Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  “Canada is a serious country,” candidate Michael Ignatieff grandly told one crowd during the 2006 Liberal leadership race, yet it’s also a country where a cross-country driver will come across a giant pickerel, goose, five-cent piece, Easter egg, moose antler, oil can, apple, hockey stick, elephant, tomato, lobster and, in little Beiseker, Alberta, a giant skunk called Squirt.

  It is a country where the representative head of state, the current governor general, comes from Haiti and had to renounce citizenship in France to represent the Queen of England in Canada. A country where the government regularly collects far too much in taxes then declares billion-dollar surpluses and acts as if it’s somehow managed to turn a profit running the place. A country whose thirteen parts—ten provinces, three territories—are convinced that there’s something in this country called “fiscal imbalance” whereby each and every one of them is getting screwed by a plan originally set up to allow for “equalization.”

  A country where pollsters not long ago discovered that more people believe in the Loch Ness monster than believe their politicians.

  It is a country that sells the outdoors and fresh air and nature and wilderness to those outside its borders—yet today is the most urbanized modern nation in the world. A country whose citizens often seem less interested in whether a glass is half full or empty than they are in whether there might be chips in the rim—and yet will still tell pollsters they think of themselves as contented people.

  A country whose citizens are suspicious and jealous of their neighbours yet say the Canadian value they treasure above all others is represented by a health system sworn to fairness and universal access. A country so renowned for the tolerance it continually celebrates that writer Margaret Atwood once couldn’t help remarking, “In this country you can say what you like because no one will listen to you anyway.”

  A country with no history of civil war—but only because historians haven’t yet come to terms with what the Meech Lake Accord was all about.

  IT TAKES CREATIVE MINDS to keep a place like this together—and perhaps the true secret to the little-recognized longevity of Canada belongs to the inventors. After all, as the poet Miriam Waddington asks:

  Are we real or

  did someone invent us …?

  Canada, of course, gave the world the telephone, and insulin, and Pablum. It gave the world the CanadArm, kerosene, caulking guns, standard time, the combine harvester, green garbage bags, the electron microscope, instant potatoes, snowblowers, AM radio, the BlackBerry, electric stoves, IMAX, the Robertson screw, Muskol, the snowmobile, the paint roller, five-pin bowling, the Wonderbra, and Trivial Pursuit.

  But Canada’s greatest gift to the world—and perhaps to itself— might have come from J.D. Millar back in 1930. Millar, an engineer with the Ontario Department of Highways, had an idea so simple that, eventually, his small experiment in northeastern Ontario was adopted around the world.

  The line down the middle of the road.

  Just maybe it required a Canadian to realize that forces headed in opposing directions might need a little safe space between them, a little order to the traffic.

  And perhaps the secret to Canada can be said to lie somewhere between the lines.

  One

  The Unknown Country

  ON A RAINY DAY in the spring of 1991, I headed off to Victoria to pay a visit to Bruce Hutchison.

  It was the year following the failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord. Meech Lake—no matter what one’s opinion of the political initiative to turn Confederation into one big, happy, supportive, sharing family—had been a pivotal moment for this country as the century that was supposed to belong to Canada came to a close. Many firmly believed that Meech’s death was the end, which it wasn’t. What it was, undeniably, was the beginning of a long, perhaps irreparable rift between the governors and the governed.

  A civil war without the shooting—but hardly without casualties.

  For much of the previous nine months I’d been on the road “taking the pulse of the nation.” This, of course, is journalese for moving about the land in airplanes and rented cars, staying in four- and five-star hotels, eating and drinking at company expense, putting in for overtime and generally visiting old friends—but still, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to suggest that Canada was in the midst of the Second Great Depression. Only this one was of the mind, not the pocketbook, and the drought far more one of political imagination than of prairie fields.

  I had gone deliberately to Victoria to visit with Hutchison. After all, who better for a wandering journalist holding a stethoscope instead of a pen to call on than the one known as “the conscience of the nation”?

  Hutchison had written more than anyone before—or since—on the elusive Canadian identity. In thousands of columns and several books he’d sought to analyze and advise this country, its politicians, and even its people. His writing was vibrant, his optimism renowned. For someone setting out to travel the country in search of answers, Bruce Hutchison was an obvious destination.

  Some might even say he invented us.

  The man called “Hutch” by older journalists had long been a personal hero as well. He was, after all, the author of The Unknown Country, surely the most important book published in this nation over the previous half century. Three times he’d been given the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He’d also been named to the Privy Council and made an officer of the Order of Canada. He had, years earlier, evolved into an icon for just about every working Canadian newspaper columnist, revered as much for his prolific output and common sense as for the fact that he might have been the first to realize that it’s possible to avoid the newsroom and send your work in to sit at the desk for you. And this in the days before data transmission.

  Bruce Hutchison would turn ninety that year. Born in small-town Ontario in 1901, he was still writing a weekly column for the Vancouver Sun, still living on his small acreage just outside Victoria, still obsessively splitting firewood at his rustic cabin retreat farther up Vancouver Island at Shawnigan Lake.

