last like
00:16:40
Speaker
15 years. i mean, we're now, we are seeing, you know, the body rejecting the heart transplant where g we are in the kind of the backlash. The regression. The regression. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:53
Speaker
Sorry. I got lost in a little, I was like, you know, what is it? It's like, normally it's like the the body rejects the baboon heart, but like this time it's like somebody tried to put a heart in a baboon and a baboon is just like, I don't want this. I don't want this.
00:17:07
Speaker
Well, you're really going to something, though, about this idea of like, I would see it as, I was taught in theater history about how like all fashion is, all it's ever about is at one point it goes big and then the response is it goes small. Right, right, right. And then it gets and then it goes small. And that's how anything ever works. And we're just, unfortunately, we're in, we enjoyed a really, really nice period of of expansion, it just happened to also coincide with all these other problems. So it didn't feel like a very expansive time. And we're now in a time where it's naturally going to cycle into a compression, but unfortunately that's coupled with a bunch of other really unfortunate things to think very esoterically. Yeah, esoterically, and yet somehow putting one's finger right on it And so I didn't want to be part of that moment that said like, oh, you know, we're taking on a little bit of water. So like, let's throw out these land acknowledgements. They're weighing us down. and Let's throw out this stuff about, you know, the, the, the, I mean the Land Back the the land back the land back entry is one of my favorite entries in the entire book. It was beautiful. you know what's Not to derail, it just you know i don't know so many of the entries are so concise. And I think that's one of the things that's so powerful about the book is that these aren't long entries. these are you know The book is small and each entry is a couple pages max. And yet what you pack into there is incredible. It is like one.
00:18:30
Speaker
take assignments. Writers should take more commissions because it's like, i they knew Greystone books, they they knew what the book had to like, they're like, we we know what the word count has to be. We know how long these entries can be. like we had it was the long entries are
00:18:53
Speaker
ten words, the shortest entries are 145 words and the medium entries are No, 380 words. i think the three hundred and forty five words got i or know three hundred and eighty words I think those are the numbers. okay but it's something like that.
Influences on Charlie's Writing Process
00:19:10
Speaker
yeah yeah And it's like these are written like two those numbers right exactly okay And but because we were talking about, the you know, the nuance that's involved in this and you don't just pretend it's like, and everything's great and isn't Canada beautiful? And aren't we just happy-go-lucky G-shucks, you know? It's like you really dig into the the warts of the country, you know? And that is partly because I had to do it in the space provided. Right, yeah. I think if I'd been given unlimited space for as many entries as I wanted, the parts where I got into the dark stuff would probably have
00:19:46
Speaker
ah overweighed the funny because I would have felt a need to get too much into it, do the book that no one is asking me to write. Like no one needs me to write it, nobody's asking me to write it, yeah but like the the the the book that relitigates all the stuff that everybody knows I'm talking about when I'm alluding to this stuff.
00:20:08
Speaker
I had to keep it economical. And then the other thing that these publisher-imposed word counts did was it put me right back into the world of the debaters, the I've been doing for 20 years.
00:20:25
Speaker
where when we write our opening rants and closing arguments on the debaters, we have to write 260 to words to open, to words to close.
00:20:40
Speaker
so i for two decades have any yeah poetry writing these it's it's this it's this intense Froese poetic combination of joke dens yeah joke dense text that nevertheless has to convey argument and some data and keeps the focus and keeps always driving towards this very... I realized pretty early on in the process, I was like,
00:21:08
Speaker
oh, this is, these are debaters muscles. And then when Jen Kroll from Craystone was at the launch and she heard me read it for the first time, she went, oh, it's stand-up. Like, it's like, that was the, like, but it's a whole different kind of, but if you get too booky, then, and I don't know what I would have done with all of my, the complexities of my feelings if I'd been given just free range. And would help. There's something really beautiful about that economy, you know, and it really, yeah, it does. It does. It allows for you to make the point, you know, something I would often talk about in when I was when I was a teacher was this idea of like, make a point and move on. Yeah. You don't have to keep on repeating it like we get it. Yeah. You know, and, you know, that's that this book, I feel like is actually really shiny example of that of like, you know, you don't you don't keep hammering it. You just say, yeah, this is, you know, no, this let's go on. Yeah. Let's get on. Right. You know.
