It took till my mission to learn that those ol’ Classic Rock-radio standbys The Guess Who were Canadian—and of course it was a Canadian companion who informed me.
The song certainly takes on a completely different resonance once you take its Canadian origins into account: suddenly it’s not about getting over some young filly that broke your heart, but a very literal rejection of the seductions of the superpower south of the border. He’s not addressing the object of his scorn as a fellow citizen, but as a foreigner affirming his autonomy and independence.
That particular mission companion (one of my favorites, by the way) was from Alberta in particular, near Cardston; the town was one of many settlements first established by LDS pioneers in western Canada in the late 1800s, and is home to the first LDS temple built outside the U.S. The Cardston area in general has tended to be treated as a mini Canadian Utah. This is the same region, for example, that produced Hugh B. Brown: a major in the Canadian military during WWI, a lawyer who passed the bar at the University of Alberta, and an apostle and first counselor in the First Presidency under David O. McKay—the sole non-U.S. member of the Q15 during his tenure.
Not that such was considered all that unique or radical in his lifetime; then, as now, Canada—so similar in language, history, and culture to their much more populated neighbor to the south—has tended to get overlooked as “America’s hat,” the afterthought of North America, a de facto “51st state.” Most Canadians in general, globally renowned for their politeness, have tended to take these jokes in good-humored stride.
But it would be a grave error to mistake politeness for cowardice; Elder Bednar once said in Conference that meekness is not the same as weakness—which principle was again proven when a certain reelected casino owner started making noise about actually annexing Canada as the 51st state just earlier this year (apparently assuming they would be pushovers about it). Canadians in general responded by boycotting American products, closing ranks, standing up for themselves, and overall treated the idea with overwhelming contempt. (The tariffs certainly didn’t help either.) Canadian hockey fans started openly booing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of matches; Canada’s Conservative Party—leading by double digits as recently as January—lost decisively in April due to the rapist’s meddling; and the Prime Minister-elect (a Harvard trained economist) allegedly began manipulating the bond market alongside the EU and Japan to force the TACO to back off on tariffs. Like the Guess Who over fifty years ago, Canada told America “I don’t wanna see your face no more.” And who could blame ‘em!
Hugh B. Brown, incidentally, also proved much feistier than his Canadian background might suggest. As documented in Matthew L. Harris’s recent book Second Class Saints, Brown fought almost single-handedly to end the racist Black priesthood ban his entire long time in the First Presidency. And that not quietly! In both interviews and General Conference, he openly called it a policy, not doctrine, forcefully contradicting his opponents within the Twelve; he constantly pressured an obviously-sympathetic McKay to end the ban outright; and he used every stratagem in the book to outmaneuver the hardliners right to the very end of McKay’s life.
Alas Brown, much like Canada itself, was simply outnumbered. Hardliners like Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, Mark E. Peterson, and Ezra Taft Benson refused to budge on calling the ban doctrine; and when Smith became Church President in 1970, Brown was demoted (however much everyone refused to call it that) back to the Twelve. He passed away in 1975, three years before Spencer W. Kimball finally pulled the trigger on ending the ban himself. There would not be another non-American called to the Twelve till Uchtdorf in 2004.
But Brown was validated in any case, even if he never got to see it in this life. He was right on this issue, and the American hardliners were wrong. Perhaps Canada’s marginal status in North American politics gave him greater empathy for other marginalized people, who knows (or at least caused him to not automatically equate power with righteousness). Such marginality perhaps also explains Canadian’s renowned sense of humor: they don’t take themselves too seriously, so they don’t take America’s pompous self-regard very seriously, either. Or maybe the sheer fact of him being an outsider to America meant he didn’t share any prior commitment to American racism. Or maybe, given that Canada has its own racist problems, being Canadian simply allowed Brown to more easily see his American colleagues’ blind-spots.
In any case, when one reviews the history of the Black priesthood ban in the LDS Church, one begins to wish there had been more Canadians in senior Church leadership. Canadians may seem very similar to Americans, but they are definitely not identical; and it is exactly where they are different that they are most important.