The school Max attends changes noticeably from the first half of the first season (filmed at Lord Tennyson Elementary in Vancouver - seen mostly in The Nuclear Family (1990) ) to the second half (filmed at Burnaby South Secondary, seen in this episode).
Max wears a "Hudson's Bay Company" coat in this episode. The stripe design was first used by HBC in 1798 in the manufacture of wool blankets, which at the time were a huge trade commodity in northern Canada. Wool coats with the stripes were introduced in 1922, and were worn by the Canadian Winter Olympics team in the 1960s.
When Max returns home at the end of the episode, his grandfather (played by Jan Rubes) is listening to the radio show "Songs of my People". This was an actual weekly show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) featuring folk music from around the world, and was hosted by Rubes from 1953 to 1963.