Canadians Read online

  Praise for Canadians

  “In the quest to define our national identity, the most essential question was asked by the greatest of our literary critics, Northrop Frye: ‘Where is “here”?’ Finally we have the answer: In the pages of Roy MacGregor’s magnificent new book, Canadians.”

  —Peter C. Newman

  “Longtime readers of Roy MacGregor, or even fortunate newcomers to his graceful unfolding style, may be excused for thinking the writer is actually trained in medicine. So precise is his diagnosis of Canadian-ness, so clear and crisp are his stories, so full of rich, revealing detail, so apt are his anecdotes and adjectives from a lifetime of storytelling that we come to think of him as a well-trained professional who can see inside the unique creature that is the Canadian.

  “Canadians will smile and nod and even wince at times as they travel along with him across this broad body of sprawling bright lands and deep dark waters and [meet] open people who have so much chronic difficulty understanding themselves and, thus, being understood by others. We can only hope that, first, Canadians will grasp the elegant lessons of ‘Canada: the line down the middle of the road.’ Then, just maybe, if we’re lucky, the rest of the world will follow suit. And we’ll all have Dr. MacGregor to thank.

  “In short, Roy MacGregor’s new book is a national treasure.”

  —Andrew H. Malcolm, author of The Canadians

  “Writing a book that tries to explain Canada to Canadians is in many ways a gift … MacGregor unfolds a fascinating depiction of Canada … Canadians is a sprawling book. But it does capture the essence of our diversity; it does evoke the spirit of this beautiful, undefinable set of contradictions that make up Canada … A couple of the chapters are powerful enough to bring a reader to tears.”

  —Aritha Van Herk, Calgary Herald

  “It’s hard to think about anyone more qualified than Roy MacGregor to write a book that truly is a portrait of Canada.”

  —The Chronicle-Journal (Thunder Bay)

  “MacGregor cuts to the bone of what it is to be Canadian … MacGregor interprets Canada not only as a country and as a nation, but as an idea, an imaginative construct that often defies reason and logic but one that continues to speak to many who call this insistently unknowable place home.”

  —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “Canadians stands as a superior example of reportage and a reckoning of a journalistic career of more than three decades … MacGregor has a unique ability to balance objective reportage with a keen, emotional core; he has a good eye for the human interest angle, which intensifies his editorial thrust … Canadians is, in the final reckoning, a series of snapshots of our varied and diverse cultures, an insight into worlds and events that may be utterly foreign to some of us, but are, at their heart, fundamentally our own.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “If passion for our country counts, Roy MacGregor certainly has it. In Canadians he shares that passion with us again, leavened with a generous sprinkling of humour. Perhaps, as he says himself, it is only another exercise in examining our own belly-button lint, but if so, I never imagined lint could be so fascinating.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “MacGregor’s writing in Canadians is clear, crisp, and easy to read—the qualities that have allowed him such a long and successful career…”

  —Quill & Quire

  “MacGregor writes about us while at the same time seamlessly identifying himself as one of us. Canadians is a charming book, and MacGregor is a graceful writer.” —Winnipeg Free Press

  “He brings a rare—and trust me, admirable—touch to his work … A worthy and entertaining effort, reminding us of shameful shortcomings and how we can get it so right, even spectacularly so … In many ways, travelling over time, topics, and geography, often courtesy of MacGregor’s first-person, on-site observations, by anecdotes and quotations, Canadians the book reflects that. The overall effect after a read offers quiet, clear-eyed reassurance.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “The book’s greatest strength is the sense of the country and its people that emerge—personal, impressionistic, improvisatory, transitory, speculative. This is journalism of a high order … MacGregor interprets Canada not only as a country and as a nation, but as an idea, an imaginative construct that often defies reason and logic but one that continues to speak to many who call this place home.”

  —Guelph Mercury

  PENGUIN CANADA

  CANADIANS

  ROY MACGREGOR is the acclaimed and bestelling author of The Home Team: Fathers, Sons, and Hockey (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award) and A Life in the Bush (winner of the U.S. Rutstrum Award for Best Wilderness Book and the CAA Award for Biography), as well as two novels, Canoe Lake and The Last Season, and the popular Screech Owls mystery series for young readers. He has twice won the Ottawa-Carleton Book Award.

  A regular columnist at The Globe and Mail since 2002, MacGregor has written for publications including the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, Maclean’s magazine, and the Toronto Star. His journalism has garnered four National Magazine Awards and eight National Newspaper Award nominations.

