Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  “This is a country we’re talking about here!” Hutchison snapped at one point when the discussion wavered into individual politicians. But he himself swept it off into personality when he began to talk about the death of the Meech Lake constitutional accord and the role played in its death by the likes of Manitoba legislator Elijah Harper Jr. and, of course, the accord’s most vocal critic, Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells.

  “That bastard !” the grand old man barked.

  Vaughn Palmer said he’d never seen Hutchison so black and pessimistic. On the ride out he’d warned that the old man had taken “personally” the crushing blows Harper and Wells had dealt the previous year. The accord had been well received in Quebec for its “distinct society” clause and Hutchison was one of many who believed this was the only way to keep Quebec in the fold. But instead, he argued across the lunch table, it “was rejected without serious thought by an English-speaking majority who hadn’t bothered to learn its contents.”

  Not surprisingly, his opinion was not well received by those who had opposed Meech Lake. Some recalled how much he’d always admired Pierre Trudeau—and hadn’t the former prime minister declared that the accord, which he opposed, could be rejected without consequence?

  “Balderdash,” said the old man. Quebec couldn’t possibly be stopped now from leaving Confederation; moreover, Canada’s very justification lay in the experiment it represents: different languages and different cultures coexisting peacefully and prosperously under one flag. If Quebec were to go, the rest must follow.

  “People who think the rest of Canada can survive are mad,” he went on. “You can’t have a scarecrow nation. It would simply fall apart if the Maritimes and Ontario and the West tried to stick it out. The others couldn’t deal with such a strong Ontario. The Maritimes would be the first to petition to join the United States and it would be over for everybody else very soon after.”

  Hutchison was hardly the only Eeyore moaning and groaning about the land in those days, but being the Grand Old Man of Canadian Journalism, his points had an added edge. And it wasn’t only the leaders who’d failed Canada, but Canadians themselves. Sitting in the Union Club stabbing air foes with his fork, he suddenly stopped and smiled. “I came across a quote from Emerson the other day in my reading,” he said. “‘The people are to be taken in short doses.’” He was feeling the same, showing little concern for news of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future that was then going about the country listening to “ordinary Canadians” vent over what had happened during the Meech Lake negotiations.

  Returning to his plate, he spoke to no one in particular: “Democracy is such a dirty, dirty business, isn’t it? How does it go on? How does it keep working? I honestly don’t know.

  “It wouldn’t matter if Lincoln or Ben Franklin was sitting down to write up a Canadian constitution right now. It wouldn’t work. It can’t work. The country is in too bad a temper. This country has lost its soul— it’s like they took you and they ripped out your heart, that’s what it feels like.”

  This wasn’t just old age railing at the coming night—despair knew no clear demographic in the months following the collapse of the constitutional talks—but Hutchison was undoubtedly feeling the march of time. He still worked on an old manual typewriter and delivered hard copy to the Vancouver Sun at a time when the other three at the table were pressing “send.” He was cared for by a loyal housekeeper, Gladys Veitch (Dorothy had been killed in a car accident in 1969 and daughter Joan, who’d kept house for him, had died a few years earlier). He’d had a heart attack. He had trouble walking.

  Later, back at the doorway of his little country bungalow, rain forming dimples on his big glasses, he stopped momentarily and shook his cane. “You know,” he said, “there is nothing about old age to recommend it. Avoid it. Avoid it.”

  Before that wet day in Victoria was out he’d say that he might have, at best, another year left in him. The country he’d spent a lifetime defining, he said, might have two more years. Bruce Hutchison would prove correct on the one date—he had only one year left.

  But he would prove wrong about the country.

  BRUCE HUTCHISON’S FAMOUS OPTIMISM did rally slightly in his final months as yet another constitutional initiative, the Charlottetown Agreement, was underway, but he died six weeks before it was voted down in referendum on October 26, 1992.

  This rejection would have upset him as much as the death of Meech, perhaps even more so in that the people—the very ones Emerson suggested “be taken in short doses”—were directly involved this time. The journalist who all his life considered himself a man of the people would never have agreed with them on this one.