Canadian Humor and Shared Cultural References
00:22:10
Speaker
um You know, so there is a real tenderness to to a lot of Canadian hume, right? yeah and and And a lot of canadian Canadian culture. You know, the idea of the big friendly giants, right? You know, Mr. Dress Up, the Heritage Minutes. You know, these are things that that we think of very fondly and very tenderly.
00:22:28
Speaker
Why do you think... we hold those as shared reference points so tightly. And what do you think that we're actually protecting when we kind of project those, you know? Do you think that, for instance, like, you think that this is a bit of a projection to protect what you've identified at other places as kind of like a Canadian smugness that allows us to, you know, pretend like we're doing better than we actually are, yeah especially in reference to what, what you know, these these entrances of like,
00:23:01
Speaker
it's not all rosy here. like you know and and And we don't need to, you know, yeah, we can love the big friendly giant, but also he wasn't even a Canadian, you know, what im like, or whatever it might be yeah you know what i mean? Like, yeah and so I'm curious, like, like, why do you think we, we collectively shared those reference points more than maybe more, more, i don't know if I want to call them honest, but you know, that's a really good question. And I don't want to give a, like a glib answer to it. I mean, I mean the,
00:23:31
Speaker
and it's And it's funny because both the friendly giant and Mr. Dress up are Americans. you know they like They were both, which is such a funny thing. But it's also like, it's so weird that like both also totally unknown yeah in the United States. like And there's like. And why does that matter? They're just performers. Anglo-Canadian.
00:23:51
Speaker
culture was always the shorthand for describing it was like always, you know, it's a mix of American and British or it's like this halfway kind of. British and American like ball both british and american Well, the comedy are both much more vicious than Canadian comedy, right? Like like yeah like British comedy oh it is very cold. yeah really To the point where I'm like, this isn't funny anymore. no you're just This is an excuse to be mean. But then I also, like I remember I watched a couple of seconds of a clip from that the roast of Kevin Hart recently.
00:24:39
Speaker
And it wasn't even some of the more like controversial stuff that yeah like, you cause there was a lot of, I think pretty understandable backlash to that. Yeah, unnecessary. But I, I, I, I saw it just, I forget whose, whose bit. And I just thought like, I just was so put off by it and it was like, but put off by it the way I would be like,
00:25:06
Speaker
You know, if my daughter brought me like, you know, some like special kind of ultra sour candy that's like for kids, you go like, oh, ah that's not for me. Like that was not, that was made for someone else's taste. This is not for me. Like I was watching that roast video and thinking like,
00:25:26
Speaker
oh this is yeah this is I'm not built for this and I remember specifically thinking this is so American. yeah yeah and and So you go, okay, so what is it?
00:25:38
Speaker
And my my worry like my worry is to say that it it comes from a a sentimentality. Sentiment is usually ah a cover and a camouflage for, and this is always the thing we worry about with with with Canadian culture, right?
00:25:57
Speaker
That the manners are really ah a form of you know camouflaging yeah passive aggression, that the the sort of self-effacing is really a kind of way of, of again, caoufl flushing pass Like that it's all just basically there's some kind of... And and the sentimentality... It's all rooted in that that British nicism. What's the show, wave um the the the rich people and the servants put too much salt in the dish and there was a big kerfuffle? You know the British... Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey, thank you, thank you. Exactly. and But it's like like all so much of Canadian culture, especially Anglo culture is is rooted in that type of, yes you know, that's the history of it, right?
