Tim Hortons has opened fourteen stores in Manhattan and the writing is on the wall. This is how it all begins. This is how Canada reclaims Great Britain’s lost territory to the south after all these years. Don’t think the Queen isn’t privy to these important geopolitical developments. First we take Manhattan… then we take Berlin.
I’ve been to Tim Hortons in various parts of Canada, and it is like going into a Canadian government office, but a Canadian government office that works: it’s clean, it has doughnuts, it has hot coffee… delicious hot coffee. I like to do business at the Hortons because when you talk to Canadians about Tim Hortons they get a glint in their eye. “He was the Leafs’ iron horse, and he started so small,” they say. “And then… then Tim expanded. And now he’s HUGE… over 3000 locations…”. This usually followed by a grunt of pure Canadian pride. “It’s quite a legacy after having died so young.” (Tim died at 44 in a car accident.)
I like to do business at Tim Hortons because it is more than anywhere Canada’s public square. In this, the second largest country in the world (by area) yet one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world– a generally cold weather country—I can count on Tim Hortons for a comforting, fattening respite from the echo at the core of the collective Canadian soul. And I can always bank on encountering my fellow Canadian travelers there. For the Hortons is nothing more than a tricked-out lean-to– the modern simulacrum of those structures built by explorers for shelter throughout the great north woods. But it is also a bearhug: the sort of bearhug Horton was famous for on the ice– the sort of bearhug he would implement as he punched your guts out.
So take that, America. Six time zones, but always fresh. Tim (one of our greatest defensemen in the history of the game) knows what he’s doing. You’ll thank us later.
