time we switched to red wine

I Am Coor-nadian

The Edmonton Journal
Sat March 19, 2005
By Todd Babiak

Canada, as we know and love it, is finished. Am I referring to the declining power of the federal government? The plummeting interest in the Anne of Green Gables series of books and television properties?

No. I'm talking Molson Coors. This week, the multinational brewer announced it is retiring the most successful and most annoying tagline in the history of domestic advertising: I Am Canadian.

Of course, the sorrow began months ago, when Molson announced it would seek to merge with Denver-based Coors Brewing. Molson is a Canadian institution, founded in 1786 on the windy banks of the St. Lawrence River. The company has traded on its essentially Canadian character for years, attaching itself to institutions like hockey, downhill skiing, and the promise of drunken sex near a body of water, in the context of loon calls. But no one, not even the Molsons, could have foreseen the I Am Canadian thing.

After thousands of young men filled their wardrobes with I Am Canadian T-shirts and hats, tattooed the logo and phrase on their arms and calves, drank themselves stupid on July 1, 2001, and smashed up Whyte Avenue, this is how Molson treats them? Like a bunch of customers?

All of this is deliciously educational.

There is something sad and withering about millions of men discovering a love for their country through a series of beer ads. History lessons didn't work. Travel and bilingualism? Nope. It took a few loud snowboarding ads and a spoof of an American political speech written by an American to inspire our young people to wear and wave the red and white.

I don't know many people who feel strongly about the actual beer that comes in a Molson Canadian can, which is the great genius of advertising firm Bensimon Byrne. Of course, it's about the brand, not the beer. Patriotic packaging has been around since the dawn of modern capitalism, but since Molson's success with I Am Canadian it has exploded in this formerly humble nation. Truck manufacturers, coffee shops, hardware stores, football leagues and department stores work at attaching their brand to the maple leaf and to your need to be loudly, proudly "something significant that isn't American!"

The new campaign, It Starts Here, will focus on other concerns dear to the young Canadian male, namely sports and bars and scantily clad women. These concerns also happen to be dear to the young American male, which shouldn't surprise anyone. Mergers often mean merged advertising campaigns and business cultures.

So what is Coors?

Adolph Coors, a Prussian immigrant, started the brewery in the wild foothills west of Denver in the 1870s. The company survived Prohibition and expanded during the Cold War from a regional to a national and, eventually, an international brewery. Adolph's grandson Joe Coors reacted strongly against the social changes of the 1960s and applied literal interpretations of the Bible to workplace policy. He started the Heritage Foundation; the family continues to sink millions of endowment dollars into other ultra-conservative causes.

One of these is the Free Congress Foundation. On its website the Free Congress Foundation explains, "our main focus is on the Culture War. Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture? Or will we continue the long slide into the cultural and moral decay of political correctness? If we do, America, once the greatest nation on earth, will become no less than a Third World country."

Now, the Coors family is free to do whatever it likes with the fortunes it has derived from selling beer. Their Dark Age values clash with Canadian values, but they are distinct from company policy. The family can spend a billion dollars to erect a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in America, but the brewery remains legally separate.

However, in the era of the big, living, all-encompassing brand, how can we separate the Coors family from Coors, or Coors from Molson Coors? If you wear the shirt, the hat, the tattoo, you wear the family's reputation and philosophy.

The only sentimental tragedy in this merger, and in the retirement of I Am Canadian, is that we always fall for the advertising identity game. It isn't Molson's fault that Canadians are so needy, so desperate to feel singular and important, that we accepted beer commercials as a key part of our national mythology. Perhaps it's time we switched to red wine. It Starts Here.

Beer Baron Adolph Coors (1847-1929)