It’s not that money is no longer being made by farming in the Canadian prairies, it’s that the money doesn’t stay—as a cursory look at most small-town Main Streets will immediately confirm.
Even the familiar landscape has shifted. The iconic grain elevators numbered more than sixteen hundred a half century ago, but today are roughly as many in number as the ceramic ones in the bin at the front of the Raymore liquor outlet. Some have been turned into museums. Most were torn down and carted away as the reality of modern transportation obliterated first the rationale of having one grain elevator or more in every single community and then the rationale of the map-speckled communities themselves.
All that remains the same is the Big Sky—with fewer landmarks on the horizon.
In the great midlands of the United States they call this the “emptying out.” The young leave for opportunity, for adventure, for conveniences. Farming, with its uncertainty and its personal pressures, loses its attraction when those who dream of life on the land face up to such matters as international subsidies and competition, crop failures, fickle weather, and the totally unexpected, such as mad cow disease closing down the border to what had been a guaranteed market.
In February of 2000, during a series on Saskatchewan that Adam Killick and I were writing for the National Post, we made reference to Eric Howe, a professor of economics at the University of Saskatchewan who happened to call his beloved province “the Mississippi of the North.” Howe saw a province ill-prepared in both education and skills to deal with the vast changes coming in agriculture. He saw the best minds leaving and the Native population exploding to the point where, some demographers now believe, by the middle of this century Saskatchewan could become the first province with an Aboriginal majority.
The phrase “Mississippi of the North” outraged those who treasure this province. The premier at the time, Roy Romanow, was furious, claiming the series was factually incorrect—Saskatchewan had more than a million people and we were ignoring the fact of recent economic growth. By the time the next election rolled around, however, the census had borne out our numbers—the population had fallen to less than a million and the economy had soured. A short while later the economy shifted again, the oil boom elevating Saskatchewan into unfamiliar status as a “have” province that for a time delivered somewhat more revenues to the national equalization program than it was getting back.
The population, however, remained below a million, sometimes shifting up, sometimes down. Saskatchewan was increasingly seen as a province apart, a province of the past rather than the future, a province of the country rather than the city. It became symbolic of a growing urban–rural split in this country, something that many were soon calling “the new Two Solitudes.”
At the time of that controversial story, however, angry readers were keen to shoot both messengers and professor without realizing that we felt as fondly about Saskatchewan as they did. When Maclean’s columnist Allan Fotheringham called this “the most Canadian of provinces”— Fotheringham was born in its tiny community of Hearne in 1932—he wasn’t being facetious, or sarcastic, or funny. He was simply being accurate.
But Saskatchewan was fast becoming Canadian in a Canadiana sense— a province whose fastest rising value was sentiment.
There’s always a danger in over-romanticizing the countryside. I myself am often guilty of it and won’t deny having a sentimental streak. But you can’t go too far. Journalists—despite the privilege of entrée, the air mile points, the expense accounts, and even the ridiculous sense of self-importance—are supposed to keep some thin grip on reality. Jeremy Paxman looked at the tendency in The English, pointing out that “somehow the English mind kept alive the idea that the soul of England lay in the countryside.” But the romance of the far harsher Canadian countryside isn’t as simple as Paxman found it in England: wolves instead of hedgehogs, winter instead of mist, lost in the bush instead of wandering through the cowslips by a gentle stream….
Rather than dreaming of being country squires, Canadians tend to dream of having some small place of escape where the soul can be rejuvenated: a cottage, a camp, a cabin, or even a nice campsite on the banks of a northern river. As the late Canadian historian W.L. Morton observed more than half a century ago, the “alternative penetration of the wilderness and return to civilization is the basic rhythm of Canadian life.”
Bruce Hutchison found it at his lake on Vancouver Island. “For myself,” he once wrote, “the return to my swamp and the whispered welcome of the forest seems like release from a luxurious prison.” Millions of Canadians would agree. I certainly do.
There is romance in Canada for summer retreats and canoe trips, but there is no permanence to such notions. A canoe trip in February is not only impossible to imagine but, in most of the country, impossible to execute. There is, however, a great fondness of heart for rural life and rural connections in Canada. As there should be.
But there is also a great respect for reality in a land where wills sometimes have to be carved into tractor fenders, where the railroad can’t go through everywhere, and where, if an Inuk hunter lays down a glove while skinning a seal and the wind blows that glove away, the hunter has about as much chance of survival as the hunted.
And the reality of Canada is urbanization.
Twelve
The New Two Solitudes
I FIRST HEARD this phrase—“the new Two Solitudes”—during a 2003 interview with Carleton University social scientist Paul Reed. Reed, along with other academics and statisticians, was talking about a fundamental shift in demographics—a change that had already produced a Canada the likes of which none had ever known and most had never imagined.
In the decade leading up to the 2001 census, Canada’s urban population grew by more than three million while the rural population fell by 300,000. Canada had shifted from a country where 80 percent of the population was rural and 20 percent urban to the precise opposite.
