Freddie Freeman, who grew up in southern California and plays first base for the Los Angeles Dodgers, is getting more Canadian every day.
Canadians started to seriously claim him as one of their own when he hit the first walk-off Grand Slam in World Series history on Oct. 25, in the opening game of the best-of-seven showdown against the New York Yankees.
We embraced him all the more warmly after he hit homers in games two, three and four of the series, a feat which left journalists scrambling to explain why the ballplayer with the all-American background is truly a Canadian. (Freeman, 33, has dual citizenship, based on the fact that his mom and dad were born in Ontario.)
From our vantage point in CrowsNest, we’re guessing that sports journalists wouldn’t be so eager to claim Canadian bona fides for an athlete caught stealing signs or doping his way to better performances.
Sprinter Ben Johnson is a case in point. He was Canada’s most celebrated athlete for a fleeting day or so in 1988 when he set a 100-metre record at the 1988 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Then he was caught cheating. The “Canadian sprinter” was quickly rebranded as a “Jamaican-born sprinter” in (too many) media stories.
Let’s face it, we’re eager to strip certain Canadians of citizenship once things go awry. We’re sure not eager to claim credit for Gavin McInnes, the Canadian founder of Proud Boys, labelled a terrorist organization by the Canadian government. And there’s no need to stress that David DePape, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi (Nancy’s husband) with a hammer in 2022, was born in British Columbia.
In truth, the definition of a Canadian can ebb and flow like the tides. In the 2015 federal election campaign, before he lost the prime minister’s job to Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper test drove the phrase “old-stock Canadians” – which sounded to many critics like a descriptor for an elite of long-settled white people. The phrase stuck, but only to Harper, and it stuck like mud.
We believe the key to this citizenship confusion is understanding a simple idea. A Canadian is not a person. A Canadian is an idea.
Gavin McInnes is not our idea of a Canadian.
Freddie Freeman, who competes internationally for the Canadian ball team to honor the memory of his late, Peterborough-born mother, is our idea of a Canadian.
So is Sidney Crosby, the modest hard-working, immensely talented, Cole-Harbour-born leader of the Pittsburgh Penguins.
We know, we know, some of you will say that Sid is first and foremost a Nova Scotian. Let’s give him dual citizenship – and leave it at that.