(Thomas Froese Photo)
Montreal Canadiens Captain Nick Suzuki on the jumbotron at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, May 3, 2025)
I think my wife is in love with the entire Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
Naturally, these guys are young. And rich. And cool. Nick Suzuki has to be the most hip and humble NHL captain out there.
So my wife, a lifelong Leafs fan, recently put on my Habs jersey along with our son’s Habs hat and off she and I went to our first NHL game in Montreal. Friends had offered us free tickets. How could we refuse? “Babe, let’s take the train.”
My own heart fell for the team when I was a boy, when Montreal was swimming in Stanley Cups like drunken sailors. But now, sure, this particular Canadiens team – the youngest NHL team ever to make the playoffs – has a future. Suzuki for Prime Minister.
Speaking of, prior to Monday’s big election, did you notice after the April 17 leader’s debate in Montreal how Mark Carney, of the Red Team, and Pierre Poilievre, of the Blue Team, smiled and laughed and spoke to each other with ease, like real people instead of robotic political caricatures? You’d think they were heading to the same Montreal pub.
It was a reminder that if we’re going to get through this – and you know what I mean by “this” – if we’re going to have another 160 or so years of Canadian nationhood, if our children and their children will have a shot at it all, then we’d better put aside any petty differences.
We’ve done it before. Remember Canada’s Unity Rally in 1995 when a throng of Canadians bused and trained and drove and flew and hitchhiked to Montreal on the eve of Quebec’s referendum on independence?
I was a young reporter in St. Thomas. My editor said I couldn’t go. His thought? “It’s not a local story.” My thought? “Have you lost your mind?” The paper’s publisher knew better and sent me on a bus with camera and notepad and – what’s this? – a brick of an early-generation mobile phone.
From a payphone around Montreal’s Place du Canada I dictated part of the story back to my Ontario newsroom. Later, using that clunky mobile, I dictated the rest while sitting on the john, the only quiet place I could find on that bus returning home.
Quebecers then voted 50.6 to 49.4 per cent to stay in Canada. Gosh. This win because 100,000 Canadians, that’s five full NHL hockey arenas, took the trouble to get to Montreal and show their heart. Earlier that year I’d trained from Toronto to the Pacific Ocean. Then Montreal’s rally. I was discovering what writer Robertson Davies said, that Canada has a soul and we should get to know it better.
Today there are different times and measures. Team Canada and elbows up and such rhetoric. But what does it really mean if, now, after Monday’s vote, we don’t assemble a mixed political team with different players bringing different strengths to the game? Or will we gather in Alberta next to stave off its independence?
Statesmen worth their salt understand this. For one example, when Winston Churchill, a Conservative, became Britain’s Prime Minister in May 1940, he created a war cabinet of three Conservative and two Labour MPs, a sort of U.K. All-Star Team. Canada can easily do something similar to strengthen its economic war room.
Otherwise, the sorry truth, as seen in Ottawa’s parliamentary circus of recent years, is that partisan politics will get in the way of running a country with any amount of common sense. Which would suit the great divider, the criminal mob boss who’s now running the White House, just fine.
Red. Blue. Polka-dot. Whatever. Make an economic team of stars. Politics, after all, is supposed to be the art of compromise. It’s not unlike marriage and family life, really. The handful of election votes that came from my own household weren’t identical. That’s life. But we’re still family.
How much more for a nation retooling itself?