The Canada these social scientists saw emerging wasn’t marked by the dual languages of novelist Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes. The new Two Solitudes wasn’t about any east–west split. Nor was it a facile way of describing a country with one level of government in Ottawa and the other in the provincial capitals. It was, instead, two solitudes composed of the vast majority who live in cities and the increasingly small minority who do not. Canada, somehow, had gone from being a settler’s country to being the most urbanized large country in the Western world.
Even more dramatically, Reed pointed out, the demographic shift had reached a point where more than half of all Canadians, 52 percent, were living in only four Big City regions: Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, the Montreal Urban Community, the Calgary–Edmonton axis, and B.C.’s Lower Mainland. “It’s sobering to recognize,” added Reed, “that the Greater Toronto Area would, if designated a province, be fourth largest in population and conceivably largest of all in economic terms.”
“Without quite realizing it,” University of Toronto political scientist David Cameron, a colleague of Reed’s, argued, “we Canadians are in the process of building a new country within the old one. The new country is composed of the large cities, especially the great metropolitan centres of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, the old country is all the rest. Life in the former bears little resemblance to life in the latter….”
LIFE IN THE FORMER can be very good indeed. Of the great metropolitan centres, I happen to live closest to Montreal and, over the years, have covered more ground in Canada’s most walkable big city than in any of the other sprawling giants.
The street I love to walk in Montreal is Ste-Catherine, surely the most alive, divergent, sexy, and interesting one in the country. It’s a walker’s paradise, a single street that’s worth a morning, afternoon, or—best of all—nighttime visit. It’s also a rare city street in that it feels as if most of those on it have walked here from their homes, something one rarely feels on other main streets in other cities in other provinces.
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bsp; It’s a street of traffic jams, sirens, musicians, beggars, upper-crust shops, dollar stores, eccentrics, double-parked BMWs, artisans, people from every possible continent and every imaginable country. Walkers along Ste-Catherine move at a pace that can be described only as Montreal: neither too slow nor too fast, eye-to-eye contact, even among members of the opposite sex—which tends to rattle visitors from other parts of the country—and a strong sense that there’s nowhere they have to be and in fact nowhere else on earth they’d rather be.
No wonder the international travel writer Jan Morris called Montreal “the most interesting city in Canada.” No wonder, after a day of poking along streets like Ste-Catherine, she felt compelled to note how often people here smile and speak and engage each other casually. “They are,” she wrote, “less numb than their cousins in Toronto or Vancouver.”
Mark Twain said you couldn’t throw a stone in Montreal without hitting a church window, and there are parts of Ste-Catherine where it seems he wasn’t exaggerating, despite the street’s also being the main shopping district of the city. There are birds in the quiet, daisy-filled gardens of the Anglican Church of St. James the Apostle and there’s an eerie calm inside the doors of the Catholic Christ Church Cathedral that dates from 1857 and feels, once inside, like 1857.
There may be plenty of Christian charity inside these churches, but not enough to go around on the streets where—as in all big Canadian centres now—the beggars sometimes outnumber the begged. “It’s tough working this place,” a large young man with a Mohawk says at the corner of Ste-Catherine and Montagne. “There’s somebody at every corner—and people only got so much spare change.”
Harsh realities are found on any large main street. The homeless seem to multiply going west, and by the time afternoon amblers walk down the streets of Vancouver or even Victoria they’ve become practically oblivious to this modern tragedy. Buskers are also on the streets, but only rarely do passers pretend they do not exist. An older man sitting on a fold-up camping chair plays a lovely accordion solo in front of Ogilvy’s; a young man serenades on a saxophone near the corner of Ste-Catherine and University. The Montreal jazz festival may come to town only once a year, but the music of Ste-Catherine is year round, and to the untrained ear, often as satisfying.
Ste-Catherine had always been the “shopping” street—they used to run an electric street car between Ogilvy’s and the Bay—but it fell on such hard times during the last recession that, early in the 1990s, Montreal Gazette columnist Jack Todd wrote, “You had to hold a mirror to the lips of Ste-Catherine to be sure it was still breathing.”
Ste-Catherine, happily, has long since been reborn. The empty spaces for rent have been largely rented out. There are new projects, new shopping galleries, new brand-name outlets. Its walkers, with the same Montreal disdain for traffic lights as its drivers, control this street more than any other in the city.
I have moved along this street very slowly, very quietly—once when following the funeral cortège of Pierre Trudeau, once when following the hearse carrying Maurice “Rocket” Richard—and I have run, breathlessly, along this street to reach the campus of Dawson College following the horrific shootings of September 13, 2006. But I’ve been happiest on it when there’s no place I have to be but here, and for as long as I wish to ramble.
The surprises are endless. On a day before a Stanley Cup playoff game a few years ago I set out alone in search of a late lunch, walking in the spring sunshine along Ste-Catherine and losing myself in the sights and smells and sounds of downtown Montreal. Near the corner of Ste-Catherine and St-Mathieu, a sex shop offered “Pasta Boobs” for sale. Snorkels and swim fins were in the same window, hopelessly confusing a sheltered visitor from Ontario.
