Canadians (3 page)

But there was more to it than just confusion. It was the surprise—there is no other word for it, the
surprise
—of staring out at a country and seeing a face you had no idea was there, even though your job, day in and day out, is to describe this face and give it voice.

It was also the stark realization that you were staring out at one small corner of a country so large it defies generalities; defies, we sometimes think, even slight understanding.

Staring out at Canada … and yet acutely, startlingly aware that if VIA Rail no. 638—carrying the man who said the state had no business in the bedroom, who brought in bilingualism and biculturalism, who brought home the Constitution, who brought in the Charter, who called in the troops and called out the energy producers—happened this same soft October day to be passing through, say, Salmon Arm, British Columbia, rather than Alexandria, Ontario, the people of Canada would also be reaching out.

But not to touch the train. Rather, to give back the finger.

THAT REMARKABLE EXPERIENCE—the hands of Alexandria contrasted
with the fingers of Salmon Arm—accelerated my growing fascination with the contradictions of this bewildering country.

The Europeans believed they had “discovered” a New World that was of course neither new nor without people holding prior claim. They found a vast, rich, fertile country and, initially, actively discouraged settlement. They found a sprawling, seemingly impenetrable land of tree and rock and bog that already had in place the best highway system the country would ever know: the rivers. They arrived thinking themselves the advanced civilization and found that the most ingenious, most necessary engineering marvel had already been invented: the canoe.

What did Giovanni Caboto think of this place that late June day in 1497 when he sailed into Bonavista Bay and discovered the waters so teeming with cod that his men had only to drop weighted baskets to begin hauling in the fish? What, on the other hand, did Jacques Cartier think when the inside walls of his Stadacona shelter coated over with six inches of ice in early 1536 and 25 of his 110 men perished? What was it that Captain George Vancouver, explorer, is supposed to have seen as he sailed up the west coast in search of the Northwest Passage in the early 1790s, something so disturbing to him that he decided to keep it secret? We don't know. We will never know.

Perhaps, like George Vancouver's great secret, such a country is ultimately unknowable.

The political lines run east and west, the economic lines mostly south. We are some thirty million people who line up along the southern border like goldfish against the glass, all the while leaving the North so empty the rest of the world can say, with some legitimacy, that we aren't even in it.

We have a jagged line far up this empty northern stretch with trees on one side and no trees on the other. We begin the real New Year the day after Labour Day Weekend. We celebrate Groundhog Day when winter has just settled in, not when it's supposedly ending. We complain about the cold and yet, in places like White River, Ontario, and Snag, Yukon, we argue over and boast about record lows. We revere our anthem although only professional anthem singers know the words. We mostly
like Americans and often dislike America. We drive from flat prairie into mountains. We have three ocean shores—one with high rocks at the Atlantic, one with shrinking ice over the Arctic, one with inviting beaches into the Pacific—and a fourth shore, freshwater, along the Great Lakes, where for long stretches we stare across to the United States at night as if that country were lighted store windows on the far side of a street that's mostly vacant lot on ours. And yet we consider our vacant lot the superior property.

Thanks to journalism's
entrée
I've seen the sun rise at Cape Spear, Newfoundland, knowing there is nothing but water between my sneakers gripping that rock face and Ireland. I've watched that sun set off Long Beach on Vancouver Island and known there is nothing but sea between my bare feet and Japan. I've felt the shine of that sun for days and nights on end in the Far North, and stood on the most northerly spot of Ellesmere Island knowing there is nothing but ice between my rubber boots and Russia. I've touched salt water east, west, and north—and even bathed in salty Little Manitou Lake in the heart of Saskatchewan.

I have travelled the country by train, bus, ferry, camper, car, bicycle, canoe, foot, and thumb. I have flown by helicopter over the harsh coast and breathtaking fiords of Newfoundland; I have flown by bush plane over the wild white rivers of northern Quebec and the ice fields of the Arctic; I have stared down from passenger jets enough to know what early explorer David Thompson meant when he stared up into the Rockies and thought the mountains looked rather like “the waves of the ocean during a wintry storm.”

