Canadians (15 page)

Over time, under Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Stephen Harper, she would be proved largely right.

“Meech Lake is not dead,” she said with a smile. “It will live forever as the turning point for Canadians' distrust of the political system.”

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future reported, I got a call from Spicer suggesting a lunch with him and David Broadbent, the bureaucrat who put the Forum back on track and carried it through to the end.

We met across the river at Café Henry Burger and, at the end of a lunch in which some astonishing stories were told of government interference and internal fiascos, Spicer reached down beside the table and pulled up a framed certificate. It looked official, complete with the Canadian coat of arms embossed at the top. It read “Commissioner 13— In recognition of your valuable contribution to the work of the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future” and was signed by both the chairman, Spicer, and the executive director, Broadbent. I will treasure it forever.

A few months later, with the government showing no inclination whatsoever to follow up on any of the Forum's suggestions, Spicer headed back to his post at the CRTC. He was now, he would later say, a “non-person in the style of George Orwell's
1984,
” his name gone from official Ottawa as effectively as names were once erased from the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
.

As for Commissioner 13, he, too, vanished, happily leaving Parliament Hill for a new beat. He'd been assigned to cover the second matter ordinary Canadians said they valued most about their troubled country: a part of Canadian culture that, some would argue—me happily among them— tells as much about this country as anything else.

Hockey.

Five

Hockey, the National Id

THERE ARE FEW MATTERS in Canada that penetrate as deeply into the national soul as hockey. This is hardly surprising. The more dominant of the two national sports, with its heavy equipment and its vigorous effort, is exactly the sport that should have evolved in a land of ice and cold, just as baseball, with all its standing around, its thin uniforms, and its brief, periodic bursts of effort, is the perfect sport for the warmer climes of America.

In some ways, you can know a country better by knowing how it plays. That golf—with its strict rules and orderliness—would develop in Presbyterian Scotland comes as no surprise, any more than the military formations of American football.

“In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane wrote a generation back, “hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

I discovered just how deeply the penetration of hockey into the national psyche goes on two different occasions in the same month in late 2003.

The first was November 5, when I was assigned by
The Globe and Mail
to spend the day with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in his final week in office. The Liberal leader was retiring after a decade in the top job and having easily won three majority governments in a strange time of little opposition in Ottawa. Only ten weeks away from turning seventy,
he should have been taking it easy, but he was up before dawn working on his file folders, in this case signing off on nearly four dozen appointments that would make headlines the next day.

We had breakfast together and then headed in to Parliament Hill, his Royal Canadian Mounted Police security force having chosen one of several different routes they used to break the routine and, theoretically, to foil those who might have nefarious plans. On this day we headed down Sussex Drive and then MacKay Street, just to the side of the Rideau Hall grounds. He was in a good mood, showing me the emergency telephone that was always within reach in the prime ministerial limousine and joking that he didn't think he even knew how to use the thing. There had never been cause. With the exception of the 1995 Quebec referendum, which his side almost blew to the point of losing Quebec altogether, and the growing scandal over the use of sponsorship money following that nail-biting sovereignty vote, there had been fewer bumps along his three terms than there were this fall along Sussex Drive. It had been a relatively easy ride.

But then he settled back and became pensive. And why not? Forty years in Parliament were about to come to an end. He would, very shortly, no longer be prime minister of his country. His lengthy term in office was being compared—with considerable debate—to the records of King, of Laurier, of Macdonald … only I was about to discover he was thinking of none of these names but of a name not even in politics.

“You know,” he said, “I am like Rocket Richard. He was maybe not the most elegant player on the ice, but he had the instinct for the net.

“It is a game,” he added with a slightly crooked, undeniably sly grin. “And I am the pro.”

There was no need to say any more. Any Canadian would understand, immediately, how Jean Chrétien viewed himself as a politician.

