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As my year of Canadian immersion comes to a close, I’ve realized that there’s a ton of research I’ve left undone. I simply haven’t had the time this year to assess the Canadianness of a bunch of non-essential categories or sub-categories. For example, I happily had no need for a rifle or shotgun in 2011, so I never got around to determining if there were any made in Canada.

Over the year, I’ve received offers from a few people who volunteered to help with researching the project. It occurred to me that I might be able to crowdsource some of these research challenges. Hence, I’ve created the research brigade.

If you’re a fan of the project, or are just looking for some way to avoid your relatives for 45 minutes or an hour this holiday season, here’s your chance. I’m looking for volunteer researchers to pick a topic and then use their Google kung-fu to determine whether such a product is sourced or manufactured in Canada. Here’s how it would work:

1. Pick a topic from the list below.
2. Do online research (or make phone calls, if you’re feeling really eager) to determine if the product is sourced or manufactured in Canada.
3. Complete the form below with your results (or just email me at darren@1y1c.ca). You can just include notes and links. If you’re keen to write something fully-formed, I might even feature it as a guest blog post in the new year.

Make sense? If there are a lot of examples of Canadian sources or manufacturers, try to pick the most popular ones. It’s quite possible that you’ll discover that there are, in fact, no Canadian-made products for a given topic. That’s okay, too.

What do you get? My undying thanks, of course. Also, if I end up writing a book about the project, I’ll send five randomly selected brigade members a signed copy. We may end up with less than five volunteers, so your odds of gotten a book are good.

Here are the topics. Again, we’re searching for the answer to the question: “Are there any of these products made in Canada?”

1. Eyeglasses (including sunglasses)
2. Rifles and shotguns
3. Common manual tools like screwdrivers and hammers
4. Tents (for camping)
5. Motorcycles and scooters
6. Razors (manual or electric)
7. Hockey pucks
8. Common sports equipment like soccer balls, footballs or baseballs
9. Skates
10. Pens and pencils
11. Common school supplies like rules, erasers and felt tip markers
12. Condoms
13. Cutlery
14. Musical instruments
15. Anything else?

As #15 suggests, if there’s a topic that I haven’t covered that you’re curious about, feel free to dive in. Or you can leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

Once you’ve done your research, just fill out the form below. My sincere thanks to anybody who participates!

Read comments here.

Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

And so, my year of Canadianness reaches its crescendo this month with all-Canuck Internet use.

I’m writing this while listening to the sounds of the waves on Cox Bay intermix with Broken Social Scene playing on iTunes. I’m wearing a t-shirt from Bearhug, and have local venison sausage digesting in my stomach. I’m drinking a glass of the local water, and have a DVD of “Gunless” nearby to watch later on. Oh how Canadian I’ve become.

Considerable calculus went into the order of the categories I added each month. I didn’t want things to be too easy in the early going, but I also had some practical requirements for how the year would play out. One such requirement is that, because I work on the web, I’d need to put the category of ‘Internet’ last.

What do we mean when we say “the Canadian Internet”? It’s a good question. Do we mean websites that are hosted in Canada? Probably not, because many Canadian companies, media organizations and blogs host their so-called ‘Canadian content’ on computers that are physically in the United States or elsewhere. Rather stupidly, when I set up this site, I added it to my existing set of sites hosted by the good Americans at Laughing Squid.

Others have pointed out that I shouldn’t use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or dozens of other sites because they’re American. This seems overly reductive. The computers that host these sites, and the sites and services themselves are the infrastructure of the web. I don’t require that Canadian music be recorded through Canadian soundboards and played on Canadian speakers (if I did, it would have been a quiet year), so I don’t think I should ban myself from these services.

Instead, I’m restricting myself to only electronically communicating with Canadians. On social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I’ve created lists of Canadian friends and followers. I pay attention to those, instead of the default view of everybody.

 

Whenever possible, I avoid exchanging emails with non-Canadians. An American friend emailed me the other day, and I sent him this:

Dear non-Canadian Sir/Ms:

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, due to restrictions imposed by my One Year, One Canadian project, I’m unable to exchange
electronic communications with non-Canadians until January 1, 2012.

This has been an automated message from Canuck Bot.

It’s in jest, but I’m doing my best to ignore American email. And I’m only reading Canadian news sites, blogs and other reference sites. I’m a big fan of Reddit, but these days I’m only in the Canada, Vancouver and hockey sub-sections of the site.

I’ve faced a challenge in a bunch of web-based tools we use for work. We use online tools for time tracking, invoicing, project management and so forth. I’m simply avoiding these, and regretting the decision to not use Canadian equivalents like FreshBooks and FunctionFox.

