Canadians (40 page)

Electoral reform, in whatever form it ultimately takes in this country, will almost certainly give increased powers to the urbanized economic centres. And while a reformed senate—even if it one day approaches the Elected, Equal, and Effective triad once proposed by the Reform Party— is intended to help balance the regions, it would still be urban focused.

When Glen Murray was mayor of Winnipeg he was one of the driving forces behind the search for a New Deal for cities. If the country is 80 percent urbanized today, Murray told me one day in Winnipeg not long before he left city politics for an unsuccessful try at federal politics, it will be 90 percent urbanized by the year 2020. In his view, if the nineteenth century was about empires and the twentieth century about nations, then the twenty-first will ultimately be about modern city states.

He saw “a real immaturity in Canadian political organizations” that would need to be addressed in the coming years. With city power on the rise, provincial power would have to dwindle. “If the federal government treated the provinces the way provinces treat cities,” he warned, “there would be civil war.”

THE TRANSFORMATION from rural to urban hasn't been restricted to Canada, of course; the United States too has increasingly become a vast hinterland with pockets of virtual city states. David Brooks's recent essay in
The Atlantic Monthly
asked, “Are We Really One Country?” But the American Two Solitudes, if we may call it that, is far more split along political lines, divided as it is between the red states of the heartland, which voted for George W. Bush, and the blue states along the seaboards,
which didn't vote for Bush. Brooks perceives a split so profound that the reds have no idea what life in the blue states is like, and the blues no sense of life in the reds.

Red of course stands for Republican conservatism, blue for Democratic liberalism. In Canada, where, conversely, red is the colour of the Liberal vote and blue the Conservative, the elections of 2004 and 2006 demonstrated a similar split, with red prevailing in the cities and blue in the smaller communities and countryside.

A country divided.

And following the January 23, 2006, election even more a contradiction than ever, with a minority Conservative government in charge and the Liberals largely reduced to those city centres that were, in so many other ways, running so much of the country: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa. Tory blue, however, was solid in Alberta, where oil and gas had turned Calgary and, by extension, mushrooming Fort McMurray in the oil sands into the main economic engines of the country.

Stephen Harper's slim victory in 2006 may have averted yet another crisis in the rolling panic attack that is Canadian unity. Eighteen months earlier, when the Liberals had squeaked out a minority victory under Paul Martin, the West had recoiled in anger. It meant, to them, that Eastern voters—Ontario in particular—had decided to stick with the Liberals despite the ongoing sponsorship scandal and the clear signals from the West that it was well past time for change. The West had the economic power; the West had the growth; but the West felt powerless in determining Ottawa.

I was in Calgary at the end of June 2005, watching in the Roundup Centre as the air went out of the thundersticks the Tory faithful had been holding in anticipation of victory. The anger was palpable.

“There is no Canada!” Elizabeth Craine told me. She'd worked for the Conservative Party since John Diefenbaker's time and had that very day served as a scrutineer for Harper in his Calgary Southwest riding. “There is no Canada,” she repeated as supporters and candidates stood around the Centre looking as though they'd just been struck by lightning.
“There's Quebec. There's the Maritimes. There's Ontario. And there's the West. They're all different.

“Let's wake up to reality—it's time for us to form our own country.”

She was hardly alone. Western alienation—a distant cousin to Quebec separation—has been around since Riel, since railway route decisions, since Montreal and Toronto bankers controlled farm loans, since Pierre Trudeau brought in the despised National Energy Program, since Meech Lake failed to address the West's desire for senate reform. It flares periodically—Alberta even has its own separation party—and, had Harper not won in early 2006, likely would have blown as dramatically as Leduc No. 1 did back on February 13, 1947.

The rage following Martin's victory was undeniable. A professor in Calgary emailed me to predict that the country would disappear within ten years. Voters in British Columbia began talking about joining with Alberta and putting an end to Canada altogether.

“I'm not a wild-eyed lunatic,” Elizabeth Craine told me that night. “None of us are out here. We just want to see things change. And we can see now that it doesn't work and it can't work. This country is never going to be anything but frustration. Why can't we divide it up? Lots of countries get divided up—and they survive.”

Canada, of course, did survive long enough for Harper to claim his own minority. The slogan the Reform Party had adopted on its founding back in 1987—“The West Wants In”—was finally a fact. “The West is in,” former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed told me when I went once again to Calgary, this time to listen to the thundersticks pounding in celebration. “Even if it's a minority government, it will be a positive thing for Canada.”

“National unity and the state of federalism,” added Reform founder Preston Manning, “is in better shape today than it was before this election began.”

But no one really expected it to last long; it never does in Canada. Another election could just as easily throw power back to the Liberals. And, increasingly, Alberta was coming to resent how much of its oil money was being lost to such matters as equalization. There was also the
continuing matter of senate reform, which Harper had promised to address. And then there was the growing issue of the environment, which Harper would need to deal with. The panic attacks might have subsided somewhat, but the nervous twitches, whether talking about the threat of Quebec separation or Western alienation, were a constant.

