OTTAWA, Ontario — Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, after weeks of controversy from a leaked private phone conversation, held a press conference Sunday admitting that “Canadian Thanksgiving was a hoax all along.”
According to the official government statement, the holiday was created in the 1940’s by the Big Pilgrim industry in the United States as a way to expand the Thanksgiving holiday market to Canada. During the conference, a visibly emotional Trudeau stated that for decades the industry “poured money into creating a fake holiday like we pour gravy on poutine.” He apologized for the leak, saying that it was not his intention to keep this “shocking revelation from the public”, but that, “I had just learned about it myself and was grappling with how best to present it.”
Canadian Thanksgiving is approximately an 8 billion dollar industry worth about 6 billion dollars.
Various opposition MP’s have called for Trudeau to step down over the scandal, dubbed “Thanksgateing” in the press.
Calgary resident Alberta Kolds said the news was upsetting. “Are you telling me we didn’t always pour maple syrup on turkey? This is causing me to question my Canadian-ness, eh?”
Though Canada did have existing harvest festivals before the ‘40s, the current version of the holiday shares only its name with American Thanksgiving, where little pilgrims came together to make Big Pilgrim.
Some of the biggest historical differences are in the traditional holiday foods. “It turns out that Canadian mashed potatoes, which are made of cheese curds, were originally made from cooked and crushed vegetable tubers,” says Professor of Canadian History at the University of British Columbia, Pete Peterton. “It is still unclear what the Americans make theirs out of, possibly cotton candy, as they occasionally cover it in marshmallows…. And the idea of a turkey being the traditional fowl is nonsense. It was, of course, Canadian goose.”