Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  And sometimes more than that, it seems. I am reminded of the great— and mysterious—Freddie “The Fog” Shero, who as coach of the Philadelphia Flyers in their infamous “Broad Street Bullies” days once sought to fire up his players during playoffs by writing on the dressing room chalkboard: “Hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.” Canada is, after all, a country where, in any given hockey rink, more fans will know the words to Stompin’ Tom Connors’s “The Hockey Song” than to the national anthem.

  It is a country so attuned to its national game that the Ford Motor Company can run a television spot in which car horns at a traffic jam honk out the theme music to the CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada—with no explanation required.

  It is a country where, for nearly three months each spring, playoff games that mean nothing to the rest of the world regularly bump The National news, with the latest score from Iraq and Afghanistan forced to wait until the scores are in from Ottawa and Edmonton.

  It is a country where, in the lead-up to the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, the organizers of the Team Canada entry could call a press conference—heavily attended and carried live across ten provinces and three territories—to announce that no decision had yet been made on who would serve as the team’s third goaltender.

  All this for a player who wouldn’t even be dressing for the games. Lester Pearson, appearing before a London audience in 1939, many years before he’d win the Nobel Peace Prize or become prime minister, told his baffled audience that hockey is not just a game to Canadians. “It is perhaps fitting,” Pearson said, “that this fastest of all games has become almost as much of a national symbol as the maple leaf or the beaver. Most young Canadians, in fact, are born with skates on their feet rather than with silver spoons in their mouths.”

  Pearson was partly right. Hockey had certainly become a national symbol. The Stanley Cup was the ultimate sports icon. And yet the Grey Cup, the pinnacle of Canadian three-downs football, was always considered fundamental to Canadian unity. After all, except for a few ill-fated years of thoughtless expansion in the 1990s, the Grey Cup has been contested by Canadian teams, for the most part east versus west, with several of the teams community-owned to provide an added dash of passion.

  Grey Cup weekend—often referred to as “The National Drunk”—is such a tradition that it attracts millions who haven’t paid the slightest attention to the threadbare league the entire rest of the season. In 1962 the Diefenbaker government ordered both national television networks to carry it so that as many Canadians as possible might tune in. As Mordecai Richler once so delightfully wrote in a magazine piece, “Other, more brutalized nations were knit by civil wars or uprisings against tyrants, but Canada, our Canada, was held together by a pigskin.”

  But even so, football is not hockey. Canadian football, in fact, is more a cousin of American football—slight differences in downs, size of field, and number of players—whereas hockey is absolutely and entirely Canadian. And in far more ways than as a game played on frozen water.

  The Canadian climate may have given hockey its first ice surfaces, but the makeup of the players and of its burgeoning fans—people of different cultures, different beliefs, more often separated by religion than brought together—was what ensured that the rink and not the church would become where community met, the home team where they kept the faith. That hockey often gets called “the true religion of Canada” is no accident.

  The wall plaques that honour the great players of the game in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto ring with the very history of Canadian settlement during the twentieth century: Schmidt, Dumart, Bauer, Delvecchio, Mahovlich, Mosienko, Esposito, Gretzky …

  More and more new Canadians are arriving from parts of the world that consider ice a curiosity, if not a luxury, and who know absolutely nothing about this strange winter game until their children insist on signing up with the other kids in the neighbourhood. This new reality was happily realized in recent years when the Calgary Flames’ Jarome Iginla— whose father came from Nigeria—became the first black player to win a National Hockey League scoring title.

  As Dryden and I wrote in Home Game,

  Hockey is part sport and recreation, part entertainment, part business, part community-builder, social connector, and fantasy maker. It is played in every province and territory and in every part of every province and territory in this country. Once a game for little boys, now little girls play hockey as well, and so do older men and women; so do the blind and the mentally and physically handicapped. And though its symmetry is far from perfect, hockey does far better than most in cutting across social division—young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, French and English, able and disabled. It is this breadth, its reach into the past, that makes hockey such a vivid instrument to view Canadian life.