00:26:40
Speaker
Is the politeness and the, you know, the the oh well the aloofness, right? And in my experience, like, like for instance, indigenous humor in Canada,
00:26:53
Speaker
it's it's not it's And it's unsentimental, yeah but it's not mean. yeah And and um and and and she and and humor in Quebec is very unsentimental. It can be mean, but it's not particularly kind of cruel or it doesn't have that kind of like...
00:27:11
Speaker
It's just bullyism. I just don't know where this bully comedy... Well, I mean I do know where it came from. I just have no idea yeah no time for it. There's there's a gentleness there's a gentleness in in in Canadian comedy. That's what we're talking about right now. Yeah, and just the culture in general. like you know Especially the culture touch points. right you know like Thinking of the ones that really echo. you know I always think of... you know there's there's ah There's a generation of people who all you have to say is house hip.
00:27:35
Speaker
and And it's like, it's like they're... What's that from again? it's It's one of those, it's one of those like kids awareness. It was a commercial. It was for like, it was literally for media literacy. all Right? You know, they were like, they were like, the house hippo lives, you know? And then it was like, that looked really real. maybe You know, like i have I know the cadence of that sentence, you know? that's But it's like, there's a generation that you say those words and it's like the hard experience, right? Right. You know? And, and... and Yeah, I don't know. I think it's a multifaceted question. I think it's a very multifaceted answer, but it's like, I'm curious what you're, you know, just, yeah, like, why do you think those are the moments that
00:28:09
Speaker
echo and resonate and hold us together. Whereas like, I don't know. I'm trying to think of a counter example, but I, there's one coming because I don't, I mean, there is, think there just built like baked in the country. There is just not that same.
00:28:25
Speaker
I might live to regret this. I maybe I'm am venturing a ah ah grand theory that I ah don't quite fully buy. So like take this as tentative. I'm putting this out tentative. Yeah. Like, like there, there is a like,
00:28:42
Speaker
so, so if there's a, there's there's a theologian at the Vancouver School of Theology, an indigenous theologian named Ray Aldred, who talks about treaty as basically being the, like the,
00:28:58
Speaker
the possible of a, of a, like if there is a viable, coherent
00:29:06
Speaker
identity and narrative and sort of shared kind of like, if there is a, if there really is a kind of atom at the center of like what it could mean to coherently be a Canadian or to live in this country of like for non-indigenous people in particular, treaty is at the
The Role of Treaties in Canadian Identity
00:29:25
Speaker
heart of it. It has to be. Yeah. Yeah.
00:29:27
Speaker
and And that thought, you know, I'm really quite influenced by the thinking of of Paul Tillich. And Tillich had a whole thing about how, you know, nations have kind of like vocations. There are the like there are these these things that various national cultures just kind of bring to the world. They have like, and the and obviously that's idealized and all that kind of code. but and ah and And of course he didn't talk about what Canada's was yeah because you know Canada was too marginal to figure it into. I was reading that and i was like, well, what would it be? And like, it would be
00:30:08
Speaker
treaty. Like, that's the... Like, when things aren't working, that's the thing that's been deformed. yeah And that's the thing that's been abandoned. And when things are... Like, when it's... It's like it's a country based on, like...
00:30:24
Speaker
you know, the, the, the, the Francophone population is conquered yeah and then afforded these like specific rights of like the, the proclamation of 1763 says like, this is going to be the, and like, and then, and then all of those agreements are like abrogated and, and, and deformed and, and, and and betrayed. Mm-hmm.
00:30:52
Speaker
But that those are still the ideas at the heart of... And there is something about... like Versus in the States, the idea at the heart of it is this is this revolutionary idea of...
00:31:08
Speaker
you know, a kind of zero sum yeah confrontation that like... But it's I'm hearing this sort of like, you know, America's like ah like a push for self. Whereas like the the Canadian sentiment that I'm hearing you talk about that I'm very much in align with, I think is this idea of like,
00:31:25
Speaker
how to collectivize and how to, you know, and it, you know, it doesn't very rarely if ever sticks to the end. How to live with each other. Exactly. How to be with each other and understanding that like, it's not just you. There could never be Canadian and like, that's what a Canadian looks like or sounds like or like, like that's what a Canadian thinks.
