Mark Critch’s latest book is Sorry, Not Sorry: An Unapologetic Look at What Makes Canada Worth Fighting For, from which this essay has been adapted.
The Big Nickel, in Sudbury, is nine metres tall and 64 million times bigger than the actual coin.Fred Lum
Americans love their political heroes. They do much more than put their faces on currency. They carve them into mountains. They build giant monuments and larger-than-life statues. They turn them into godlike immortals who can do no wrong.
A few years ago, I found myself in Washington on a stroll along the National Mall. It’s a landscaped park lined with iconic memorials to America’s political heroes. Spend one day there and you’ll quickly realize that they do everything bigger in the States. The Washington Monument is both a stunning memorial to their founding father and the gold standard of phallic symbols.
The statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, just a short walk away, truly is a wonder to behold. Chiselled from white marble, Lincoln is 19 feet tall. Thomas Jefferson’s memorial statue, on the south side of the Tidal Basin nearby, is also 19 feet tall, but he doesn’t even get a chair. Martin Luther King Jr.’s statue stands opposite Jefferson across the basin and is the tallest, at 30 feet.
People tour the Lincoln Memorial at dusk in Washington on Nov. 2. The statue is nearly six metres tall and made of white marble.AL DRAGO/Reuters
If the United States were a house, the National Mall would be the mantel over the fireplace. The place where the family photos are kept so you can brag to the visitors. The memorials in the National Mall are there to create the mythology America wants the world to see and its own people to believe in. America is the modern Rome, and Rome must have its gods.
There is no comparable space in Canada. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Francis Scarpaleggia, recently declared the United States to be “modern-day Rome in size and power.” He then added, “We are Athens in culture, values and democracy. That is how we must see ourselves. That is who we must be.”
Athens has the Parthenon, the Zappeion, the Erechtheion. They had temples to Athena Nike and Olympian Zeus. The Athens analogy refers to democracy, public discourse and education. But surely, if we are to be the new Athens, we should have a couple of statues?
I have spent a lot of years wandering around our nation’s capital. As a correspondent for CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, I’ve had the good fortune to see more of the Parliament buildings than most Canadians have. I’ve admired the Parliament buildings. I respect them. But I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever been in awe of them.
The statue of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in front of East Block on Parliament Hill is one of some modest memorials found through the grounds.Roger Hallett/The Globe and Mail
Peppered amongst our government buildings, however, you will find some modest memorials. Canada’s first francophone prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, has a statue there. Laurier was no slouch. He brought both Alberta and Saskatchewan into Confederation, which is no easy feat for a French guy. His statue isn’t that big. If he was knocked off his pedestal, he’d be close to his real-life height. He stands facing the Château Laurier, the five-star Fairmont hotel named in his honour, which is a much bigger monument to his life.
One of the first things you come across, just a stone’s throw from the sidewalk in front of Parliament Hill, is a monument to the War of 1812. Of course, Canadians weren’t about to let our one big victory over the United States get away without a mention.
Across the street, in front of the Senate building, a grouping of statues celebrates the Famous Five. These were the women who won the Persons Case, which recognized women as persons under the law and made them eligible for appointment to the Senate of Canada. The statues show the women celebrating their victory. There’s even an empty chair so you, too, can be a part of the monument.
Peppered throughout the area, in clusters of bushes and down winding paths, you’ll find statues of George-Étienne Cartier, Queen Elizabeth II and others, but, while attractive, there is nothing monumental about our monuments.
In Canada, we don’t toot our own horn much. Nobody wants a 30-foot statue of Justin Trudeau. In Canada, we like to commemorate the things that really matter. Not the prime ministers. Not the victories. That’s just not who we are. No, we prefer to honour the things that truly make us Canadian and bind us together as one nation from coast to coast to coast.
The Big Nickel with the Vale 'super stack' in the background. The attraction features an image of a smokestack to honour Sudbury's mining history.The Globe and Mail
Like the Big Nickel in Sudbury. It’s nine metres tall. It weighs 13,000 kilograms. It is 64 million times bigger than the real thing, so you’d need pretty deep pockets to claim it. It features an image of a smokestack on one side to honour the town’s rich mining history and what I would imagine is the world’s largest portrait of King George VI on the other.
The Big Nickel was the brainchild of Ted Szilva, a firefighter born to Hungarian immigrants who pitched it to the town to commemorate its centennial. But the committee rejected it, calling the plan a “Mickey Mouse operation.” So he decided he would build it himself. He bought land and raised the money by selling miniature versions of the nickel through coin-collecting magazines. The city refused to offer him a building permit, so a year later the Big Nickel was finally open to the public just four feet outside of the city limits.
Today, the nickel attracts around a 100,000 visitors a year. I don’t think of Sudbury’s Big Nickel as a monument to spare change, or even mining. I think of it as a monument to what Canadians can achieve when they’re too stubborn to know better.
The Wawa Goose has been replaced twice and was the subject of a Stompin' Tom Connors song.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
But the Nickel is not the only oversized monument to Canadian innovation. In 1960, the Trans-Canada Highway was set to link Wawa, Ont., and Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. A Wawa businessperson named Al Turcott figured all that traffic meant a lot of potential customers zooming past his town. That could lead to a lot of extra business if he could only get those cars to stop. “Wawa” means “wild goose” in Ojibwe, so naturally he built an eight-metre-tall bird out of plaster by the side of the road. Eventually the plaster goose was replaced by a steel one, and when that rusted, they made yet another out of steel covered in bronze. The Wawa Goose became such a Canadian icon that Stompin’ Tom Connors even wrote a song about it.
One hundred thousand people visit the Wawa Goose each year, too. Maybe they’re the same hundred thousand who visit the Big Nickel. They just might be, because other towns have followed suit and you can criss-cross the country and visit the Big Nickel, the Wawa Goose and the Big Loonie in Echo Bay, Ont. In Drumheller, Alta., you’ll find the World’s Largest Dinosaur guarding the side of the road. She’s four-and-a-half times larger than a real Tyrannosaurus rex, and for five bucks you can climb right inside her mouth. There was also the World’s Largest Hockey Stick in Duncan, B.C., once accompanied by the World’s Largest Puck. The Big Apple isn’t in New York; it’s in Colborne, Ont., standing 10 metres high, a tribute to apples that’s four times the size of any statue we have in honour of any prime minister.
There’s a giant beaver in Beaverlodge, Alta. A giant lumberjack’s axe in Nackawic, N.B. A massive moose in Moose Jaw and a freaking big fiddle in Sydney, N.S. These are the monuments that make Canada great. They’re in the heart of the country, our small towns. They show the resilience of our communities, which, like the country itself, refuse to let their size stop them. These are the things Canadians choose to celebrate.