Timbit Nation

By Kenneth Kidd
Toronto Star, March 26, 2006

Conversation with 19-year-old daughter

Parental unit: "Do you ever go to Tim Hortons?"
Daughter: "Well, obviously. What's your point?"
Parental: "Well, I'm meant to be writing about Tim Hortons and Canadian culture."
Daughter: "Isn't that obvious?"

Early one recent morning, Rick Hillier was strolling through the Star's newsroom, a couple of aides in tow. He was, in his way, an imposing figure, which is what you'd expect from the Newfoundlander who now serves as Canada's chief of defence staff.

He looked steady, reliable, someone you could depend on in a pinch. But there was also something casual about it all.

Maybe it was the plain battle fatigues, little different from those of his colleagues. Or maybe it was what he held in his hand: a take-out cup of coffee. From Tim Hortons.

The red paper cup, with its "Roll Up The Rim" entreaties, was like a little exclamation mark on Hillier's demeanour. Well of course, it said: He's Canadian.

On the heels of Friday's frenzied IPO, plans to open a branch in Kandahar, and a dispute in Quebec over a discarded cup that turned out to be a winner of a $28,000 Toyota, is there anything that marks us, from coast to coast, quite as much as our downmarket love of Timbits and coffee?

Yes, we drink more of it than our neighbours to the south: Canadians now down more than 100 litres of java per capita every year. But that doesn't explain this visceral connection between the national psyche and what is, let's face it, a mass commercial enterprise whose core job is to separate us from our money, a buck or two at a time.

Sure, there's great marketing at work -- all those contests, the community involvement, the kids hockey, not to mention the emotional "True Stories" ads that attest to the centrality of Tim Hortons in Canadian life.

But there has to be something else. We, collectively, also have to be part of the icon narrative -- we have to bestow that status. We're the ones who, in celebrity quizzes, now try to measure a star's character with questions like "Starbucks or Tim's?" -- as if a one-word answer will summon unspoken volumes in a language we all understand.

Why do we do this? What kind of a country would raise a now American-owned chain of coffee shops to a sort of shorthand for Canadian values -- an emblem to go along with beavers, Mounties and maple syrup?

If anyone knows the straightforward answer to that, you'd think it might be the loyal customers, who all seem a little possessive about their local Tim Hortons.

That would include the likes of regular Peter Flood, as he sits in an east-end Toronto outlet. But ask him about Tim's Canadianness and he talks instead about how much the chain has improved in the last 10 or 15 years. He mentions newer buildings, better cleanliness. "Their products are never stale," he says. "It's down to earth, value for money."

But you could probably say that about other chains, too, ones with no patriotic hold on the country's imagination. So where, exactly, is the link?

"For us, maybe the cold weather," suggests Tony Nguyen. Perhaps, at least in many parts of the country, but Toronto is scarcely Arctic compared with, say, Chicago, Boston or New York. National symbols are supposed to have some measure of uniqueness.

So we're back to what makes Tim's, specifically, a patriotic vessel. "Is it Canadian or not? " wonders Flood. "I'd have to ask a foreigner."

Tom Georgiou, sipping camomile tea puts Tim's popularity, and its icon status, down to human nature, of which he generally takes a darker view than most. (Sample outrage: "Politicians are the biggest criminals in the world.")

Georgiou figures there's also a lemming quality at play. "When they see a place that's busy, they want to go there," he says. "They like to go with the crowd. There's no other explanation." Perhaps tellingly, he also puts any sporting event in the same basket.

He'll concede that Tim Hortons is generally cleaner than its rivals, and more welcoming to women. But a cultural touchstone? Just lady luck, he figures. Or, more cryptically: "There are some strange forces beyond."

Unlike, say, the Mounties, the whole Hortons-as-emblem business is surprisingly recent.

"I don't think that 10 years ago we would have been called an icon, so it's been in the last five years," says Bill Moir, executive vice-president of marketing at Tim Hortons.

Every couple of years, the marketing people go out into the field to interview customers. They call it a "brand character" study. The words they hear back about the chain have been pretty consistent: unpretentious, caring, friendly, dependable, and (wait for it) Canadian.

It is, in other words, one of us.

We even call it "Timmy's," the kind of nickname that comes freighted with other Canadian associations. In hockey dressing rooms, from pick-up to pro, just about everyone's name similarly grows a "y" or "ie" appendage. (Think "Dougie" Gilmour.) It's the great leveller, a way of checking everyone's outside-world status at the arena door.

You can see a species of that in any Tim Hortons, especially downtown, where the line-ups are apt to be both longer and more diverse than those at the neighbouring Starbucks.

"Every kind of vocational level is represented in one line and not the other," says Paul Wales, president of Enterprise Advertising, the people who produce the Tim Hortons television ads.

