At the beginning of last week, as Simon Laroche, the president of Kraft Heinz Canada, gathered with his senior executive team in Toronto to hash out a plan for how to respond if U.S. President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on Canadian exports, they realized they had to confront some vexing misinformation about the national identity of cream cheese.
More than 70 per cent of the products sold by Kraft Heinz in Canada are manufactured domestically by Canadian workers, Mr. Laroche explained in an interview on Monday. But as fear and uncertainty descended across the country, some employees in their Montreal factory heard from family members about calls on social media to boycott the company’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese and other brands that consumers believed are made in America.
“There’s a lot of misinformation,” he said. The employees were “afraid of not having a job two months from now.”
By the end of the day, Kraft had secured 30 seconds of airtime in the Canadian broadcast of the Super Bowl. On Wednesday, the company shut down part of its Montreal plant to film a spot boasting, as a voiceover noted, of the “real Canadian wheat and cheese” in the locally produced Kraft Dinner and the “100 per cent Canadian dairy” in the Philadelphia Cream Cheese, as well as the “other Canadian classics prepared here, in our factory in Montreal, Quebec, where over 1,000 proud Canadians help bring Kraft to the rest of Canada.”
The ad aired Sunday night shortly before the halftime show, and it fit right into a rare moment of commercially sponsored Canadian flag waving.
On a night when many Canadians normally resent being subjected to Canadian TV ads, an unusual number of domestic brands trumpeted their patriotism during the Super Bowl broadcast. Some declared themselves “Proudly Canadian” while others rolled out such national signifiers in their ads as a beaver, maple leaves, or “Sorry” to highlight their Canuck bona fides.
The eruption of national pride in commercial form came as Canadians are rethinking their relationship with the U.S. and its products and services, as that country’s president continues to threaten tariffs and muse about annexing Canada.
Coffee chain Tim Hortons aired a spot created specifically for the Super Bowl broadcast that featured a tongue-in-cheek riff on Stompin’ Tom Connors’s Canadian classic The Hockey Song. In place of the original lyrics – “The good ol’ hockey game / Is the best game you can name” – a crooner sang, “the good ol’ football game … is the second-best game you can name.”
The ad concluded with cheeky on-screen text – “Sorry, not sorry” – and the statement: “We’re proudly Canadian.”
Bell Media’s Crave streaming service ran numerous spots throughout the night advertising original shows it described as “made in Canada, by Canadians,” such as the Leonard Cohen mini-series So Long, Marianne, a docuseries about the Montreal Canadiens, the hockey comedy Shoresy and Canada’s Drag Race. The spots concluded with the description: “Proudly Canadian.”
Men’s underwear brand Manmade, which is based in Montreal, also included the “Proudly Canadian” label in its ads.
Super Bowl commercials are a notorious sore spot among Canadian TV viewers because of federal regulations that permit what is known as “simultaneous substitution.” That enables the holder of the domestic broadcast rights – currently, Bell Media, which operates the English-language TSN and French-language RDS – to swap in ads made just for the Canadian market.
The scheme means Canadian viewers miss out on the dozens of slick U.S. commercials, which this year saw brands spend upwards of US$8-million for 30 seconds of airtime in addition to the production costs. Canadians who want to watch the ads and participate in the chatter around them have to search out the spots online.
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But in the days leading up to this year’s Super Bowl, there were hints – online suggestions to boycott the game, for example – that Canadian attitudes toward the annual celebration of American culture and excess may have been curdling, leaving room for domestic brands to pitch themselves as patriotic alternatives.
Tim Hortons stepped up, though it didn’t originally intend to boast of being “Proudly Canadian.”
Company executives met with their ad agency, Gut Toronto, in early January, “before all this tariff drama unfolded,” noted Hope Bagozzi, chief marketing officer of Tim Hortons, in an interview on Monday. “We wanted to do something just playful and fun, and I think using the Stompin’ Tom song was sort of harking to our hockey roots,” she said. “While we love watching the Super Bowl, a lot of Canadians, their heart still lies with hockey. So that was kind of the impetus.”
But by the time Gut finished making the ad, the political tremors from the U.S. had gotten louder and more unnerving. The agency added the “Proudly Canadian” tagline – the first time Tim Hortons, which wears its Canadian identity on its sleeve, has made that explicit proclamation in an ad.
“If all this has done anything, it’s inspired a bit more pride in being Canadian and what that means, and I think Tims is probably part of that,” said Bagozzi.
Home Hardware, which regularly boasts of its homegrown character, ran an ad spotlighting some of the store’s franchise owners and declared the company is “proud to be locally owned and genuinely Canadian.”
Even brands that aren’t based in Canada but have large Canadian operations played up their local connections. TikTok Canada ran a 30-second spot about Corey McMullan, a content creator with almost 500,000 followers who uses the platform to promote his family-owned appliance store in Smiths Falls, Ont. The ad is part of the app’s TikTok Sparks Good effort to burnish its brand as it comes under fire in both Canada and the U.S. for its alleged control by the Chinese government.
And though a 60-second domestic spot for Doritos never explicitly mentioned Canada, it asserted that its chips are “For the BOLD” – with a maple leaf in the middle of the “o” in “bold” – and burst with Canuck clichés. Lumberjacks, road-hockey players, a beaver, a suburban dude using a flame-thrower to melt a mound of snow in his driveway and a Newfoundland cod all belted out, to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s anthemic I Will Survive, “I won’t apologize!”
The spot ended, of course, with one of them saying sorry.