Canadiana for the cool kids (maple syrup not included)

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/01/2025 (262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

John Batt is not a comedian, nor is he a historian. He’s not exactly a journalist, either.

Yet somehow, he’s also all three.

Batt, 38, is the creator of the popular Instagram account @canada.gov.ca, where he serves as our nation’s foremost Extremely Online curator and chronicler of Canadian culture to more than 92,000 followers.

His vision of Canadiana is not the maple-syrup-and-Mounties, hockey-and-Tim Hortons one, however. Batt serves up niche-nostalgia deep dives and shines a light on obscure cultural corners — a cheeky, high-low mix of intensely specific regional memes, bite-sized history and art lessons, and rabbit-hole explorations of Canada’s weirdest foodstuffs.

Canada is very large but, in many ways, it’s also very small. Despite our varied regional quirks, @canada.gov.ca proves we can bond over shared formative experiences, such as colouring in maps of Canada with Laurentien pencil crayons or watching Fred Penner crawl through a log and into our living rooms on CBC.

In the early 2000s, there was a lot of national anxiety around whether or not Canada has a legible cultural identity, especially living next door to one of the world’s biggest cultural exporters.

Batt’s project proves it absolutely does, and it’s more rich, diverse and complicated than beavers, tuques and calling the last letter of the alphabet Zed.

“I want this account to be the anti-I Am Canadian Molson beer commercial. We are done with that. It’s Canadian history for bros. I completely stay away from that stuff and, wherever possible, criticize and make fun of that,” Batt says.

• • •

The Instagram account came about completely by accident, says Batt, who grew up in Fredericton, N.B., and now lives in Quebec.

In 2017, he was working an office job that was, in his own words, “absolutely soul-crushing.”

“It could not have been worse. I was looking for a big-boy job that was not in the service industry so I found myself, through friends, working for this company,” he says.

One day, bored, sitting at his desk, @canada.gov.ca came to him as a potential handle for an Instagram account. It struck him as funny, the idea that maybe people would think the Canadian government was oddly proficient at social media.

The account’s bio still says “not the government” because, owing to the account’s vaguely bureaucratic handle with its classically Canadian mouthful of suffixes, sometimes people still think Batt is the government. Like Jann Arden, who commented, “Please stop the live export of horses to Japan” on a @canada.gov.ca Valentine’s Day post about her.

They had a good laugh about the misunderstanding on her podcast in December.

The handle was available, so he nabbed it. He began posting what he calls mundane, arbitrary Canadian landscape photos — “maybe like a rowboat in a Newfoundland harbour, or like a grain elevator in Saskatchewan” — before making the switch to “posting a photo of Jean Chrétien strangling someone with the Shawinigan Handshake, just to brighten people’s mornings.”

But @canada.gov.ca really took off when Batt started writing captions and telling stories, letting his curiosity lead the way.

“Like, how did the whole Shawinigan Handshake come to be, or what about the PEI Pie Brigade? What about the group of people who were, for five years, throwing pies in the faces of politicians as a means of protest? That kind of thing,” he says.

Batt is interested in telling Canadian stories without glamorizing Canadian history.

“Because now is not the time for that. I think that people of our age, our generation, are not huge fans of the quote-unquote, Canadian legacy, so to speak,” Batt says of millennials.

“I think that we’re proud to be Canadian because we’re proud of Canadians. I don’t think we’re proud of Canada. I think there’s an important distinction there.”

He’s also interested in challenging the narratives many Canadians grew up with, such as the idea that Canada is inherently a peacekeeping nation, or that we’re universally beloved, or that we’re better than our southern neighbours (or anyone else) when it comes to our human-rights track record.

“We’re a lot more colonizing and imperialist than we were led to believe growing up,” he says.

---

Batt has been able to quit his day job. There’s @canada.gov.ca merch. He’s even collaborated with a Toronto brewery on a canada.gov.ca IPA.

He’s also bringing a live @canada.gov.ca-inspired show to cities across Canada, including Winnipeg this weekend as part of Winterruption. This will be his first time to the Prairies, although being from the Maritimes he finds a certain kinship with people from the middle provinces — especially as the pandemic brought people out east.

“One of the things that my Maritime friends and myself noticed straight away was that the people from the Prairies were the most like us: overlooked, a little underappreciated, a little rough around the edges, but salt of the earth and what you see is what you get. We took to calling people from the Prairies Prairitimers because they were just so much like us,” he says.

As to how he’s translating an Instagram account into a live show, Batt likes to say what it’s not.

“It’s not a podcast, it’s not standup comedy; it’s something else all together. I’ve called it a tipsy TED Talk in the past. I’ve likened it to Stuart McLean having a couple drinks before going up on stage. At the end of the day, it’s a 70-minute PowerPoint presentation about the absurd moments in Canadian history that I tailor to the town that I’m in,” he says.

For a long time, @canada.gov.ca was anonymous, and Batt was known only as The Admin. He knows he’s blowing his own cover a bit by appearing IRL.

“I think the whole anonymity part of the account has really helped drive ticket sales, which I find very funny, because I wonder whether or not it’s a letdown when people arrive and then I’m just some guy.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com