FIRST READING: The last time U.S. reputation was this low, a Canadian stood up for them

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The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion) wound up peaking at number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, thus putting the then 73-year-old Sinclair among Terry Jacks and Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the exclusive club of Canadians who were able to manage a hit American record in the early 1970s.

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On some particularly patriotic stations, it aired multiple times per day. One Kentucky newspaper printed a letter from a reader declaring that every time it played, “tears come to my eyes and joy to my heart for the generosity and greatness of this gentleman, Gordon Sinclair.”

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Sinclair’s rant even yielded a cover; country singer Tex Ritter recorded a version of The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion) that re-enacts the recitation, but with a drawl in place of Sinclair’s nasally Canadian accent.

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Overnight, Sinclair was suddenly every American’s favourite Canadian.

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An estimated 100,000 letters of praise from U.S. addresses arrived at his Toronto home. He was briefly ubiquitous on American late-night TV.

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The speech was read multiple times into the U.S. Congressional record and the embattled U.S. president Richard Nixon sent Sinclair a personal letter of thanks.

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A later president, Ronald Reagan, would make his first international trip to Canada just after his 1981 swearing-in, and made a point of meeting the now 81-year-old Sinclair to tell him how much comfort he had taken from the Canadian’s praise.

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Sinclair died in 1984, but the recording would experience a brief revival in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, as newspapers and radio stations suddenly found a ready audience for sentimental Americana.

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One such reprint, published just six days after the attacks in California’s Lodi News, said Sinclair’s “greatest and lasting fame rests with a hurriedly-written commentary which proudly proclaimed the greatness of a land not even his own at a time when many Americans doubted their own futures.”

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IN OTHER NEWS

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This is the latest seat projection from 338Canada, showing that the incumbent CAQ is likely to be blown almost entirely out of the Quebec National Assembly in the province’s Oct. 5 general election. The irony here is that the CAQ once pledged to move Quebec towards a more European-style system of proportional representation, which, given the CAQ’s vote share of about 20 per cent, would probably have yielded a caucus of at least 20 seats. But the CAQ changed its mind about proportional representation after the existing “First Past the Post” system helped catapult the party into power in the 2018 Quebec election. Photo by Screenshot from 338Canada

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It may not have been just one massacre against Canadian Jews that was averted earlier this month. 

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On Sept. 20, an active shooter targeting the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ont., was stopped by police before he could breach the building.

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But the day before, the Durham Regional Police arrested a 19-year-old in Whitby, Ont., on suspicion of plotting a similar attack.

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The Durham Regional Police credited the tipoff to an “external law enforcement partner” but didn’t specify which one.

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Then, on Wednesday, the FBI revealed it had been them. The agency spotted “social media threats by an individual to attack a synagogue” and wired the information to Canada via the agency’s Ottawa-based Law Enforcement Attaché Office.

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And this happens a lot. The massive reach of U.S. intelligence often means that it’s coming across threats and criminal networks with relevance to Canada – and that may not have otherwise been spotted.

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One of the more high-profile recent examples is the 2023 assassination of Sikh nationalist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. Although initial Canadian police reports seemed to treat the homicide as a local targeted killing, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation linked it to a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by figures close to the Indian government.

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First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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