Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  George M. Grant, the man assigned to keep a written record of the journey, described what had already become known as “The Great Lone Land.” It is a name that stands up today. Great, and lone, but powerful. The new Dominion, recorded Grant, “rolled out before us like a panorama, varied and magnificent enough to stir the dullest spirit into patriotic emotion.”

  Even then, it was about unity.

  WALTER STEWART was approaching seventy when he wrote My Cross-Country Checkup, but he was still up to taking the stuffing out of Canada and Canadians. One of the first stops he made was in the Maritimes so that he might harangue his fellow citizens for an early form of ethnic cleansing.

  In 1755 as many as twelve thousand Acadians were driven out simply because these hard-working French-speaking settlers weren’t particularly keen on swearing allegiance to an unfamiliar British crown they weren’t exactly sure had that much staying power under the circumstances of the day. For dallying, those Acadians who didn’t escape into the dense bush were arrested, had their families torn apart and their homes burned, and for the next eight years until England and France finally reached a peace agreement, were sent by the hundreds and thousands to the south, to Europe, and even to the Falkland Islands. Their land, much of it cleared and perfect for planting, was then offered up to thousands of “planters”— the preferred English word for “settlers”—with the only restriction that no Catholics be allowed. Out with six thousand Catholics, in with as many as eight thousand Protestants, most moving up from the southern “Yankee” colonies. Out with the French, in with the English.

  Ethnic cleansing seemed like a pretty fair comment.

  One of Walter Stewart’s most endearing qualities was an ability to embrace outrage and humour at one and the same time. While passing through Nova Scotia’s Grand-Pré National Historic Site, he stopped to watch the devout pray before the statue of Evangeline that stands in the little cemetery at Saint-Charles-des-Mines. “Evangeline,” of course, is the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about the Acadian couple separated on their wedding day by the expulsion. Evangeline spends her life searching for her lost husband only to find him in Louisiana years later, lying helpless on his deathbed. Gentle Evangeline, unable to save her beloved, dies herself from the shock of seeing him in such a desperate state.

  Longfellow, Stewart delighted in pointing out, wrote his poem nearly a hundred years after the expulsion. He’d never visited Grand-Pré. And Gentle Evangeline never existed. The devout Canadians, therefore, were kneeling deep in prayer before a fantasy that existed entirely in the mind of an American poet.

  It was the kind of story—the irony, the wonder, the sheer madness of it all—that put the squeak in Walter Stewart’s voice and the magnificent tweak in his writings.

  JOAN DROVE HER HUSBAND twenty-five thousand kilometres, much of them on the Trans-Canada, much off, over those long months Walt spent doing one final check of his country. He made up a list of “Deep Thoughts”—“Unisex washrooms at gas stations are not an improvement” and “‘Country Cookin’ means over-cooked in grease”—and entertained himself by jotting down the best and worst of everything they saw. “Best road for scenery—The Dempster Highway.” “Worst road for driving— The Dempster Highway.”

  He poured his love of history and his love of truth into the book. But there is also a love of the landscape, a respect for the natural world that might be expected from a man whose parents, Miller and Margaret Stewart, had once co-authored a long-forgotten book on the natural world they called Bright World Around Us.

  Walter and Joan Stewart covered every province and then drove north up through the Northwest Territories toward the Beaufort Sea. They visited L’Anse aux Meadows, the ancient Viking site on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. They toured historic Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and drove across the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island. They sat by the statue of Lord Beaverbrook that stands in Fredericton, a statue of a man of astounding wealth built by the nickels and dimes of New Brunswick schoolchildren. They travelled to Quebec City where, three decades earlier, they had driven straight into a language-rights demonstration and Joan, honking the horn and screaming, in English, “KINDLY … GET … OUT … OF … MY … WAY!” had pushed through the crowd to get to their hotel while Walt cowered as close to the floorboards as he could get. This time, a much quieter time, they kept running into the same couple from Boston who, at every encounter, extolled the beauties of this glorious city, the middle-aged American woman admonishing Walt to be careful with the way English Canadians treat French Canada because, well, “You wouldn’t want to lose this.” In Ontario they saw the sights, travelling from the Martyrs’ Shrine at Midland to the huge roadside goose at Wawa. They meandered across the prairies talking about everything from rebellion to elevators and asking such pertinent questions as “Why do they paint the barns red?” (Red was the easiest paint to make. Just put iron scraps into a bucketful of buttermilk and wait for the rust to turn the whole mixture the colour of a handsome barn.) They toured over the mountains and down through the Okanagan and talked about everything from ginseng farms to the Nisga’a land claim.

  The trip had a profound effect on Stewart. The man who, many years earlier, had written a three-part series he called “My Farewell to Quebec” found now that he’d softened—or perhaps Quebec had softened. He found Canadians warm and open. He found them interesting. And he found the place much changed.

  In the final chapter of My Cross-Country Checkup, Stewart said his country could still be intolerant, even racist, but that most Canadians now considered these “matters for shame, not pride.” Yes, there was still a vast gap between the wealthy and the poor, but there remained the possibility of that gap narrowing over time. The most promising change of all, he said, was that Aboriginal issues were now being addressed not by force but by law.