  The game also transcends emotion. Love hockey with a passion or hate it with a passion, the game still dominates Canadian small talk at a level comparable only to the weather.

  Consider the following: the most-treasured children’s story in the land is Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater; the most-popular modern film in Quebec is Les Boys and its sequels, the ongoing tales of a local beer hockey league; and in Mordecai Richler’s final novel, Barney’s Version, the main character descends into Alzheimer’s disease, his memory losing all but the crystal-clear recollections of games played by his beloved Montreal Canadiens.

  Small wonder, then, that 115,000 in Montreal would wish to file past the coffin of a man who hadn’t played a game in forty years, that 57,167 in Edmonton would want to sit in –20°C and watch a bunch of retired players play shinny in a makeshift rink so far away most fans couldn’t even see the puck.

  Small wonder, then, that when country star Shania Twain—as famous worldwide for her navel as for her songs—appears on stage in Canada with the upper half of her body draped in a bulky, totally non-form-fitting hockey jersey, Canadians will stand and cheer.

  If you can understand that one, you’re closer to understanding Canadians.

  Six

  The Canada of the Imagination

  THE DARKEST EYES of the national game may have been closed forever that day in Montreal, but the brightest eyes in Canada never shut in Ottawa.

  They’re the clearest blue eyes in the National Gallery, and though they hang in the European section, they’re every blink and tear Canadian. Yet they have nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of Lawren Harris or Emily Carr, Canadian artists whose self-portraits have stared out from the rooms devoted to Canadian art; nothing at all to do with Jean Paul Lemieux’s famous portraits or Alex Colville’s haunted studies.

  They are the eyes of Henry Wentworth Monk—“Wenty” to family and friends—and what he saw, and foresaw, with those eyes should be the stuff of movies and books. But this is Canada, and perhaps he’s fortunate to find space in the European section, his portrait more notable by the name of the artist, William Holman Hunt, than by the subject, poor Wenty of Mosquito Cove, not far upstream along the Ottawa River that flows so quietly past the National Gallery of Canada.

  And yet, for those very few who know his curious story, Wenty was at one time a force. He was, in fact, the first person ever to use the term “United Nations” as he preached for the creation of an international tribunal that might bring some order to a chaotic world.

  A devout Christian, he was first to call for a special land to be set aside for what would eventually become Israel.

  He was also the first in this country to suggest that Canada might one day serve the world as a military peacekeeper and peacemaker—a role that has cost some 150 Canadian lives since the United Nations he foresaw began such missions in the 1950s. No other country has paid so large a price.

  Monk had the ear of Czar Nicholas II, of Lord Salisbury, and of Horace Greeley of the powerful New York Tribune. And yet he couldn’t even get in to see Prime Minister Sir J
ohn A. Macdonald. They laughed in his face in Canada, dismissed him as a “crank” and, soon after he died, forgot all about him.

  “We tend to forget all our interesting characters,” says Frederick McEvoy, who has written about Monk in The Beaver magazine and hopes one day to produce a full biography.

  Monk was most certainly interesting. He was born on April 6, 1827, in a small settlement along the Ottawa River, a pretty cove on the Ontario side now known as Pinhey’s Point. He was the sixth of what would eventually number ten children. A wealthy neighbour, apparently so taken with the strikingly intelligent stare of the child, offered to pay for a fine education once he was old enough to head off to boarding school. When the time came the neighbour wasn’t nearly so well off, but he did have enough pull left to arrange for seven-year-old Wenty to sail for London. He entered Christ’s Hospital School, an institution established by King Edward VI for the promising children of the destitute. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been a student here, as had Charles Lamb, who later claimed that the school’s rigid devotion to religion and starvation was what produced such pronounced oddity in so many of its graduates.

  Wenty would prove no exception.

