The Globe is visiting communities across the country and beyond to hear from Canadians about the issues affecting their lives, their futures and their votes in this federal election.
Until now, they were simply the least noticeable immigrant community in Hollywood: a ubiquitous but largely uncontroversial force behind America’s signature cultural products, their nationality rarely more than a trivia question.
On a recent Saturday, however, those Canadians decided en masse that it was time to make a show of themselves. Thousands of showbiz hosers bought blocks of tickets and made the drive to L.A.’s downtown stadium, many in blue-and-white jerseys.
The Los Angeles Kings were playing the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first Canada-U.S. game here since Donald Trump’s punishing tariffs came into effect, and only days after Mark Carney had called an election that was widely predicted to be a contest over how Canada would battle Mr. Trump.
A pair of Canadian-born TV producers seated beside me remarked that nobody in our section was seeing this as Toronto versus L.A., but as Canada’s chance to get back at the increasingly ugly Americans. More than that, it was a rare chance to express the new mood of fiercely defensive nationalism that’s arisen since Mr. Trump began uttering near-daily threats to Canada’s sovereignty and existence.
Canadian fans showed their pride at March 29's game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the L.A. Kings. One sign boasted of a fan's journey from Scarborough, the Toronto suburb where Ms. Kevork is from.Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Imagn Images via Reuters
“I’ve been in California 20 years, and I don’t think I’ve seen that much representation of Canadians – it’s on another level,” said Zoe Kevork, a Scarborough, Ont., native and entertainment-industry-focused lawyer whose immigration practice had arranged the working visas, green cards and dual citizenships for many of the people seated around her. “After all the tension of the past month, I think there was just this need, this feeling – like ‘I need to go and represent and be amongst my people.’ ”
This past month, she’s fielded a daily torrent of calls from Canadian creatives fearful for their continued U.S. residency, and also from American entertainers seeking to flee to Canada.
As the lights dimmed and the players stood along the blue lines, there was a tense murmur in the rows around me: Would we be booing The Star-Spangled Banner, as Canadians had recently done in Ottawa and Vancouver? Should we? There had been some audible jeers when the screen flashed an image of Wayne Gretzky, the Kings hero and, more recently, Canadian pariah for his embrace of Mr. Trump.
The tension eased when the announcer declared that the anthem would be sung by an LGBT youth choir. Nobody was going to boo that. In fact, the Canadians mostly stood and sang, often with passion. Most told me they wouldn’t have booed anyway: From their perspective, the United States isn’t a foreign threat, but an intimate presence in their lives and their work, often the nationality of their spouses and children, and in some cases their second citizenship.
For the Hollywood Canadians, the mood this year is not so much mass rage as a collective identity crisis. “In the last few weeks, I’ve become part immigration lawyer, part therapist,” Ms. Kevork told me. “Because the conversations I’m having now – it’s the anxiety around your citizenship and the nerves around not feeling like you belong here. As Canadians, we’ve never had that feeling before.”
What is particularly frustrating, a lot of creators told me, is the inability to express that sense of split identity, of your country of residence being at war with your country of birth. Actors and comedians have had an easier time: Mike Myers’s acts of onscreen defiance on Saturday Night Live (and his campaigning for Mr. Carney) have been an inspiration for many here who lack those outlets. But the Trump attacks, the trade war and the ensuing election have been particularly agonizing for those Canadians who spend their days creating the most definitively American movies, TV shows and music.
“I’ve always felt comfortable being both Canadian and American, and it used to feel like there were no contradictions between the two,” said Tim Long, who grew up in Exeter, Ont., and has been a writer and producer for The Simpsons since 1999. “But now it feels like there are severe contradictions – obviously, especially when you come from the country that Trump, perversely, has decided he hates more than any other country apart from, arguably, Ukraine.”
For people like Mr. Long, who says he has become obsessively interested in the minutiae of the Canadian federal election, the Trump administration’s repeated attacks on Canada feel deeply personal. “It sort of feels like – I remember being at school and some bully deciding, ‘I think I’m going to punch you every time I see you,’ and just that feeling of fear and hopelessness and confusion. Like, what did I do to deserve this? I’m just minding my own business, but someone just decides they want to pick on you. That’s how it is as a Canadian – what did we do to deserve this? Why is he so fixated on us?”
Recent events have tested the limits of satire, says Tim Long, top, who wrote a Canada-centric episode of The Simpsons.Jen Osborne/The Globe and Mail; Fox/City TV
It’s particularly awkward because a lot of the most prominent Canadians in Hollywood are involved in comedy, and they are discovering that the situation facing their home country, and the regime in power in their adopted country, are no longer remotely funny.
“I think there was a feeling in the first Trump term that satire will save us if we keep making fun of this guy. That’s how we take down people,” said Mr. Long, who co-created a Simpsons episode during the first Trump term, titled “D’oh Canada,” in which Lisa Simpson flees Trump-era extremism by becoming a refugee in an idealized Canada. He said he doubted that an episode like that would work this time around.
“I don’t think anybody really thinks that way any more. I do think it’s important to keep at it. But also, it can really boomerang and make you feel like we’re just normalizing this guy. … We could do it again, but it wouldn’t feel right. Because I think all satire is sort of secretly a little bit loving, and that’s not how anyone’s feeling now.”
Ellen Rehak is the Canadian owner of Run Out Groove Records in Burbank, Calif., the home base for many of Hollywood’s major film and animation studios.Jen Osborne/The Globe and Mail
For many long-established Canadians here, the Trump attacks have forced them to re-examine their divided identities, and find the fundamental differences between their Canadian and American sides.
Ellen Rehak, a Toronto native and three-decade California resident who runs a record store in Burbank and is at the centre of a network of well-known Canadian comedians, actors and performers here, said this moment marks a painful rupture.
“Throughout my entire adult life, the two countries have had such a close relationship, and the collapse of that relationship is so discombobulating and disheartening, to put it very mildly. At the very least, it’s incredibly insulting for Canada to be treated the way it has been by the White House.”
Ms. Rehak has also become re-engaged with Canada during this election. But she speaks for a lot of the Canadian artists here when she says that moving back is not likely to be an option.
“I don’t know where my line in the sand is – it’s a much easier thing to say, ‘I can’t live with another four years of this, I’m going back’ than to actually act on it. But it wouldn’t even solve anything. Staying here and fighting the good fight, that’s my mentality now. Being inclusive and welcoming to people. Keeping my Canadian values, that’s what I can do.”
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