Thus far, the biggest challenge is getting a decent, detailed view of stories that don’t have a Canadian component or angle. I was interested in Louis CK’s recent experiment in self-publishing a recent comedy video, but I had to hunt around for Canadian coverage. Likewise, I’m sometimes interested in how Canada is discussed internationally. The Guardian would have been my go-to site for an external view on Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Agreement.

I am missing vast chunks of the web. I certainly wouldn’t want to keep up this online diet indefinitely. What would you miss if you could only consume Canadian content online?

Read comments here.

Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

Back in August, I gave up all food that wasn’t sourced in Canada. On a day-to-day basis, what has that meant?

• I drink water almost exclusively. With the exception of a few samples, I can drink no soda (I’ve been a lifelong Coke user–I seriously miss it). Most juices are out as well, and I don’t drink coffee, tea or alcohol.
• I don’t eat many deserts. Chocolate is out. I’ve occasionally had some homemade pie with Canadian fruit, and my wife made an excellent galette with blackberries and peaches from the freezer, but they’re the exception to the rule.
• Junk food and fast food are non-starters.
• I rarely ‘grab something on the go’ when I’m out of the house. That means I’ve been eaten far fewer muffins, bagels and other baked goods you’d usually find at your local coffee shop.
• I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, fish, chicken and pasta (made from Canadian wheat durum).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m downright apathetic about food, so this process has just been a time-consuming bother more than a trial. I have missed the stimulating effect of Coke and the occasional sugary snack. I didn’t realize how much I depended on those to get me through some wintery afternoons.

I didn’t plan for this to happen, but I’ve lost seven pounds. Or, if you prefer, 3.2 kilograms. I think the big difference is that I’m pretty much drinking only water. If you add up the calories from a can of Coke a day, plus the occasional juice and hot chocolate, you get to a couple thousand calories a week pretty quickly. Over a few months, that makes a difference.

I’ve been using an app to track my weight all year. This is what the last few months looks like:

Maybe I’ll start a new Canadian dieting craze? “Act now, and get your Canada Diet Program for three monthly installments of $29.99! The pounds will melt away like a spring thaw in Winnipeg!”

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Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

Another month, another topic. This month I added ‘transportation’ to the Canadian-only landscape that is my life. It’s one of those topics where, in retrospect, I have no idea what my December, 2010 self was thinking. What is Canadian transportation? And how do I restrict myself to it?

Then I considered what makes a form of transportation Canadian? Well, Air Canada has “Canada” in the name, so that seems safe. I frequently take the “Canada Line” rapid transit service to and from downtown Vancouver. It was built for the Olympics last year, so that feels pretty patriotic. And I belong to a local car co-op, which seems very homespun and Canadian.

What if I wanted to drive a home-grown car? What would my options be? I’m not talking about a Chevrolet that was assembled in Oshawa, but rather a real Canadian-designed and built vehicle.

Enter the Bricklin. Designed and manufactured in New Brunswick from 1974 to 1976, it’s the gull-winged equivalent of Magnum PI’s moustache. It looks like the sort of car that an early-career James Bond might drive. But not Connery or Moore’s Bond, it’s more of a Lazenby vehicle. Frequently called the worst car ever built, the two-door sports door was fraught with mechanical problems, and its creator, Malcolm Bricklin, struggled financially. He only ever built 2854 cars, and bilked the New Brunswick government out of $23 million.The story of the Bricklin was recently retold in that most sacred of artistic modes, musical theatre.

I’ve been poking around various local contacts, trying to determine if anybody in the city owns a Bricklin. According to Wikipedia, roughly 1100 of them still exist. In the meantime, I just sticking to forms of transportation with “Canada” in the name, and my shoes from Roots.

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Bricklin photo courtesy of Alden Jewell.

Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

I first discovered the Cowboy Junkies when my brother brought home their extraordinary 1988 album, The Trinity Sessions. The band's languid rhythms and Margo Timmons's hesitant, sultry whisper clutched at my serious teenage heart, and kicked off a lifetime love affair. They were the first band I ever really discovered, and they were Canadian.

And, while the band has taken musical vacations to different climes-the American South or China-they've always felt profoundly Canadian. The sparseness of their sound seems to echo our endless wilderness. They've always been a humble band-songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmons (Margo's brother) plays sitting down, with his hair concealing his face. And their back catalog is full of Neil Young covers.

I had been primed to love the Junkies, of course, because my childhood household was filled with rock and roll-and lots of it Canadian. I didn't appreciate them then as much as I do now, but my father fed us a steady stream of Neil Young and The Band. One of the first riffs I mastered when I was learning to play the guitar was the emblematic opening of Young's "Hey Hey, My My".

The Junkies were just the first in a long line of Canadian bands I've come to deeply admire. They're in a zigzaggy line from the Junkies through Weeping Tile to, most recently, Dan Mangan.