  Bitterness, like arthritis, often seems a common affliction among older Canadians. Hutchison was not the first eminent figure to hit a wall of disappointment near the end of his life. When novelist Hugh MacLennan entered old age—he died in late 1990 at eighty-three—he felt such doom and gloom that he tried to put it all down in one final dark, dystopian novel. Voices in Time is a science-fiction account of the hopelessness that prevails decades after a nuclear explosion has destroyed his beloved Montreal. A main character is likened to “a mind trapped in the collapsing vaults of history.” He seems to speak for the author himself.

  Such a shift seemed improbable for MacLennan, once the great celebrator of his country through his novels, essays, and such nonfiction works as Seven Rivers of Canada. He’d ended one of his earlier novels, The Watch That Ends the Night, with “It came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence.” To think otherwise, it would seem, would be to go against even the MacLennan clan motto: “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

  Yet Hugh MacLennan had clearly lost his. When his last book was about to come out I went to see him at his cottage in North Hatley in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and the old man, sitting under a leafy oak tree on a gorgeous late-summer day, said he didn’t know exactly what had happened to his country, but somewhere along the way “the fibre went out of us.”

  Bruce Hutchison and Hugh MacLennan were hardly alone. Canada can sometimes seem like the land of Grumpy Old Men.

  Robertson Davies, at one time Canada’s best-known international author, was so put off by the 1980s rush to enter into free trade with the United States that he became convinced “this is the worst this country has ever seen.”

  And historian Donald G. Creighton, a year before his death in 1979, the year before the first referendum on Quebec sovereignty, had come to regard the country he spent a lifetime writing about as “a good place to live, but that’s all Canada is now, just a good place to live.”

  IF ANYONE WAS GOING TO ENTER his later years in a grumpy mood, I would have expected it to be Walter Stewart.

  It stands as one of the good fortunes of my lucky career that I was able to work with, and at one point be hired by, this man. Walter Stewart was the greatest investigative journalist of his generation, a man who muck-raked and took on all comers in the great traditions of William Lyon Mackenzie, the original Canadian revolutionary, and Joseph Howe, the early anti-Confederate.

  Stewart, with his mad-professor hair, his bottle-thick horn rims, his cackle, and a squeaky voice that seemed to run on rusty shocks, was at the same time solidly built, muscular, and utterly fearless. He was the very first to take on the instantly iconic Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, his highly critical Shrug: Trudeau in Power coming out only three years into the sixteen that Trudeau would so totally dominate Canadian politics, even when briefly out of power.

  Stewart was the ultimate iconoclast in Canadian journalism, the fourth son of committed CCFers in ultra-conservative London, Ontario, and a top student who once described his hobbies as “reading, writing and arguing.” He was writing about the perils of globalization before the rest of us could even fit the word in our mouths. He took on the banks, the food industry, the insurance industry, the historians—and even Canadians’ very notion of
themselves.

  As he once wrote in a rant against government cutbacks, “There’s just not enough voices out there saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ ”

  Stewart, who died of cancer in 2004 at the age of seventy-three, worked for the Toronto Star, Maclean’s, Today magazine, and the Toronto Sun, wrote some twenty or more books, and served as director of the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. “Approach each story as if you just arrived in town that morning,” he would advise young reporters, me included, “and write each story as if you’re leaving town that night.”

  He travelled the country extensively, but disliked driving. He had a driver’s licence—claiming it had been issued by a local garage even though he ran into a gas pump during the test—but poor vision in one eye made depth perception difficult, so he rarely took the wheel. Instead his wife, Joan, did the driving while Walt sat in the back seat, happily typing away and periodically looking up through his thick glasses to shout “Are we there yet?”

  One of his books, But Not in Canada: Smug Canadian Myths Shattered by Harsh Reality, took a bit of the stuffing out of this gentle, polite, caring country. Stewart had become so put off by Canadians wallowing in their own silly superiority that he believed “smugness has become a national religion, a national disease” and traced its then most recent rise to the American crisis in political trust that had grown out of the Vietnam War, the Watergate break-in, and the impeachment threat that finally forced Richard Nixon from presidential office.

