It Started With Fries
We’re Americans.
We fell in love with Canada.
At a Tim Hortons.
The “i” stands for “we meant to do that.”
It started the way most life-changing moments do: with fries.
We were at a Tim Hortons somewhere in the GTA. Not looking for anything in particular. Definitely not looking for a national identity crisis. And then someone put gravy and cheese curds on a plate of fries and slid it across the counter like it was nothing.
“Why didn’t we think of that?” was the expression we all understood after the first bite.
(Why have you been hiding this?)
From there it was a slow unraveling. The politeness. The quiet confidence. The way a Canadian will hold a door for you even when you’re an unreasonable distance away — and then apologize for the pressure they’ve created. The healthcare. The metric system. The snow.
Oh, the snow.
It’s like cocaine for Canadians. Their eyes light up. Their energy shifts. Just stay out of their way when the flurries are a’startin’. They become a different people. A focused people. A people with shovels and purpose.
We came back different. Quieter. More inclined to hold doors. We started saying “sorry” to furniture. We began measuring things in kilometers and pretending that was normal.
And then we built this website. Because that’s what Americans do when they fall in love with something — they build an unnecessarily elaborate tribute to it on the internet.
“Why .com and not .ca?”
We’re Americans. We don’t have permission to use .ca.
We asked. They were very polite about it. They said they’d “look into it” and “get back to us,” which — as we’ve learned — is Canadian for “absolutely not.”
So we went with .com. Like Americans do. Loudly. With a credit card.
Our Mission
To restore the goodest of relations between the US and Canadia.
We’re not saying anyone started anything. We’re just saying we didn’t. Probably. Sorry.
This site is an homage. A love letter. A slightly excessive digital monument to a country that would never build a monument to itself because that would feel like showing off.
We’re not gatekeeping Tim Hortons, gravy on fries, or any of it. In trade, we offer you KFC Extra Crispy. (We went to a KFC in the GTA and they didn’t have Extra Crispy. This is the kind of injustice we’re here to address.)
“No Worries”
We know what you really mean when you say “no worries.”
Or maybe we don’t. That’s the thing about Canadians — “no worries” could mean “genuinely, it’s fine” or it could mean “I will carry this slight with me to my grave but I will never, ever mention it again.” There’s no way to tell. That’s the beauty of it.
When an American says “no worries,” they mean “I literally do not care.” When a Canadian says it, they’re managing an entire internal diplomatic summit about whether to feel hurt, and they’ve decided — for now — to let you live.
We respect this. We fear this. We aspire to this.
About the Name
We know it’s spelled right.
Those other people forgot the “i” — since they don’t like to appear self-centered.
The “i” stands for “infrastructure that works.”
Or “inclusive.” Or “I can’t believe they have healthcare.” We rotate.
Official Tagline Rotator