Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Have you ever been Canadian and pretended to be American?

That

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I was an illegal alien in BC for awhile...so an American trying to pass as Canuck? N.F.W. Apparently adding 'eh?' didn't fool anyone. I wonder where my payroll deductions went....probably Pierre Trudeau's little bastard son got a shiny pony and a pair of sparkle socks.

I was born well south of the Mason Dixon line—have blood kin who died in the war of Northern Aggression. Have lived in Canada for 52 years.
People locally still refer to me as that Yankee.

I have no issue with most Americans. Just as I hope that most Americans have no issue with me. After all, we share an undefended border. More like second cousins than anything else. Biggest trade partners.

I enjoy travelling in the USA. Favorite places, Hawaii, Florida, Washington DC (beautiful architecture, MLB), Montana< Idaho, Wyoming and Eastern Washignton state.

Travelling internationally, I've never sewed a Canadian flag onto luggage etc, but I've read that in some parts of the world, the red maple leaf curries a lot of favour. Holland comes to mind. A large Canadian contingent liberated Holland from the Nazis. They still love us?

alwaysoutdoors;
Good evening to you sir, I hope that the day went okay for you and you're well.

Not to my knowledge no, I've not pretended to be anything other than what I am, but I have been mistaken for one at least once.

Somewhere around 2008 or 2009 our family drove down into Yellowstone, then out to Cody, then up through Glacier NP Montana, up into Waterton NP up here, through Kananaskis country and into Banff, then into Glacier NP up here and home.

We were tenting most places, but we'd had a bit of fun tenting in Cody on our previous trip before the girls were born, so we decided to grab a bed and a shower in a little place that had cabin like structures in Cody. That proved to be a very good decision as they had a wild thunder and lightning storm, 50mph winds and an inch of rain.

Next morning broke bright and clear however and our girls decided to take advantage of the swimming pool.

I was standing beside the pool watching them dressed in hat and boots the same as I do here, when some chap came up to me and started asking about some local attraction.

When I replied - in typical Canuck fashion - "Sorry, I can't help you sir as I'm not a local", he replied, "Well you look like a local" and the way he said it didn't sound like a compliment.

When he asked where I was from and I told him "British Columbia", he replied, "I've been to British Columbia - Vancouver to be specific - and they don't look like you do there"....

He was from Boston or Baltimore or somewhere I've never been, and when I tried to explain we had some reasonably big ranches in BC and a long history of livestock production, which I was involved in peripherally and that we owned horses, it was obvious he gave not a rotund rodent's rectum for my attempts.

There in ends the tale of me being mistaken for a Cody area resident.

All the best to you as we head into the weekend.

Dwayne

AB2506;
Good evening to you sir, I hope the weather on your side of the big hills is tolerable tonight and you're well.

This story is from about 1990, but nonetheless it does involve Canucks travelling in Holland.

As a prequel to that, when we were there in '75 we were treated very well when they found out we were from Canada. Two of my wife's uncles were on the ground and in the air during the liberation of Holland, so there's a bit of a personal connection there.

Anyways this coworker and her partner liked to travel and her father was a Canadian Vet from the Holland Campaign so they were retracing some of where he'd been.

She related that in a little pub one night, when the owner - who was their age so mid 30's - found out they were Canadian and that her father had fought to free the town they were in, he told them, "Whatever you want from the bar or the menu is on me. My grandparents wouldn't be alive today without Canadian troops coming here, so neither would I".

From what I'm given to understand, the Dutch remember who did what for them much better than the folks in some places in France, though not all.

All the best to you all.

Dwayne

May your powder stay dry, brother.

I had no issues living in Calgary for near five years as an American managing an engineering team on a $10B oil sands project in the Stephen Harper era. I did have issue living in Dubai managing an Iraq South Gas project where the terms required Iraqi staffing requirements, all far and away useless. This as the "new" elections were to be had. Not a fun time. Thankfully I was eventually tossed to a crisis project living in a construction camp in Ras Laffan Qatar for our PEARL project. Crazy thinking we managed 50K+ folks on site on that project.

Thanks, brother. If you feel fit, hence forth in a moderator like fashion to hunting rifle forums herein.

That is an amusing question and I have a corollary to it.

In July of 1999 our middle son was finishing his studies at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand. We decided to pick him up in person and be tourists for about 10 days. We flew into Christchurch, got a road map and rented a diesel-powered camper. (Obtaining an International Driver's License is insufficient preparation for maneuvering the equivalent of a very small house, on the "wrong" side of the road, negotiating those round-abouts, shifting with the wrong hand, etc., but that is an entirely different story!) President Clinton had just (mid-to-late July) used a Presidential Proclamation to impose tariffs and limitations on imported lamb and it was quite a hot topic of discussion for the Kiwis, creating some concern about Those Yanks (TY), their politics and poor judgment. At that time NZ had about 40 million sheep and 3.8 million citizens. Their economy had appreciated a favorable trade relationship with the USA that was beginning to erode, causing some distrust of TY.

We were Wonder Bread Americans, born in TX, IN and CO, and the only positive connection we had with our host nation was the fact that our son had acquired an accent during his time at University and that our family had hosted a NZ exchange student 15 years earlier. We were solidly committed to being low-key, polite guests in a nation that had been a long-serving ally in war, but had just been given a poke in the eye in agricultural affairs for purely political reasons. We travelled the country, pulling into RV parks at evenings in towns that saw few tourists. After visiting with the locals about nearby sights and places to eat, we were invariably asked, in a very courteous manner, if we were Canadians, since we seemed to be OK and weren't objectionable boors. We didn't mislead anybody, but emphasized our aggie connections, understood their concerns and now lived in New Mexico, a "bit south" of Canada.

That approach, and our son's ambassadorial attitude, got us the Royal treatment. Once it was obvious that we were not the imagined enemy, the Kiwis were all down-to-earth, friendly and accommodating. They judged us charitably, during many unrelated conversations in a variety of small towns, that we must be Canadians. Under the circumstances, we didn't argue. We never once put out our Stars and Stripes flag while we were there.

It was rather pleasant to be (mistakenly) lumped in with the Canadians.

Waiting for the punchline and the Corolla. I think Birdwatcher drives one too.

Aka. I’m a kghunt and haven’t fired a gun since 1999.

Never pretended to be an American but I confess I’m a wannabe, really starting to hate this f*****g country, if only it was so easy as to just walk across the border and claim asylum…to bad I vote wrong