  In 2005, he was made an officer of the Order of Canada. He is described in the citation as one of Canada’s “most gifted storytellers.”

  Roy MacGregor lives in Kanata, Ontario.

  Also by Roy MacGregor

  The Dog and I: Confessions of a Best Friend

  The Weekender: A Cottage Journal

  Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada

  A Loonie for Luck

  A Life in the Bush

  Canoe Lake

  The Last Season

  The Home Team

  Road Games

  Chief: The Fearless Vision of Billy Diamond

  Home Game (with Ken Dryden)

  The Screech Owl Mystery Series (for young readers)

  Forever: The Annual Hockey Classic

  For Helen and Duncan, mother and father,

  who passed on their deep love of the land—and

  who always had patience for young explorers

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2007

  Published in this edition, 2008

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Roy MacGregor, 2007

  Epigraph on page viii: “Canadians” by Miriam Waddington. Permission to reprint granted by Jonathan and Marcus Waddington.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  MacGregor, Roy, 1948–

  Canadians : a portrait of a country and its people / Roy MacGregor.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-14-305308-8

  1. National characteristics, Canadian. 2. Canada. I. Title.

  FC97.M315 2008 971 C2008-901400-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305308-8

  ISBN-10: 0-14-305308-6

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  Contents

  The Hands of Alexandria

  1 The Unknown Country

  2 A Canadian Is …

  3 The Midway Mirror

  4 The Wind That Wants a Flag

  5 Hockey, the National Id

  6 The Canada of the Imagination

  7 The Shrinking of the World

  8 Missing, Minor, Middling, or Moral World Power?

  9 The Invisible Founders

  10 Pier 21 to Pearson

  11 Prairie Ghosts

  12 The New Two Solitudes

  13 The Colony of Dreams

  14 City Elephant, Country Mouse

  15 Nous Nous Souvenons

  16 North of Summer

  Roots and Rocks

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Readings

  … We look

  like a geography but

  just scratch us

  and we bleed

  history, are full

  of modest misery

  are sensitive

  to double-talk double-take

  (and double-cross)

  in a country

  too wide

  to be single in.

  Are we real or

  did someone invent

  us …?

  —Canadians

  MIRIAM WADDINGTON, 1968

  The Hands of Alexandria

  I HAVE NO IDEA who he was.

  A Canadian, obviously. And perhaps that’s all we need to know about him apart from this:

  He stood on the east side of the tracks near Casselman, a small farming community in southeastern Ontario that sits along the rail line between Ottawa and Montreal. He was an older man, wearing rust-coloured coveralls and high green rubber boots, and he stood so dead centre in the field he’d been turning over that it seemed he must have paced it off for effect.

  He stood at attention beside his green John Deere tractor. He picked off his cap with his left hand and slowly raised his right over a long weathered face to a forehead white as the day he was born.

  And saluted.

  One loner to another.

  The famous loner—a man who saw himself as a solitary paddler and was seen by others as a stand-alone gunslinger—could not salute back from where he lay on-board VIA Rail train no. 638. He could not toss out one of those easy, sarcastic jibes he periodically threw at farmers—“Why should I sell your wheat?”—and he most assuredly could not raise his hand and give the middle finger to those lining the tracks, as he had done years earlier from a train carrying him and his sons through British Columbia. No, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was dead at eighty, the personality who had dominated the first third of this country’s second century as surely as Sir John A. Macdonald had dominated the first third of its first century, gone forever and on his way home to Montreal for burial.

  Train 638—two locomotives to pull only three cars—could not have chosen a happier route that surprisingly warm second day of October 2000. All along that 187-kilometre stretch the people of eastern Ontario and western Quebec had come out to mark the passing of the unknowable man who had for so very long commanded the attention of their country. In leftover sunshine from summer they gathered at crossings and along the tracks and to the sides of bridges; they carried flowers and Canadian flags and more than a few babies, the infants held up and their tiny heads steered toward no. 638 as if this one simple act might lock its historical significance into a small brain unaware of any past at all, including the last diaper change.

  All along the long route lay the unexpected. The surprises began on the outskirts of Ottawa when the funeral train began picking up speed and passed behind the repair shops for the city’s public transit system. The mechanics had lain down their tools and made their way to the rear of the buildings where they stood, in dark coveralls, staring through the fence in silence, their big, grease-covered hands folded as if in recital.

