Maybe it's because I never grew up in a Canada in which the polar bear is a national symbol, but when I think Canada, I don't think of polar bears, or vice versa.
One senator doesn't like that beavers are our national symbol. She said we should have something new, suggesting a polar bear. This is why senators should be unseen, unheard and just collect their cheque at the end of the week. They clearly aren't ideas people.
Coca-Cola already uses the polar bear for their mascot. Well, polar bears and Santa Claus. We don't want to have to pay them royalties. Canada owns the North Pole, I think, so we could use Santa, but he might hold a dual-citizenship with Norway.
The Mercury website ran a poll asking what Canada's symbol should be and the beaver was the general consensus. Winning 38 per cent would likely give it a majority government.
Runner-up went to the maple leaf, but it's already on our flag. I love the Canadian flag, but we don't want to be redundant when it comes to symbolizing our nation as we are so much more than a pile of leaves.
The move to get away from the beaver is apparently because they are one step above rodent, a short step that is, and rodents don't represent us. But beavers are underdogs, like Canadians. They just quietly work away and do their thing until one day there's water in the basement and a house of mud and twigs in the river. This is kind of what happened with Justin Bieber, and the entertainment industry.
If we are to select a new symbol, it better be a good one. There isn't much going on for polar bears. I don't think we have a lot in common with those albino northerners.
Maybe a bottle of pure maple syrup, Canada's greatest export. It would be difficult to come up with a catchy way of representing that visually. Mounties were an option on the website that garnered a small following, though I suspect that was probably our local RCMP detachment voting multiple times. Those red coats are eye-catching but red coats also have a different meaning in Britain's history, so those images might be confused by others.
We could have a multi-coloured flag, to represent how Canada is built 90 per cent on immigration from all over the world. But the gay community already has rainbow flags, so we'd have to pay them royalties too.
Canada is just a difficult thing to symbolize in one clean and crisp image. Maybe if we just had an updated, hip beaver logo, one that speaks to a new generation of Canadians. Rather than that squirrelly fellow gnawing on a thin twig, we could give the image some spinach and Popeye our national symbol up a it.
We developed the beaver as a national symbol after the critters' prominence in the local fur trade. Maybe if we made the beaver a slick salesman and gave him a sophisticated name like The Merchant of Canada, he'd be seen as a more respectable representation of us all.
Beavers are so synonymous with Canada, a beaver coin in the 1800s was valued as 10 beaver pelts. We didn't measure value in currency, we measured it in beaver pelts. So if you asked a someone how much that new car was, he'd reply, "It's 12,000 beaver pelts, sir."
That's a Canada I want to live in. Let's keep the beaver.
