As he performed a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on “Saturday Evening Dwell” in March, the veteran Canadian comic Mike Myers was not desiring to make a private political assertion. However when he stood onstage for the closing credit of the present, he mentioned, “I obtained angrier and angrier.”
He thought of Mr. Musk’s remark that Canada is “not an actual nation,” and about how President Trump had known as the previous Canadian prime minister “Governor Trudeau” and rudely referred to Canada as “the 51st state.” He thought of tariffs, and about graffiti he’d seen in Winnipeg: “There’s no larger ache than being betrayed by a good friend.”
And he thought in regards to the legendary Canadian hockey participant Gordie Howe and his well-known “elbows up” response to aggression on the ice.
And so Mr. Myers, the 61-year-old star of the “Wayne’s World,” “Austin Powers” and “Shrek” movies and a beloved determine on either side of the Canadian-American border, boldly opened his down vest and flashed his “Canada Is Not for Sale” T-shirt on dwell tv. “Elbows up,” he mouthed into the digital camera, twice.
“What occurred got here from my ankles and from my mind and from my coronary heart, and it was not about me — it was about my nation,” he mentioned. “I needed to ship a message house to say that I’m with you, you already know.”
As public acts of defiance on “S.N.L.” go, the revealing of Mr. Myers’s T-shirt was much less stunning than, say, the Irish singer Sinead’s O’Connor’s dramatic destruction of a photograph of Pope John Paul II in 1992. However for the mild-mannered Mr. Myers, an expatriate who mentioned that “nobody is extra Canadian than an individual who not lives in Canada,” it was the second the gloves got here off.
“What’s occurred has actually damage our emotions,” he mentioned in a latest phone interview that started when, in what felt like a classically Canadian transfer, he apologized for having hay fever and maybe sounding a bit snuffly. “We love America. We love you guys. We don’t perceive what this insanity is.”
Mr. Myers moved to the US in 1988 as a result of “America is the leisure capital of the world” and it was the place his profession took off, he mentioned. Although he divides his time between New York and Vermont, he mentioned he travels again house to Toronto usually. He has an American spouse, three American kids and an American passport (alongside his Canadian one).
“I’m additionally an American citizen, and I took my oath very significantly,” he mentioned. “That’s what’s so loopy. Individuals are the final folks you’d assume would ever be a menace to us.”
In Canada, Mr. Myers has two streets named after him, seems on a postage stamp and in 2017 was named an officer of the Order of Canada for his work in comedy. He printed “Canada,” a memoir-cum-Valentine to his native nation, in 2016.
Emboldened by how his “elbows up” defiance on “S.N.L.” caught on up north, Mr. Myers plotted an escalation of his political involvement.
“I consulted with my brothers, who’re each, clearly, Canadian, in addition to being very savvy politically and good and humorous,” he mentioned. The end result was a television ad for the Liberal Get together, that includes Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mr. Myers — sporting a “By no means 51” jersey — chatting beside a hockey rink. Although the race has been tightening, the Liberals have been buoyed by a surge of anger at Mr. Trump’s bellicose conduct, and pollsters say they’re favored to defeat the Conservatives in Monday’s federal elections.
Impressed by “these World Warfare II films the place they ask the pretend Individuals who received the World Collection” as a technique to unmask them, Mr. Myers mentioned, he needed the advert to be a reaffirmation of his personal Canadianness in addition to an endorsement of Mr. Carney.
“I needed it to be like, ‘I do know I don’t dwell there anymore, and let’s discuss that,’” he mentioned. “I assumed it might be humorous if the prime minister of Canada ran an identification take a look at on me.” (The half wherein Mr. Myers appropriately identifies Toronto’s “two seasons” as “winter and building” was contributed by Mr. Myers’s greatest good friend since childhood, David Mackenzie, he mentioned.)
The advert exhibits that Mr. Carney, along with being a former governor of the Bank of England, has advantageous comedian timing. “I believe he’s very affordable,” Mr. Myers mentioned of Mr. Carney. “He’s taken a relaxed, resolute, articulate stance in protection of our sovereignty.”
Mr. Myers was an “S.N.L.” solid member from 1989 to 1995. He’s now appeared 3 times this season as Mr. Musk, who’s initially from South Africa however who was raised in Canada. (At one level, Mr. Myers had Mr. Musk make a classic Dr. Evil pinkie gesture.)
“To the extent that Elon Musk is concerned in our democratic authorities, it goes in opposition to how I really feel as a Canadian,” he mentioned of Mr. Musk’s slash-and-burn strategy. “We don’t have a mistrust of the federal government. We’ve got a perception in good authorities.”
And comedy is a method Mr. Myers could make that time, he believes.
“Fascism doesn’t wish to be ridiculed; it likes to be feared,” he mentioned. “Satire is a crucial device within the toolbox to say that this isn’t regular — that the cuts he’s making are usually not regular.”
Mr. Myers mentioned he had no ailing will towards one other distinguished Canadian expatriate, the hockey celebrity Wayne Gretzky, whose embrace of Mr. Trump’s MAGA motion has triggered some Canadians to turn against him. Mr. Gretzky stays “an incredible Canadian,” Mr. Myers mentioned.
He talked about the sport Pink Rover, which he performed as a boy in Toronto, as a car for inviting Mr. Gretzky to hitch his facet.
“Pink Rover, Pink Rover, we name Wayne over,” he mentioned. “I hope he does. We might settle for him with open arms.”
In his ebook, Mr. Myers writes that his native nation has usually struggled to outline its goal, its residents asking not “Who’re we?” however slightly “Why are we?”
It has a solution now, he mentioned.
“As the good Canadian poet Joni Mitchell mentioned, ‘You don’t know what you’ve obtained until it’s gone,’” he mentioned. “The opportunity of all of it being gone has raised our consciousness of how nice we’re.”
