umm two of the award recipients are Canadians

I encourage downvoters to read the article below for a perspective on how LeCun, Hinton and Bengio may have unfairly excluded a wealth of prior work in their version of deep learning history:

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.htm...

Note for people put off by the link: The conspiracy refers to the title of a paper by the Turing award winners, not Schmidhuber's.

Dr. LeCun is a French native, for what it's worth