Jeff Douglas portrayed Joe Canada in a beer commercial 25 years ago. It’s inextricable from both him, and the country’s newfound united spirit in the face of American trade bluster
There is a price that comes with success.
Mark Hamill can’t get a bagel without someone yelling “Luke, I AM your father.” Kit Harington suffers endless recitations of “You know nothing, John Snow.” Vin Diesel has probably heard just about every version of a “family” quote from his Fast franchise.
For Jeff Douglas, his bane is: “I. Am. Canadian.”
It’s been 25 years since the actor became the face of patriotism in an iconic Molson beer commercial, and 25 long years of hearing that line everywhere he goes.
“Oh, dude. My tombstone is going to be plaid,” he says with a chuckle.
Every few years there’s a spike in awareness of the legendary ad, but in the past few weeks it has seen the Mount Everest of all spikes. The faded ideal of patriotism the ad was founded upon has blazed into a new conflagration of nationalism.
The recent surge started when U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Canada should be annexed, and started to burn hotter when he called Justin Trudeau the governor of Canada, before reaching previously unseen temperatures of fervour when Trump attempted to beat the country into submission with a spiked wooden baseball bat of tariffs.
The external pressure forged the country into a unified entity for once, with Joe Canada’s rant the rallying cry across social media.
“Every Canada Day blows up my social feed,” said the 53-year-old Douglas, a longtime host on CBC Radio. “Typically, although people tag me, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s Canada Day!’ But this has been showing up kind of independently. I do feel like there’s something different right now. People just needed something to latch on to right now. I guess it was there and it was familiar.
Even in the resource-rich Conservative heartland there has been a jump, with Alberta and Saskatchewan up three and four points, respectively. Ontario (9), B.C. (12), and Atlantic Canada (15) and Quebec (15) lead the way.
The only province to see a drop was Manitoba (minus-4), which tracks, since it’s insanely cold and boring.
The fishing and seafood industry is the lifeblood of the easternmost provinces. In 2023, Canada sent 64 per cent of its seafood exports to the U.S., a value of $4.9 billion, with the Maritimes responsible for half of that. The proposed 25 per cent tariffs would be devastating to the region’s economy, and they would be crowded out by Northeastern U.S. states like Maine, New Hampshire or Massachusetts.
“Down here, culturally, we tend to be pretty good to each other. We tend to try to look after each other. We try to be hospitable to each other,” Douglas said. “And so I think the tone of the rhetoric internationally and in Canada really pisses people off, to be frank. People are freaked out. They’re worried about that.”
The “I. Am. Canadian.” rant has struck a chord and resonated, just as it did in 2000 when it was released. It was the brainchild of advertising agency Bensimon Byrne’s creative director Glen Hunt, who had written around 25 different scripts for a Molson campaign centred on Canadian nationalism. Douglas played a bright-eyed young man with bangs — in a, you guessed it, plaid shirt — explaining what was and wasn’t Canadian in slowly escalating passion.
The ad has spawned countless spinoffs and covers, from William Shatner to Simu Liu to cartoon Weasels. Douglas’s personal favourite is “I Am Not Canadian” — a spoof by a Quebecois radio jock.
The original ad landed well with the target demographic of the time — young and white, who loved mass-produced beer. But it wouldn’t, Douglas said, work the same way now.
When he grew up, the Nova Scotia-born actor knew nothing of the horrors of residential schools or the black slaves of Atlantic Canada.
“I think patriotism had kind of become an old-school thing. Not everyone’s into it. I have to admit that even my own sense of patriotism has kind of faded, been battered around. It’s been hard to feel super proud of Canada over the past few years,” he said. “As I became aware of that, it was hard to feel the same kind of naive patriotism I was feeling back in the day.
“I do believe that the whole process of truth and reconciliation, not only in the context of our first people, Indigenous and First Nations and Métis, but black Canadians, African Canadians, African Nova Scotians, and the fact that our economy was largely (built) on a foundation of slavery that we’ve never really explored or even been honest about.
“Living with those myths, living in denial of these things, doesn’t help us grow as a nation. And I do believe that we can. I believe in the goodness of people, and I do believe in the goodness of individual Canadians.
“What can we do today to create that country that is the myth that we have been telling ourselves. I do think that is possible, and I think when we get there, it will be amazing. I see the greatness of Canada, and the recognition of the ugliness of what we have done and the ugliness that is still there.”
He and Hunt have been writing back and forth the past few weeks as the interest in The Rant has skyrocketed, both recognizing that there is a huge appetite for the sentiment that it evoked. Recreating it with Molson probably couldn’t be done — it merged with Coors in 2005, the same year it ended the I Am Canadian ad campaign — but it could be done.
But it couldn’t just feature a young, white, blue-eyed male.
“If I’ve learned anything in the past 25 years, it’s that I don’t know anything about what Canada looks like to you, to a Muslim woman, or trans individual. I don’t know how you’d write it now and do it in a way that it would it would speak to Canadians in the way I would hope Canada would be,” he said. “(Hunt and I) talk about the difference and what is Canadian identity? The thing I like about Canadian identity is the fact that this is a perennial question.
“I think the reason why we wrestle with it in Canada is because of that difference — and living with that difference, discomfort, and sometimes unfamiliarity — that is our identity. And whether people like it or not, or are comfortable with difference or not, it’s however you as an individual interface the differences that we encounter every day. That is your Canadianism.
“This country has never demanded of anyone — not explicitly anyway — that you have to change who you are to be Canadian. And if you can’t live with that, you’re not confronting your own Canadianism.
“The difference is at the very core of who we are, and it’s what makes us strong, right? It’s what makes this nation amazing.”