Little more than two weeks later, on November 22, the
Globe
sent me to Edmonton for the Heritage Classic, where 57,167 spectators—thousands of them outfitted in snowmobile suits, thousands of them further warmed by hot chocolate and Baileys—showed up in –20°C temperatures. They had come to watch Oilers legends and multimillionaires
Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier play shinny on an outdoor rink and then, like neighbourhood kids almost anywhere in the country, pitch in to shovel off the ice between periods. Organizers claimed that ticket requests were so wild for the oldtimers' afternoon game and the evening NHL match between the Oilers and Montreal Canadiens that they could have sold 800,000 tickets if only the stands had stretched all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

During the Salt Lake City Games, Gretzky had said that winning gold was not the only goal of the players, but to live up to the expectations of the entire country. I asked Cassie Campbell, the captain of the women's Olympic team, if she felt the weight of the nation, and she agreed. “When you put on the Canadian hockey jersey,” she said, “that's what you expect as well, and that's what you want. It's such a great game. The traditions of the game are that this has been passed down from generation to generation.”

Campbell knew her history without even having to study it. Back in 1924, when the first Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France, Canada sent the Toronto Granites over to represent the country. The top player on the senior team was a ringer brought in by the Granites, big, handsome Harry “Moose” Watson of St. John's, Newfoundland. Moose made arrangements, presumably financial, to send periodic reports to a Toronto newspaper once the team reached Europe.

“It has been a wonderful and delightful trip,'' Moose telegraphed from London, “and our only hope now is that we can get to Chamonix at the earliest opportunity, so that we may start heavy training again and justify the confidence that has been placed in us and retain for Canada supremacy in the hockey world.”

There was nothing to worry about. Canada, after all, had no competition to speak of in Chamonix. Moose himself set an Olympic scoring record—thirty-six goals, including thirteen in a 33–0 pasting of the Swiss—that will surely stand forever as the Canadian team waltzed through the competition and claimed the first-ever Winter Olympic Games gold medal for hockey.

But that “confidence that has been placed in us” back in 1924 would eventually become an incredible stress on Canadian players, at times all
but unbearable. Who among us watching that night in September 1972 will ever forget Phil Esposito's impassioned plea following Canada's 5–3 loss to the Soviets in Vancouver?

“To the people across Canada,” Esposito said, near-teary eyes turned not to interviewer Johnny Esaw but full-on to the camera, “we gave it our best. To the people that booed us, geez, all of us guys are really disheartened. We're disillusioned and disappointed. We cannot believe the bad press we've got, the booing we've got in our own building. I'm completely disappointed. I cannot believe it. Every one of us guys—thirty-five guys— we came out because we love our country. Not for any other reason. We came because
we love Canada
.”

Thirty years later, in Salt Lake City in mid-February 2002, the emotional outburst came from Team Canada executive director Wayne Gretzky. “Nobody understands the pressure these guys are under,” a livid Gretzky told a post-game press conference following a lacklustre start by the Canadians, a decisive loss to Sweden, an unimpressive victory over weak Germany, and a tie against the Czech Republic. “The whole world wants us to lose,” Gretzky said.

Whether Gretzky's rant was calculated, as some—not me, and I was in the room—have argued, or merely an uncontrolled emotional outburst, as many of us believe, the Canadians in 2002 rallied and went on to victory, just as Esposito's Canadians had in 1972. There is, some have said, a “controlled rage” to Canadian hockey that exists but is little understood, even by the players. “It scared the hell out of me that I would have killed to win,” Esposito said, looking back on his famous speech a quarter century on. “That really scared me.”

It is a passion, fully understood or not, that applies to fans as well as players. Such a grand national
itch
for a game, however, can be difficult to explain to those who don't readily share it, especially those Canadians who disdain the game and who argue, from time to time, that it has no reason to be carried on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because, well, it has nothing to do with the culture of the country.

They could not be more wrong.

