The more the world perceives Canada, the more it becomes obvious that we’ve been doing things our way for a long time

Dear Gossips,

Last night was the eTalk TIFF kickoff party, celebrating the 25th season. I arrived pretty late, as in, I missed Sarah altogether and only briefly got to see Jacek in *party attire* – but the feeling in the room was, incredibly, almost the same as it was back in the very beginning, when eTalk was a scrappy upstart staffed by a bunch of kids, fighting for red carpet access and celebrity interviews from publicists who neither knew nor cared about us or our show.

That feeling of consistency is partly my nostalgia, of course, but it’s also there because the show mandate, creating amazing and authentic celebrity TV moments, was fundamentally the same in the first season as it is all these years later. Like this clip released a couple of days ago, where Drake, then Aubrey, gives Keke Palmer a tour of the Degrassi set and all the workplaces of my 20s Matroyshka doll together.

That’s how Toronto functions during TIFF, too. It’s busier in certain areas and everyone enjoys the buzz, but the city keeps on being itself regardless of who’s outside Roy Thomson Hall. It’s a consistency we can rely on - and mirrors how it feels to be Canadian in general, these days.

Because there has never been so much global, sustained focus on us. Not like this. The headlines this year ricochet so wildly, from the universal Heated Rivalry fandom or Sterling Point bringing Muskoka envy to the masses, to the Other Stuff. But the more the world looks at us, the more it becomes obvious that we’ve been doing things our way for a long time.

On CBC’s Q today, Tom Power interviews Canadian actress and TV institution Kathleen Robertson – among other projects, she’s the creator and showrunner of the upcoming Blessed Sacraments – where they discuss her Substack post 'Why I'm Not More F-cked'

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I cannot overstate how familiar and normal this feels. For us. Yet – “it barely let me feel special”? Objectively I understand how that’s a bananas way to see the place where you grew up, starting a career in an industry where you kind of have to be special – but I understand exactly what Kathleen is saying, and I can’t say I’m mad at it.

We’ll come back to this, especially because I’m still processing Canadian Alison Pill’s NYT Op-Ed about child actors, itself a reaction to Hayden Panettiere’s untimely passing. For now, as the entertainment world looks at Toronto (which is not synonymous with all of Canada, but go with me for the sake of the piece) and as I step into huge shoes here while Lainey and Sarah chase the stories in and around the films, forgive a little pride at what makes us consistently us. Case in point below, an amuse-bouche: mother Celine never tires of entertaining. Or air guitar, apparently.

Yours in gossip,

Duana