Wikileaks III: U.S. worried about how it looked in The Border, Little Mosque on the Prairie

Wikileaks III: U.S. worried about how it looked in The Border, Little Mosque on the Prairie

The National Post has some more memos from the ongoing (and periodically hilarious) Wikileaks drop, only these ones don’t involve a CSIS bigwig bad-mouthing Canadians to the Yanks. Instead, we get amateur television criticism from someone in the U.S. embassy in Ottawa. Apparently, the Americans got quite exercised by the portrayal of Homeland Security staffers in CBC shows The Border and Little Mosque on the Prairie.

Some of the things that irked the nameless memo writer from a few different Border episodes:

  • “A fairly transparent the Maher Arar case [sic]” where agents intervene to save a Syrian-Canadian mistakenly sent to Syria
  • a smoking-hot U.S. agent, “sort of a cross between Salma Hayek and Cruella De Vil
  • and most memorably an American F-16 air strike on Canadian soil while all of our aircraft are busy fighting in Afghanistan.

On top of all that, Little Mosque got in on the act by making fun of Kafka-esque U.S. border security procedures.

The fact that all this happened on the public broadcaster’s airwaves is what really seems to get on American nerves. The memo reads: “the degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events…is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping.” Yeah, the kind that Canadians love so much that The Border was cancelled after three half-seasons. Little Mosque continues to flood the airwaves with its anti-American propaganda, returning to the airwaves December 6.

Americans may not have loved the depiction of them on Canadian television, but it’s not as if Canadians are regularly portrayed as superheroes in U.S. media (with the notable exception of Wolverine). Hell, if people believe How I Met Your Mother, all Canadians are afraid of the dark. So suck it up, Yanks.

• Documents: WikiLeaks releases diplomatic memos on Canada [National Post]