The one exception is Kraft dinner—the subtle in-joke being the odd emotional stranglehold this product has over the Canadian imagination. On the other hand, maybe the items I end up including will merely remind Americans that there are still a few Canadian products to be sucked into the globalized, U.S.-branded economy.

Trash, suitable for framing
As globalization eats its way through all aspects of all cultures, the hunt for authenticity begins circling in on ever-tinier, ever-older, and ever-more esoteric fragments of the past. What we see here as trash might, in a hundred years, be something placed proudly on the walls of design cognoscenti. You say, “No way!” but anybody who’s ever been near a flea market knows that anything from the Nineteenth Century—anything—is valuable. You merely have to start thinking of right now as something other than right now—as the past—and suddenly it begins making sense.

Four-dimensional garbage truck
What we consider trash and what we don’t consider trash reveals much about us as individuals and as members of our culture. Can we define a nation solely by what it discards? Of course not. Unless, that is, we introduce the fourth dimension, time. Time is something that we can use as a tool as surely as we use our hands as tools to crush paper. If we look at the way we have been using our time, it reveals that we haven’t been very effective at keeping Canadian things Canadian. If you took a great big blob of time from the 1950s and violently squished it, it would yield a vast heap of three-dimensional Canadian objects. If we took a blob of time from 2003 and squished it just as violently, the resulting heap of Canadiana would be small indeed. Waste not, want not. Baton Rouge lurks around every corner.