00:31:47
Speaker
It's like the Canadian is the idea of... those two or three or four, like how did the end? Like, again, this is completely, I did because I know that for a very long time it was like, yes, a Canadian is a white yeah English speaking Protestant, like, like they're like, and they're like,
00:32:09
Speaker
The idea of it, like that ah that there that was always felt as a distortion. I agree. And I think you know a friend of mine a couple of years ago, it described Canada as basically one of the greatest social experiments the world has ever seen. i totally agree Because there's never been a country that has attempted to legislate multinationality in a way that this country has.
00:32:33
Speaker
and And like I say, you know it is not done... great of a job, right but it's tried in a way that no country really ever has no historically ever. you know and and and so they're you know And that's not to say like, so we got to, but it's like, but it's like no I think that there is something granular, like in the in the soil of the formation of this country that that is trying to germinate. yeah And at at moments gets to bloom out a little bit. But then, yeah, you know, cyclical stuff happens. We're still dependent on economy. You know, money, which is a made up concept, still influences how we're allowed to live in Gada Gada, right? yeah You know, we live in Vancouver. It's like the most obscene, bizarro world
00:33:18
Speaker
thing, you know, but there, I think you are spot on that. Like even unintentionally, there was something in the formation of what we're now calling Canada that, that we see sparks of, you know? Yeah. And, and I think like, that's an, you know, when you look at, for instance, the response,
00:33:37
Speaker
You know, I think it's instructive to look at the response in indigenous communities, in Francophone communities, like among among like sovereign-tist leaning Francophones, like how what has been the response to the threats from the United States over the last like year and a half, two years? It's not to say, can you get by? Yeah, exactly. It's and okay, how do we together? Exactly. For the last 10 or 15 years, i think, in this country,
00:34:06
Speaker
We came to, I think, the the the the sort of mainstream sort of median Canadian who kind of doesn't exist, but like in the statistical sort of main, was invited into an awareness of the country that oh a great many groups, I think, walk around with. Yes.
00:34:27
Speaker
that you know that actually there are a lot of people in this country that would have preferred for something much different than this country to have been the case. yeah Whether that is a confederation of autonomous interlocking indigenous polities and couple of independent French speaking republics in Acadia and along the St. Lawrence river. And by the way, we probably wouldn't call it the St. Lawrence river, but you know, all these things and like, and I, that's a pretty, that would be a pretty fucking cool setup. I think that it's important. The frigging planes of Abraham had an house, you know, it's important for people
00:35:09
Speaker
to hear that criticism and let that knowledge that there are people who who's whose preferred alternative would have been that, let that inform what we do yeah with what we have.
00:35:31
Speaker
And then as soon as Donald Trump started talking about the 51st state, it was a reminder that in the course of the 19th century, the the options on offer were not Confederation of Interlocking Indigenous Polities and two French-speaking republics like versus Canada.
00:35:54
Speaker
It was Canada Or the states the United States from Mexico to exactly the North Pole. yeah And ah so we live in that world.
00:36:06
Speaker
And so how do we having hopefully metabolize some of the lessons that we've learned about what the people who had this country foisted on them or what the people who have this country who have not been in the kind of leading, the cheerleading about it. What what they have taught us, what they've taught you over the over the last number of years, how can that be taken on board as we deal with the, like, a really serious real world where this guy is like talking about taking over countries that don't belong to him. yeah
00:36:45
Speaker
And i I just, I know it's like, I know it's true say, well, you know, Canada's stolen anyway, so like so what does it mean if Donald Trump steals it? it's like I've not heard that from a lot of people who actually had their land stolen in Canada. That's right. and i think Those are mostly the people. i the The only people I've heard say anything bordering on that are also a part of separation. exactly why Exactly. So it's like, oh, so you this is all bad faith argument. It just becomes cynicism. yeah just It's just cynicism.
