A Canada Day Adler beginning

Opinion

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This article was published 30/06/2023 (811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” — Marshall McLuhan

Saturday is Canada Day.

We’re just a kitten — still 44 years away from 200. Maybe by then, we will have what McLuhan, the late philosopher and media guru, claimed we were missing — an identity.

McLuhan was a brilliant teacher who was born in Edmonton, but had much more than a cup of coffee in Winnipeg.

He attended school at the University of Manitoba before he went overseas to Cambridge. He taught at various schools in the United States and Canada — eventually becoming an institution at the University of Toronto.

McLuhan died 43 years ago. But his work will live forever for a multitude of reasons. The prescient professor talked about the coming of the worldwide web — the internet — decades before it happened. He’s best known for the expression, “The medium is the message.”

As a child watching McLuhan doing interviews on CBC, it was clear as an Alexander Graham Bell, that I was going to be a media professional.

Everything McLuhan said about how media could captivate the imagination rang true for me. I had not a sliver of doubt that I could tell stories, coloured with emotion and connect with people via the use of a microphone or camera or both. Instinctively I knew it.

But Prof. McLuhan gave me the confidence that public communications wasn’t just something that belonged in the realm of my childhood imagination.

Fifty years ago today, I pushed my very first button on a soundboard in the control room of a Top 40 rock radio station, CKGM, in my hometown of Montreal. I was only 18 when I began to professionally pursue my Canadian dream, wanting to prove that I could excel at what Prof. McLuhan inspired me to do.

I wasn’t allowed to speak into a live microphone at that radio station. My job was to produce shows for the various communicators, most of whom had at least 15 years of experience. Fifteen years was a lot more than 15 seconds. So on this day 50 years ago, I had no idea how long it would take me to become a professional on-air communicator, with enough skills and showmanship to work in a large North American market, which was my goal.

When I pushed that very first professional button at 6 p.m. Eastern time on July 1, 1973, in Montreal, I didn’t know that within a year, I’d be on the air in Vancouver, and two months after speaking into a Vancouver mic, I’d be back in Montreal speaking into the No. 1 microphone in my hometown, at 800 CJAD, the station Mike Adler listened to all day long, outside of 6:30 p.m. — 8 p.m. which was when Barbara Frum and her guests occupied all of my papa’s thoughts on CBC’s As It Happens.

If you had told me 50 years ago today that someday I would no longer call Montreal home, I would have thought you were a clown.

I was driving east on the Trans-Canada on a Labour Day weekend 49 years ago when I stopped in Winnipeg.

I was driving the cross-country drive from Vancouver to Montreal and I paused in Winnipeg to see some friends I had made in Alberta and British Columbia. They were in Winnipeg for the holiday weekend. So I wanted to celebrate with them.

Like in every other Winnipeg conversation, I bumped into someone who knew someone I knew. After shaking hands and chatting with the boss at KY58, he offered me work. The offer included tuition at the university Marshall McLuhan studied at when he was my age.

The stars seemed aligned.

But the CJOB of Montreal, CJAD, gave me the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of their radio legends. To this radio baby, the candy was too sweet to turn down.

While I said no to Winnipeg 49 summers ago, I said yes in the summer of ’81 and the fall of ’98.

In my adult life I have lived here five times as long as I did in Montreal. On this Canada Day, I have to tell the late professor, McLuhan, that he was right about many things — but not everything.

This Winnipegger feels Canada does have an identity. It’s the promised land for hard-working people from around the world, looking for the best place on Earth to call home.

Happy Canada Day!

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com