About

I love Canada Shirt is a regular tourist T-shirt, typically with a heart emoticon instead of "love". Usually it is stylized in an all-caps font, like "I ❤️ CANADA", with "CANADA" on the second row. When the sides of the text are obscured by something such as an unzipped hoodie or backpack straps, it can appear to read "I ❤️[LOVE] ANAL". This is a potentially embarrassing admission about one's sex preferences. This also works if the text does not include the "I love" part.

Origin

The earliest known occurrence of this meme is a reddit post by the user TylerS55 of a photo in which a schoolboy wears a Canada T-shirt obscured so that it reads "ANAL". A comment on the post mentioned that:

I would color the C, most of the D, and the A on my Hilroy notebooks.
If you are not from Canada, Hilroy notebooks are mandatory for students.

Another early post is an Imgur photo of a woman in a Canada shirt hugging by two other women who cover part of her shirt.

Spread

Many anime images, some NSFW, have been made depicting a character wearing a T-Shirt in this way, often being embarrassed about it or wearing a seductive expression:

On July 31 of 2023, Elon Musk posted a photo on X intentionally displaying a T-Shirt in this way, which was followed by a spike in Google Trends for "I love canada" and "I love anal".

T-Shirts explicitly highlighting the "ANAL" inside "I ❤️ CANADA" have been offered for sale e.g. by Unethical Threads.