00:37:18
Speaker
And I think there's something Canada that is there's something in canada that is like I don't know, can invite you to a place of non-cynicism that hopefully this doesn't make people throw up when they hear it, but i like just non-cynicism that isn't necessarily naive, like that isn't necessarily like, whereas I feel like if you're in in the United States and somebody gives you,
00:37:48
Speaker
here's the the the war of independence, like here's the American Revolution. you you've yeah it's There's no compromise built into that. There's no there's nothing like you're either like in it or you're out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas if you live in a country that's like a bunch of deals, yeah a bunch of treaties that we're like, that we forget, but like are are like our sacred Agreements, like agreements made between like the crown and indigenous leaders who like in both those cases, those are like spiritual fonts that that are like, these are supposed to be so these are supposed to be sacred agreements that that they're not just transactional. They're supposed to establish relationships.
00:38:38
Speaker
I really appreciate that framing and and it's you know it's something that I can't think a lot about this stuff and yet I don't remember the last time I've heard it framed like that. And it just it's and it's a reminder that it's not a... you know I almost feel like the idea of like the concept of treaty, like you're talking about, yeah it's something that we have communally neglected. we've We've allowed it to become this sort of like oh, that's a um that's a thing that government daddy takes care of. yeah It's like, no no, no, that's actually something that we take care of in the neighborhood. That's something that we take care of with who's on our block. How do we show up together? you know And that's always really trying to dig at on the show is this idea of like, what are you doing with your neighbor? you know That's your community. Your community isn't you know like like, yes, it is
00:39:29
Speaker
conceptually, but it's like, it's more about how are you showing up? What's your response? Yeah. And then, and the the, and the treaty is relationship. That's right. and Right. i i I forget the name of the author, but she's, she's written a book called treaty words and it's just this tiny little, I don't know if it's on the shelf here, but, but but it's this beautiful, tiny little, very easy to read book that kind of,
00:39:54
Speaker
It's just this reminder, and this is what you know Dr. Aldred as well at at VST, like you know it's a it's... Because you know even when I was growing up, even if you were sympathetic, even if you were somebody who was like very kind of critical about what the government has done, you still sort of thought of treaties as like, oh, this was how we...
00:40:12
Speaker
bought the land yeah and it was unfair and it was whatever. It's like, it's not how anybody bought yeah the land. Nobody, that was not the agreement. It was just was enacted after. Yeah, exactly. It was how it was treated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah But I, you know, I, so i I felt like I could, I felt like I could write about the country in a way that, that, you know, hopefully wouldn't be like, a you know,
00:40:35
Speaker
eat your vegetables, you know, like that could be, that could be funny that you could bring into the bathroom with you. yeah I,
00:40:47
Speaker
language has been a like a like a fault line in this country's history like from the very beginning. But it's also been a place where we come together and ideally when it's really working, like we don't even notice when it's one is bringing us together. And then you're sitting around in the States one day and and you say,
00:41:13
Speaker
toque or Mandarin orange or you you know, whatever. omp instead of like yeah yeah People look at you like, ah um and you know, Atwood's whole thing about how it's, you know, the world's longest one way mirror. Right. Like, you know, but but because we know all their words yes and they know none of ours. yeah So that if you say, you know, if they say, oh oh, you know, I was in first grade. Well, yeah, I know you you were six. I understand what that means. You came after kindergarten.
