Canadians Read online

  Al Purdy spent a lifetime looking at his country through poetry and prose and would regularly rail against those who dared dismiss the land he so adored. It irritated him that outsiders, usually Americans, acted as if the country were “a kind of vacuum between parentheses.” It was not, he said in his essay collection No Other Country, some godforsaken place devoid of culture or art or literature, some “4,000-mile wide chunk of Arctic desert.”

  Purdy believed the country was essential to his own personality, his adult experiences on the road as formative as his parents had been while he was still a child at home. He once drew up a list of all his journeys across Canada and declared, “This is a map of myself, what I was and what I became. It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility: and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled.”

  A big, hearty man who liked to order his beer two at a time—when I first met him I thought, wrongly, he was ordering for us both—Purdy felt that everyone else should share in his wild enthusiasm for figuring out what, exactly, made Canadians tick. It was his greatest passion during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of Centennial Year, Expo 67, and early Pierre Trudeau, a time when Canada seemed particularly anxious to distance itself from the Vietnam War, Watergate and, of course, Richard Nixon.

  Purdy set off across the land, writing about the landscape and periodically dropping in to collect the wisdom of some of Canada’s most respected minds. At Campbell River on Vancouver Island he called on Roderick Haig-Brown, a renowned nature writer and West Coast judge who considered fly fishing the ultimate court of decision.

  The scotch had been poured, the judge’s pipe lighted, and Purdy had deftly steered the conversation toward the country. He was certain that the London-born judge would be as puzzled as he was by the parochial nature of most Canadians—a people who, in a direct reversal of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, might list their address as the universe, the world, North America, Canada, province, city, street, room….

  But Haig-Brown would have none of it. “‘What does the cockney know of rural England, or the countryman of London?’” he asked Purdy. “‘I’m not at all sure that provincialism is such an evil thing at that. No man becomes a great patriot without first learning the closer loyalties and learning them well: loyalty to family, to the place he calls home, to his province or state or country.’”

  And as for Purdy’s request to have Haig-Brown pontificate on “The Canadian Identity”—this country’s equivalent of the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin—the country judge just shook his head. “‘That,’” he said, “‘is a question manufactured by writers and intellectuals.’”

  The judge, it turned out, was far more interested in the coming salmon run.

  A CANADIAN COMES to a fork in the road, the old joke goes. The sign pointing in one direction reads “Heaven.” The sign pointing in the other direction says “Panel Discussion on Heaven.” The Canadian heads straight for the panel discussion.

  “The English,” Jeremy Paxman says, “at least, have the saving grace of being able to laugh at themselves. Which must be based on a profound self-assurance.” That may go some way toward explaining British comedy, but it does nothing to explain the Canadian penchant for self-deprecating humour. It has long been found on Canadian television—SCTV, Corner Gas, Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes—but increasingly, though not many Americans are aware of this, on U.S. television and in Hollywood movies.

  Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, is Canadian, as are, of course, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, the late John Candy, and a great many others widely considered American comedians by American audiences. If their humour has anything in common, it’s in being slightly … off … neither American slapstick nor British wordplay but a form in which jokester and joke are so often one and the same. A Canadian, Michaels once said, would never have come up with a movie called It’s a Wonderful Life. That would be bragging. The Canadian version would have to be It’s an All Right Life.

  Scott Feschuk, who’s written satirical pieces for the National Post and Maclean’s—and, no laughing allowed, worked as Paul Martin’s speech-writer during Martin’s brief and disastrous tenure as prime minister—has said that self-deprecation is the cornerstone of Canadian humour. Feschuk also quotes Mark Breslin, the founder of Yuk Yuk’s, as saying that “Comedy is the cry of the intelligent and the powerless”—making it, of course, particularly attractive. “Canadians are so funny,” Feschuk concluded, “because no one takes comedy more seriously.”

