It’s been just over a week since Team Canada’s heroic gold-medal victory against their U.S. counterparts in the men’s hockey finals of the Olympics. That night all of Canada seemed to rejoice: horns honked until the wee hours of the morning and Canadian columnists draped their newspapers’ front pages with emotional, patriotic outbursts of pride.
But it didn’t take long for the internal squabbling to recommence. First it was the vacuous debate to amend a gender-biased line in our national anthem, and now we’re back to dissecting Canada’s role in the abuse of Afghan detainees. Within a week, the unity that was felt during the Olympics has already started to dissipate.
But wait. This Friday the Paralympics will begin and the parade of honks and cheers emanating from bars and households across the country will resume. Or will it? After 17 days of relentless Olympic media coverage does the country have the appetite for 10 more? According to Caley Denton, VANOC’s vice-president of ticketing and consumer marketing, the success of the Olympics has helped generate real interest in this year’s Paralympics games. All it will take now is another prorogue of parliament and a relentless Paralympics media blitz at the expense of all other news going on in the world.