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But oh, what a falling off is here. Tim Hortons was started by the great and tragic hockey player, Mr. Horton, and an ex-cop, Ron Joyce. In the beginning — silly boys — they had no time for anything but putting out fresh donuts (ah, history!) and cheap coffee. Their target audience was the nine-to-fivers, the road-gypsy truck-drivers, the hard-hat construction gangs fixing roads and building skyscrapers, the jacks of all trade, and another great class — the retirees, who’d often gather of a morning to hold cheerful seminars on the bottomless outrage of each day’s political folly.

In short, their customers, by and large, were the people who do much of the work of the country — who never sit on political panels, or attend international conferences on the plight of the six-tailed lizard of Tasmania, and who never troubled themselves with sculpting tofu into a likeness of Al Gore or writing manifestos on the threatened lifestyle of the delta smelt or the Bolivian tic-mouse. (Some of these are, of course, from my own private zoology.) They were people who built things and drank a lot of coffee. They went to Tim Hortons. And they saw that it was good.

Well, what now? Now that Tims has declared itself fully in step with the new consciousness, now that they see themselves not merely as peddlers of donuts and double-doubles but are implicitly putting moral stickers on what they ideologically approve of — and by example urging their customers to do likewise — what are we to make of it? By purging Enbridge they are, by synecdoche, blasting the whole Alberta oil industry, and — this is key — the tens of thousands of workers, from every province, in the oilfields. They are saying these sons and daughters of honest toil are not worthy to uncurl the rim.