Canadians Read online

  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 pointer
s 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.

  Perhaps it’s only fitting for a country with water on three sides that things tend to come in waves in Canada. Meech and Charlottetown had pounded the shore and the 1995 Quebec referendum had threatened to turn into a tidal wave, but then relative calm, albeit with the usual ripples, had followed. That Meech had led to the rise of the Bloc in Quebec and reinforced the rise of Reform in the West only underlined the old theory, first voiced by Trudeau cabinet minister Jean Marchand, that Canada is more like five countries than one. Its face automatically includes at least one nose out of joint.

  And yet, in surprising ways this increased regionalization turned to an advantage. Jean Chrétien came to office in 1993 with a clear majority and an opposition so regionalized and marginalized that he was able to return to a style of prime ministership not seen since the days of Mackenzie King, running the country more as a part-time hobby than anything else. As F.R. Scott wrote of King in his marvellous poem “W.L.M.K.,” the secret of Canada’s longest-sitting prime minister had been to “Do nothing by halves / Which can be done by quarters.”

  Chrétien wasn’t Mackenzie King, but he did vow not to resurrect the issue of the Constitution. His government concentrated on jobs and the economy, as promised during the election campaign. And despite that one chilling scare in the fall of 1995, when Premier Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard came within a whisker of winning the Quebec sovereignty referendum, the country largely went back to sleep on those matters that turn the bumblebee on its back.

  Canada, however, woke up that bright Tuesday morning in September 2001 to a world that had changed. The country quickly joined the NATO-led deployment against the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, but when talk of invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq followed, Canada balked. It became popular for politicians and Canadians to take the moral high ground, but closer to the truth was that Canada couldn’t afford it. The military, once so proud, had been allowed to decline over the years of constitutional warring to a point where barely enough “might” was on hand to get to Afghanistan.

  The Chrétien government had its UN ambassador, Paul Heinbecker, work hard behind the scenes to bring about a Security Council resolution that would have given UN weapons inspectors more time to determine whether Iraq really did possess the weapons of mass destruction that Powell had so convincingly argued it had. Five years later Heinbecker would tell me he was being quietly encouraged by both American and British UN officials who saw the planned invasion as “a catastrophe unfolding.” As he so wistfully put it, “what we might have avoided.”

  Powell might not have won the day with the Security Council, but he certainly did with the American people and, backed up by Tony Blair, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq. No weapons were found, of course, and the quick, definitive victory began turning into what, by the winter of 2006–07, was being regularly compared to the American fiasco in Vietnam a generation earlier. But early on in the military action no American sympathy was to be had for doubters either inside or outside its borders.

  When Canada, like Germany, like France, raised initial questions about the advisability of the military action, what little glow was left on its friendship in the hours and days following the 9/11 attacks quickly dissipated. First there was the prime minister’s communications adviser calling Bush a “moron” for his decision to take his “War on Terrorism” into Iraq when no clear link had been established between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and no firm evidence of Powell’s feared weapons of mass destruction. A member of the Liberal caucus, Toronto MP Carolyn Parrish, was caught saying “Damn Americans—I hate those bastards!” and months later exacerbated the situation by gleefully stomping a George W. Bush doll on CBC’s satirical show This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

  Then it got nasty.

  By the time President Bush came to Canada on an official state visit eleven days after the Parrish stomp, the media on both sides of the border were in full sniper mode. When Parrish—who’d been immediately booted out of the Liberal caucus and forced to sit as an Independent—appeared on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Crossfire’s rather precious bow tie, Tucker Carlson, suggested that “without the U.S., Canada is essentially Honduras—colder and a lot less interesting.” Not particularly witty, but more than enough to get well under Canadians’ thin skin.

  The American media piled on. The country was ridiculed by Pat Buchanan as “Canuckistan.” It was mocked as “limpid, flaccid” and as “third-rate,” “a made-in-Taiwan version of the United States.” The Fox Network’s acerbic Bill O’Reilly was particularly vituperative, with a ridiculous disregard of reality—at one point characterizing The Globe and Mail as “a far-left newspaper.” It had become the bilateral equivalent of “Your mother wears army boots.”

  The Canadian government even hired a polling firm, Millward Brown Goldfarb, to conduct a quick survey on what Americans were thinking of Canadians in the early months of the conflict. Not much, it turned out. They dismissed Canada’s offer of $220 million toward the rebuilding of Iraq once victory was assured as “unimpressive.”

  There was also a growing American apprehension about Canada’s stance on social issues. “Directions to Canada,” said the headline over one New York Times feature, “Head North and Turn Left.” The paper even quoted Canadian comedian Rick Mercer connecting the U.S. concern over Canada to the American attempt to find Saddam and his henchmen: “Between the pot smoking and the gay marriage, quite frankly it’s a wonder there’s not a giant deck of cards out there with all our faces on it.”

  No politician was as dramatically anti-American policy as Carolyn Parrish, but the Liberal government under both Chrétien and his brief
successor, Paul Martin, grew increasingly testy. At one point Canada’s ambassador to Washington, Frank McKenna, a former Liberal premier of New Brunswick, called the American government “dysfunctional.”

  On January 23, 2006, Canadians elected Stephen Harper prime minister with a minority government. Harper, a deeply conservative Westerner, immediately launched a strategic effort to repair diplomatic relations— including McKenna’s swift replacement by former Conservative finance minister Michael Wilson. Harper and Bush got along so famously that Bush took to calling the rather stiff and formal Harper “Steve,” much to the delight of the Canadian media. U.S. secretary of state Condoleeza Rice and new Canadian secretary of state for foreign affairs Peter MacKay struck up such a quick friendship that the media filled with gossip about possible romance.

  What mattered much more was that the new Harper government set out to rebuild the armed forces that had fallen into such sorry disrepair, committing an additional $11 billion to new equipment and recruitment. It also significantly increased Canada’s Afghanistan commitment by establishing a base in Kandahar and taking over leadership of the International Security Assistance Force. With casualties rising rapidly—more than forty Canadian soldiers had been killed by the beginning of the year—the notion that “flaccid” “Canuckistan” wasn’t pulling its weight was a sad one to embrace.

  And yet it still held water in whatever parts of America were paying attention.

  “CANADA FILM starting now.”

  Beside the Epcot Center’s Future World is Disney’s World Showplace, constructed back in 1982. Nine nations were involved in the original launch—the United States, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, and the United Kingdom—with Morocco and Norway added later. Some, like Mexico, had since updated their pavilions, but, for reasons unknown, Canada had remained frozen in 1982.

  The 1982 film O Canada still being shown at the Canadian pavilion was technologically impressive—shot in 360-degree “Circle Vision” and spread out over nine screens—but was sadly out of date with reality. The faces no longer represented the near-cosmic shift in demographics that had occurred since the year the Constitution was repatriated. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police musical ride was featured, as were Niagara Falls and the Rockies—both timeless—but the one brief shot of the country’s largest city, Toronto, didn’t even include the SkyDome. Given that the World Series champions would be playing in the Dome a decade after the film was shot, even American viewers must have been struck by the omission.