  Canadians also crave approval. Self-deprecating humour is one way to get people you might have just met onside. Another sits at the very core of the Canadian language, the instantly identifiable “eh?”—a linguistic cap-in-hand begging for a nod, an agreement-in-principle before the speaker moves on from, say, the profoundly dismal weather today to the current dismal state of the government.

  When poet Earle Birney described Canada as “a high school land, frozen in its adolescence” more than half a century ago, he was hitting pretty close to the bone on what an abiding insecurity does to a national personality.

  I’ve often thought that, for a Canadian, one of the worst things that can happen is to learn your brother-in-law has won the lottery. Oh sure, most of us would come around eventually, but only after the initial backlash. Unlike Americans, we’re not comfortable with easy fortune. Malcolm Lowry once wrote a poem claiming that, for Canadians, “Success is like some horrible disaster.” Better, he felt, to have your house burn down.

  Encouraging stuff, that.

  Australians call this the “tall poppy syndrome,” the striking down of any who dare, by intention or accident, stick their heads up above the common measure. Perhaps in Canada we could call it the tall trillium, but then that would only compel those provinces where trilliums don’t grow to complain of discrimination. Poet bp Nichol once said that, despite our better instincts, Canadians spend so much time denigrating each other and others that they’d turned their land into “a country of pointless struggles.”

  Self-denigration, on the other hand, has long been raised to a national art form. “If Canada invented the wheel,” Ottawa high-tech guru Denzil Doyle likes to say, “it would drag it on a sled to be marketed in the United States.” John Ralston Saul, who’s written so much on the psychological makeup of this country, has remarked that in the entire world only Canada and Australia claim to be “so consistently populated by the abandoned and the defeated.” He may well be on to something.

  Whether it can be blamed on the tall poppy syndrome or not, Canadians have trouble with heroes. George Bowering, the country’s former poet laureate, once claimed that “Napoleon would have been a nobody here.” When the announcement came in 1957 that Lester Pearson had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the reaction of one ranking Canadian politician was typical: “Who does he think he is?”

  It’s not quite true to think Canadians turn their backs on heroes; it’s just that they like their heroes quiet. They prefer them to tend toward type—deeply humble, even shy—and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the hockey star prototype: Rocket Richard to Jean Béliveau to Bobby Orr to Wayne Gretzky to Mario Lemieux to today’s new star, Sidney Crosby.

  My old boss at Maclean’s magazine, Peter Newman, liked to joke that the classic Canadian hero would have been William Lyon Mackenzie King, the strange prime minister who held power longer than any other, who liked to talk to prostitutes, his dog, and his dead mother, and who once, when invited to visit wealthy American industrialist John D. Rockefeller, took along a half-dozen shoelaces just to make sure he’d have spares if one broke.

  So it’s a little surprising that it was a Canadian, Joe Shuster, who came up with the Superman character back in 1938. Evidently Shuster knew it would never … fly … in his hometown Toronto, so he sent his comic-book hero off to Metropolis, a my
thical American city eventually taken as New York, and the rest, of course, is history.

  The superhero who stayed home wasn’t so lucky.

  Captain Canuck, a comic that appeared and disappeared periodically from 1975 on, never took off, despite his amazing superpowers. Wearing a red-and-white body suit, the super-clean-living Captain fought for “peace, order and good government.” It was long held that in these watchwords of the Constitution and the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of its American counterpart lay the essential difference between Canadians and Americans. That, and the “right” to bear arms Americans so treasure.

  Captain Canuck, in everyday life, was Mountie Tom Evans, obviously of British descent but perfectly bilingual and with part “Indian blood.” The action was set in the 1990s, with Canada—since anything is possible in fantasyland—as the dominant world superpower.

  The good Captain, alas, was eventually brought down. Not by kryptonite, but by a force even more powerful and energy-sapping: the economics of publishing in Canada.

