Canada

“I thought I was in Vancouver and it just occurred to me that I was in Toronto.” That is how David Farrier opens the Canada episode of Flightless Bird—by admitting he spent several days in Canada’s largest city and later forgot which city he had been in. The episode is a characteristically loose, digressive tour through a country that Americans (and New Zealanders) think they understand but mostly don’t. Farrier and co-host Rob “Hayden” Donnan weave together a visit to a Canadian listener’s home, a deep dive into therapeutic clowning, a baffled investigation of bagged milk, and a running joke about how little they actually know about their northern neighbor. The throughline is that Canada is both deeply familiar and genuinely strange to outsiders, and that its quiet, apologetic culture hides real complexity—especially in how it handles healthcare, comedy, and dairy.

Therapeutic Clowning and the Canadian Healthcare System