6 Canadian Tees That Aren't a Maple Leaf
Canadian merchandise has a default setting and it is a maple leaf on a red background. These six are the other option.
1. Terry Fox
He dipped his leg in the Atlantic at St. John's and filled two bottles with seawater, planning to pour one into the Pacific at the far end. A wave took one of them before he had run a single day. He then ran close to a marathon a day for 143 days on one leg, 5,373 kilometres, until the cancer came back outside Thunder Bay. The run in his name is now the largest single-day cancer fundraiser in the world. The bottle he kept is still Atlantic water.
The Terry Fox tee.
2. Leonard Cohen
He spent about five years on "Hallelujah", drafting somewhere near eighty verses, at one point sitting on the floor of a New York hotel room in his underwear banging his head on the carpet. Later Dylan asked how long it had taken. Embarrassed, Cohen said two years. Dylan mentioned that "I and I" had taken him fifteen minutes. Both men were shading the truth in opposite directions, and only one of them wrote "Hallelujah".
The Leonard Cohen tee.
3. Waldo in Montreal
The joke needs no footnote if you live here. Somewhere under the cones and the plate steel and the detour signs there is a street, and it has been about to reopen for some time.
4. Elvis Gratton
Falardeau made him in 1981 as a weapon, a sovereigntist's caricature of the Americanised federalist Québécois, and Quebec took him to heart instead. The satire outsold the argument, and its author never stopped being annoyed about it.
The Elvis Gratton tee.
5. Videodrome
Cronenberg wrote and shot it in Toronto during the last stretch of Canada's tax-shelter film era. It is the most Canadian thing on this list in a way nobody plans: a film about media rewiring its audience, financed by a capital cost allowance.
The Videodrome tee.
6. Margaret Atwood
She wrote The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in 1984 on a rented typewriter, working under one rule: nothing in it that human beings had not already done. Every element of Gilead has a historical precedent, which is why it reads as prophecy and is actually just reading.
The Margaret Atwood tee.
Six designs, no maple leaf, no apology, no mention of politeness. Canada is more interesting than its merchandise suggests.
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