  George Woodcock, the British-born critic, used to say that Canadians had a deep distrust of heroes and much preferred martyrs—Terry Fox was embraced more easily following his death from cancer than when he hop-skipped along the edge of the highway—because, well, they largely see themselves as victims, particularly when compared with the mighty and often bullying America and Americans.

  For John Ralston Saul, hardly a debate goes on in this country that isn’t, at core, “a struggle between competing myths of victimization.” One side is forever blaming the other. Francophones blame anglophones; the West thinks itself a victim of the East. It can be regional—Newfoundland blaming Quebec for controlling hydro in Labrador, Quebec blaming Newfoundland for laying claim to Labrador—or it can be financial, such as the oil industry blaming consumers and using this as an excuse to do nothing to protect the environment. But the ultimate myth of victimization, he argues in Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, the one that unites all regions of Canada and both official languages, is the idea that “Canada exists only because it did not wish to be American.”

  Not being American is by far the most common definition around, one that’s often offered by Canadians themselves. Saul finds it wanting, a negative notion of existence that for him is offensive. But it’s out there, and not about to go away on its own. And when it comes to Canada’s possible role in the world—the subject of a later chapter—it may actually serve a purpose.

  Of the many obvious differences between America and Canada, the first that comes to mind would be weather. Robertson Davies claimed that “cold breeds caution” and thought this suggested a direct link between winter and the reserved, suspicious Canadian personality.

  I think it goes much deeper than that. It was winter, and evolution, that created the thick, luxurious furs—beaver, fox, mink, marten, fisher, wolf, ermine, muskrat—that kept the Europeans coming to these shores in the first place, and it might well be argued that the fur trade is what compelled Canadians to be not only well prepared but prepared for the worst.

  The fur trade might have brought prosperity for European backers of the trade, but it left behind a strong, almost genetic, sense that nothing will last and bad times are surely coming. The beaver eventually ran thin and European fashion shifted away from felt hats. There were two key lessons here. One was sustainable harvesting. The other was that you’re at the whim of outside forces.

  That this country should be suspicious of external influence, then, hardly seems surprising. To make sure Canadians remain Canadian, we rely on rules. We threaten legislation to keep American football out. We enact laws to promote Canadian music and give Canadian magazine publishing a leg up. We tie film and book publishing funds to Canadian content. We set up a massive bureaucracy to ensure that Canada gets its fair share of the television and cable world. We establish foreign ownership controls to keep our communications and arts industries away from outside clutches.

  And then, having duly protected ourselves from the rest of the world, we sit back and read British mysteries, rent Hollywood movies, watch American television shows, read New York magazines, listen to rock music from London and country music from Nashville on devices manufactured in Asia—and bet our hard-earned Canadian money on American football.

  YOU BEGIN TO SEE, surely, how impossible it might be, in two words, two thousand words, or two million words, to say exactly “What is a Canadian”? The politicians keep talking about a National Portrait Gallery for Ottawa, but perhaps it would be easier if they passed on the paintings and decided, instead, just to nail a little jelly to the wall.

  The Irvin Studin book came out in the fall of 2006. It contained a number of worthy opening-sentence attempts, including his own conclusion that a Canadian is “no more and no less than a citizen of the state called Canada.”

  Mark Kingwell, philosopher: “A Canadian is … an imaginary creature with various mythological traits, some of them charming, some irritating, many of them contradictory.”

  Christian Dufour, legal expert on federal–provincial relations: “A Canadian is … at the outset a Québécois, a habitant who lives in the St. Lawrence Valley and speaks French. It’s worth recalling that the name meant that, and only that, during most of the country’s history.”

  Aritha Van Herk, author: “A Canadian is … part of a jigsaw puzzle, always trying to find that one missing piece that has fallen behind the wainscoting.”

  Paul Heinbecker, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations: “A Canadian is … a promissory note, a bearer of hope in troubled times, a bet that diversity will work, that people can get along and that peace is possible.”

  William Watson, economics professor and author, McGill University: “A Canadian is … as a rule too fond by half of contemplating what a Canadian is.”