Like any Canadian, I'm familiar with the touchstones: the Canadian Shield, Peggy's Cove, Old Quebec, nuisance grounds, curling, Georgian Bay, Nanaimo bars, maple syrup, the Rockies, muskeg, road hockey, weather talk, late-night newscasts being bumped by
Hockey Night in Canada,
place names like Climax, Saskatchewan, Dildo, Newfoundland, and Medicine Hat, Alberta, soapstone carvings, legends like Mufferaw Joe of the Ottawa Valley and the Windigo of the northern Crees, the Avro Arrow, May two-four weekends, Screech, Céline Dion, the lake, John Deere caps, fiddleheads,
Morningside, Razzle Dazzle, Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys,
Don Cherry, Michel Tremblay plays,
Anne of Green Gables,
poutine, “peace, order and good government,” with everything held together by Red Green's duct tape.

I have seen flax in bloom, read Sinclair Ross, been to the Quebec Winter Carnival, tried to play Gordon Lightfoot songs on a guitar, skinny-dipped in northern lakes, removed bloodsuckers, figured out the Toronto subway, portaged canoes, trapped beaver, whined about trivial matters, eaten wild as well as flour-and-sugar beaver tails, cheered for fringe theatre, drunk Keith's draft beer to Stan Rogers songs, toured a northern diamond mine, picked Saskatoons, played hockey, swatted mosquitoes, stood at both Mile 0's on the Trans-Canada Highway, made love under the northern lights (just kidding, children), shovelled roofs, jogged the Hotel Macdonald stairs in Edmonton, boiled sap, kissed a cod, slept on an offshore oil rig, complained about banks, used an outhouse, attended the Calgary Stampede, and even rubbed Timothy Eaton's bronze toe in Winnipeg for good luck.

But do I know the country? Sometimes I think so; more often I feel I know nothing.

Canada, I sometimes think, is a country that, like Einstein's theory of relativity, is impossible for virtually any of us to grasp.

Einstein's theory can be worked out on a blackboard. We have a thousand books, dozens of royal commissions, hundreds of learned papers, and millions of panel discussions and late-night bar conversations—yet none has ever satisfactorily worked out the equation that is Canada. All we know for sure is that for every sign that points one way another seems to be pointing back. We are a country of endless contradiction.

Canadians have two languages but rarely speak them both; they have two official national sports but hardly ever play one, lacrosse; they fret over other provinces' separation threats and race to threaten separation themselves; they use Ottawa as both capital city and swear word; they have politicians who are elected to the federal government to work for the elimination of the federal government; they have academics calling for the end of provinces, premiers working for ever-increasing provincial powers, and mayors hoping for the creation of city states at the expense of
provincial powers; they argue, still, over whether Louis Riel should have been hanged as a traitor back in 1885 or deserves a statue on Parliament Hill as a Father of Confederation.

It should come as no surprise, then, that this country that saw 42,042 citizens pay the ultimate sacrifice in the Second World War, that takes such enormous pride in its contributions to both wars, would have as a celebrated novel about those times Earle Birney's
Turvey,
the story of an enlisted man who never sees battle.

Not only did different sides of the country hold different views on Trudeau—Salmon Arm, B.C., never forgiving him for giving them the finger—but time, as well as space, also saw him differently. Pierre Trudeau died the ultimate symbol for a strong, central government. He left behind, as his legacy, a Charter of Rights that is based on tolerance and equality. A half-dozen years after his death, however, a book appeared—
Young Trudeau
by Max and Monique Nemni, two Trudeau contemporaries—showing that he began his political life sympathetic to fascism, thought democracy bad for the sort of elite he himself came from, considered himself a revolutionary capable of open insurrection, and once called upon a crowd to “impale alive” those who supported the conscription intended to send more Canadians off to fight for their country. Thirty years later he would himself call out the army, thinking it necessary to save the nation.

