Episode Transcript
25.1 Polite Canada Remilitarizes, Part 2: “Elbows Up”
Welcome Patreons to part two of episode 25 of Antifascist Dad podcast: Polite Canada Remilitarizes: Elbows up.
I'm grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days.
For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. And if you're listening to this on Patreon, thank you for your support. If you're not, if you're hearing this in the open feed, you can get early access to episodes like this at Antifascist Dad Podcast on Patreon, because that's what subscribers get: early access to every second part of the main feed episodes. And I would also direct you to a link to pre-order my book, which is coming out April 26th. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. Pre-orders are cool, but they also help with visibility and all that. So please consider doing that. Thank you.
Now, in the first part of this episode, I spoke with veteran anti-war activist Brent Patterson about Canada's remilitarization program under Prime Minister Mark Carney. Brent explained how Carney has performed a sleight of hand that may have eluded less technocratic politicians of the past.
By reframing militarization as critical mineral sovereignty, NATO infrastructure spending as economic resilience, and defence procurement as industrial strategy, Carney has made resource extraction and financial capital accumulation intrinsic to this notion of national security, while insulating these same aims from leftist critique by just draping them in the flag.
Where a cruder politician might have simply said we need to open the north for business, Carney has constructed an interlocking architecture in which the F-35 purchase, the Arctic shipping lanes, the Critical Minerals Corridor, and the Defence Industrial Export Strategy are presented as a single integrated response to geopolitical threat.
And he's done it all with a banker's panache for making the inexorable movement of capital appear totally rational, totally necessary.
Now, today I'm going to go into that panache part by doing a close read on the main slogan that Carney has used to sell his Trump response policies over the past year. Elbows up. This is an old hockey slogan that he skated on as he attempted to sell his cultural resistance project to the country, and it's a slogan with a lot of resonance.
The present iteration began back on March 1st of last year, when comedian Mike Myers appeared on Saturday Night Live with a Canada is Not for Sale t-shirt. And as the closing saxophones soared, he mouthed elbows up, pointing to his elbow.
And this was a moment that really moved a guy named Charlie Angus, who's a super interesting Canadian political figure. He's a former punk rock musician and Catholic Worker house organizer who was also, for decades, the NDP MP from Timmins in Northern Ontario.
He published a Substack two days after Myers' appearance about the slogan being part of what he called the secret language of Canadians. The piece was optimistic and galvanizing, and it ran on this pure, straight-edge anti-MAGA Canadian nationalism. You know, the wholesome type.
Angus traced the slogan back to its source in the country's most famous hockey player, Gordie Howe. Now, Gordie Mr. Elbows Howe was a gentleman off the ice but a roughneck on the ice. And this was back in the days of flat hockey sticks that let you shoot righty or lefty just the same. This was when the goalies didn't wear masks and they just had no teeth by the age of 25. A time when brawling was constant. There's even a game achievement named after Howe. The Gordie Howe hat trick means you score a goal, you get an assist, and you get into a fight in the same game.
Angus positioned Howe's purposeful toughness as a commitment to serving his teammates. But it's also an extremely romantic post that links Canadian identity not only to hockey slogans but to the wilderness.
I'm going to read a section of it here to give a sense of how that sounds, because it's quite poignant.
"As Canadians, we rarely think about the secret codes that bind us. It's just there, like the land. When I first hit the road with the band at 18, I was overwhelmed by the immensity and beauty of our country. On this vast geography, our cities and towns are strung out like isolated outposts. Getting from one town to another often requires 12 hours of straight driving. Little wonder that by the time we hit these towns, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, there was a sense of relief, as if we were coming home. And even if it was the first time in that town or province, we were always welcomed, like we belonged. Those road trips changed who I am. And I am not the only one. I don't know a single person who wasn't transformed by witnessing the aurora borealis over Lake Superior or the incredible beauty of the North Saskatchewan, or felt the exhilaration and sometimes panic of the nosebleed drive through Kicking Horse Pass and then down through the long shoot of the Fraser Canyon. The first time this city boy saw Peggy's Cove, I was almost scared out of my skin by the power of the North Atlantic. These things stay. It's not like you talk about it. You simply absorb it. It becomes part of you. It makes you Canadian. As if we would ever give up a land this profound and mystical to a convicted felon and pervert decked out in tacky bronze makeup."