  A modern traveller across this country, he felt, would recognize its vastness and variety but would also gain “a sense that there are no problems we cannot meet, no challenges we need to fear, no wrongs we cannot right, given the political will. It’s not a bad old place, taken all in all.”

  Stewart, who dealt in harsh truths and was never shy in sounding the alarm, did not in the least share the bitterness that marked the later observations of the old newspaperman Hutchison, of the old novelists MacLennan and Davies, of the old historian Creighton. Iconoclastic to the end, he would happily contradict their pessimism with his own surprising optimism.

  At the end of what would be his final trip across his country, Walter Stewart stood on a hill near Inuvik, close by the Arctic Ocean, stared back through his thick glasses over the vast landscape he and Joan had just covered, and smiled. “The Canada we have just driven through,” he concluded, “is enormously, immensely better than the nation we first crossed thirty-five years ago.”

  He had found it infinitely different from the Canada he and Joan had first explored in the 1960s. More interesting. More diverse. More hopeful.

  I HAVE COME, over time, to see Canada as the Bumblebee of Nations. It flies, somehow, between all its various contradictions, not least of which would be Bruce Hutchison, the eternal optimist, losing hope and Walter Stewart, the grumpy iconoclast, finding hope. It defies logic—but it flies. Somehow.

  I know that scientists have gone to considerable lengths to show how bumblebees do actually fly despite the fixed-wing aerodynamic calculations that suggest otherwise. Poor Canada, however, has yet to find a zoology professor—let alone a political scientist—who can explain the secret of this country. For bees, it might well be, as some researchers suggest, the extra lift acquired by the air expelled during rapid wing clapping, hence the buzzing sound. But the forces that keep Canada airborne are rather more elusive. Apart from rumours of cabinet shuffles and possible hockey trades, Canadians emit no buzz at all.

  In fact, if a visitor from another world were shown a fat bumblebee with its tiny transparent wings and this massive land mass with its sniping regions, histori
cal disputes, constitutional entanglements, and naysaying populace, the betting, surely, would be much higher on the fat insect staying afloat than on the strange, unwieldy creature called Canada.

  And yet this country carries on, seemingly without a flight plan, flitting from one distraction to the next.

  It’s worth pointing out that, in the relative life span of countries, there almost always has been a Canada. Yet again we find the contradictions. Canadians talk and write obsessively about the “New Canada” as if Lester Pearson and Rocket Richard and Wayne and Shuster and Hugh MacLennan and Juliette all fell off some turnip truck a few decades back and the country is just now finding its legs. That black-and-white Canada of the newsreels has been replaced, so many would have you believe, by a colourful, vibrant, updated version that may or may not last, depending on everything from disaffected Westerners to disenchanted Newfoundlanders to disavowing Quebeckers. But the rarely acknowledged fact of the matter is that Canada, no matter how it defies logic, is already a greybeard among countries. And it has proven remarkably resilient.

  It is the second-oldest federation after the American federation that came together between 1776 and 1792. The rest all came later: Australia in 1901, others after the Second World War. John A. Macdonald and Georges-Étienne Cartier were getting Canada’s act together, in fact, around the same time as Bismarck and Garibaldi were working to unite the German and Italian states. And while France may be older, it has struggled through five constitutions compared with Canada’s two … and perhaps counting. The years since Canada became this impossible country have seen fluctuations and convulsions and reorganizations in Russia, in China, in Japan, in Mexico, and in countless other sovereign states.

  And yet no one ever talks about Canada’s lasting power.

  Just how long it can last.

  Two

  A Canadian Is…

  IT IS OCTOBER 17, 2006. A cold rain is falling in a slant along Wellington Street, the lights from cars moving past Parliament Hill washing yellow down toward the parkway along the Ottawa River. It is nasty and miserable and those of us hurrying along the sidewalk are in danger of being splashed from the side as well as having our umbrellas ripped inside out from behind. We are heading this wretched night, heads bowed, collars tight to chin, to the National Library to hear a panel discussion on what, exactly, makes a Canadian.

  True story.

  Several months earlier, an enterprising young Rhodes scholar named Irvin Studin approached fifty Canadian writers, thinkers, business leaders, politicians, activists, academics, artists, and—obviously running a bit thin on contributors—even a few journalists and asked them to submit two-thousand-word essays beginning with the words “A Canadian is …”

  No two answers were the same, as might be expected, and some didn’t even answer at all, which I’m tempted to suggest could be as profound an answer as some of those that were actually typed and delivered. It was a strange exercise: two thousand words not nearly enough, two thousand words way too much.

  One thing “A Canadian is …,” however, is willing. As Stephen Leacock once wrote about a favourite character, “he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” Leacock, of course, was writing nearly a century ago. The horse ridden today by alarmists is the computer keyboard. And it goes in as many directions as there are fingers on the keys.