  How, Stewart wondered, could Canadians feel so great about their own political process when, only two years before Watergate, a handful of Quebec indépendentistes known as the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) had kidnapped British diplomat James Cross and murdered Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte—and, with almost every Canadian politician backing the decision, the government of the day had brought in the old, rarely used War Measures Act? After calling out the army, Trudeau’s Liberal government had tossed more than four hundred people in jail without charges or trial and made it illegal to belong to an organization that had been perfectly legal only the day before—never bothering to explain its actions surrounding an “apprehended insurrection” that became known as the October Crisis.

  “We view ourselves as a superior people,” Stewart wrote, “a sober, peaceable people, a people of extraordinarily decent instincts and firmly entrenched civil liberties, and we reject any contrary evidence.”

  He’d become convinced that Canada had become “captive” to its own largely self-created myth of the world’s most reasonable citizen—patient, neighbourly, sure to stand up against violence and racism and anything that might threaten civil liberties.

  “In short,” Stewart wrote in his typical take-no-prisoners style, “all the things your average wild-eyed, gun-toting, bigoted, loud-mouthed, venal, aggressive, tyrannical bastard of an American is not.”

  Walter Stewart did nothing in halves that could be done by the dozen, and he chased after the myth of the perfectly behaved Canadian like a dog suddenly given wings in a forest full of squirrels. He talked about the October Crisis of 1970 and the troops on Parliament Hill and the suspension of civil liberties that had been so widely applauded by the vast majority of Canadians. He cited previous laws passed in Canadian legislatures that required no proof and allowed no defence. He talked about a Native girl who’d been raped and killed by three white youths in Williams Lake, B.C., only to have their convictions amount to two $200 fines and charges dismissed against the third young man. He told the story of how angry whites had once rounded up Chinese “Coolie” workers they believed had taken their railway construction jobs and driven the terrified workers over a cliff to their deaths.

  For a country with such a reputation for tolerance, Stewart often found Canada quite lacking in Christian charity. He talked about the Second World War when those Canadians, many of them from Quebec, who refused to volunteer for active service overseas were tagged “Zombies” and openly attacked, spit upon, and sneeringly handed white feathers as a sign of their cowardice. He talked about how sailors from the Canadian navy were often afraid to go ashore in Quebec City, convinced they’d be treated as enemies by those who opposed the war and attacked and kicked in the side streets.

  The war and the lead-up to it was indeed a time of widespread intolerance, the most famous being when the St. Louis, a ship carrying nine hundred Jewish refugees, was turned away from Canada, the passengers’ last hope, and forced to head back for Germany and the Holocaust, where most perished. The prime minister of the day, Mackenzie King, thought there were already too many Jews around Ottawa. According to Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many, in Canada in those days “refugee” was code for “Jew.” The director of immigration, E.C. Blair, considered Jews inassimilable, a people “who can organize their affairs better than other people” and who therefore were a threat to good Canadians.

  To dismiss the myth of the law-abiding, peaceful, nonviolent Canadian, Stewart offered an entire chapter on Canadian riots. Riots to start a rebellion back in 1837–38 and riots over giving reparations to those who’d rebelled in the first place. Riots during Orange parades in “Toronto the Good.” A riot in Regina when unemployed men came through on their way to ask Ottawa for help finding jobs—a riot that cost a life and, Stewart argued, was entirely orchestrated by the state to put the labour organizers in a bad light. A riot in Halifax to celebrate V-E Day that saw liquor stores looted and drunken men and women having sex in the streets and even in the local cemetery. A riot in Montreal over a hockey game that became, many believe, the first sound in the Quiet Revolution that would transform Quebec politics.

  Many years after writing But Not in Canada, Stewart retraced the route he’d taken decades earlier for the Toronto Star Weekly, a cross-Canada trip by car. Joan, of course, was in the front seat, driving. And Walt, of course, sat in the back, happily hammering away at accepted wisdom.

