Canadians (23 page)

“No grim-faced fortifications mark our frontiers,” he told the gathering, “no stealthy spies lurk in our tranquil border hamlets.… Only humble mileposts mark the inviolable boundary line.”

Fifty thousand Canadians cheered his every word.

THE BORDER CROSSINGS are no longer “only humble mileposts.” They grow tighter every day—the Canadians beginning to arm themselves, the Americans now demanding passports for anyone wishing to travel to the United States. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost's neighbour keeps telling him in “Mending Wall,” but Frost, somewhat like Canada, is never quite convinced. Who says? he wants to know. Why?

… Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence …

And yet there are times when the “good neighbour” theory holds wonderfully true, no matter what the state of the fence that has grown from Harding's humble mileposts to the razor wire that runs between Coutts and Sweetgrass.

No American ally was more involved than Canada when the order came to shut down the airways after the second airliner had gone into the Twin
Towers. More than thirty thousand airline passengers found refuge and welcome in Canada—and yet it seemed to count for nothing. When the president took to the airwaves a few days later to thank those nations that had come to America's aid in its time of need, Canada wasn't even on the list.

Canadians poured out their sympathetic grief on Parliament Hill as they gathered for the first National Day of Mourning since 1967, when Governor General Georges Vanier had died in office. They came to listen to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien say, rather appropriately, “Words fail us.” Eighty thousand came to lay floral tributes, release balloons, and sing both national anthems.

“You have a symbol before you,” Chrétien told U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci as a north wind rattled the lowered flag over the Peace Tower. “A people united in outrage, in grief, in compassion and resolve.”

He quoted from Martin Luther King Jr., who once said that in difficult times it is not the words of the enemy that one tends to remember, but the silence of your friends. “There will be no silence from Canada,” the prime minister said, his words echoing off the office buildings on the south side of Wellington Street. “Our friendship has no limit.”

It seemed, at that point, as if it did not. Shortly after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, I travelled across both Canada and the United States to talk to everyday citizens about the effect of these stunning attacks on their lives. It was in some ways a stark reminder of the differences between the two countries—yet in other ways a reminder of the similarities.

When you travel you can't help noticing the endless disparities, even the most basic ones. Better roads in America; better coffee in Canada. No sidewalks in America; people walking everywhere in Canada. When I eat in Canada I think about appetizers and dessert; when I eat in America I stick to the main course—and even that's so large the server will offer to put what can't be finished in a Styrofoam suitcase so that I can work on it later in my hotel room.

In America they turn the homes of past presidents into shrines; in Canada they have to take up public collections to clean up the neglected graves of former prime ministers.

Talk radio in Canada is the CBC, which many in the country find too left for their liking. Talk radio in the United States is from the far right, National Public Radio the exception that proves the rule. What's particularly notable about American talk radio is the constant refrain about how insufferably
liberal
the media is. Evidently they don't listen to themselves—but that, of course, is an affliction on both sides of the border.

All that aside, I found ordinary people much the same. As angry in Arkansas as in Alberta. As terrified in Charlotte, N.C., as in Charlottetown, P.E.I. There were those in Canada insisting that this country should join the war on terrorism, and those who felt that everyone should duck and stay put—“safe from the evils of civilization.”

But above all was a deep sense of being in this thing together, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the little Newfoundland town of Lewisporte. It was at this outport community along the rocky edge of Notre Dame Bay that 773 weary travellers ended up after the closing down of North American air space.

The airline passengers were sent here on yellow school buses from Gander, the once-great Newfoundland airport where transatlantic flights used to refuel and where, that unforgettable Tuesday, thirty-eight aircraft holding 6656 passengers and crew were ordered to land and stand by until authorities figured out what had happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania and decided when it would be safe again to take to the air.

They arrived in foul moods and often foul odour—the last planeload had been sitting on the ground thirty hours before being processed and sent off in the school buses—and were headed for a place they'd never heard of and where they didn't know if there'd be telephones to call home. Many didn't even speak English.

They stayed the better part of a week, put up in people's homes and whatever other space could be found. Hundreds slept on church pews. “Seven hundred and seventy-three,” mayor Bill Hooper boasted, drawing out the number as if he were announcing the next hymn, “and not one complaint.”

“Most of them didn't know where they were,” Salvation Army major Lloyd George told me when I visited in the weeks following the

attacks. “We had to get a map of North America and put it up on the wall and point out where Newfoundland was—and then where we are here.

“They had trouble believing what we were telling them. Someone would ask about a shower and we'd tell them just to head over to the house and take one, here's the directions. Well, they couldn't believe we'd just let them into our houses that way. Then they'd ask about a key and we'd say, ‘You won't need a key, the door's always open—most of them don't even have locks.' The one thing they couldn't grasp about us was our trust.”

The moment the mayor heard of the air shutdown he contacted the major and they set up a “war room” at the Sally Ann. They contacted the other churches and the various service groups and the major himself okayed every imaginable expense without the slightest thought of where the money, some $15,000 eventually, might come from in a town that has seen lumbering vanish and the fishery dwindle.

The little community put on skits and entertainment each night for the stranded passengers. They fed them partridgeberry jam on toast in the mornings. They held banquets in the evening. The local fishermen, with nothing better to do, took them out on the sea and showed them the harbour and the near islands. They organized hikes through the countryside. They held elaborate cod-kissing ceremonies to make the visitors “Honorary Newfies.”

Some of the stories coming out of Lewisporte made it difficult to think there could be such gaps widening between Canadians and Americans. When one seventeen-year-old American girl broke down when she realized she couldn't possibly make it home now in time to attend her grandfather's funeral, the Lewisporte women running the community-centre kitchen came out, took the girl in their arms, and simply took turns holding her as she sobbed.

