Seven Oaks Magazine.

By way of a disclaimer, I should start by saying that I can't stand the Olympics but that I do feel a certain affinity for Puerto Rico. I've never been to the Caribbean nation, and I missed all but the dispersal of the Puerto Rico Day parade in New York City last June. But ever since erstwhile proto-fascist Pat Buchanan spoke out against Puerto Rican statehood by pointing to the example of Quebec, I figured Fuck it, Puerto Rico is okay by me. Mi padre es un Puertoricanyo blanco del Norte. So even as a staunch anti-Olympian, I could thrill to the sight this past weekend of Carlos Arroyo and the rest of the Puerto Rican basketball squad trouncing the American Dream Team. As we tried to imagine the elation in the streets of Puerto Rico and the South Bronx, my roommate turned to me and said See? Imagine if Quebec got to play hockey against Canada. And why not? If our Anglo-American friends to the South can offer concessions to the national aspirations of a Latin colony through separate Olympic teams, why can't Canada?

Time was, I would have figured that, given our nutritional anthropology as a people, we weren't really built for international athletic competition. After all, Quebec's national dish is poutine; it used to be cigarettes. I've always considered myself lucky that, when my father moved out here from Ste. Therese, he converted to a more West Cost gastronomy -- I say lucky because even out here in the midst of the lentil-heavy sprout orgy that is Vancouver cuisine, I'm a fairly big guy; raised in the nutritional backwater of la belle Province, I'd be using Jared Fogle's old pants as leg warmers. Quebec's most popular dessert is tarte au sucre sugar pie.

Sugar pie. Sugar pie. No longer confined to Motown lyrics, or to free-form word association at the fat farm: Sugar [pause] pie! Hot dog [pause] sandwich! There is also, of course, our infamous tourtiere , which is a meat pie. Meat pie. Meat pie. A dish apparently developed by high French-Canadian scientists in an effort to combine the carbohydrates of a pastry with the fat content of pork and veal. A lot of people's grandfathers don't cook, but mine does. More specifically, he barbeques inch-thick slabs of honey-glazed baloney. As a people, it seems that we've ground our instinct towards self-preservation down to fine nub, whose suggestions we're more than willing to entertain between steamed hot dogs.

But apparently more than a few of my countrymen make it past our collective culinary handicap every four years to become world-class athletes. For me, listening to the Team Canada coverage is a lot like watching the sponsorship scandal hearings: I don't really understand what's going on, but I hear a lot of French names. It's always Pelletier this, and Simard that, and -- as long as they're willing to hold the maple leaf flag they're getting gold handed to them by the IOC or Mononc ' Chretien. I hear we even had a separatist bearing the Canadian flag in Athens.

So it seems we'd do pretty well for ourselves, in terms of per capita medals. So isn't it about time we got a chance to bring the Fleur de Lys to the games? Wouldn't we all love to see Gretzky and Lemieux coaching opposing benches (in between takes of whatever commercial the former was shooting that day)?

But it'll be a while before that happens. Even still, as the Montreal Expos play half their games out of Puerto Rico, the destinies of our two peoples shall be linked by more than just sports. Pat Buchanan doesn't want either of us hanging around.