There's a particular sound the last weeks of August make in this country, and it is, if you grew up within driving distance of Toronto, the sound of the Ex. The Canadian National Exhibition opens in mid-August and runs through Labour Day, and for those eighteen days it functions as something the calendar refuses to admit: the countdown. The Ex doesn't just mark the end of summer. For a few generations of Canadians, it was the end of summer, a last, glorious, deep-fried gasp before the school bell swallowed everyone whole.
A Fair Older Than Canada Itself
The Ex has been doing this to us for a remarkably long time. The first Canadian National Exhibition opened in 1879, eight years before Confederation's first batch of provinces bothered to build a railway across the whole country, and a full twelve before the word "Canada" was officially stretched from ocean to ocean. The fairgrounds at Exhibition Place, on the lakefront west of downtown Toronto, have been hosting it almost every year since, pausing only for the two world wars.
It began, as these things did, as an agricultural and industrial show, a place to prize the fattest hog and admire the newest steam-powered thresher. That earnest, chrysanthemum-judging heart still beats somewhere deep inside it. But what the fair grew into, over a century and a half, is something stranger and stickier: a temporary city of midway rides, food trucks, prize homes you'll never live in, and a donut machine that has somehow become a national heirloom.
The Little Donut Machine That Could
Which brings us to the heart of the matter: Tiny Tom Donuts. If you've been to the Ex, you know them by smell before sight, that warm oil-and-sugar fog that finds you two aisles before you find the stall. If you haven't, picture a small, open-fronted booth containing a miniature donut machine: batter plops from a hopper, rings drop into hot oil, travel a lazy conveyor, flip, and emerge golden, to be swept, still hot, into a paper bag and shaken with cinnamon sugar while you watch.
They are small. Aggressively small. A bag holds several dozen, each roughly the size of a loonie (see our earlier piece for the coin; see your pocket for the loonie). The point was never size. The point was that you could stand there, bag in hand, eating donuts straight off the line that had been hot oil thirty seconds ago, and that this was, in some important way, summer.
Tiny Tom has been at the Ex since 1967, another Canadian centennial baby, born the same year the country threw itself a hundredth-birthday party. For anyone who went to the Ex as a child, the booth is less a vendor than a landmark: the place you met your parents when you got separated, the treat you earned for surviving the Tilt-A-Whirl, the last thing you ate before the drive home, sitting in the back seat in sugar-dusted, midway-drained silence.
Eat It On A Stick
If Tiny Tom is the Ex's conscience, the food building is its id. Each August the fair's food vendors engage in an arms race of escalation so predictable it has become a genre: take something, deep-fry it, put it on a stick, and dare the next person to walk past. The menu rotates, but the principle is eternal. One year it's deep-fried butter. The next, poutine on a stick. The year after that, something involving maple bacon and a waffle cone that has no business existing and sells out by 3 p.m. anyway.
The genius of the Ex food building is not the food itself, which is, honestly, often regrettable. The genius is the social contract. You go in knowing you will eat something ill-advised. Your friends will eat something ill-advised. You will all compare notes, agree it was terrible, and then, this is the crucial step, go back the next year and eat something even more ill-advised. It is the only place in Canada where consuming a deep-fried Pepsi is met not with concern but with a kind of grudging respect.
The Midway at Dusk
As the sun goes down over Lake Ontario, the Ex transforms. The agricultural pavilions empty; the midway lights up. This is the Ex's best hour, the one that lives in memory long after the stomach ache has faded. The Ferris wheel turns against the darkening sky, the rides throw their riders sideways under bulbs that seem impossibly bright, and the whole midway hums with generators and pop music and the specific, tinny voice of a carny explaining the rules of a game you will absolutely not win.
There is a particular Canadian melancholy to the midway at night at the end of August. It's warm enough still to be outside in a t-shirt, but the air has that edge, the faintest suggestion that the season is turning. You ride the rides with the knowledge, not quite spoken, that this is the last time. The Ex closes on Labour Day. The day after, the country puts on its jacket and goes back to school.
The Air Show, and the End
The Ex culminates, and concludes, with the Canadian International Air Show, held over the lake on Labour Day weekend. The Snowbirds roar across the waterfront in formation; the crowd tilts its collective head back and squints. And then it's over. The midway folds up. The Tiny Tom machine goes quiet. The food building is stripped back to concrete.
The Ex is a finite thing, and its finiteness is the point. It is the punctuation mark on summer, a comma if you're an optimist, or a period if you're a kid staring down September. Either way, it runs out. That's what makes the donuts taste the way they do, and the rides feel the way they feel: not because they're extraordinary, but because they're temporary.
Final Thoughts
The Ex isn't the biggest fair, or the grandest, or the most sophisticated. It's a 146-year-old agricultural show that grew a midway, a sugar fog, and a tiny donut machine, and somehow became the way a lot of Canadians measure the end of summer. You go for the rides and the regrettable food, but you remember it for the feeling: the last warm night of the year, lit up and spinning, knowing it all closes tomorrow.
Every Canadian childhood ends the same way, give or take: standing on the midway at dusk, bag of Tiny Toms in hand, the air show fading over the lake, and the quiet certainty that summer is almost over and there's nothing to be done about it except buy one more bag.
Stay gold, my friends.
P.S. The official line is that the CNE "closes for the season" on Labour Day. The honest line is that it closes because summer does, and Canadians, being who we are, would rather mark the ending with donuts and a Ferris wheel than simply let it happen to us.