  I was coming to visit at a time when many believed that the sometimes blue, sometimes overcast yo-yo that is the sky over Canada might, for once, actually fall all the way. Meech Lake had been intended to bring Quebec into the 1982 Constitution Act that the province had angrily refused to sign when Premier René Lévesque felt the final deal had been struck behind his back without his knowing.

  But there was much more to the national angst than the familiar fretting over Quebec and Confederation, no matter how intense it might be at the moment. The economy was sinking. The deficit was drowning the federal government. And even Hutchison’s little house in the country was threatening to wash away after a solid week of hard rain.

  Jamie Lamb and I had come by rented car and ferry from Vancouver, where Lamb was doing a general column for the Sun, and we were joined by Vaughn Palmer, the fine legislative columnist for the same paper. Despite an age difference of half a century, Palmer was Hutchison’s closest friend and very much treated as a son by the older man.

  We drove up between the tall Lombardy poplars that Hutchison had planted as seedlings sixty-five years earlier. The trees had grown so high they now seemed out of all proportion to the little wooden bungalow perched on a small rise of land. We knocked on the door— the knocker a brass and smiling William Shakespeare—and were greeted by a small, wizened old man with large, black horn-rimmed glasses and a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century British wardrobe that made him seem more a character out of P.G. Wodehouse than of the laid-back Canadian West Coast.

  He had a cane in his hand and its presence clearly embarrassed him, but the endless damp of this disappointing spring had turned his sciatica leg pain “excruciating.” Up to now the old man’s health had always been excellent, but during his annual visit to Ottawa over the past winter—a visit that invariably included a tête-à-tête with whatever prime minister happened to be in office, from Mackenzie King to Brian Mulroney—he�
�d ended up in an ambulance rushing him to Ottawa General, where doctors had diagnosed a small but cautionary heart attack.

  He needed the cane to get about his garden, which he insisted on showing off even though the tulips were bent over as if they’d just run a marathon. “It’s not what it used to be,” he said, waving the cane over the expansive lot while his spit-and-polished black shoes sank in the long wet grass. “But then, what is any more?”

  The very question I’d come to ask.

  Bruce Hutchison, after all, had published The Unknown Country in the 1940s. A generation later, in the 1980s, seized in an octogenarian fit of energy, he’d penned a follow-up book whose essence could be gleaned from the title: The Unfinished Country.

  “There won’t be a third!” he said in his creaky old man voice.

  BRUCE HUTCHISON was only forty-one in 1942 when he wrote what was, for many years, the best-known book in the land. Today, The Unknown Country is out of print—its red cover with the gold-embossed maple leaf on the spine sometimes showing up in second-hand bookstores—and has been largely forgotten. The book is undeniably out of date, both socially and historically, yet it remains a mandatory read for anyone trying to gain any grasp at all of this slippery thing called Canada.

  It wasn’t even a book he’d intended on writing. He said that it came out of a liquid lunch—Hutchison was a very light drinker—with a New York publisher who kept pushing drinks and insisting that Americans needed to know about their northern neighbour—and that Hutchison was the man to do it. Six weeks later he delivered the manuscript.

  Right from the well-known opening sentence—“No one knows my country, neither the stranger nor its sons”—there is a sense of the nation’s new spirit and of the author’s great optimism for what was to come. He saw Canada more as an energetic youth than a mature adult, a youth unaware of its strengths and uncertain of where exactly it might fit in. It had all the trappings of such young ambition: high hopes and deep doubts, delight and despair, but most of all a restlessness about what might become of it.

  Hutchison wrote about a then-young country, eleven million strong but spread so thinly in such an impossibly large space that the real story of the eleven million was an uncanny “loneliness”—the people huddled around the lights of little towns and a few cities, the country forever beyond.

  The people, he believed, didn’t yet know their own country, but it was slowly coming into focus. It was young and filled with great energy, just coming out of the muffling snows of the past and into a promising new season. The very name of the country was to him the shout of a youth, a name filled with sounds of geese returning and melting rivers roaring down mountains, destination uncertain.

  It was as if he could hardly wait to see what was coming. Then.

  In preparing for whatever this book would become, I naturally began my research with The Unknown Country. After all, Hutchison had been there first and had certainly stayed longest. I broke open the dark red covers of a second-hand volume, inhaled the must of yellowed pages, and was much heartened to read in Hutchison’s introduction that he’d begun with a plan but had instantly abandoned it. The original plan, he hoped, would not matter in the end.

  I, too, had a plan and I, too, soon abandoned those detailed architectural designs. It made sense when I mapped it out; it stopped making sense the moment my fingers stepped, uncertainly, onto the opening page. Hutchison’s warning on his opening pages might not have been as direct as Mark Twain’s in Huck Finn—“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted”—but he did have a motive, even if he claimed no master plan.

  His assignment had been to explain the great empty northern neighbour to the United States. It was released to a country that barely took notice. One year later, however, the book would be published north of the border and would become a remarkable bestseller.

  It was Canadians, it turned out, who wanted to know about Canada. Hutchison wrote that he wanted to open up southern eyes to what was happening on the northern half of the continent. In part because of its impressive war effort, he believed that Canada already stood with the significant countries of the world. And he argued that both countries needed to know each other better, for in coming years this North American relationship would prove an essential factor in world politics.

