God bless Christie Blatchford...

My nation is . . . Toronto

Stow the envy, rest-of-Canada dwellers. 'We are a nation because we are what we are' here in Hogtown

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD, Globe and Mail, October 25, 2006.

I cannot tell you how conflicted I was by the "Quebec is a nation" business that broke out all over this week: as a federalist, delighted; as a Torontonian, amused. To borrow from the deliciously outfoxed and caught flatfooted Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe, who said, "We are a nation because we are what we are," we here in Toronto are also a nation and for the same reason.

As a native Quebecker, I know well how unique is that province, but if I had to name one place in the country that has almost nothing in common with the rest of it, it wouldn't be Quebec, but the city where I've lived for almost four decades.

In recent years, it's become so bad I've seriously considered separating myself from Toronto, the friends and routines of an adult lifetime, the house and neighbourhood I love.

I give you a small but telling true story.

I was in Edmonton last week and so, it turned out, was a Toronto couple I adore. They were visiting relatives who live about an hour out of the Alberta capital, and we chatted briefly on e-mail, unsuccessfully trying to arrange our various schedules in order to meet for dinner one night.

At one point, the husband was trilling on about how beautiful the relatives' property was, and how peaceful, and blah, blah, blah. Why, he cooed, from a window that very day, they'd spotted a deer.

"You should have shot it," I snarled, though I confess I have not yet found an e-mail icon to properly signify a snarl.

I actually knew, from an Alberta friend, that it is, or was, deer hunting season. Indeed, because of this friend, who regales me with lurid descriptions of the shots he could have taken but didn't and the hours he spends lying in various frigid places waiting not to shoot, and the array of clothes and gewgaws he takes with him to while away the wait until he doesn't shoot, I may well know more about Alberta deer season than any other single person in Toronto.

Anyway, as I recall, there was shocked e-mail silence from my Toronto friend. I don't think I ever got a reply. He probably thought I had mislaid my mind or that I had misspoken, which is what we here say when we accidentally have told a truth or said what we believe but had no intention of saying and been called on it.

After all, I had broken about a dozen Toronto conventions in one fell swoop: Thou shalt not speak of guns; thou shalt not speak of guns but to condemn; thou shalt not suggest, by word or deed or inflection or lift of brow, that there are good gun owners and bad ones; thou shalt not speak in any manner approaching approbation about hunting (for one thing, it may lead to meat eating), and thou shall always and at every turn defend the liberty-encroaching yet entirely useless national firearms registry while simultaneously attacking the liberty-encroaching but undeniably useful notion of imposing reverse-onus bail conditions upon those thugs caught actually using guns in the commission of an actual crime.

Now I didn't really want my friend to shoot the deer because, though I am a bad Torontonian, like any good one, I still see all deer as Bambi, much as I see all collies as Lassie and all horses as Black Beauty and all pigs as Miss Piggy and all cows as the long-lashed ones in the milk ads. We prefer our animals, domestic or wild, to be cartoons with cute voices, which is why so many of us want our dogs to be no bigger than a beaver's tail.

But the point is, Torontonians may not really think like this, but certainly, to judge it by what we say and certainly by how we vote, we do. The odds of the average citizen in this city being shot by a law-abiding, registered-up-the-ying-yang, taxpaying, gun-club-using fellow are next to nothing, but we here live in fear of that guy.

Him, we want banned, or his guns anyway. And his pal the hunter. We have no patience for any of his nonsense about shooting being a sport (what, biathlon?) or for any of the hunter's BS or the varmint-shooting farmer's. But give us a dude with a criminal record longer than (see earlier reference to dog size), a habit of not showing up for court and a well-documented taste for violence, and honey, we will turn ourselves inside-out in search of root causes.

I didn't mean for this to be so much about guns, but this is one of those issues that really captures so much that makes Toronto so breathtakingly irritating and, well, distinct.

There are others, but chiefly what distinguishes the Torontonian is that from the sanctity of his SUV-loving life, he desires to tell other Canadians how we all ought to live.

A few weeks ago, I was walking through the University of Toronto campus with my dog, both of us minding our business. Obie was, of course, on his leash, just trotting by my side. I had plastic bags in every pocket lest there be a hint of a dog turd within miles, and as we approached a young man, he smiled nicely. I am accustomed to people smiling at the sight of my dog (he is huge, white, goofy and with one floppy ear and one upright one) and smiled back.

"Where's the muzzle?" the young man asked pleasantly.

I presumed he had mistaken Obie for a pit bull and was referring to the Ontario ban on these dogs.

"Oh," I said, still polite, "his breed is exempt from the law."

"It's not a matter of law," he said.

"What is it a matter of then?" I asked.

He held his hands about a beaver-tail length apart. "I have a dog about this size," he said sorrowfully, shaking his head in what I suppose I was to take for rueful wisdom.

"My dog plays with dogs that size every day," I said. "He's as gentle as a lamb."

"Well," smarmed the young man, "I'm glad to hear it."

"I need neither your lectures nor your praise," I replied, rather regally I thought, and took my leave. But as he was to me, Toronto is to the nation. We are what we are, and what the rest of you, if only you were a little brighter, would want to be.
__________________