But we also give similar nicknames to neighbourhood pubs, a practice that dates at least from the time Toronto taverns still had separate entrances for "ladies and escorts." A bar like The Benlamond invariably becomes "The Benny" in neighbourhood parlance, just as The Wallace House becomes "The Wally." It's as if, in order to sanction a local meeting place, we have to strip away any hint of pretension.

So has Tim Hortons replaced, or at least joined, local bars as the informal town halls of neighbourhoods?

Pollster Michael Adams, whose book Fire and Ice explores the growing differences between Canadian and American values, thinks there might be some truth to that theory.

"Americans aspire to independence," he says. "Their model is to drive out of town, Gary Cooper with Grace Kelly, and get on their ranch and she's in the kitchen and having babies and he's standing at the ranch gate with a gun, saying, `no trespassing.'"

Canadians, by contrast, are far less fearful. Yes, we're mostly autonomous (from institutions and the state) but also interdependent (with each other as individuals).

That's partly because, despite the vastness of Canada, our population is much more urban: Roughly 40 per cent of us live in the three biggest cities, compared with 15 per cent of Americans.

This, in turn, colours our respective views of "community." Americans now increasingly use churches as their replacement for a sense of community lost to long working hours and lengthy commutes. Not us. "We don't go to church as much on Sundays," says Adams. "We go shopping and we go to Tim's."

Yes, going to Tim Hortons may now be central to the Canadian experience, but so are a lot of other things, like taking out the trash and going to the dry cleaners. You'll note that we haven't raised those, or bait shops and ice fishing, to iconic status.

A few years back, a certain Steve Penfold managed to turn our coffee and doughnut obsession into a doctoral thesis. Along the way, he collected an "Ig Nobel Prize," handed out annually by an American humour magazine for academic research that really ought not to be replicated.

Now a history professor at the University of Toronto, Penfold recently revisited the topic in "Eddie Shack was no Tim Horton," a chapter he wrote for a recent book on food. He figures you have to start with Horton himself as an archetype of Canadian masculinity: "humble in origin, large in talent, strong in body, and gentle in demeanour."

Needless to say, at least to a Canadian, any gentleness was mostly observed off the ice.

If the great Maple Leaf defenceman were still with us, that might explain the chain's claim on the national consciousness. But Horton died in 1974 when his car went out of control along the Queen Elizabeth Way.

These days Horton's place in Canadian pop culture comes mostly via the ubiquitous coffee shops that bear his name. But Penfold reckons Horton the athlete is still part of the equation.

As he puts it: "The theme that unites these two sides of Tim Horton iconography is their connection to the patriotic symbolism of everyday life in Canada -- to a kind of folklore of mass culture where commodities are used to express important, if ironic, interpretations of national and local identity."

The doughnut -- and by implication, Tim Hortons -- ends up being the "quirky receptacle for the politics of identity."

We like to think of the doughnut as a kind of national food, and Penfold claims, as have others, that we probably eat more of them than anyone else on the planet, although it's hard to come up with any meaningful statistics. (Some think Americans may eat as many; they just happen to buy them in grocery stores, not standalone outlets.)

We make jokes about our doughnut infatuation, claim to have more doughnut shops per capita than anyone else, and even put it in songs. Like this one by lowercase Toronto bar band go bimbo go:

The values you'd tend to associate with doughnuts are mostly blue-collar, middle-class: hard work, honesty, pride in the simple pleasures of family life. And, yes, we Canadians tend to see ourselves that way. But there's something knowingly anti-high-culture, anti-pretension about praising the doughnut -- like a blue-collar, Hamilton finger raised in the direction of Toronto's sense of self-importance.

There's a kind of backhanded sense of superiority at play: We know your game, and even though we can't play it at your level, we think all your showy prowess is loathsome and a little vulgar, really.

So, yes, there is an echo of some strains of Canadian nationalism vis-à-vis the Americans.

But there's also, more endearingly, a kind of winking self-deprecation. We consume vast amounts of American mass culture, but from just enough distance that we can mock both it and ourselves.

So we turn an American invention — the doughnut — into a Canadian icon and say we've perfected it. You can see how this comes from the same part of our collective brain that produced SCTV and the sensibility of South Park and Saturday Night Live.

Mike Myers, who recycled his Scarborough youth into Wayne's World, couldn't help but take doughnuts along with him to the film's Chicago setting. With a wink only Canadians would appreciate, Myers named the movie's doughnut shop after Stan Mikita, of Blackhawks fame.

The doughnut approach may trail reality slightly -- doughnuts now being a fraction of Tim Hortons sales -- but no matter.

Nationalism, after all, is always a work of imagination, just like any comedy sketch: You take something and stretch it until it becomes an outsized emblem.

It's just that Canadian identity has always come with a quirky circularity: It's also about finding Canadian identity -- anything to make us distinct from the grunting Yankee hordes to the south.

So if Tim Hortons is a Canadian icon, maybe it's just because we really, really want it to be -- a humble little cup to fill with our sense of self, irony and all.