We just got back from spending a week with the kids in Canada, one of my favorite places. Over the years I have visited each of the major cities (Toronto, Ottowa, Montreal, Vancouver) multiple times without and with kids, and each experience has been notably good.
Although I have visited Canada many times as a tourist, this feeling originally crystallized many years ago when I traveled there quite a bit for business as part of my job at Kenneth Cole. That was how I met with the team at the Brainstorm Group, a boutique creative agency we had engaged in Toronto. Now marketing people are known for being, shall we say, confident, and fashion people can be well, overly-engaged in their own view of things. Frequently, this can be a toxic mix, but the relationship went swimmingly, and the people at Brainstorm were wonderful to work with. The proof: 10 years later Brainstorm still works with Kenneth Cole in Canada. This in a world where agency – client relationships make celebrity marriages look positively ageless. It helps that Kenneth is pretty damn cool too. But I digress.
To me, Canada has always seemed to represent a kinder, more enlightened version of America, a place where people understand that guns are for the police and not the rest of us, where healthcare is a right and not a privilege, and where the people who run the government can be counted on to accept scientific fundamentals, like evolution.
One of the nice things about living in the Seattle area is that Canada is so close. We can drive there in about 3 hours hours and our local NPR station, KUOW, features weekly updates and analysis of Canadian news with Vancouver Sun columnist, Vaughn Palmer. I wish these chats were available more widely because Canadians offer us the most balanced and fair outsider view of the American landscape available.
So, I was taken aback to see the kerfuffle started while we were over there last week after a woman nursed her baby in public at an H&M in Vancouver. (Yes, I am probably the last mom in the blogosphere to mention this story, but hey, that’s why they call it vacation, folks.) My take is that this dust-up was simply a product of two excellent strains in the Canadian character conflicting with one another: liberal-minded support of human freedoms butting up against an unfailing commitment to niceness and decorum.
Ironically, this happened in H&M of all places, a trendy department store based in Sweden, a country so liberal that once, while vacationing there, my husband once saw a topless woman riding a bicycle. (This, unsurprisingly, made such a strong impression on his conservative Japanese sensibilities that 15 years later it is still the first story he tells whenever anything related to Sweden comes up.)
The whole thing seems to be resolved now, with a Toronto-based PR representative of H&M flying in to meet and welcome a riled-up bunch of moms who came down to the store last Friday to protest with a group nurse-in. That’s Canada, a happy and diplomatic ending.
Has anyone else been to and loved Canada? I would love to get suggestions of great places to go with kids there. Maybe I’ll even make a few of my own in my next post.