My taste is mostly in the folk rock and singer-songwriter mold, but I dabble in other mediums. My favourite music to listen to while I write are Glenn Gould's famous recordings of Bach's "The Goldberg Variations". And I fell for Sophie Milman when I saw her play at the Vancouver Jazz Festival a few years ago.

The Rules

They're pretty simple. I'll only listen to Canadian music for the rest of the year. There's not a lot I can do when I leave the house, but at home, on my iPhone and in the car I'm going all-Canadian, all the time.

Will that be a burden? As it happens, I'm an obsessive self-documenter, and so for years have tracked my musical taste with Last.fm. Here's what I've listened to over the last 12 months:

I'll I'll accept partial responsibility for Taylor Swift, but not Glee. In any case, more than half of my most-listened-to artists are already Canadian. My wife and I have an iTunes library of about 10,000 songs. I went through them and made a playlist of all the Canadian ones, and that came out to be about 1,500 tunes. So, that should carry me through the rest of the year.

Photo by Adam Bowie.

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Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

Let's just acknowledge something right off the bat about Canadian movies: they're rarely good. I've been watching a bunch of Canadian cinema over the summer-mostly the films that enjoyed brief runs at local cinemas-and they've been dismal. The Mountie, Modra, Breakaway, Terry, The High Cost of Living-the list of underwhelming movies goes on and on.

The problem, I think, is that I inevitably compare them to Hollywood fare. Obviously, mainstream American cinema is full of dogs too, but they're easy to avoid. Plus, there's a constant flow of quality movies from which to choose. For Canadian movies in the theatre, there's usually zero to one on in Vancouver at any given time. And there's no assurance that that one will be any good.

As a case in point, this weekend I watched Breakaway, the story of a team of Canadian Sikhs who earn redemption on the hockey rink. It was pretty dreadful. The script was clunky and the performances were wooden. It was the unfunny red-headed step-child of Bend It Like Beckham.

In a conversation with a friend of mine, he suggested that Canadian cinema was the AHL to Hollywood's top-flight league. He's right, after all, as we send our best filmmakers to California to find fame and fortune. So maybe I should lower my expectations for Canadian movies? Part of the problem is that while I don't watch AHL teams at Rogers Arena, I see Canuck films in the same theatres or on the same TV screens where I watch the very best American movies. So, the average Canadian movie will inevitably disappoint by comparison.

Of course, our country has produced a number of great movies. The one bright spot in my 2011 viewing schedule was Incendies, a terrific tale of a daughter discovering her past in the war-torn Middle East. It was French and included incest as a plot point-two common characteristics of good Canadian movies.

I sometimes think that, in North America, we have a biased view of so-called "foreign films". Why? Because the movie market filters out 98% of movies from any other country, so that we only see the very best (or, possibly, the most commercially viable) films from France or China. Maybe that's the approach we need to take with Canadian movies: treat our local films as if they're from a foreign country, and only watch the very best?

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Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

Note: I'm back-dating this post to September 15 because I failed miserably to write it last month.

For the rest of 2011, I shall not set foot on foreign soil. I know that, compared to giving up non-Canadian food or television, this self-denial doesn't feel like much of a sacrifice. But I have had to forego invitations to one of the Carolinas (I can't for the life of me remember which) and Point Roberts, Washington.

Point Roberts, incidentally, is this idiosyncratic peninsula that's connected only to Tsawassen in British Columbia. Much like the Russian region of Kalinigrad, it's a pene-exclave which Americans can only reach by air, water or passing through Canada. It's full of Canadians who have bought cheap (or cheaper, at least) property for holiday homes. Hence, the invitation I had to decline.

And so I'll only travel in Canada for the balance of the year. I've done plenty of that already. I've been to Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax since the start of the year, and I have plans to see Regina and to return to Toronto before the year is out.

That sounds like a lot of Canada, but, of course, it's just a thumbnail on the body of our great nation. I'm a little ashamed of how little of Canada I've actually seen, particular if you remove the big cities from the equation.

I have traveled outside of Canada a lot, though, and I've lived abroad in Ireland, Malta and Morocco. Nothing makes you more patriotic than watching your country from a distance, or celebrating national holidays with newfound Canadian expats.

A side note: a few months ago, I had a notion of assembling a slideshow of Google Street View screenshots of big Canadian roadside statues and monuments. This proved more difficult and time-consuming than I imagined, so I leave you with just three of my favourites, and a question: if you were going to recommend a Canadian destination to me outside the major cities, what would it be?

I

.

I included a photo of the Terry Fox Memorial in Thunder Bay (by Paul Weimer) because it's a spot I've always wanted to visit, but haven't had the chance yet.