It's lovely writing and it went viral. But with regard to Gordie Howe, it missed an important historical contradiction I'll get to, and that Carney capitalized on. But I think it also idealizes and homogenizes the wilderness as something that we share through identity, with the "we" being a contested subject, because we're also thinking about a map of contested and unceded First Nations territories. And it's not lost on me the irony that he's talking about driving long distances and burning up fuel.
Charlie is a leftist, but here he really pulls on a settler imaginary. And the irony is that that wilderness is exactly what politicians like Carney view as a collection of commodities.
Now, the timeline from March 3rd, when Angus published his Substack, going forward, is packed.
Carney won the Liberal leadership on March 9th. In his acceptance speech, he addressed Trump's tariffs directly, calling the moment the greatest crisis of our lifetimes. But he wasn't yet PM.
On March 11th, Ontario Premier Doug Ford raised the stakes on the tariff issue by threatening to impose a retaliatory 25% surcharge on electricity exported to US customers. Also on March 11th, Trump made a Truth Social post announcing he was doubling steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada from 25 to 50%. "The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished 51st state. This would make all tariffs and everything else totally disappear," he wrote.
March 12th: the first tier of US tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum takes effect at 25%. March 13th: Canada files a formal WTO dispute resolution request against the United States. March 14th: Carney is officially sworn in as PM, and in his first speech he declares his first priority is protecting Canadian workers from the US's unjustified foreign trade actions. Then he immediately flies off to Europe to discuss security and trade diversification with the Davos set.
March 22nd, he drops this public service announcement filmed in a hockey rink with Mike Myers on X.
Myers: Mr. Prime Minister, what are you doing here?
Carney: I just thought I'd come up and check on things.
Myers: You live in the States.
Carney: Yeah, but I'll always be Canadian.
Myers: But you live in the States. So, do you remember Mr. Dress Up, the children's show on CBC? What were the names of Mr. Dress Up's two puppet friends?
Carney: Casey and Finnegan.
Myers: Bud the Spud.
Carney: Howie Meeker.
Myers: Capital of Saskatchewan.
Carney: Regina.
Myers: Tragically Hip.
Carney: Yep.
Myers: You're a defenseman defending a two-on-one. What do you do?
Carney: Take away the pass, obviously.
Myers: What are the two seasons in Toronto?
Carney: Winter and construction.
Myers: Wow, you really are Canadian. But let me ask you, Mr. Prime Minister: will there always be a Canada?
Carney: There will always be a Canada.
Myers: All right. Elbows out. Elbows up.
It's 57 seconds, but there's a lot going on here, so please forgive the close reading.
First, the setup. Canada really is small enough that seeing a top official in public isn't beyond most people. In the parliamentary system, any minister, including the PM, is supposed to be available to constituents. In his little old federal riding there is security, but Carney's never swarmed with Secret Service agents.
So the scene takes this personability to its homiest possibility. Carney is your local hockey coach. The mild-mannered, encouraging type. He's just there in the local rink. Nothing fancy. Saturday morning.
And I watch that clip and I'm filled with memories of childhood hockey rinks. The smell of the compressors and the buzz and sparks from the skate-sharpening desk and the 1960s-era hot drink machine that would shudder and spit out brown water that would taste sort of like hot chocolate. Usually the chocolate powder was a little bit lumpy, but you could stir it in with the hook of your skate tightener, though that might make it taste a little bit metallic. But that didn't matter because everything about that Saturday morning was cheerful.
And I'm going into granular detail here because I think that's where the energy of the propaganda really lies.
Carney's challenge to Myers is that there's a long history of Canadian entertainers and athletes going off to the States to find fame and fortune. We're supposed to feel proud of them, but a little annoyed at the same time. And the subject on the table is really: how Canadian are we anyway, with the US breathing down our necks? And how much effort will we make to maintain independence? And why?