  I’m not quite sure why Studin included me in his survey, but I do know that the deadline attached to my contribution was outrageously tight, which would suggest the B or even C list, someone who can type fast subbing for a significant name that either dropped out or didn’t deliver. And no money was offered, which almost always leads to the journalist’s return note beginning “Much as I would love to….”

  But the invitation was impossible to turn down. I found my brain riding madly off in all directions, asking the silly question while walking the dog, riding my bike, watching Hockey Night in Canada, and even trying to get to sleep at night. For someone who’s never had trouble sleeping, this was disturbing indeed. I simply had no idea what the answer was.

  In the end, the only way I could think of to complete that suggestive opening phrase was to go to the Statistics Canada website, look up the running census, and start off with “A Canadian is 32,146,547 different things altogether—and counting.…” It seemed smart at the time. On reflection, it seemed silly. On rereading, it seemed passable. Unable to make up my mind and, being Canadian, I went with it.

  Canadians, I sometimes think, do lead the world in one matter. Not hockey, not pulp production, not snow, not even potholes, but in picking through their own belly-button lint. For a people known for their resourcefulness, this can often seem a dreadful waste of one’s most important resource: time.

  Compulsive self-introspection, however, seems oddly and uniquely Canadian. Americans don’t seem to do much of it, apart from issue-based magazines that occupy but a fraction of the shelf space devoted to celebrity, sports, and even pornography.

  British author Jeremy Paxman says that those he studied in his 1998 book, The English: A Portrait of a People, “have not devoted a lot of energy to discussing who they are.” He finds this most curious, since vanity is also a large part of the English makeup. At one point he quotes Cecil Rhodes, who ardently believed that the English just “happen to be the best people in the world, with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace.” Why, then, would they waste time on something already self-evident?

  The result is that the British, despite being one of the critical supply sources for the elusive Canadian identity, are a people rather more interested in other parts of the anatomy than the odd little scar where the umbilical cord was once attached.

  Not so in Canada.

  More than four decades after Hutchison published The Unknown Country, Andrew H. Malcolm produced The Canadians. Malcolm had been the Canadian correspondent for The New York Times from 1978 to 1982 and spent those four years getting out and around this nation far more than any comparable Canadian journalist. An enthusiastic, adventuresome Teddy Roosevelt look-alike, he fell in love with the country of his grandparents, which he took to calling the “Eagle Scout” of nations.

  After four years Malcolm began to think that “for many Canadians perhaps their unfortunate identity was to search forever for an identity, a Sisyphean task guaranteed to ensure eternal angst. The search itself had become the identity.…”

  And yet he, too, found contradiction in those seeking that elusive identity. There was, Malcolm discovered, reserved shyness, self-deprecating humour, a worrying sense of not mattering to the world at large, but also—as Walter Stewart had earlier suggested—an occasional but undeniable moral smugness, a condescension toward many things, mostly American. “What is it in Canada’s history and character,” Malcolm asked, “that explains its superior inferiority complex…?”

  I’ve often thought myself that Canadians ingeniously use this endless “search” for identity as a handy excuse to wallow in their own self-righteousness—particularly at those moments when America has put the stuck-up Canadian nose out of joint. It could be construed as a sort of verbal party trick to turn the conversation around to oneself and all the comforting goodness of being Canadian.

  Or it might be, as Malcolm suggested, superiority and inferiority at the same time. That, at least, would be in keeping with the endless contradictions of Canada.

  The case for an inferiority complex has been made so often that it’s by far the more accepted of the two possibilities. CBC radio ran a contest several years ago challenging listeners to complete the sentence “As Canadian as….” The winner, to wide general approval, was “As Canadian as possible … under the circumstances.”

  No wonder we get called the Clark Kent and the Woody Allen of Nations. The metaphors, appropriately, are from American culture; insecure Canadians would never make a national icon out of an awkward weakling. (They might, on the other hand, make him prime
minister.)

  Several people have suggested that this inferiority mindset has its source in the colonial mentality found throughout the former British Empire, a deep-rooted sense that whatever is Canadian or Indian or Australian or South African is not quite up to standard. The sun never set on the British Empire, but not much light shone down upon it. A sense of unworthiness was just one of the struggles Commonwealth nations had to overcome as they came into their own. “My generation of Canadians,” culture critic Robert Fulford told Malcolm, “grew up believing that, if we were very good or very smart, or both, we would someday graduate from Canada.”

  Canadian heroes seem almost missing from the national canvas. There are some, of course, but hardly in the numbers Americans celebrate. “During my time in Canada,” Malcolm told me in an email from California, where he now works for the Los Angeles Times, “I was struck by the postage stamps—lacking heroes like Davy Crockett and Babe Ruth who are shared coast to coast generation after generation, the stamps in that era contained pictures of such things as antique furniture.

  “Not exactly a stirring call to self-identity.”

  PICKING THROUGH THE LINT of the national belly button is at once a useful and useless exercise. Useful to authors of thick books and newspaper columnists and talking heads and academics, all of whom have made a cottage industry of it, but rather useless to people getting on with real lives in what has now been a real country for 140 years.