00:41:40
Speaker
If you say grade one, they're like, wow What does that i mean? i get you're you know You're speaking in some rune. but i was collecting the time, but I was like, as so, um yeah, I mean,
00:41:52
Speaker
i i want to I want to bring you on for just a mega interview because I feel like I've been just listening to you talk for hours. youre Oh, that's very common. I really, really appreciate it. Clearly you and I have that in common. Sorry. It's been a long day. Today was one of those days where you like I'm probably divulging way too much. but i I was in a session with a therapist and then just have the big like,
00:42:17
Speaker
Oh, like that kind of moment where things kind of like, so, you know, now I'm in that kind of like, oh man. Yeah. It was, it was. Yeah. yeah But then you're just like, you're just punchy afterwards. Like, you're like, is this a dream? Is that, is this a real, like.
00:42:30
Speaker
It's an i like, ah it's like getting, you get like, so like when you have a good session, you're like, you're so charged up yeah after it's like, nah. Yeah, it was a lot. So it was a lot. So I'm in that kind of like half dream sort of space. So I hope I hope i haven't gone. Oh, this has been magnificent. I obnoxiously. I'll i'll ask one last question before we wrap up. but but But before we do, I just, you know, I want to say, you know, Charlie, this has been so much fun talking. to you. Likewise. This went in a completely different direction than I was expecting and I and i couldn't be happier about that. Okay, no, I agree. This is, you know, you really, you you just the way you've showed up and just, you know, not only the way you're showing up at your work, but also just the way you showed up here and just launched in. I just, i i well that's the kind of energy i I like dream of. Thank you very
Charlie's Upcoming Projects and Love for Vancouver
00:43:09
Speaker
much. really
00:43:09
Speaker
Thank you so much for for joining me. My pleasure. Before I kind of launch into the last little bit, where would you like to point listeners to you next where can they find you so I think if you if you want to check out I sure do that's the next big thing happening and so that's coming off from Tradewind books so pick it up at the bookstore pick it up from your local equivalent to if you're you know watching this from Broadway but yeah they go to the Broadway location yeah I wrote a I wrote a little novel that came out in 2009 my book Vancouver Special came out Vancouver Special
00:43:47
Speaker
really sort of found its audience. Vancouver Special was in some ways ah a little bit like this. A lot like this actually. it was ah It was a book that was kind of commissioned. I was invited in to write it. I was writing about ah city, my city. So i was I was writing about a place that I had all kinds of contradictory and ambivalent and complex feelings about. It was a process of writing that at the end of I was like, phew, it turns out i I actually love Vancouver. i yeah like yeah yeah And I kind of had that feeling after writing this book as well, like I sort of surprised myself with that how kind of how the wells of affection that I was able to access. yeah but i But The Prescription Errors, which is this little novel that nobody read except Marianne, and and she had one of those little like
00:44:33
Speaker
like staff i never published anything in this and she just like she totally got the book and she just like completely it's like ever since then she's just been such a big great supporter um but then that's the next big project and then season two of super team canada comes out on crave this summer awesome and i got to write two episodes this this season. So um that was that was very cool. That's so cool. There will be two episodes, I think, ah towards the end of the season, midway towards the end of the season, um where i got to write I got to write two episodes. So that was a real... I'm pretty sure the the Super Team Canada thing is probably how I got this job. So yeah, I think Super Team Canada, and I sure do, come in this summer. Because you have no social media. You don't really use social media the much. I'm on Instagram.
00:45:26
Speaker
oh That's it. okay i have ah I have a website and I'm on Instagram. I do i have a semi-active Substack. I was one of the first. I was an early, early adopter of Substack.
00:45:38
Speaker
Monetized it. Yeah. And then his during the pandemic, because I wasn't working. And then I demonetized it. And then monetizing. I'm really at demonetizing things. I'm really good at how to not make money on stuff. doug I'm a pro at that stuff. But but yeah, i so i do have, ah and occasionally all I'll send something out into the world via via that. But those are pretty much my Instagram, Demers.com. And yeah, the sub stack, Charlie Demers. And we're i we're actually, we're completely out of time. just want say- Thank you very just for having me. Yeah, thank you. This is- Likewise. Just an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. we' We'll stop there.