Elbows up, Canada!

Take a moment to watch the most popular advertisement in Canada at the moment:

Like me, Mike Myers is from the suburbs of Toronto and now lives in the U.S.. But we remain Canadian, and share the same sentiment about “Our Home and Native Land.”

The ad features Mark Carney, Canada’s interim Prime Minister (U.S. friends: that’s the equivalent of President) since Justin Trudeau has stepped down. There’s an election coming up, and this is an election ad for the Liberal Party, to which Carney belongs.

The Canadian electorate had been having economic anxieties similar to the U.S. electorate did, and prior to November 2024, had an election been called, the then-Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, would have been ousted by the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre — sometime referred to as “PP” — who’s best described at “Diet Trump”:

However, after Donald Trump declared what the Wall Street Journal (of all publications!) called “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” and declared a desire for a Canadian Anschluss, much of the Canadian electorate lost its taste for PP, who’s seen (and rightly so) as a big Trump fanboy.

Maybe it’s time to repurpose that old joke we used to tell about then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and then-President Ronald Reagan like so:

What’s really long and hangs between Donald Trump’s legs?

Pierre Poilievre’s tie.

The ad features the Canadian slogan of resistance, which comes from hockey: Elbows up, a phrase from Canadian-born hockey great Gordie Howe, who used it as a term for both protecting yourself and being ready to fight on the ice.

You have to love that final scene in the ad, where we see the back of Mike Myers’ jersey, which says “Never 51,” as in “Canada will never be the 51st State:”