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Blog post re-printed with kind permission from Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

I think about food all the time, and I hate it. I’m only a few weeks into my all-Canadian diet, and the amount of time I need to spend shopping for and preparing food is a bit ridiculous. I also went cold turkey on Coke, a beverage I’ve drunk daily for the past, oh, 25 years. Don’t get me started on the headaches.

On a lighter note, it’s time for another contest. The good people at Saul Good Gift Company have donated a gourmet gift basket to the cause. It contains all sorts of tasty local stuff–pecan fruit crisps from Vancouver, chocolate bark from Ladysmith, season fruit preserves from Langley and so forth.

What do you have to do to enter this contest? Simply ‘like’ the 1Y1C Facebook page. Have you already liked it? No problem, you’re already entered in the contest. Not on Facebook? Good for you. Just leave a comment below and we’ll add your name to the mix. I’ll pick a winner in early October and Saul will send you the goodies.

Enter your comments here.

Blog post re-printed with kind permission from  Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

Image courtesy of Darren Barefoot.

I was about 11 years old when my parents got divorced, and I lived with my father until I left for university. When my Mom left, she gave my father a binder with seven recipes in it. My brother, father and I ate those seven recipes for the next seven years of my life.

Because I know you're wondering, the recipes were for hamburger soup, pork chops, Shake ‘N' Bake chicken, spaghetti, pizza and the much-hated sole. His seventh meal was flank steak, reserved for special occasions.

I went off to university, and cooked for myself for the next few years.

So, for some critical formative years, I ate in a kind of culinary desert.

The result? As an adult, I'm ambivalent, if not downright anhedonic about food. There are foods I moderately prefer to other foods, but, beyond health concerns, I'm not somebody who really cares about what I eat.

I used to not eat red meat for ethical reasons. Now I don't do it because it simplifies my eating decisions. When my wife is away, I'm happy eating the same food for two or three meals in a row. When faced with a restaurant menu, I scan it until I find something that appeals, and I stop there. I also don't drink alcohol, coffee or tea.

I'm not critical of people who find great joy or comfort in preparing and eating food. Well, I do think a subsection of foodies has a misbegotten sense of moral righteousness around their eating habits, but they're the exception.

But now I have to constantly think about food. I have to rigorously contemplate my every buying and eating decision. And you know what? It sucks.

With this in mind, will I miss anything over the next four months? I do drink Coke quite often, so that's a non-starter. And who doesn't like chocolate? I'll also miss the convenience of grabbing some sushi (or nearly anything, for that matter) for lunch.

The Rules

If I eat it at home, it has to be sourced in Canada. That's everything, from cooking oil to sugar to any processed food. I've been hosting some informative discussions on the One Year, One Canadian Facebook page which has helped me discover promising sources of Canadian bread, sugar and flour.

I've also been spending a lot of time at farmer's markets, asking irritating questions about Colin the chicken. I'll also spend some time this fall going right to the source to get food. I went snorkeling with a friend to catch the red rock crabs you see in the photo.

I don't plan to eat out that much, but when I do, I'm going to require that the main ingredients be sourced in Canada.

If you had to eat all-Canadian for a year, what would you miss most?

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Blog post re-printed with kind permission from  Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.

It's only been a few weeks, but I miss The New Yorker already. I've shared a subscription with my brother and father for the past couple of years, and found the magazine incomparable in terms of the quality and depth of its reporting. It's the only magazine I read regularly.

When I'm traveling, I'll sometimes indulge in lighter fare like Esquire, Details or Wired, but that's the extent of things in the analogue world. My online reading inevitably sends me all over the place, from The Atlantic to Slate.

But July has been the month to go all-Canadian for books and magazine, so I have to give up my American magazines and magazine sites. Where does that leave me on this side of the border?

Macleans - My father used to read Mcleans religiously when I was young. I usually just read the movie reviews and Allan Fotheringham's backpage column. It's my impression that, in recent years, the magazine has morphed into a hyper-ventilating mouthpiece of conservative Canada, but I honestly haven't picked an issue up in a decade. I'll buy one and test my assumptions.

The Walrus - Early in its life, I gave The Walrus several tries. Ultimately, though, it didn't stick. I can't quite say why.

Geist - I've read Geist off-and-on for years, though I've never felt really compelled by its brand of showily-brainy non-fiction. As it happens, I've written a couple small items for this magazine, all of them at the less brainy end of the scale.

Canadian Geographic - My Mom used to get this magazine. I almost exclusively looked at the pretty pictures.

Sharp - I just discovered this in the Toronto airport. It's seems to be positioned as Canada's Esquire. The issue I read had Bradley Cooper on the cover. It was unremarkable.

Though I've never read it, several people have recommended Toronto Life to me. What's your favourite Canadian magazine?

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Blog post re-printed with kind permission from  Darren Barefoot - 1Y1C.