Rothenburger — Great coffee, Mounties, CBC and Canada Day

COLUMN — The thing I like best about Canada Day is that it makes me stop and think about why I love my country, and my community.

A few years ago, I made a Canada Day speech in which I talked about famous Canadians and inventions instead of relying on the usual bland prose that tends to be offered up. Ever since, I’ve made it a personal tradition to turn my mind toward some of the things that make Canada different.

This year, I’m thinking about these very Canadian things:

I love it that our $1 coin is called a loonie, and our $2 coin is a toonie.

When my friend Peter Sharp dressed up in his RCMP red serge and escorted the official grand entry of the cake for my father-in-law’s 90th birthday three years ago, he blared away on his bagpipes as he marched. We had relatives visiting from England and they thought a Mountie in red serge playing bagpipes was the coolest thing they’d ever seen. It made me proud to be Canadian.

The CBC, for all its warts, is part of what makes us Canadian, tells us what being Canadian is all about and reminds us that being Canadian is a good thing. I wish Stephen Harper would remember that.

Canada geese are big and noisy and crap a lot, but they’re our geese. Ozzie and Sharon, two big honkers, stop in at our place every spring to start a new family, and when they arrive it brings joy to my heart seeing them again.

We call it soccer. Everybody else calls it football. They’re wrong, we’re right. And so what if we never make it to FIFA? We’ve still got some good hockey players, and now we’re getting good at tennis, too.

Hamilton, Ont. has had a bit of a graffiti problem. Somebody was tagging public property with “Have a nice day.” When we take our household garbage to the community dumpster on weekends, the attendant unfailingly says, “Have a good one” after punching our eco card. Only in Canada.

It’s great living in a country where our most famous citizen repairs botched home renovations, and who tells his clients to “keep smilin’.”

If the worst thing about living in Kamloops is the parking kiosks, things can’t be all bad.

One day, I was behind somebody trying to figure out how to make the parking kiosk work. “Darn thing,” he said, and walked away. In some countries, City Hall would be stormed.

A former newspaper colleague has started a consulting company. It’s called Moose Media. Of course it is.

Beaver. I hate it when they come out of the river and strip my saplings but I love hearing them slap their tails in the water as they escape. Geese, loons, moose and beaver. We’re a nation of interesting creatures.

My favourite story from the 2003 wildfires is about the McLure evacuees who got into an argument because the wife had told the husband to save their wedding pictures. He decided to evacuate his hockey equipment instead. There’s nothing more Canadian than that.

This is the 40th anniversary of the death of Tim Horton. Horton was a defenceman with the Toronto Maple Leafs and he died in a single-vehicle crash after a game. Today, people know him for donuts and coffee and few know that he was an NHL hockey player. Even fewer know he was driving impaired when he died. (If you’re thinking he must have been drinking beer, you’r wrong; it was vodka.)

They also might not know that, for a time, the Tim’s company was owned by Wendy’s, but later returned to Canadian ownership. Thank you, Lord.

This Tuesday, let’s hoist a double-double (or, if you must, a beer) to our great country.

AROUND THE TOWN — Looking forward to meeting and talking with Uji Mayor Tadashi Yamamoto on Tuesday morning before the Canada Day ceremonies get underway. It will be his first visit to Kamloops, having succeeded Isamu Kubota, who retired in 2012 after visiting here several times over the years.

armchairmayor@gmail.com