When Canadian actor and comedian Mike Myers, clad in a “Canada is not for sale” T-shirt, twice mouthed the words “elbows up” and tapped his own left elbow on Saturday Night Live last weekend, he was sending a not-so-subtle signal to his compatriots north of the border: Get ready for a fight.
Facing punishing tariffs on Canadian exports and repeated jibes from U.S. President Donald Trump about their country becoming the 51st state, Canadians were understandably riled. “Elbows up” became the rallying cry they’d been looking for.
Weeks earlier, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew had warned Canada “can’t be a punching bag, and we have to get our elbows up” in the face of threatened tariffs.
At protests across the country this week, including one on Tuesday outside the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canadians chanted the slogan and scrawled it across their placards. #ElbowsUp appeared all over social media, as both a call to arms and a warning to our increasingly bellicose neighbours that Canadians may be polite, but we’re no pushovers.
The Canadian actor wore a shirt that read ‘Canada is not for sale’ on one of America’s treasured late-night comedy programs. Here’s what that says about Canadian patriotism.
In hockey-loving Canada, the phrase automatically evokes memories of one of the game’s greatest players, Saskatchewan-born Gordie Howe, who before becoming Mr. Hockey had earned another nickname: Mr. Elbows.
Unfailingly humble, generous and gentlemanly off the ice, Howe would wield his elbows like weapons when battling for the puck.
“If a guy slashed me, I’d grab his stick, pull him up alongside me and elbow him in the head,” Howe once said, describing his favourite method of retribution.
Former Toronto Maple Leaf Howie Meeker once described what it was like to be on the receiving end of one of Howe’s infamous elbows.
“He runs me into the fence, and I turn around and I whack him across the shins, and he gives me a push back in the shoulders, just misses my head, and I give him another crack. He turns with his elbow and catches me right in the mouth. I say, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in trouble here.’ I got blood running down, and I stick my tongue up and the tooth is gone,” he said.
The referee stopped the game and the players searched the rink for Meeker’s tooth, but they never found it. Meeker said for years after, Howe would politely inquire about his dental health.
“He played hockey like a good Christian: It is better to give than to receive,” joked Roy MacSkimming, author of Gordie: A Hockey Legend. “He was talking about meting out punishment on the ice, and that you have to have your elbows up in the corners because you never know who’s coming to get you.”
While MacSkimming doesn’t believe Howe coined or even used the phrase “elbows up,” he has nevertheless become synonymous with it.
MacSkimming said Howe’s father taught him to “never take any dirt from anybody,” a lesson the young man took to heart, especially when it came to his opponents on the rink.
“He would just hit them so hard, and the elbows were an important weapon in his arsenal. He would just raise them up so fast to clip someone on the chin or in the gut or whichever part of the anatomy was handy,” MacSkimming said.
“The phrase [elbows up] has just grown out of that legend, I think.”
It’s such an enduring part of the Gordie Howe legend that a bronze statue standing guard outside Saskatoon’s SaskTel Centre portrays the hometown hero with his left elbow held aloft, as if fending off an invisible opponent. To this day, fans stop by just to touch it.
At Howe’s funeral in 2016, his son Murray told mourners that right up until his final days, his father would throw his elbows around for a laugh, as he did during recent visits to Detroit’s old Joe Louis Arena.
“He went to the Joe in October and March so that he could elbow the coaching staff and the trainers and several players like Dylan Larkin and Pavel Datsyuk and Jimmy Howard,” Murray Howe recalled.
MacSkimming points out that Gordie Howe, who was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1971, spent his professional hockey career playing in the U.S., where his children were born. One son, Mark Howe, would even go on to play for Team USA.
“Gordie still thought of himself as Canadian,” MacSkimming said, noting Howe would frequently travel back to Saskatoon, where he always received a hero’s welcome. “Those were his people and they loved him. They didn’t care that he played in the U.S.”
Mr. Hockey, a.k.a. Mr. Elbows, is about to receive another tribute: The Gordie Howe International Bridge, due to open later this year, will link Detroit, where Howe spent much of his career, and Windsor, Ont., where Howe’s mother settled in 1912 after arriving in Canada from Germany.
It will also stand as a symbol of the history of cross-border co-operation that has until recently tied Canada and the U.S. MacSkimming believes Howe would regret the recent souring of that friendly relationship.
“I think Gordie would be very saddened by it, because he really believed that — off the ice — people should get along and treat each other decently. I think he would find Trump’s behaviour and conduct abominable,” MacSkimming said.
“He’d say Canada’s got to stand up for itself and fight back.”