Arts, Sport and Popular Culture: Expressing Canadian Identity

Where were you when...?

Ask Canadian adults where they were for the golden goal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, or the Raptors' championship in 2019, and many will remember exactly. Culture and sport create shared moments. They also show how diverse Canada is: an Inuit filmmaker in Igloolik, a Franco-Ontarian singer, a Black novelist from Ontario and a Cree playwright all tell Canadian stories.

Expectation E3.2 asks how individuals, groups and events in the arts and popular culture have contributed to Canadian identity since 1982. This lesson gives you the evidence to answer.

Literature: Canadian stories go global

• Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985; she won the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin (2000) and shared it for The Testaments (2019).
• Michael Ondaatje, born in Sri Lanka, won the Booker Prize for The English Patient (1992), which became an Oscar-winning film.
• Yann Martel won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi (2002).
• Tomson Highway, a Cree playwright from northern Manitoba, wrote The Rez Sisters (1986), an important play in the growth of Indigenous theatre.
• Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007) told the story of a woman taken from Africa into slavery who later came to Nova Scotia as a Black Loyalist; it reached a huge Canadian audience and became a TV miniseries.
• Indigenous writers such as Thomas King, Richard Wagamese and Eden Robinson have reached wide audiences in recent decades.

Film and television: "Hollywood North"

Tax credits, skilled crews and a lower Canadian dollar helped make Vancouver and Toronto major centres for film and TV production in the 1990s and 2000s. Many U.S. productions were filmed in Canadian cities. Canadian filmmakers also told their own stories:

• Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), made in Igloolik and the first feature film written, directed and acted in Inuktitut, won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival.
• Denys Arcand's Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 2004, a first for a Canadian film.
• Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, 1997), Deepa Mehta (her "Elements" trilogy) and Denis Villeneuve (from Quebec, later director of the Dune films) became internationally known.
• On television, Schitt's Creek (2015–2020) won a record-setting sweep of comedy awards at the 2020 Emmys. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) became one of the world's most important film festivals.

Music

• Céline Dion from Charlemagne, Quebec, became one of the best-selling singers in the world, singing in both French and English.
• Leonard Cohen wrote "Hallelujah" (1984), now one of the most-covered songs in the world.
• In the 1990s, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain and Bryan Adams were international stars; The Tragically Hip sang about Canadian places and history. When lead singer Gord Downie was dying of cancer, the band's final concert in Kingston on August 20, 2016 was broadcast live by CBC and watched by millions. Downie used his last years to raise awareness about residential schools through Secret Path, the story of Chanie Wenjack.
• Susan Aglukark became the first Inuk performer to win a Juno Award (1995). Tanya Tagaq, an Inuk throat singer, won the Polaris Music Prize (2014). The Ottawa group A Tribe Called Red (now The Halluci Nation) mixed powwow drums with electronic music.
• Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2011. Drake, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber became some of the most-streamed artists in the world.
• Canadian content rules require commercial radio stations to play a minimum share of Canadian popular music, generally 35%. Many artists say these rules helped them get their start.

Sport and national moments

• Rick Hansen, who uses a wheelchair after a spinal cord injury, wheeled more than 40 000 km through 34 countries in his Man in Motion World Tour (1985–1987), raising money and awareness for spinal cord research and accessibility.
• 1988: Calgary hosted the Winter Olympics. At the Seoul Summer Olympics, sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal for doping, a national shock that led to a public inquiry (the Dubin Inquiry) and new anti-doping rules. The same summer, Wayne Gretzky was traded from Edmonton to Los Angeles, which many fans felt as a national loss.
• 1992 and 1993: the Toronto Blue Jays became the first team based outside the U.S. to win the World Series. (In 2025 they reached the World Series again, losing Game 7 to Los Angeles.)
• 1996: Donovan Bailey, born in Jamaica, won the 100 m at the Atlanta Olympics in a world-record time, and Canada won the 4 × 100 m relay.
• 2010: at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Canada won 14 gold medals, a record for a host country at the time, including Sidney Crosby's overtime "golden goal" in men's hockey. Clara Hughes became one of the few athletes to win medals at both Summer and Winter Olympics.
• 2019: the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship.
• 2021: Canada's women's soccer team, led by Christine Sinclair (the all-time leader in international goals, among women and men), won Olympic gold at the Tokyo Games.
• 2024–2026: the Professional Women's Hockey League began in 2024; swimmer Summer McIntosh won three golds at the 2024 Paris Olympics; and in June and July 2026, Canada co-hosted the FIFA World Cup with the United States and Mexico, with games in Toronto and Vancouver.