  Farther down the line, as the train slowed through an Ottawa Valley farm village, it was the volunteer fire brigade, in full uniform, all at attention on one side of the tracks while on the other stood a peewee hockey team, also in uniform, also at attention. None of the hockey players had even been born when the man they were honouring last held office.

  At a leaf-littered golf course that ran along the west side of the tracks players stepped back from their putts and removed their golf caps, seeming for once to welcome a distraction. Those playing immediately behind walked away from their carts and also removed their caps, not one of them daring to stand in that wide-stance, arms-across-the-chest sign of impatience that is standard fare for those waiting to hit their approach shots to a green.

  At one crossing a woman held up a cherry paddle, a rainbow-coloured voyageur scarf tied carefully around it. At another, a man held up his country’s flag with his country’s perfect flagpole: a hockey stick. A railway worker at the side of the tracks cradled his hard hat in his left arm while he stood at attention. Construction workers crawled free of the hole they were digging near a culvert to stand in respect, the yellow front-end loader behind them stilled, its scoop raised in its own serendipitous salute.

  They came, sometimes alone, sometimes in numbers, to stand and stare into the window of the final link in train no. 638, a special car with draped windows through which the tall among them might make out, barely, the red maple leaf flag that covered the coffin of the man who had been prime minister for nearly sixteen years and prime personality for another sixteen following his retirement.

  They came, many dabbing at their eyes, a few holding his signature red rose, some clapping quietly as the train passed. Simple country people, mourning a man from the cities who was born into privilege and lived in privilege; a man they connected to—sometimes off and on—but who could never quite connect to them unless he was on stage; a man who many years earlier had pressed his somewhat Mongolian, somewhat skull-like, somewhat handsome face to the window of the limousine carrying him through a southwestern Ontario night and looked long out at the flickering farm lights before wondering aloud to an aide, “Whatever do they do?”

  We could debate forever what it was they felt that day—the passing of their own youth? the end of an era where insecure Canada was finally noticed by others? the death of a man who caused so much change, so much controversy?—but we cannot argue whether they felt something that October morning, and felt it powerfully.

  Not long into the long, slow ride to Montreal, Jim Munson, then a reporter for CTV, now a senator, and I left the small pack of journalists in the car assigned to the media and stood by a window on the left side, the two of us staring out at the country staring back.

  We weren’t being rude. We were merely doing what journalists are supposed to do: follow the story. The train had been set up so that, periodically, members of Trudeau’s inner circle would be br
ought from the car carrying the coffin to the car carrying the media, and there a quick formal interview would be offered. Munson and I had listened politely to the reminiscences of Senator Jacques Hébert, Trudeau’s great lifelong friend, and of Marc Lalonde, his former finance minister, but it had soon become apparent that what was going on inside the car was insignificant compared with what was going on outside.

  It was one thing to talk about the past; quite another thing to witness the present.

  WE WERE ON A TRAIN headed for Montreal, the city in which, two decades earlier, I had first realized the great privilege journalism provides those fortunate enough to work in this unpredictable job. Maclean’s magazine had sent me there to do a profile of Mordecai Richler, then about to publish a new novel. I carried a tape recorder. I did not like transcribing tapes then, and will do anything to avoid it now, but Richler had such a reputation for surliness, not to mention mumbling, that I had taken it along for self-protection.

  It turned out to be the luckiest thing I ever did in my journalism career. We met at the Montreal Press Club for drinks and then headed for his Sherbrooke Street apartment for the formal interview. He insisted on stopping along the way to pick up two large bottles of Remy Martin and several packs of the small cigars he loved.

  The interview went much better than I had expected. Richler was almost as eager to talk about his new book as he was to get into the Remy, and he smoked and talked and kept filling up two glasses, the smaller of which he would push in my direction. It was my first encounter with cognac.

  The following morning I awoke in my hotel room still wearing the same clothes I had worn to the interview. The bed covers had never even been turned back.

  I was certain I was doomed. No memory. No notes lying on the hotel-room desk. Nothing. And then I remembered … the tape recorder. Panicking, I rolled off the bed and found it tossed on a chair. Deep in prayer, promising first child, I flipped the tape and pressed the play button. Richler’s voice came through loudly and clearly. I flipped the tape again, pressed rewind, and checked again. My voice was now slow and stupid, Richler’s still strong and clear as he answered questions without so much as a slur (well, as far as enunciation went, anyway).