This is a perennial question. It's dominated Canadian politics for generations, and it's been focused most prominently on battles over globalization and the free trade agreement between the two countries, which set the mold for NAFTA and then broader agreements around the globe after that.
In October of 1988, Liberal leader John Turner said the following to Brian Mulroney during their electoral debate.
Turner: "You mentioned 120 years of history. We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we've done it. With one signature of a pen, you've reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States, and will reduce us, I'm sure, to a colony of the United States, because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow."
Now, Turner is bullshitting there a little bit, making it seem like Canada had not been completely US-entwined since the end of the Second World War, or even before. The more honest framing was that Mulroney had simply accelerated the logic of capital.
Now, coincidentally, in 1988, Mike Myers was 25 years old and had just relocated from Toronto to Chicago to perform at Second City. So while manufacturers relocated south to take advantage of lower tax rates and lower labor costs, Myers was part of a wave of talent flight.
So if Myers is going to be a prodigal son, he has to be tested to see just how Canadian he really is. And that's where Carney's trivia comes in. A kids' show, a country music mascot, a hockey broadcaster.
Carney could have asked him about other cheesy things like BeaverTails on the Ottawa Canal. But he didn't quiz him on the Winnipeg General Strike, the Regina Manifesto, or the year Medicare was implemented. Fair enough, he's talking to a comedian. But he's also talking to a comedian who's playing a child.
Even though Myers is 62 and Carney is 61, Myers is wearing a goofy jersey where the name is "Never" and the number is 51, as in the 51st state.
And all of it serves to underline this feeling that we're being taken care of in some kind of gentle way by a good dad.
But what about Gordie Howe?
The fifth of nine children, Gordie grew up in poverty in Saskatchewan in the 1930s. When he was five, a desperate neighbor sold Gordie's mom a bag of used belongings for a little bit of cash. And inside that bag was a pair of skates.
Gordie and his sister Edna shared them, one skate apiece. They stuffed them full of rags so that they could fit. They were adult skates, and they would skate side by side holding hands on the outdoor ice, which is this beautiful image to me. And Edna was my grandmother's name. It's very rare to hear this name.
Saskatchewan in those days was one of the main incubators for Canadian socialism. I talked about the origins of the Regina Manifesto in 1933 with Jasmine Peardon in that episode. So this is where all of that is coming from. But the Howe family didn't connect with that. Perhaps because dad was more itinerant as a worker and had less sustained contact with union organizers, maybe because mom was prairie German and tended toward Social Credit rather than Tommy Douglas's CCF.
And also, by the time Gordie was 16, he was off into professional hockey, which was famously capitalistic and paternalistic. He got signed by the Detroit Red Wings under the meanest player-coach-manager in hockey, the union-busting Jack Adams.
Now, Adams was a real bastard. Punching-referees-in-the-face bastard. He hired all of his players on a handshake, no contract. And he underpaid Gordie Howe for decades while assuring him privately that he was the highest-paid player in the league. He kept his salary below players like Rocket Richard and even below his own teammates. And Gordie never found out, because players talking about their salaries at that time was under a kind of omerta. You just couldn't do that. You wouldn't talk about salaries.
And when Ted Lindsay tried to organize a players' union in 1957 among the Red Wings, Adams spread shitty rumors about him and traded him to the last-place Chicago Blackhawks. And this sent a message to everyone else: do not talk about the money.
So with Carney pulling on this, there's already some weirdness going on, whether he realizes it or not, whether he even cares about that history. But he's quoting a folk hero who was tough but obedient, loyal and polite, and whose wholesomeness involved never complaining about the boss.
Gordie Howe came out of the Canadian heartland, but not that part of the heartland that produced our social welfare tradition. Elbows up was a slogan of grit, but not the grit of people who fight the structure of things. The grit of people who fight to master the structure itself.
Now, Gordie played all the way until 1980. So I was aware of him, not so much as a player but because broadcasters would say his name with just this utter reverence. I even had his hockey card when I was a kid. He was toothless and grinning, obviously middle-aged, and somehow the pure violence of his era didn't shine through. The cards smelled like bubblegum.
