How a guy from New Brunswick turned Canadian culture into an Instagram sensation

John Batt, before the first of two live comedy shows at the Owl’s Club, an old legion hall in Toronto, on Dec. 2, 2023. Batt made a name for himself via his Instagram account, @canada.gov.ca, which curates stories about popular and obscure Canadian culture for tens of thousands of followers.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail

Whenever the Leafs play the Habs, John Batt likes to log on to Instagram from his home north of Montreal and post about it. It’s easy, fun, and gets a lot of reaction from the 68,000 followers who flock to his account for Canadian trivia and ephemera.

In 2020, one of those followers, a Carey Price fan named Greg Keelor, started sending messages to Batt. What began as an exchange of emojis turned into a full-fledged conversation. That’s funny, Batt thought. That’s the same name as the guy from Blue Rodeo. But it soon became apparent that it was Greg Keelor from Blue Rodeo.

Keelor, a promising amateur goalie before he ever played the guitar, told Batt about a moment that might deserve its own Heritage Minute. As he lingered around after a tryout for the junior Toronto Marlboros in 1972 at Maple Leaf Gardens, Bobby Orr stepped onto the ice. Then Frank Mahovlich did, too. It turned out that Team Canada was scheduled to practise for the 1972 Summit Series right after the tryout. Despite the knee injuries that sidelined Orr from the series itself, he started taking shots on Keelor. Then Mahovlich followed suit. The story seemed so surreal that I had to ask Keelor about it myself. “I’ve never experienced shots like that before,” he told me. “They had inertia.”

To recap: One of Canada’s most-revered musical front men had slid into Batt’s DMs to talk about his run-in with one of the greatest hockey teams the country has ever produced. “I was like, ‘No one would believe what I’m reading right now on my phone,’ ” Batt says.

But this quintessentially Canadian story is the kind of thing that shows up on Batt’s phone every day. He runs the Instagram account @canada.gov.ca, which blew up during the pandemic into something like a massive, unsanctioned billboard in a digital town square. Through posts and stories, Batt shares a kind of underdog, tongue-in-cheek, tone-perfect version of Canadiana, filled with celebrations of regionalism, impossibly niche trivia and historical narratives that have slipped past traditional historians and gatekeepers. @canada.gov.ca is the kind of place where followers can learn about everything from Pierre Trudeau’s dating life to the history of ParticipACTION exercise-promotion commercials to the Eastern Canadian classroom ubiquity of neon polypropylene chairs.

In showcasing this version of Canada, Batt has become a bridger of people, places and moments – an accidental historian, mystery solver and, perhaps most consequentially, cultural curator. “To me, the curation is done through a lens of nostalgia, childhood and a clear regional focus,” says Tatum Dooley, a curator and writer who was one of the first people to interview Batt, for her Canadian Art Forecast newsletter in 2020. Batt, she says, “creates a world-building that’s engaging – even for people who don’t have the same regional experiences the account documents.”

But for all that work, neither Batt nor @canada.gov.ca are traditionally patriotic. “I’m not a pro-Canada account; I’m a pro-Canadian account,” he says. He eschews the kind of force-fed, exclusionary notions of cultural identity that come from I Am Canadian beer commercials and hockey culture. Sure, he drinks beer and loves to tell a story about how he once faced off against Sidney Crosby in a Pee-Wee AAA tournament, but he doesn’t love the one-dimensional tropes those types of stories can become. He’d prefer to focus on Canada’s complexity, variety, even mundanity.

Doing all this has found Batt tens of thousands of fans – many of whom send fascinating stories to him so often he can hardly keep up. Not just from ordinary Canadians, either. With fans like Keelor, Canadian culture is talking back to Batt. “If there were Junos for Instagram,” Keelor once told him, “you should get a Juno.”

The story of @canada.gov.ca’s rise is not only about celebrating the things around you, but also about the ways they connect people. Batt and I are both 37, both from New Brunswick; we started messaging in 2020 after realizing we both enjoyed many extremely specific Maritime cultural touchpoints – among them Halifax’s Jimmy Swift Band, Miramichi’s Cunard Restaurant and a Fredericton pool that I used to sneak into that boasts an underwater viewing port.

He and I met in New Brunswick’s capital over the holidays at a landmark that his followers are familiar with: a Dooly’s pool hall, one of 55 across the Maritimes and scattered throughout Eastern Canada. His earliest pieces of @canada.gov.ca merch included a shirt that mashed up the pool-hall chain’s former logo with the word “Maritimes.” He’s sold hundreds of them. As a distinctly lowbrow gathering place familiar to many in specific parts of Canada, Dooly’s is an institution that defines the kind of Canadian experience Batt tries to highlight on Instagram. “They’re the kind of places that you take for granted,” he told me over Alpine beers.

