FIRST READING: The last time U.S. reputation was this low, a Canadian stood up for them

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

Every once in a while, the pollster Gallup asks the rest of the world what they think of the United States. And the latest reviews are not good.

Of their non-American respondents, a record 59 per cent now hold an “unfavourable” view of the U.S.

Pew Research has found much the same. Their latest 36-country survey found that even among the United States’ closest allies, significantly fewer respondents see the country as a “reliable” partner anymore.

The last time it got this bad was the mid-1970s.

Then, the U.S. was in the midst of engineering an ignominious exit from Vietnam secured in part thanks to a devastating bombing campaign conducted over the Christmas holidays. At home, domestic politics had become dominated by the Watergate scandal. All the while, the value of the U.S. dollar was in free-fall.

And in this darkest hour of American self-esteem, it was a Canadian who told them to buck up, take pride and ignore the haters. Although almost entirely forgotten today, his angry paean to American exceptionalism would wind up becoming one of the most influential Canadian speeches ever delivered.

“I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name to me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?” said Gordon Sinclair in a 1973 radio editorial that would later come to be known simply as The Americans.

“Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I’m one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around.”

As he later described it, he had flipped through a newspaper containing another crop of headlines describing the fading U.S. empire, and in 20 minutes dashed off an angry defence of the American project.

The central theme of the monologue is that U.S. resources were often in evidence in the wake of overseas natural disasters or economic crises, but whenever flood, fires and recessions hit the U.S. mainland, it was expected they would handle the cleanup themselves.

“So far this spring, fifty-nine American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped,” said Sinclair.

The rant also veered off into the defence of U.S. aerospace technology and its space program and praise of the politeness of U.S. draft dodgers living in Canada.

“I’d like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes … Does any country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar, or the Douglas 10?” said Sinclair.

Canadians at the time would have known Sinclair mostly as one of the panelists on Front Page Challenge, a CBC show that had journalists attempt to name the identity of a prominent newsmaker who would be seated behind them.

The editorial was only intended for the few thousand Toronto-based listeners of CFRB radio, now known as Newstalk 1010.

But it ended up going viral across the United States, in an analogue era where that was exponentially harder to do.

A version of the editorial was first printed by U.S. News and World Report, and then reprinted and syndicated by hundreds of smaller U.S. publications across the winter of 1973-74.

“We have received numerous requests to publish it,” reads the introduction to one such reprinting in Montana’s Independent Record. “Sinclair, as you will readily note, does not take us for granted.”

Sinclair was then invited to record a version of the rant that was put to music and quickly became one of the most unlikely chart toppers of the 1970s.

It’s just Sinclair’s five-minute rant as The Battle Hymn of the Republic plays in the background.

The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion) wound up peaking at number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, thus putting the then 73-year-old Sinclair among Terry Jacks and Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the exclusive club of Canadians who were able to manage a hit American record in the early 1970s.

On some particularly patriotic stations, it aired multiple times per day. One Kentucky newspaper printed a letter from a reader declaring that every time it played, “tears come to my eyes and joy to my heart for the generosity and greatness of this gentleman, Gordon Sinclair.”

Sinclair’s rant even yielded a cover; country singer Tex Ritter recorded a version of The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion) that re-enacts the recitation, but with a drawl in place of Sinclair’s nasally Canadian accent.

Overnight, Sinclair was suddenly every American’s favourite Canadian.

An estimated 100,000 letters of praise from U.S. addresses arrived at his Toronto home. He was briefly ubiquitous on American late-night TV.

The speech was read multiple times into the U.S. Congressional record and the embattled U.S. president Richard Nixon sent Sinclair a personal letter of thanks.

A later president, Ronald Reagan, would make his first international trip to Canada just after his 1981 swearing-in, and made a point of meeting the now 81-year-old Sinclair to tell him how much comfort he had taken from the Canadian’s praise.

Sinclair died in 1984, but the recording would experience a brief revival in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, as newspapers and radio stations suddenly found a ready audience for sentimental Americana.

One such reprint, published just six days after the attacks in California’s Lodi News, said Sinclair’s “greatest and lasting fame rests with a hurriedly-written commentary which proudly proclaimed the greatness of a land not even his own at a time when many Americans doubted their own futures.”

It may not have been just one massacre against Canadian Jews that was averted earlier this month. 

On Sept. 20, an active shooter targeting the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ont., was stopped by police before he could breach the building.

But the day before, the Durham Regional Police arrested a 19-year-old in Whitby, Ont., on suspicion of plotting a similar attack.

The Durham Regional Police credited the tipoff to an “external law enforcement partner” but didn’t specify which one.

Then, on Wednesday, the FBI revealed it had been them. The agency spotted “social media threats by an individual to attack a synagogue” and wired the information to Canada via the agency’s Ottawa-based Law Enforcement Attaché Office.

And this happens a lot. The massive reach of U.S. intelligence often means that it’s coming across threats and criminal networks with relevance to Canada – and that may not have otherwise been spotted.

One of the more high-profile recent examples is the 2023 assassination of Sikh nationalist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. Although initial Canadian police reports seemed to treat the homicide as a local targeted killing, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation linked it to a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by figures close to the Indian government.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.