Who would have believed that a professional basketball team in Toronto could do more for national unity than all the expensive initiatives of the federal government?
That team is, of course, the Toronto Raptors, who have made it all the way to the finals of the National Basketball Association.
That in itself should not help national unity, even though there are fans of the Raptors all across Canada.
In the past, Canadian-based teams have occasionally made it to the finals of North American sports leagues and have even won major championships. However, you have to go back a ways to the 1990s to find the champion Toronto Blue Jays and Montreal Canadiens. (If you're a soccer fan, we don't include Toronto FC capturing the Major League Soccer championship a couple of years ago, because – despite the league's optimistic name – soccer is not yet a major professional sport in North America.)
Unlike the Raptors, the title-winning Blue Jays and Canadiens, and the others that came before them, didn't have any noticeable impact on national unity.
The Raptors seem quite different, despite the fact that the only Canadian on the team is a bench player who almost never actually plays.
The apparent positive impact on Canadian unity is all because of the team's brilliant slogan: We the North.
Ever since it was introduced in 2014, the slogan – created by Sid Lee, a creative agency headquartered in Montreal – has been a massive success. It proclaimed that the Raptors are not just playing for Toronto, but for all of Canada as the only NBA team based in the country.
Now, we could question whether many people in Toronto have any idea what it means to live in the real North, but we're not going to quibble about that.
Instead, we have to recognize the undeniable fact that the Raptors' playoff run has ignited an outpouring of support from across Canada, and united the country in a way that you don't often see.
We first got a sense of that while watching the American broadcast of an NBA finals game, and a picture was shown of Raptors fans in Tuktoyaktuk holding a We the North banner and standing in front of a sign with 'Arctic Ocean' written on it.
The announcers sounded amazed about how far north Tuktoyaktuk was from Toronto. (But to their credit, they pronounced Tuktoyaktuk correctly.)
Then there were the so-called Jurassic Parks – outdoor viewing parties – which started to pop up in places as diverse as Halifax and Regina, and attracted thousands of people to share the experience of cheering on the Raptors in front of a big screen.
Plus, there were also the fans of the Raptors who followed them to American cities. In Oakland, California, about a thousand of them celebrated in an arena after a win, much to the amazement of every American who witnessed it.
Everyone knows that a sport sometimes has unexplainable effects on people. If it helps to unify Canadians, we welcome that.
Perhaps it will be basketball – invented by a Canadian, by the way – that will show that Canadians are perhaps not as disunited as we think.