The window of another sex shop—not, of course, that I was seeking them out, merely bumping into them—near the corner of Ste-Catherine and Fort was filled with boxes of “Mama Peckeroni: Traditional Style Pecker Pasta.” Simply add water, bring to a boil, stir in, let simmer—and watch the penises grow.
I did not go in. I can produce bonded witnesses who will back me on this. I continued on in search of a late lunch that would not, under any circumstance, include pasta.
At the corner of Ste-Catherine and McGill College, if you happen to quickly glance to the north, you will see Bavaria. Or at least think you’ve seen a glimpse of a European castle in the high hills of southern Germany. If you happen to be there when the mountain beyond is green and lush and if part of the McGill campus is in view, you’ll think you’ve been transported to another world.
And if you head up into the mountain, you will enter another world.
I TEND TO SEEK OUT sanctuaries in every Canadian city—Signal Hill in St. John’s, Point Pleasant in Halifax, the Boardwalk in Quebec City, the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, Centre Island in Toronto, the Forks in Winnipeg, Wascana Park in Regina, Eau Claire in Calgary, the river valleys in Saskatoon and Edmonton, Stanley Park in Vancouver—but there is only one “mountain” you can climb, even in slippery city shoes, and be back before the next meal.
And that is Montreal’s Mount Royal.
In the short while it takes to walk up along the leafy, switchbacking trails to Lac aux Castors, it feels as if you’ve travelled by airline and shuttle bus to reach a distant resort. The noise of the city falls away until the only sounds that even those who try their hardest can hear are the gulls on the shallow lake and the wind in the willows along the shore. It’s the sort of place Van Morrison must be thinking of when he sings “There’s a place way up the mountainside / where the world keeps standing still.”
Sanitas, a columnist writing in The Gazette one month after Confederation in the summer of 1867, asked the authorities to “give us a noble park on the top of Mount Royal from whose summit a succession of the most beautiful landscapes can be seen, and where the commons may go with their families to breathe the fresh air.” It took a crisis to force the issue, though, with a wicked winter a few years later convincing Montreal politicians that any more such freezes and the mountain might be stripped entirely for firewood.
Montreal city authorities had the foresight to turn to Frederick Law Olmsted, an American who had created New York’s Central Park and who would go on to work on such natural charms as Yosemite National Park. Olmsted had been profoundly affected by the nature writings of his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and there’s a certain “Walden” aspect to almost everything he touched. His thinking in New York had been positively revolutionary. “Buildings,” he told New York planners, “are scarcely a necessary part of a park; neither are flower gardens, architectural terraces or fountains. They should, therefore, be constructed after dry walks and drives, greensward and shade, with other essentials, have been secured.”
Olmsted liked the potential of this Montreal assignment and decided to take it on, even though he was, according to biographer Witold Rybczynski, rather underwhelmed by the $5000 offered for his design expertise.
He set for himself three main priorities that could serve today as valid guidance for any Canadian community deciding what to do with a special plot of land that might be preserved rather than developed. First, take full advantage of whatever natural beauty already exists. Second, keep the costs down as much as possible. And third, in true Canadian fashion, ensure universal access.
Keeping costs to a minimum is why there are simple trails through the trees, the foliage natural instead of planted and groomed. Olmsted gave no credence to such matters as gardens or sculpted terraces or fountains. He had great faith in simple shade. And the more he tromped around the deep woods of the Mountain, the more he became entranced by a beauty unknown in other large centres. Trying to develop it, or trying even to shape it in ways it did not wish to be shaped, he declared, would “only make it ridiculous. It would be wasteful to try to make anything else than a mountain of it.”
Those who knew him best, as well as those who paid him, often grew impatient with Olmsted’s obsessive long-term
thinking. A fountain, after all, can be built before your eyes; an oak tree takes decades just to be noticed. But he had remarkable patience and a belief in the long term. When his young son Rick pressed him for “results,” he told the boy he had better be willing to wait at least forty years. He once said: “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to the future.”
Time brought along certain things of which Olmsted would never have approved—distracting communications towers, an ugly 31.4-metre-high illuminated cross, paddle boats on the little manmade lake—but by and large I suspect he’d be pleased. The closest encroachment comes from McGill University and the very rich along the city side, St. Joseph’s Oratory on the west, and massive, sprawling cemeteries to the north. One of these, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, is the largest Catholic cemetery in North America, holding more than a million graves. Perfect neighbours for such a peaceful setting.
Olmsted preserved a “mountain” with extraordinary vistas of the city and the St. Lawrence River, marvellous hiking and jogging and biking trails, and enough hardwood to drive lumber companies to distraction. About eighty thousand trees were damaged here in the 1998 ice storm, and yet today that onslaught is hardly noticeable.
Rybczynski lived some twenty years in Montreal and was always within walking distance of the Mountain. It was a place for picnics and dogs, for tobogganing and quiet, reflective moments alone. It was, he writes in A Clearing in the Distance, “like taking a drive in the country”— without ever having to leave the city.
Today Mount Royal remains a remarkable oasis of peace and beauty, much as it was when Olmsted began his work and just as it was in 1914 when British author Arthur Conan Doyle stood overlooking the city and called it “one of the most wonderful views in the world.”
Canadians Page 29