Not entirely a subtle person, Batt had walked into Dooly’s wearing one of his Dooly’s logo shirts. Then the bartender, who was wearing an actual Dooly’s shirt, remarked that she also had the “Maritimes” shirt. Batt asked where she got it. “Instagram,” she responded.

From him.

Batt’s interest in Canadiana began as a child in the Fredericton area, where he soaked up the kind of trivia about hockey, books and politics that usually tends to be fodder for adults yelling at each other in bars. “I was the kind of guy who knew the names of cabinet ministers,” he says. “The family business is education.” His mother, Elaine Batt, was a middle-school English teacher, and his father, Larry Batt, was the registrar at St. Thomas University. They kept a library at home, exposing Batt to the works of Irving Layton, Robertson Davies and Sheila Watson. He absorbed it all.

He gave St. Thomas a shot after high school, but the poetry of Layton and the works of Leonard Cohen had always pulled his eyes toward Montreal. He soon found himself enrolled at Concordia University instead. After finishing classes in 2011, Batt cycled through odd jobs and a series of roommates affiliated with the city’s creative scenes. One of those roommates was Rollie Pemberton, the musician, poet and author who, as Cadence Weapon, had just released the Polaris Music Prize-shortlisted album Hope in Dirt City.

Batt and his former roommate Rollie Pemberton, also known as the musician Cadence Weapon.Maya Fuhr/Supplied

As Pemberton spent his days making beats and writing, Batt could be found around their Rue Saint-Urbain apartment and across the Mile End spouting “Canadian factoids,” recalls Pemberton – who would eventually win the Polaris and later DJ Batt’s wedding. “This guy loves the ephemera of Canada,” he says.

Pemberton believes Batt’s gregariousness is why he eventually built such a strong connection with his online fan base. “He’d talk to anyone,” the musician says. But Batt’s personality did not square too well with his day jobs. He was aimless through his 20s and early 30s, working at an Ethiopian restaurant, a boutique hotel and then a digital marketing company, wishing he was doing something more fun, more public-facing. One day in the late 2010s, during a period in which he described himself as “soul-broken” by the dryness of the marketing job, he decided to cheer himself up by creating a parody Instagram account.

It would look like it was run by a government office, and post photos of Canadian scenery and celebrities – ideally creating the appearance that the federal government itself was as adept at Instagram as generic celebrity fan accounts that post stock images. As a bonus, since it was tied to his phone, it would instill confusion among his friends about why Ottawa was showing up on their list of suggested accounts to follow. Batt typed in an official-looking handle on the Instagram registration page. It turned out @canada.gov.ca was available.

Sometime in the carefree final months before the COVID-19 pandemic, Batt realized that hundreds of strangers had begun to follow his account. Some of them seemed drawn to his stock photos of Canada. Others possibly thought it might be the Instagram account of the actual federal government. Either way, he decided to expand beyond the original prank. If people liked pictures of Canada, his logic went, perhaps they’d like some facts, too.

Batt’s brain has been bursting with Canadian trivia since he was a kid, but the kind of facts had evolved over time. Like many Millennials, his internet-poisoned brain saw no necessary barrier between the high and lowbrow. One such lowbrow moment in Canadian history was the time in 2011 that a photo began circulating of hockey commentator Ron MacLean shirtless, beer in hand, playing air guitar. The Canadian corner of the internet obsessed over it a decade earlier. It was the kind of historical moment he felt worth resurfacing. “I thought, that’s a piece of important Canadian history that you’re not going to learn in textbooks,” Batt recalls.

This was not the kind of whitewashed, Great Man version of history that Canadian classrooms have served up for generations. It was deliciously interesting – a Heritage Minute for the extremely online crowd. “This is just a friendly reminder to take’r slow at the office Christmas party this year,” Batt wrote in the late-2018 post.

This kind of eye-catching alternative Canadiana drew in more and more followers, especially as the pandemic hit, and people began arriving by the thousands to take in Batt’s brand of nostalgia, absurdities and regional touchpoints. @canada.gov.ca became a kind of digital museum or gallery with rotating exhibits in an era when real museums and galleries were inaccessible. Batt began to develop a voice as the pseudonymous “admin” of @canada.gov.ca – a golly-gee tone whose curious overtones belied a sly smirk.