So now to my ears, the phrase elbows up has a folksy and quaint feeling to it.
And what does it turn into in Carney's mouth?
I believe it takes Charlie Angus's idealism and longing and Mike Myers' childlike regression to make the public believe that Canadian sovereignty and identity remains unique under a regime that is barreling toward the most destructive neoliberal program in history, arguably better organized and more efficient than Trump's DOGE process.
Now, I covered the militarism aspect of this with Brent. But to flesh out what else is being lost: Carney's 2025 budget eliminates 40,000 federal public service jobs by 2028. It cuts $57 billion from federal programs over five years. This is 40% deeper than what was proposed during his election campaign, despite Carney's famous promise of caps but not cuts.
Direct program expenses, which is everything the federal government does besides major transfers, are set to increase only by 2.2% over five years, at a time when inflation plus population growth could average around 3% per year. That means real per-capita cuts to virtually all public services are on the way.
He cut $2.7 billion from foreign aid over four years, breaking his explicit campaign promise that his government would not cut foreign aid, while simultaneously increasing defence spending to historic levels.
Environment and Climate Change Canada faces $1.3 billion in cuts, with the Enhanced Nature Legacy Fund, which is crucial for meeting biodiversity targets, expanding Indigenous-led conservation, and supporting species-at-risk recovery, potentially disappearing entirely.
The 15% departmental spending cuts apply across the board to things like Indigenous Services Canada, the department responsible for funding healthcare, education, and child welfare for First Nations, even though the same cuts explicitly exempt equivalent services delivered to non-Indigenous Canadians through provincial transfers. Legal experts describe this as a racially discriminatory funding policy.
Indigenous programs themselves face more than $2.3 billion in cuts, while the token new money for Indigenous-specific consultation on fast-tracked major projects amounts to just $10.1 million over three years, a figure critics describe as derisory given the scale of projects being pushed through.
I am happy to say that there's a long tradition of skeptical anti-nationalism in Canada that is always prepared to deconstruct a moment like Carney's.
It only took a few months for CBC's Elamin Abdelmahmoud to curate a collection of essays called Elbows Up: Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance, in which many contributors took aim at the slogan and the sentiments it's meant to generate. Walrus editor Jessica Johnson likened elbows up to a marketing hook for selling beer.
And then the Anishinaabe scholars went farther. Niigaan Sinclair wrote that it was ironic that the values Canadians seek to protect, empathy, collectivity, multiculturalism, are actually Indigenous keystones of the peoples whom the Canadian state has historically oppressed. Jesse Wente, who is the past chair of the Canada Arts Council, observed the irony of Canada's current fear of losing status with the US, noting that Canadians now find themselves in a position similar to First Nations on Turtle Island, holding one end of a treaty while the other end is shredded.
So the upshot is: Carney repopularized the slogan of a working class guy disciplined by capital. He compared this period of capitalist crisis to a game. He gave it a down-home and plucky feel, and it made the nation feel chummy and vitalized for a while. And something like that can feel like solidarity to those who can't see what capital is doing.
He used elbows up to describe an attitude he's taking into a game in which he knows that when it's all over, he's going to be going out for beers with the other team.
Some of my earliest political memories as a Canadian are of the PM at the time, Brian Mulroney, standing shoulder to shoulder with Ronald Reagan. I was nine back then, but I'd picked up enough from my parents to know that I didn't trust the smiles, the matching blue suits with very little variation.
The decades that have followed have been a long parade of social movement suppression and the contraction of the commons.
I see Carney now looming as a final boss of neoliberalism, with the most weapons and the highest health bars, and you're not sure how many stages of the fight there are.
My older boy plays Elden Ring. He says that what you have to learn in that game is that you will lose countless times to that boss. He told me about a Twitch streamer, Kai Cenat, who lost to a boss 1,700 times. Our son says it destroys the ego, and then you're free to keep learning, and eventually win.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Catch you next time.
