There's hockey and beer. And there's snow. And driving with your lights on in broad daylight. And that guy who painted those beautiful pictures of beavers and moose. So who says our neighbors up north in Canada have no national identity worth preserving?
Not the hockey fans in cosmopolitan Vancouver and Edmonton, whose exercise in self-esteem it was last week to roundly boo The Star-Spangled Banner before NHL playoff games involving (ultimately victorious) teams from visiting American cities. And not that group of igloo patriots up in arms about another, even graver Yankee threat to Canadian independence. Seems we've polluted their national semen supply.
In 1999, a Canadian fertility-clinic client brought home her purchase of 100 percent, unadulterated Maple Leaf sperm. And promptly caught a venereal disease. Whereupon Health Canada imposed screening regulations so stringent that most clinics have since been forced to stop collecting local donations. To keep their storerooms stocked, instead, they now rely on a single, wholesale supplier. That would be an outfit called the Zytex Corporation.
Trouble is, the Zytex Corporation is located in Georgia. And Canadians have recently discovered that Georgia is in the United States.
"This sounds like a secret American plan to finally take over Canada," Canadian member of parliament Jason Kenney told the Calgary Sun on April 20. He seems to have been joking, but other people quoted in the same story were deadly serious. Should an infertile Canadienne make use of semen from . . . ugh, America? "It's one of the things that decides whether you're going to be patriotic or not," says Dr. Roger Pierson, past president of his country's Fertility and Andrology Society. "We're dependent on the Americans for so many things, why be dependent on them for sperm as well?"
Some Canadian health experts, like Jean Haase of the Hamilton (Ontario) Life Sciences Centre, are also concerned that exclusive reliance on Zytex-provided American semen might increase the incidence of accidental inbreeding.
Which is already a major problem in Canada, judging from their hockey fans.