When the passengers were finally allowed to leave there were many more tears. Steve Kimberling, an American Airlines captain whose best friend was piloting the plane that had been hijacked into the Pentagon, bought Newfoundland T-shirts for the entire crew to wear home.

On Delta Flight 15 they partied all the way back to Atlanta. “It was like they had been on a cruise,” one of the crew members emailed back to a new friend in Lewisporte. “Everybody knew everybody else by their name. They were swapping stories of their stay, impressing each other with who had the better time. It was mind-boggling. Our flight back to Atlanta looked like a party flight. We simply stayed out of their way.…”

The email went on to tell the story of a business-class passenger asking, and receiving the quite unusual permission, to speak over the PA system. The passenger reminded all aboard what they'd just been through at the hands of complete strangers and suggested they work together to give something back to Lewisporte. The passenger, a medical doctor, suggested a trust fund be set up in the name of Delta 15. Nine months later, fourteen scholarships were given out to Lewisporte students.

“Why all of this?” the email continued. “Just because some people in faraway places were kind to some strangers, who happened to literally drop in on them.”

“It just shows you,” Major Lloyd George said after he'd shown me this remarkable email, “how much the world has shrunk. Fifty years ago, if something like this had happened, it would have seemed so far away— ‘That's in New York, that's not here'—but look at what email and cell phones and cable television have done to us.

“It happened in New York and it happened here almost instantly right after.”

“LAST CALL for Canada.”

The announcement came over the public address system at Disney's Epcot Center. I was hurrying—carefully side-stepping puddles from an overnight downpour—but wasn't exactly sure where I was going.

Much like Canada itself at this moment.

It happened to be the same February morning in early 2003 that Secretary of State Colin Powell's treasured reputation went up in smoke. It wasn't immediate, of course; in fact, his reputation might never have been brighter than at that very moment. Powell was in New York City, standing in front of photographs and maps as he methodically walked
the United Nations Security Council through the necessity of moving quickly and decisively against Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction that President Saddam Hussein had undeniably assembled.

I'd been in Florida covering the tragedy of the Columbia space shuttle, which had blown up over Texas upon re-entry. It marked the second time in seventeen months that a massive wave of sympathy for Americans had swept through Canada. First September 11; now this. Twice in less than a year and a half. It all seemed too much, too unfair.

I'd driven to the Orlando area from Cape Canaveral, where the Kennedy Space Center was still in a state of shock in the days following the disaster. The telling story in Cape Canaveral had been the silence. So attuned had the population become to space missions that they'd learned to look up at the familiar sound of re-entry, the twin sonic booms that meant the big silver ship would come into view within moments. The locals of Cocoa Beach and Titusville and Cape Canaveral call this double explosion the “welcome home.” Re-entry had been announced for 9:17 a.m., and seventy-five-year-old Charles Lee, whose astronaut son had been on four such missions, had been walking the beach when he realized his watch had passed 9:17 and there had been no sound. And silence, Charles Lee said matter-of-factly, meant “something had gone wrong.”

Columbia had blown up over Texas as it came back into Earth's atmosphere. It was an American story first and foremost, but also an international one. Israel had lost an astronaut on the mission and one of the American astronauts was of Indian heritage. There were Canadian workers at the Space Center and Canadian astronauts training for future flights. Canada, of course, immediately offered condolences for the Columbia tragedy. But as for Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and whether or not Canada, so often an ally, would join in any action against Saddam Hussein, so far there had been only the same thing Charles Lee picked up on the beach that awful morning: a telling silence.

“Last call for Canada!”

It was an unusual moment to be a Canadian in America. Powell's multimedia presentation—designed to show how Iraq had deceived the naive United Nations arms inspectors—was a tour de force.
USA Today
had compared his use of photographs and maps and pointers and argument—
“… photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret …”
—to that of Adlai Stevenson back in 1962, when the United Nations ambassador had convinced the council that the Soviets were behind a massive buildup of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Even perennial American dove Senator Edward Kennedy had been swayed. The Doubting Thomases, at that moment, had been seemingly routed by Powell's calm voice and convincing evidence—
“The truck you also see is a signature item. It's a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.”
British prime minister Tony Blair, who was already onside, was suddenly an American darling. The French and German doubters were being pilloried. If anyone happened to think of Canada, unlikely as that might be, it was only to puzzle over where it stood.

“Final call for Canada!”

THERE HAD BEEN a disengagement in Canada over much of the previous decade, in terms of both world politics and national affairs. There had been flare-ups—the most dramatic being a second failed referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1995—but for the most part people seemed rather disengaged. The endless constitutional debate had taken its toll. Ordinary Canadians were burned out.

History has already recorded that the sky did not fall the day after Meech Lake died, nor did it fall—again as widely predicted by much of the establishment—the day after Meech's replacement, the Charlottetown Accord, was turned down by referendum on October 26, 1992. The report of the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future was quickly shelved and forgotten. The people simply turned their backs on constitutional talk, most of them hoping never again would they have to squirm while the politicians played with the strings of this Confederation cat's cradle.

There was the usual doom and gloom. Constitutional expert Eugene Forsey had earlier warned that if Ottawa continued to hand off powers at such a pace it would eventually turn itself into a Cheshire cat—“with nothing left but the smile.” Yet the Bumblebee Nation carried on, defying almost everyone with any manner of opinion on its survival. The
economy, so dismal at the time of Meech, rebounded magnificently. The deficit, if not the national debt, was wiped out and soon government “surpluses” became a virtual tradition. The oil industry boomed in the West and manufacturing was healthy in the East. People were too busy watching their house values rise to waste energy worrying about where they lived.