For Canada Day, a nation with ‘elbows up’ asks how it should party down

The residents of Almonte, Ont., were elbows up before it was cool. The picturesque town in the Ottawa Valley is named for a Mexican general who fought valiantly when the U.S. invaded his country in 1847. Canada had its own border dispute with the Americans at the time – some Yankee politicians wanted to seize what is now British Columbia – so a group of Anglo farmers and mill workers seem to have felt a brief surge of solidarity with a Spanish-speaking statesman named Juan.