Bruce Hutchison once wrote in a newspaper column that hockey might be the country's only authentic and indigenous art form. He also said, with uncanny foresight, that few realized the game was even “a political force” in the life of Canadians.

Hutchinson was writing in 1952. Three years later, the most significant
political
act hockey has ever produced in this country would take place in Montreal. And it would involve a man named Maurice “Rocket” Richard—a player who always said he didn't even much follow that other game called “politics.”

“MERCI, MAURICE. Merci bien.”

Georges Boudreault stood at centre ice, wiping tears from his eyes and speaking to a dead man.

“Merci … merci … merci …”

Boudreault and his grown son, Mario, had driven, hard, more than four hours from their home in the Saguenay, that rough and rolling, rock-and-pine area well north of Quebec City where the wild blueberries grow large and the people, known for their fervent nationalism, are referred to as
bleuets
. The two Boudreault men had taken turns at the wheel, one driving fast, one looking out for cop cars and speed traps, and had pulled off the autoroute, through the exit, and onto rue de la Gauchetière at exactly 10:05 p.m., May 30, 2000.

Five minutes too late.

Georges Boudreault, a man in his sixties with curling grey hair and a face that has known contact sports, had idolized Maurice “Rocket” Richard all his life. He'd grown up on the outdoor rinks of the Saguenay and was no different from young boys all over the province in those years, a time captured so lovingly by Roch Carrier in his children's book
The Hockey Sweater:
“As for church, we found there the tranquility of God: there we forgot school and dreamed about the next hockey game. Through our daydreams it might happen that we would recite a prayer: we would ask God to help us play as well as Maurice Richard.”

Carrier's prayers were never answered, nor were those of Georges Boudreault. In that they were, again, the same as all young boys in
Quebec during those years, for no one—not even with the help of God— ever played as well as Maurice Richard, either on the ice of the Montreal Forum or in the imagination.

Now the Rocket was dead. He had succumbed to cancer earlier in the week at age seventy-eight, and the outpouring of grief had caught the rest of the country—but not Quebeckers, and certainly not Quebeckers of Georges Boudreault's era—by surprise. Richard would lie in state at the Molson Centre, the famous Forum having been shut down so it could be converted to a multi-screen movie theatre. When Boudreault saw the television images of the people of Montreal lining up by the thousands to walk by the casket and pay their respects, he knew he had to be there. The Rocket would be lying in state until 10:00 p.m., at which time the doors to the Molson Centre—today known as the Bell Centre—would be closed. The funeral would be the following day.

Georges Boudreault had only one chance to say goodbye to his hero. But the clock was against him. He and Mario had found a place to leave the car and were now running toward the rink.

I was hurrying myself. I had flown to Montreal from Newark, New Jersey, having covered the opening game of the Stanley Cup final the evening before. The New Jersey Devils had beaten the Dallas Stars handily, 7–3, and would go on to win the Cup in six games, but there was far more talk about the death of the Rocket than whatever life might be left in the Stars. Many of the sportswriters covering the playoffs were also heading for Montreal to cover the funeral. I had packed quickly and left immediately for the airport, hoping to get a flight early enough that I might catch the last of the crowds filing into and out of the arena.

The hockey rink lying-in-state fascinated me. Sixty-five years earlier, the great Montreal Canadiens' hero of another generation, Howie Morenz, had entered hospital in late January 1937 after fracturing his leg in a game. He'd been kept in hospital so long that he was reported to have suffered a nervous breakdown. Then, six weeks after being admitted, he suddenly died of a heart attack. He was only thirty-four.

The outpouring of grief had been so great that the hockey club and Morenz family had decided to hold the funeral at the Forum, with fifteen thousand
fans/mourners surrounding the casket as it rested at centre ice and thousands who couldn't get in milling about outside in the cold March wind. It is said that his funeral cortège passed by 200,000 more mourners who lined the snowy streets and roads all the way to the cemetery where Morenz was laid to rest.