There's a feelgood story in today's newspaper about a local musician who lacked money to produce his album. So he crowd-sourced, in what sounds like a sort of cheap and cheerful way. The big difference: he did not solicit actual cash, as in that printed by the Bank of Canada, or indeed that of any other country. Instead, he collected 'Canadian Tire' money, which is more easily mistaken for the bills out of a Monopoly set than for legal tender. It is stuff given out by cashiers at the eponymous, nationwide chain of stores (which sell nearly everything, though I have not yet seen tires there) as a sort of primitive version of a customer loyalty card (without the self-interested benefit of actually getting market-worthy information about the customer). It appears mainly in denominations of 1 or 5 or 10 cents. So, the musician, Corin Raymond, collected more than $6,000 in real (Canadian) money in Canadian Tire cash. The total stash weighed something over 60 pounds and counted out at more than 32,000 pieces of paper, providing a good workout in addition to the capital for creating his appropriately-titled album 'Paper Nickels'. In the article Raymond seems delighted and talks about the enthusiasm with which his supporters donated to his cause. Says he: “It made them happy in such a Canadian way.”
It leaves me feeling good, of course, but also wondering: what is happiness the Canadian way, exactly? How does happiness differ nation by nation? How do I go about learning to be Canadianly happy? It seems important.
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