No surprise, then, that when John English published his first volume of
Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau
in the fall of 2006, the official biographer would conclude, after years of studying Trudeau's public and private writings, that the man was “contradictory and conflicted.”

Just like the country itself.

IT WOULD BE SIMPLER, perhaps, if Canada were only smaller.

When Luigi Barzini set out to write
The Italians
in the early 1960s he fancied himself a portrait painter whose “sitter happens to be my country.” To capture Canada, however, you'd have to be not only a portrait painter but also a cartographer, for the central personality of the Canadian is landscape. You'd also need to be an analyst, for Canadians often seem far more interested in what they think—or, more accurately, what
others
think—than in how they look. And you'd have to be a seer, to know what lies ahead, if anything at all.

A friend once said, almost as a joke, that “Canada is the painting that Tom Thomson never finished.” The final strokes forever out of reach.

How could you ever expect to properly capture such a country? Can you even try to talk about
a
—one, single, specific—Canadian when the personality you're trying to define speaks two official languages, hundreds of other tongues, and is made up of faces in shapes and colours more varied than in any other nation in the world? How can it be that a country so vast and so blessed with natural resources could shift from a place where four of every five lived on the land to a place where four of every five live in the city—and in so short a time that there are Canadians alive who have lived in both realities?

And how, others must wonder, can a people apply such ridicule to government—even to the very notion of Confederation—and yet take such annual pride in being named by the United Nations as one of the very best countries in the world to live?

“Canada is a serious country,” candidate Michael Ignatieff grandly told one crowd during the 2006 Liberal leadership race, yet it's also a country where a cross-country driver will come across a giant pickerel, goose, five-cent piece, Easter egg, moose antler, oil can, apple, hockey stick, elephant, tomato, lobster and, in little Beiseker, Alberta, a giant skunk called Squirt.

It is a country where the representative head of state, the current governor general, comes from Haiti and had to renounce citizenship in France to represent the Queen of England in Canada. A country where the government regularly collects far too much in taxes then declares billion-dollar surpluses and acts as if it's somehow managed to turn a profit running the place. A country whose thirteen parts—ten provinces, three territories—are convinced that there's something in this country called “fiscal imbalance” whereby each and every one of them is getting screwed by a plan originally set up to allow for “equalization.”

A country where pollsters not long ago discovered that more people believe in the Loch Ness monster than believe their politicians.

It is a country that sells the outdoors and fresh air and nature and wilderness to those outside its borders—yet today is the most urbanized modern nation in the world. A country whose citizens often seem less interested in whether a glass is half full or empty than they are in whether there might be chips in the rim—and yet will still tell pollsters they think of themselves as contented people.

A country whose citizens are suspicious and jealous of their neighbours yet say the Canadian value they treasure above all others is represented by a health system sworn to fairness and universal access. A country so renowned for the tolerance it continually celebrates that writer Margaret Atwood once couldn't help remarking, “In this country you can say what you like because no one will listen to you anyway.”

A country with no history of civil war—but only because historians haven't yet come to terms with what the Meech Lake Accord was all about.

IT TAKES CREATIVE MINDS to keep a place like this together—and perhaps the true secret to the little-recognized longevity of Canada belongs to the inventors. After all, as the poet Miriam Waddington asks:

Are we real or

did someone invent us …?

Canada, of course, gave the world the telephone, and insulin, and Pablum. It gave the world the CanadArm, kerosene, caulking guns, standard time, the combine harvester, green garbage bags, the electron microscope, instant potatoes, snowblowers, AM radio, the BlackBerry, electric stoves, IMAX, the Robertson screw, Muskol, the snowmobile, the paint roller, five-pin bowling, the Wonderbra, and Trivial Pursuit.

But Canada's greatest gift to the world—and perhaps to itself— might have come from J.D. Millar back in 1930. Millar, an engineer with the Ontario Department of Highways, had an idea so simple that,
eventually, his small experiment in northeastern Ontario was adopted around the world.

The line down the middle of the road.