Mickey Mouse has Canada in his animated blood.

His creator, Walt Disney, is descended from proud Canadians.

Epcot’s Canada pavilion is – in part – a tribute to this.

Walt Disney’s father, Elias, was born in Canada, but didn’t find out that he wasn’t actually a confirmed citizen of the U.S.A. until he was much older.

Walt told writer Pete Martin the story in 1956:

“My father, you know, was born in Canada. He grew up in the Goderich (Bluevale, Ontario) area and my grandfather had a farm there and things.

I was up there one time and visited a lot of my dad’s cousins. He used to tell me a lot about it and I felt like I knew the country up there. He said when he was a little fellow about eight years old he ran the foot races on the Queen’s birthday, a big day in Canada.

My grandfather did some funny things. He was a driller and they were drilling for oil in Goderich and they struck salt and started the salt industry in Goderich. They needed salt there.

My dad and I before he died, we’d always talk and I’d say ‘Dad, let’s go back up there. Go back and visit there’. So we were going to do it but we never got around to it before he died unexpectedly when I was in South America, in 1941.

They have a cemetery in Goderich. They call it the Pioneer Cemetery and all my great grandfathers on both sides are there. The Disney side and the Richardson side. That was my grandmother’s maiden name, Richardson.

My dad, whenever he was asked, would say that he was born in Canada and naturalized an American by Act of Congress and for some fifty odd years he voted in every election. Someone in Portland – maybe he wasn’t voting the way they wanted him to vote – challenged him. They found that by a technicality my dad was still considered an alien. That was a mean thing for anybody to do.

He and my mother went through the whole procedure of learning the Constitution upside down and backwards and all of that and then he had to go to court and went through the whole routine.

Then at a certain point the judge said, ‘Mr. Disney, it won’t be necessary for you to go through all this’. But I assure you, my dad was ready. And they became naturalized American citizens in their 70s.”

As Martin Short says in his O’ Canada! Circlevision movie at Epcot, “Vive Le Canada!”