  THE CROSS-COUNTRY TRIP is as much a tradition in Canadian journalism as talking about the weather is at Tim Hortons. There’s something about the 7714-kilometre-long Trans-Canada Highway—in reality, series of highways—that provides not only the natural narrative of a journey but a continuing metaphor for unity. And considering that so many such trips are undertaken in an effort to understand this confusing behemoth called Canada, and often in times of national crisis, the attraction is obvious.

  It was the approach Bruce Hutchison chose for The Unknown Country. It was what Walter Stewart decided to do, first for the magazine and then for his book. Like Stewart, Thomas Wilby, Edward McCourt, Charles Gordon, and John Nicol travelled the route by car. Kildare Dobbs and John Aitken tackled it by bus, Dobbs saying that the Trans-Canada allowed the nation’s scattered communities to be “strung like tiny beads on an infinitely strong thread.” David Cobb did it on motorcycle. John Stackhouse hitchhiked. As he wrote in Timbit Nation: A Hitchhiker’s View of Canada,

  There was no better way to see a country and meet its people than to beg for rides along the way, to have long conversations (sometimes very long) with strangers, to test public generosity, to overcome fears, within oneself and in others, and to see the road, and feel it. Standing on a remote rural road, you could see the vastness of what it was attempting to connect. On a suburban on-ramp, you could feel the pulse of a society as it rushed from office to mall to home. And climbing into the cars of that society—at the invitation of a stranger, who had everything to lose, as did you—you could sense the openness of the nation, along with its fears and prejudices. In short, you could stand on the roadside and put an entire nation on the couch.

  Stackhouse ended his journey decidedly more enthusiastic than McCourt was at the end of his trek in the early 1960s. While McCourt agreed with the importance of bringing the various parts of the country closer together, there was a sense of defeat in his overall assessment of the country he had just tried to grasp. “In Canada,” he wrote, “there is too much of everything. To
o much rock, too much prairie, too much tundra, too much mountain, too much forest.”

  Vancouver’s Daniel Francis took the most recent journalist’s journey in A Road for Canada: The Illustrated Story of the Trans-Canada Highway, published in late 2006. Francis, who calls the road Canada’s “Other National Dream,” uses archival material to show where the road began as well as where it ends in both Victoria and St. John’s—both marked Mile 0—and includes Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s remarks at the official opening of the highway on September 3, 1962.

  Diefenbaker, even then, saw it bringing “a renewed sense of national unity” to the country—though none of us can remember what the crisis was back then. “This highway,” he thundered, “may it serve to bring Canadians closer together, may it bring to all Canadians a renewed determination to individually do their part to make this nation greater and greater still.”

  There is plenty of evidence that this long road—as criticized for its construction work as for its potholes—connects in mysterious ways with Canadians. This is the road travelled by Terry Fox in 1980 when a return of his cancer forced the one-legged runner to stop his valiant run near Thunder Bay, roughly halfway to his destination in Victoria.

  Those who would say Canada’s most inspirational hero made it only halfway have no sense at all of the country.

  This is also the road another one-legged cancer survivor, Steve Fonyo, ran from one end to the other after Fox’s attempt. It is the road wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen travelled and then headed the rest of the way around the world. Their triumphs are so much the stuff of legend now that they’ve inspired an annual summer cottage industry of similar quests, most of which go unnoticed.

  There’s also evidence that this journey had symbolic value even before the Trans-Canada Highway was a suggestion, let alone officially opened. Five years after Confederation, in 1872, Sandford Fleming—who would later give the world time zones—decided to lead a grand expedition across the new country to see what had come out of all that big talk in Charlottetown and Quebec City. The Fleming expedition went from Halifax to Victoria, covering an estimated 1687 miles by steamer, 2185 miles by horse, including coaches, wagons, packs, and saddle horses, nearly 1000 miles by train, and 485 miles in canoes or rowboats.