Canada's Heritage Minutes are short dramatized TV spots celebrating Canadian history, created in the early 1990s by Charles Bronfman's foundation, not the government. The series grew to over 100 episodes covering war heroes, hockey players, and residential-school survivors. One famous episode about stroke symptoms with the line "I smell burnt toast" became so popular it spread a medical misconception.
Chapters
You can make any video funny to a Canadian by adding this to the end of it: "A proud part of our heritage." That is how every Heritage Minute ends. These are TV ads of sorts. They're like a little mini film about a moment in Canadian history. The reenactments are theatrical, the dialogue is a bit stiff.
"Our future was determined by our oath, not the Americans." They are the most earnest thing we have on television.
Americans, they're like the Canadian version of The More You Know. And here is what you probably believe about it: that it's a government program, taxpayer-supported, probably like the Ministry of Culture or something like that. What if I told you that everything you thought you knew about the Heritage Minutes was wrong? Let's start with the fact that it was actually completely fronted by a booze baron. They were started by Charles Bromfman, who inherited the Seagram Spirits empire in 1971 after the death of his father. And if you think, "Oh well, and then he went into politics and became the Heritage Minister," no, no, he did not have a life in politics. He was a billionaire doing billionaire things. He owned a home in Palm Beach, he owned the Montreal Expos, he had an art collection, But he also owned a charitable foundation, and they'd done a survey and found that Canadians were bad at history. Fewer than half could name the first Prime Minister, and nearly a quarter could not even name a single Canadian event or achievement that they were proud of. Not one. In a country that had invented insulin, basketball, peanut butter, and the greatest invention of all time: pineapple on pizza. A quarter of the population was sitting there drawing a complete blank on anything worth celebrating. So Bronfman hired a researcher and a film crew and made these spots and paid for them to go on TV. They were essentially ads. But not at first. They started as little segments inside a history quiz show in the early '90s. There are now more than 100 episodes. They cover war heroes and hockey goalies, enslaved people running to freedom, Inuit artists, residential school survivors, railway builders. Some videos are famous here. The famous "I smell burnt toast" episode.
Now what? Uh.
What is it, Mrs. Gould?
Burnt toast. Doctor Penfield, I can smell burnt toast.
Somehow convinced a generation of Canadians that that was the sign of an oncoming stroke, even though the video itself is actually about seizures. Eventually he spun it into its own operation that is today called Historica Canada. The government kicks in some money to help, and yes, they're still making them. 3 last year popped up out of the blue. And that's the thing about Heritage Minutes. They just happen to you. Nobody sits down to watch them. But every single time, you end up learning about something you didn't know, and a person you're— suddenly weirdly proud of.