  He could not, however, offer Americans any clear-cut description of the northern personality. The Canadian just didn’t define as readily as the English or the French or the German, all so firm in people’s minds in this time of war; nor as readily as the American, whose personality was increasingly well formed and known to the world. The only truly distinct Canadian was found in Quebec, he said—this was 1942, remember—but the country’s overall identity was still far from clear.

  The best Hutchison could do was offer up a snapshot of Canada as he saw it at the time. He knew the country was evolving, had to evolve, and that soon enough that snapshot would have to fade. You might capture it for a moment, or even bring into brief focus a sizeable portion of it, but in the end it remained the unknown—perhaps even unknowable—country.

  Many years later, historian Pierre Berton, who considered Hutchison a mentor, would say he had it right. The Unknown Country’s very title still held up—a wolf howling in the distance, heard but not seen, a personality left largely to the imagination.

  Hutchison decided to write his book as a travelogue. He and wife, Dorothy, visit the Maritimes and Quebec, where they are hopeless with the language. They stop off in Ottawa, where Hutchison attends Question Period and describes the House of Commons as “the true heart of Canada.” Here, he thought, everything that was felt in the vast nation was spoken of within a matter of hours. He also believed Parliament was floating in a “comfortable vacuum” and disconnected from the reality of the country.

  The Hutchisons slip through Ontario—“I do not pretend to understand Toronto”—and then head ever west, stopping in Gimli, Manitoba, to write about Icelandic immigrants and eventually ending up in the lotus land of British Columbia.

  At the end of this trip he’s so overawed by the magnitude of trying to understand and describe this vast land that the man who would write more than three million words before his death turned to someone else’s words to sum up the experience. Hutchison quotes Captain George Vancouver, the eighteenth-century explorer of the west coast: “A lifetime is not enough to explore this country. A man is too small to feel its size. The poet has not been born to sing its song, nor the painter to picture it.”

  Hutchison had set out to do just that and, judging by The Unknown Country’s sales and shelf life, his attempt was successful.

  The book is at times lyrical, at times purple, at times terribly out of synch with current reality. French Canadians are pipe-smoking, goodhearted, simple country folk; the Japanese in British Columbia are breeding so quickly he finds no hope of their assimilation over time. The book is also sexist, consistently ignoring the female half of the population. That is, of course, the way men thought and wrote in 1942. Sixty years from now, today’s words will carry different weights.

  In Winnipeg Hutchison went to see Free Press editor John W. Dafoe, a man he considered the greatest Canadian of the times and whom he credited with helping move the country out of its colonial mindset and into full nationhood. Dafoe, he writes, originated Canada’s push to find its own role on the world stage as an “honest broker.” Sixty years on, that sentiment has fallen badly out of focus, the phrase itself, when it’s used at all, invariably tied to Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize work more than fifty years ago. John W. Dafoe, on the other hand, is no longer a name Canadians recognize.

  Hutchison knew that the war had revitalized the country’s economy following the Great Depression. Canada was now a stronger nation than anyone had imagined possible and, thanks to Dafoe’s enlightened thinking, would take its new and rightful place among leading nations once the war was over.

  In Hutchison’s opinion, Canada in 1942 was on the
verge of greatness. “Now our time is come,” he wrote, “and, if not grasped, will be forever lost.” No wonder that in later years Peter C. Newman would call Hutchison “the eternal optimist.”

  HE WOULD NOT REMAIN that way.

  The four of us—Jamie Lamb, Vaughn Palmer, Hutchison, and I— headed back into Victoria for lunch at his Union Club. He sat in the passenger seat while I drove. To passersby who happened to peer in at this shrunken little hawk-nosed man, his tie perfectly knotted, his black hat fitted so tight it seemed threaded on, he would have looked like a frail senior being taken for a ride by his grandsons. They wouldn’t have known that he was the one in charge, barking out directions and condemning a “Road Closed” sign as one more reminder of the new housing developments bearing down on him.

  Nor would they have seen his hands, sitting loosely on his lap over the cursed cane. The man who once described Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as having “the hands of a physician” still had, at nearly ninety, the hands of a woodsman, their size and grip shaped more by axe than by acquaintance.

  Hutchison’s love of chopping wood was, for me, one more reason to admire him. His friend and neighbour at the lake, Percy Rawlings, often told the story of Hutchison splitting wood and then deliberately hiding it from sight because if Dorothy found it “she’d only burn it.”

  Hutchison had once said that the simple woodshed “contains not just some fuel but nearly all that mankind has learned, so far, about civilized society.” And that “civilized society,” he’d come to believe, had taken a distinct turn for the worse in recent months in Canada.

  Bruce Hutchison had lost faith. He’d turned his back on the great promise he’d found so readily in 1942 and held on to for decades. At the club he moved into his familiar seat at the very same table former British Columbia premier W.A.C. “Wacky” Bennett had eaten lunch at for twenty years—“a sacred table!”—and immediately began railing about the state of the nation, barely pausing to take breath or bite.