  Sujit Choudhry, University of Toronto law professor: “A Canadian is … a participant in an ongoing constitutional conversation.”

  Allan Fotheringham, columnist: “A Canadian is … someone who crosses the road to get to the middle.”

  Perhaps just checking, for all we know, on the invention Canada gave the world.

  MY OWN ANSWER arrived well past the point where a contributor could request even a minor spelling change, let alone a complete rewrite. I’d been thinking much more about personality than actual persons and had become trapped in the abstract rather than the actual. I’d seen the question not as disarmingly simple but as overly broad, one that failed to properly consider how wonderfully different people are from one end of this country to the other, and how, in my business, you just never know who you’re going to meet next.

  In the fall of 2006 I happened to be in the bookstore in my old hometown of Huntsville, Ontario, when the manager, Catherine Wyle, told me there was a very interesting man living just north of town near the village of Sprucedale. He was a hundred years old, she said. And he had taught himself to read in his nineties.

  I knew, instantly, there was a good story here—but would never have guessed how good.

  Clarence Brazier was then living with his daughter Doris and her husband, Jim Villemaire, a retired police officer, on a lovely acreage in the country where they’d put in a pond and built walking trails through the thick bush surrounding their home. I’d been told I would find Clarence in good shape, but had no idea just how vibrant he was at such an improbable age. The previous summer, at ninety-nine, he had finally put his beloved chainsaw away, having nipped his pant leg while cutting a large maple into blocks and frightened himself that the next slip might be more serious. He still liked to head off into the bush on his all-terrain vehicle, though. At ninety-five he’d bought a brand-new one, one that he said should last him “a lifetime.” At a hundred, and vigorous enough to walk the trails and spry enough to bound out of his easy chair like a gymnast, that now seemed in some doubt.

  I had come to learn about his reading, but Clarence had a much longer story to te
ll and was determined to tell it all. What had been intended as a short visit turned into a full day of listening.

  Clarence had been born not far from this place, on a small, dirt-poor farm near the Magnetawan River. When he was only five his father lost both eyes clearing land when the dynamite he was using to blow out the stumps failed to go off—until the moment he bent over a stump to see if the fuse had gone out.

  By the age of seven Clarence was running the entire farm. To pay off the small mortgage on the property, his mother, Fanny Mae, found work as a cook in the nearby bush camps and would be away for weeks at a time. Clarence took care of his father and five siblings, milked the cows, looked after the animals, mucked the stables, and did the plowing, planting, harvesting, and endless repairs. He would lead his blind father by the hand into the nearby woods where he would position him so that they could both work a cross-cut saw through a tree they could then cut into firewood.

  “I had his life in my hands,” Clarence told me over a third cup of coffee. “I was seven years old, but I had to know exactly how that tree would fall so it wouldn’t hit him.”

  In the winter months the children went to school, but Clarence— sprouting fast to his eventual six-foot-two—was both tallest in his class and furthest behind. He was so humiliated by appearing dull and hearing the other children laugh at him that he never even finished grade one.

  Clarence almost died in the Spanish flu pandemic that raced through the country at the end of the First World War, killing some fifty thousand Canadians (almost as many as had died in the war). He was only twelve when it struck. He lay in bed from January through March, chest burning and blistered from mustard plasters and onion poultices, convinced at times that he wouldn’t make it to the next day. He did recover, but was so weak it took him until the middle of May to walk again.

  Survival became the story of Clarence Brazier. He took odd jobs— haying for other farmers, filing horses’ teeth, de-horning cattle, clipping sheep, felling and hauling wood—to keep up the payments on the farm. When he was fourteen a couple of neighbours lied for him so that he could claim to be sixteen and take out a guide’s licence and make some extra money leading city hunters out after deer and moose. In winter he took to the logging camps and in spring worked the river runs, where his quickness and strength soon made him a valued employee.