By Matthew Visser

€ anadians have had this
stereotypical crown put over
their heads as being nice people.
Canada is the country where people

will hear the words “please” and “thank
you” like echoes throughout the streets,
hearing someone yelling on the top of

a mountain for everyone to hear. And I
can say that I try and put the effort out to
say these two simple words as much as

I can. When I ride the bus I hear almost
every person when they get off say thank
you to the bus driver for getting them

to their destination. But it’s funny that
this is the bus driver’s job and he will be
doing this even if the passengers don’t say
thank you. But I guess this is what makes
Canadians, well, Canadian. And I guess
this is where we Canadians have got

this stereotype. And I say this is a good
stereotype and what makes the world see
us differently from our cousins to the
south.

Maybe we as Canadians living in
this great country, and living in British
Columbia, are as nice as the world wants
us to be and also as nice as we need to
be to the world. As I see it however, we
can be as nice as we want to the world
and our foreign cousins and friends
and neighbours; we need to be nicer
to ourselves. Canadians have a way of

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forgetting about how we can be cruel to
other Canadians.

I don’t mean that we don’t care or
don’t pay attention to the world that is
around us. It is just that when Canadians
watch the news, especially local news,
that news stations focuses on local events
of the day, and then onto global news.
Global does this and whenever I watch
it, the first forty minutes of news is about
the destruction of mankind on himself
and the left over twenty minutes is full of
very helpful weather, sports, and traffic.
But within the forty I don’t see enough
news about Canada as a whole. And this
is where, I think, non-Canadians, possibly
even Canadians, think of themselves as
nice people.

Now it is time to talk about how truly
wrong this is. I have, for this newspaper
article, cut out articles from multiple
newspapers from around the province and
looked at the sections labelled “Canada”
or Canadian News” and sadly, just like the
forty minutes of news on the television,
is all a bunch of terribly harsh, real acts
done by Canadians onto other Canadians.
And to think, I thought we were nice
people.

One story from Toronto came out
about a husband and wife who had forced
their senior mother to live in their garage
since November. The woman is 68 years
old, is in life threatening condition and

  

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is in hospital with severe frostbite. Apart
from this, the woman was not given
enough food and had to use a portable
toilet, which had not been changed for
some time. Over this, it is estimated that
between four and ten percent of Canada’s
seniors’ experience some kind of abuse,
which through this story, is clearly
unacceptable and is something that needs
to be looked into with more detail.

Another account features border
officer Daniel Greenhalgh, who took
four women aside during April to May in
separate incidents and stripped searched
them without consent, sexually touching
three of them. Now, when I heard this
story I first though that this guy has the
biggest balls to try and go through with
this, let alone four times, and also really
does not like his job or wants to know
what it must be like to live in a jail cell.
Because, really, who when they read this
article, which is only a few months old,
thought this guy was going to get away
with this?

My last example is another BC
story about three men charged with
having a child pornography ring with 57
total children. These men were part of a
worldwide scandal, having a total of 218
charges against people who were a part of
the child pornography ring. The children,
boys and girls, are of all ages, but some
were as young as four. The three men who

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were arrested by Vancouver police, in my
opinion, need to see multiple shrinks and
specialists to try and figure out why they
find this a satisfying way to live life and
how to understand that doing this destroys
a young child’s psyche and ability to grow
up normal within society.

So I guess what I am really trying
to get across is that individually, like
every other person on this planet, we are
all capable of doing terrible things. The
examples I have written of are only four
that occurred in Toronto and throughout
the Lower Mainland. Canadians are
capable of doing terrible things to each
other and I guess that as a people, we
don’t see that the stereotype that we have
from the world is just as easily stripped
from us when we hurt and cause pain to
other Canadian.

I guess Canadians are just not as
nice to each other as we are to the rest of
the world. I guess we can now have the
stereotype that Canadians, when we go
to other peoples’ house for dinner we are
so polite and properly behave, but when
we come home we raise hell and hurt our
family members. My mom used to hate
this when she heard I was like this when I
was growing up. I was a wonderful kid at
other peoples’ homes but a horrible child
when I was at my own home. I guess I am
a stereotypical Canadian.

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