"The last great thing this country ever achieved"

Canada's Generation X never really went to war, but we have a solidarity forged in the shared experience of the Canada Fitness Awards.

EVERY COUNTRY HAS ITS OWN UNIQUE and often strange ways of working out its anxieties over its history, pride, and national identity. The Americans have the orgy of pop-culture infused militarism that passes for the Super Bowl, the French insist on periodically taking to the streets in mass demonstrations/strikes/fashion shows in what is more than anything a ritual reenactment of the Revolution, while English soccer fans continue to chant “One World Cup and Two World Wars” when playing German teams. More darkly, Russia works out its frustrations over the collapse of the Soviet Empire by routinely invading its neighbours to commit atrocities. 

From the early 1970s to the end of the 1980s, an anxiety-ridden Canada forced its youth to do wind sprints, push ups, and hang from a bar as part of a set of prison-yard style torture exercises, largely motivated by a national meltdown over the spectre of an exceedingly fit Swedish sixty year old. 

It all started when the Canadian government began to worry that its citizens were in increasingly poor physical health, had negative attitudes toward fitness, and were generally turning into a nation of lazy and apathetic couch potatoes. In response, the feds launched two parallel initiatives: one was a non-profit organisation devoted to promoting healthy lifestyles called ParticipACTION,  the other was a national fitness test and evaluation program for primary and secondary school children called the Canada Fitness Awards.  

Both programs were launched in the early 1970s, but what really catalysed the issue in our collective consciousness, and turned it into something close to a wartime mobilization of youth, was a public service announcement that ran in 1973 and made the startling claim that the average sixty year old Swede was fitter than the average 30 year old Canadian.  

 The idea was shocking on the face of it, but the humiliation was compounded by the fact that Canadians were at this point becoming enamoured of the conceit that we were the Scandinavians of North America: more egalitarian, more socialist, more cosmopolitan, and (we assumed) more healthy, than Americans. That Canadians were, in fact, slugs, became a matter of national urgency, worked over endlessly in the comment pages of the newspapers and hotly debated in Parliament.  

As it turned out, the statistic wasn’t remotely accurate. It was based on a misreading of a report from the University Toronto, which had graphics on opposite pages: One was a table of international fitness comparisons showing Swedes at the top with Canadians much lower down, while the other was a graph suggesting that an active sixty year old could be as fit as a sedentary thirty year old. Somehow, perhaps deliberately, these two ideas were fused in the infamous PSA, and the myth of the outrageously  fit sixty year old Swede ended up haunting generations of Canadian schoolchildren. 

The Canada Fitness Awards had its origins in the Centennial Athletics Award Programme, which ran from 1966 to 1967 and was designed to test the fitness of students between the ages of six and 18. There were three mandatory exercises – sit ups, the standing broad jump, and the 300 yard (this was pre-metric system Canada) run – and a choice of a swim, long distance run, or a skating event. Participants were scored and given a gold, silver, or bronze badge, or just a Participation pin for the unathletic. 

The programme was a one-off, and it ended with the rest of the Centennial celebrations, but it was rebooted in 1970 as the CFA, with the aim of promoting health and fitness in the youth of the nation. It brought back the Gold/Silver/Bronze/Participation scoring, but added the Award of Excellence as the highest possible achievement level. This time there were six events, including  the 50 yard run, the 300 yard run, the flexed arm hang, the shuttle run, sit ups, and the standing long jump. The lineup was tweaked over the years, with the 300 yard run dropped in favour of a longer endurance run. Most notably though, in 1980 the flexed arm hang was switched out in favour of more prosaic pushups. 

Even for the more athletic kids, the Canada Fitness Awards were difficult. The shuttle run was an ankle cracking nightmare, the speed sit ups left your abs sore for days after, the endurance run left everyone sucking wind as they headed off to geography class. But if you didn’t experience it, it is hard to explain the place of the flexed arm hang in the psyche of those of us who went through elementary school in Canada in the mid to late seventies. 

As an activity, it was simplicity itself. Grab a bar with a two-handed underhand grip, pull yourself up till your eyes are level with the bar and your forearms form a 90-degree angle with your biceps, and… hang there, for long as you can. 

It is hard to know exactly what the flexed arm hang was supposed to measure. Arm strength? Chest strength? Abdominals? It was an event that didn’t separate the fit from the unfit so much as identify a completely different class of achievers. Bigger boys who were used to dominating on the soccer pitch or hockey rink found themselves dropping out after a few seconds, biceps on fire, while tiny kids of no obvious athletic ability could hang for ages. The winner in our class was almost always a waif of a girl who could, by all appearances, hold it for as long as she cared to. The Tragically Hip caught a sense of how it felt in their song “Fireworks”, which has this lyric:

Next to your comrades in the national fitness program

Caught in some eternal flexed arm hang

Droppin' to the mat in a fit of laughter

Showed no patience, tolerance or restraint

The Canada Fitness Awards programme was eliminated in 1992, a victim (if that’s the word) of changing philosophies around physical education. The main problem was that the CFA had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Far from encouraging youth to value physical fitness, it made them hate gym class. Worse, it was connected to “destructive eating and exercise practices” by some kids, girls in particular.  Ultimately, it was an excessively competitive and outcome-focused set of exercises, created in and for an era when gym teachers were glory-days obsessed former high school football stars, phys ed was considered a paramilitary activity, and making kids throw up during class was considered a professional accomplishment. 

Things have changed enormously since then. Notwithstanding legitimate concerns about increasing levels of screen time for kids, there’s no question that we are a far more health conscious society than we were in the seventies and eighties. Gym class itself involves a far more egalitarian, holistic, and less survivalist approach to physical fitness, in some cases perhaps to a fault (helloo, Tchoukball).

If there is anything to lament in the demise of the Canada Fitness Awards, it’s not that eight or nine year olds no longer have to prove themselves by hanging trembling from a bar for longer than anyone else, or cranking out as many half-fake pushups as they can in a minute. 

But there’s a scene in an episode of Corner Gas, where Eric Peterson’s Oscar is trying to help Lorne Cardinal’s Sergeant Davis get in shape, and he presents him with an old copy of the Canada Fitness Guide that lists all the events and the various achievement standards. As a skeptical Davis leafs through the guide, a deadly earnest Oscar tells him that that the Canadian Fitness Test “is the last great thing this country ever achieved.” The scene is followed by a delightful montage parodying the old ParticipACTION “do it, do it, do it” spots.

In comedy, truth. For all its flaws, the CFA did represent something beyond a fitness agenda, and that’s the idea that the federal government might usefully intervene in the daily lives of Canadians in a way that spoke to our national ambition and identity. In this sense, the program’s cousin was something like the Oh Canada board game package, devised by Keith Spicer, the first Official Languages Commissioner, which was distributed to schools across the country as a way of promoting the new-fashioned idea of Canada as having two official languages. 

That Canada is long gone, as much an object of nostalgia as MuchMusic or the 1987 Canada Cup. But generations are like countries, in that their identity and their solidarity is forged in the fire of shared adversity and triumph. Canada’s Generation X never really went to war, but we retain the atavistic responses of a very specific trauma. If you ever want to really trigger a middle aged Canadian, show them this:

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As always, thanks for reading. We are going to come back to the Long Eighties theme next week and then work our way toward the first culture war of the early 1990s. If you like this, I’d appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might it enjoyable as well. — ap