  The little boy consumed and was consumed by the Bible. He believed that train travel, the rage of the times, had been prophesied in the Book of Isaiah—the “swift beasts” that were going to bring the believers to Jerusalem. Scholars, on the other hand, have always read that to mean “camels.”

  But that was only a small part of what Wenty found in his beloved black book. He predicted the telegraph, then only a few years off, but also saw the world connected by a vast and immediate communications network. He saw that one day there would be weapons of mass destruction. He was a modern Nostradamus in that he predicted, accurately as it turned out, Y2K, the bizarre millennium anxiety that was then still more than a century and a half away.

  And he didn’t even have a computer to back up.

  Wenty had an epiphany one Good Friday when, during the collect, he opened his Bible at random and read: “Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to this flock, that they may be saved among the remnants of the true Israelites.” From that moment on, he believed that world peace was attainable only if, first, a home for the Jews was established in Palestine.

  At age fifteen this strange, bookish loner returned to Canada and was struck by culture shock. His father had hoped he’d take over the dismal little farm, but Wenty had no interest. He had a scholarship to divinity school, and was soon off again. But not for long. He quickly became convinced that the clergy were nothing more than “blind leaders of the blind.” He decided to take up the farm offer after all.

  In his slim 1947 book on Monk, For the Time Is at Hand, Richard S. Lambert writes that Wenty couldn’t put down his Bible long enough to lift a plow or an axe and that the farm began failing. Wenty decided to give the farm to a brother, renounce materialism, and become a full-time prophet. He headed for Jerusalem to save the world.

  It’s a long and twisted story, the tale of Henry Wentworth Monk. He travelled by merchant freighter and met up with the soon-to-be-famous religious artist Hunt in Jerusalem. Hunt, who was also a bit strange, believed Monk had somehow modelled by telepathy for a portrait he’d painted of Christ years before the two met. They became fast friends and soon Monk began modelling in the flesh. The portrait that hangs in the National Gallery is but a small study of a much larger Hunt work.

  Wenty put all his visions and prophecies into a book, but no Canadian publisher would touch it. He set out for London to prove them wrong but still ran into a lack of interest. When he finally did get a publisher to bite, he had the enormous misfortune of having his book on Bible interpretation published against Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, and Darwin, as they say in the trade, buried poor Wenty.

  He returned to Canada, left for Washington to put a stop to the brewing Civil War—even got in to see Abraham Lincoln—but got nowhere with his grand peace scheme. So, it was off to Jerusalem and, frustrated once more, back by freighter to North America. The ship foundered and sank off Nantucket Island and Wenty, a strong swimmer from his childhood days along the Ottawa River, was the only survivor. He reached shore, was set upon by dogs, and then shot by a farmer who mistook him for a treed bear.

  This is a true story.

  By March 1865, still weak but recovered from his wounds, Wenty was finally back home. He suffered terrible headaches. He created disturbances in the street—verbally and sometimes physically attacking those who wouldn’t listen to him. He was institutionalized at least once.

  But he also made it back to London, where Hunt the artist stood by him and proclaimed his friend “a wild genius, a soul of spotless innocence.” Others grew tired of him. Doors that were once open now closed. He headed, once again, back to Canada. This time he was home for good.

  Wenty ended his days as a Parliament Hill eccentric, wandering the paths under an umbrella and straw hat, his long white beard and hair flowing behind him. He wrote pamphlets and, periodically, for the Evening Citizen, at one point informing his bewildered readers, “I am determined that it shall be through no fault, or neglect, on my part, if people shall refuse to take advantage of the ‘great light’ and understanding that has been imparted to me for their benefit.”

  He thought Prime Minister Macdonald should arrange for him to take a seat in the House of Commons. He lobbied for a senate appointment. But they were offering nothing. When the idea of a permanent international tribunal began to pick up steam there was some parliamentary debate that poor Monk, the originator of the idea of a United Nations, should be given his credit, but nothing was ever done.