This voice worked across all kinds of subject matter, such as when Batt posted about a sky-high tire swing on a highway near Halifax (”Who put it there? Was it your cousin Matt? Was it the Boy Scouts?”) and the breakup of Peter MacKay and Belinda Stronach, led by a photo of a despondent-looking MacKay petting a Bernese mountain dog (”Perhaps my favourite detail was that it was later revealed that the dog had been borrowed for the picture! LOL brilliant!”). Even more lined up behind his posts challenging the Canadian establishment, including one celebrating the work of Dene Chief Frank T’Seleie to block oil-and-gas pipelines through the Mackenzie Valley. (”Chief T’Seleie gave a rousing speech that PROMISED to Justice Berger that the pipeline would not be built.”)

Soon each post was getting thousands of likes, and Batt’s admin character was engaging with as many followers as possible. When he started posting asking for Friday “tip jar” donations, some people began sending him money weekly.

The community that formed around @canada.gov.ca created the ideal kind of echo chamber for the project – one in which fans shared not just their enthusiasm, but ideas for Batt to explore in future posts. Take, for example, Ven-Rez chairs.

Batt remembers sitting in the company’s particular brand of curved, neon-coloured polypropylene-and-steel chairs pretty much all the way through school. When a follower from Nova Scotia suggested Ven-Rez for a post idea, Batt began to research them – and came to notice that just about anyone he talked to who went to school on the east coast, and parts of Quebec and Ontario, had racked up years of their lives in the seats. Everyone who spent their school years ensconced in Ven-Rez’s finest had a story of trying to bend the chairs’ arched backs, or of falling backward seeing how far their stabilizing legs could lean.

But most people remembered little more than the chairs’ shapes and propensity for inducing goofballery. Batt wanted to tell his followers more about them. He used the account to share the Ven-Rez origin story: the Shelburne, N.S., company had been founded by two ex-servicemen who realized that the laminated wood body of the de Havilland Mosquito bombers used in the Second World War could also be used to make furniture. The brand name actually stood for veneer and resin. They’re made with different materials these days, sure, but the post resonated. Now Batt even sells shirts with the chairs’ image on them.

The sheer reach of @canada.gov.ca has ensured that some of the celebrities Batt has posted about have gotten in touch. Keelor is one. Jann Arden once commented on a mock Valentine’s-Day-card post featuring her likeness, thinking it was an official government account, pleading for the federal government to stop the export of live horses to Japan. Anne Murray, meanwhile, saw @canada.gov.ca for what it was, and reached out to share her admiration.

Back in 2021, after posting some footage of a vintage Murray performance, Batt suddenly found the Grammy-winning Nova Scotia musician and golf enthusiast in his DMs. They exchanged a few messages, and some time later, her team sent a package full of gifts from the Anne Murray Centre in Springhill, N.S. – including one photo signed to Batt and one signed to the “admin,” so he could post it without breaking his (then gradually disappearing) anonymity. He’d found a fan in the Snowbird singer.

“It is astonishing how much content ‘Admin’ posts,” Murray told me when I e-mailed her about the account. “Where is it coming from? It is simply remarkable and so much fun.”

Anne Murray sent Batt this signed photo in appreciation of his @canada.gov.ca work.Submitted by John Batt

In November, Batt quit his latest job – working in student affairs at McGill University’s medical school – to become the admin full-time. Doing both had become cumbersome after promising himself he’d always respond to his daily messages, which by then stacked up into the hundreds. And as it happened, he’d started hosting PowerPoint-driven comedy events under the account’s name at the start of 2023. They’d become a lot of fun. And lucrative.

Well, lucrative enough, so long as he gave up his Montreal apartment and moved to his cottage full-time. Which he did. (This was not a difficult proposal to sell to his newly wedded wife Allison Batt, who herself is a creative in the entertainment-tech space.) If he can average one event a month, Batt reckons he’s now able to make a living from his account; sponsored posts add in some gravy, as do the Friday “tip jar” donations.

At one of those speaking events in Toronto in early December, Batt asked the audience a question about Canada’s most famous recent Jeopardy! contestant, Mattea Roach – and then revealed Roach was in the audience. The 23-game-in-a-row winner was met with massive applause. Roach, Canada’s literal reigning champion of trivia, loves the @canada.gov.ca account, too. In the middle of their winning streak, Batt posted Roach’s slow-motion reaction video to a clue about New Brunswick. That was the moment – being posted on Batt’s Instagram account – that Roach recalls they realized they had “made it.”

@canada.gov.ca, Roach says, “is promoting the idea that there is such a thing as Canadian culture, when often we act as though there isn’t one. It’s picking out these little nuggets and celebrating the mundane – the sublime within the mundane.”