Boo. It’s Your Patriotic Duty

02/15/2025

Best scribe around these parts for the last while has been sports writer Cathal Kelly who carries on the great tradition of Globe and Mail play-pen columnists such as Scott Young (Neil’s dad), Allan Abel, Trent Frayne and Stephen Brunt.

Kelly was in his best voice this Saturday morning when he addressed the booing of the U.S. national anthem at Canadian hockey games. In rather unCanadian words, he told his countrymen that it is time to drop the nice act and become what Canucks once were … tough.

The men who stormed Vimy Ridge were not nice nor were the men who landed on Normandy beach. Nor were the men who roamed the hills of Afghanistan looking for particularly not-nice terrorists. And while lumbermen, miners, farmers, and fishers (yes fishers) might have been nice, they were also tough.

Now Canadians are nice (or as Americans would have it … inconsequential).

Time to dump the nice act, Kelly says.

Everywhere else, if you want to voice your displeasure with American interference, you have to go to the U.S. Embassy. You do a bit of chanting, burn a flag, maybe get tear gassed. Doing so makes you look hysterical, and therefore easy to ignore.
Here, you can go to a sports contest most nights and, for no extra charge, you are provided with an opportunity to do the most basic sort of politics. Someone sings. You boo.
It is a harmless, but meaningful, gesture. Mexico, Panama and Greenland don’t have this luxury. Just us. We are exercising it on their behalf, as well as our own.
The main argument against booing seems to be that it’s not nice. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly called it “unfortunate,” the limpest adjective in the English language.
It’s also unfortunate that our manufacturing sector is going to be burned to the ground because America made a deal with us and no longer feels like keeping its word. I’d say one of those things is more unfortunate than the other.

If you want to read the Kelly column, you’ll have to subscribe (which your agent recommends) to the Globe. Subscribing to reputable news sources is a bit of a patriotic duty as well. If you do subscribe to the Globe (god bless ya), you can read Kelly’s column here.

And the hell with NHL deputy poo-bah Bill Daly. I’ve interviewed him. Daly said if I used anything he said, he would never talk to me again. Problem was … I wasn’t going to use Daly’s illustrious words because they were … ah … inconsequential. But now, given his vow, I had to run something. I wasn’t about to be bullied by that guy. Furthermore I wasn’t a sportswriter so I didn’t need the blowhard. Daly isn’t very nice. Sometimes, I’m not very nice.

And back to the main topic of this wandering yarn … boo, while you still can.

If your best friends are being (insert expletive here), tell them.

Ken Gray