  Others, however, did not offer a cold shoulder. Czar Nicholas II of Russia responded to his letters, as did Lord Salisbury, former prime minister of Great Britain.

  It seemed, for a brief shining moment, as if Wenty might finally find redemption when, in 1896, a small campaign was mounted to give him his due recognition. The Montreal Star even called him “the philosopher of the capital.”

  Unfortunately, Wenty died of blood poisoning that summer and was buried in an unmarked grave in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery.

  CANADIANS, UNLIKE AMERICANS, have always had difficulty mythologizing their own past—we are, perhaps in true northern personality, actually quite adept at stripping the past and knocking down the ones who should stand out. As George Woodcock said, Canadians tend to distrust the heroes they could so easily celebrate. Louis Riel, who would surely be considered a democratic renegade and nation builder had he been American, was to a great many Canadians a madman and a traitor. Tom Thomson, the romantic painter whose work has so defined the Canadian landscape and who lost his life so mysteriously in the deep woods in 1917, was a drinker and a philanderer who either committed suicide or fell overboard when he drunkenly stood in his canoe to take a leak. Billy Bishop lied about his war exploits. Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister and the man who, more than anyone else, put this mysterious entity called Canada together, was a drunk.

  As Andrew Malcolm pointed out in that email from California, the United States will put Davy Crockett on a stamp while Canada will go with one celebrating antique furniture.

  There may be no better example of Canadians turning their collective backs on the great than in whatever became of Will Barker.

  Barker, a farm kid from Dauphin, Manitoba, won the Victoria Cross for what many argue was the greatest aerial dogfight of the First World War. On October 27, 1918, Barker was alone in his Sopwith Snipe over La Forêt de Mormal, France, when he was attacked, according to the official account, by sixty enemy aircraft.

  So typically Canadian in his self-effacing humility, he always said it was only fifteen. But whether sixty-to-one or fifteen-to-one, what were his chances?

  Barker evaded the initial attack, turned, and counterattacked, shooting down three enemy craft while taking fire himself. As the third plane went dow
n, he passed out from devastating wounds to both legs and one arm. His plane plummeted, another enemy aircraft tailing him to make sure he was finished.

  Somehow he came to in mid-air, turned on the fighter tailing him, and took that plane down, a fourth kill. But he could hold his plane in the air no longer and crashed within view of astonished British ground troops. The British soldiers had witnessed the battle, seen Barker’s heroics, and now ran to where they expected the young RCAF flyer to have surely died. They were stunned to find him still alive, pulled him free of the wreck, and got him to safety.

  Those four kills took Barker’s list to fifty downed enemy aircraft. He returned to Canada as Lt. Col. William George Barker, VC, DSO, and with enough other medals to lay claim to being Canada’s most honoured combatant—if he’d ever cared to do so. He never did.

  But as British Air Chief Marshal Sir Philip Joubert wrote, “Of all the flyers of the two World Wars, none was greater than Barker.” Billy Bishop, Canada’s best-known flying ace, called Barker “the deadliest air fighter that ever lived.”

  Barker came home and settled in Ottawa, where he went into the aviation business with Bishop, who had also returned with the Victoria Cross. He married Bishop’s wealthy cousin Jean Smith and had a miserable dozen years. The business failed; the marriage teetered; he suffered depression and terrible pain from his injuries. The teetotaller became a drinker.

  It seemed life was taking a turn for the better early in 1930 when Fairchild hired him to help sell aircraft to the Canadian government. A test pilot had been sent to show off the plane at the Rockcliffe base airport, but the veteran fighter insisted on taking it up himself for a run. He lost it, and crashed near a concrete landing on the banks of the Ottawa River.

  Some said Barker committed suicide. Some said he was showing off for the cute teenage daughter of another pilot. Some say he simply made a mistake with an unfamiliar machine.