I’m talking about the people who can be credited for turning the city from a giant wilderness into the budding metropolis of today. The place, and indeed the whole of my country, Canada, was pretty third-worldish until the English, French, and various other Europeans arrived and started planning and building infrastructure and government, and teaching the natives discipline, order, and capitalism. Canada or the USA without European immigrants would look somewhat like Africa.
It’s no coincidence that the best countries in the world are either European or founded by Europeans. Everywhere they go, European immigrants make things better – until they’re asked to leave, at which point everything usually descends back into chaos. Not that they ever get any thanks for it.
So how are the Vancouver 2010 Olympics paying tribute to these increasingly marginalized European immigrants and their defining contributions to Canada? By ignoring them completely, it seems.
The logo for the Games is some sort of native Indian stone carving resembling a bloke with massive oedema of the legs. While the natives were carving away at such lovely things, the Europeans were busy building an entire world around them, but that’s conveniently overlooked. The mascots for the games are various hybrids of legendary native indian animals that could only ever exist only after a good toke-up of Canadian weed: a half-whale half-bear hybrid (Miga), a whale-thunderbird-bear hybrid (Sumi), and a sasquatch (Quatchi).
A feature on the 2010 Games website allows you to take a quiz to find out which mascot you are. I can tell you, without even taking the quiz, that even as a Canadian I would be exactly none of them because I’m not some sort of native Indian hallucination with a Japanese name who resembles an Asian cartoon character. I’m descended from the people who built my country, but they’ve been forgotten.