The West was in, all right, but as one newly elected Western politician put it, this might delight and calm the West but would most assuredly cause “the Central Canadian Sphincter Index to shoot to the top.”

One inescapable observation about the Harper victory was that the Conservative seats were almost exclusively away from the big cities, Edmonton and Calgary being obvious exceptions. And within the West itself there were signs of the urban–rural split, with Edmonton, Calgary, and booming Fort McMurray—now being called the “Shanghai of Canada”—drawing thousands of rural Westerners to high-paying jobs in and around the old industry.

It didn't help Saskatchewan that Alberta, with high-paying jobs and the lure of two mighty cities, was right next door. Young workers and young families were quick to follow opportunity. When my
Globe and Mail
colleague John Stackhouse was researching his
Timbit Nation
in 1999 he passed through Yorkton, picked up the local
This Week,
and found the following reference to the fact that twenty-six thousand people had bailed from the province that year: “Once again, Saskatchewan plays the farm team, educating people for the twenty-first-century economy, at the expense of the Saskatchewan taxpayer, and sending them off to build other provinces.” It all seemed to underline what Sharon Butala had written in an essay nearly twenty years earlier: “Saskatchewan was only the holding area where one waited impatiently until one was old enough to leave in order to enter the excitement of the real world.”

Yet those who come from Saskatchewan, much like those who come from Newfoundland, have a sort of worship for the place—even if the place left behind has vanished, as in the case of Tate down the road from Raymore.

Wallace Stegner, the celebrated American writer, lived with his family on a homestead near Eastend, Saskatchewan, between 1914 and 1920. He
called it “Whitemud” in
Wolf Willow,
the novel he wrote of the Canadian prairies, and said that “prairie and town did the shaping, and sometimes I have wondered if they did not cut us to a pattern no longer viable.”

Stegner returned to little Eastend after some three decades living and prospering in the southern United States. Places like Eastend, he believed, were not unlike a coral reef in that they were formed by substance built up through the “slow accrual of time, life, birth, death.… The sense of place so rock solid it, at least, never vanishes.” He walked about the town that had so formed him, and concluded, rather evasively: “Has Whitemud anything by now that would recommend it as a human habitat?”

By not answering, he answered.

When the Royal Bank of Canada did a study on what has been called “the internal brain drain,” it found there were two big losers among the ten provinces: Saskatchewan and Newfoundland.

No one was surprised in the slightest.

Thirteen

The Colony of Dreams

IT WAS IN BONAVISTA, three hundred kilometres up the wild and rocky eastern coast of Newfoundland from St. John's that, legend has it, Giovanni Caboto first set his feet on firm ground on June 24, 1497. Giovanni was a Venetian but also an entrepreneur, so as “John Cabot” he claimed the land for King Henry VII of England and, for his troubles, collected a ten-pound bonus.

Newfoundlanders consider this their first selling out by outsiders, and certainly not the last.

John Cabot was supposed to be searching for the fabled western passage to Asia, but instead he found this massive rocky island at the far reaches of the Atlantic. He sailed along the western coast until he found the deep shelter of Bonavista Bay, where the cod were so plentiful his men had only to lower weighted baskets into the water then quickly haul them back up teeming with glistening fish. He called it “New-Founde-Land” in the language of his new patron, and the name stuck.

There's a statue of John Cabot on the outcropping of rock that stands between the sheltered harbour and the open sea. For years the fishermen of Bonavista would pass under his gaze as they headed out, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers had done for centuries. But no more—not since the federal government closed down the cod fishery in these parts and obliterated the only reason Bonavista stands here in the first place.

Yet few here, if any, believe the federal fisheries scientists. They've been wrong before—who, after all, foresaw the collapse of the East Coast fishery?—and they say they're wrong again. The fish haven't gone; they're just … not here. When Newfoundland's Wayne Johnston was seeking a title for the novel he wrote about his home, he didn't need to think long.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
could just as easily stand as the provincial motto.

Not long after the most recent fisheries closures, I called in on Bonavista and found Larry Tremblett cleaning up his fishing boat that hadn't left its moorings in weeks. The vessel, appropriately, is called
High Hopes
—and Tremblett certainly had them. He was convinced that Newfoundland remained a land of such untapped potential—the return of the fisheries, the offshore oil and gas—that it could equal Saudi Arabia if only it were managed correctly. “We'd have people coming down here to do our work for us,” he told me, pushing back a frayed and faded baseball cap over curling hair.

It's an old refrain and eerily similar to the “New Jerusalem” dreams of Saskatchewan. A half century earlier Newfoundland's first premier, Joey Smallwood, predicted that his stubborn little province would one day emerge as the “new Alaska.” It's always something. The New Norway. The New Iceland. The New Singapore …

Tremblett pointed to the gulls floating on the calm harbour water. He said that the gulls of Bonavista, once so well fed from the constant dumping of cod guts from the plant, wouldn't even acknowledge the boats coming in and out of the harbour. Now they sit and wait for the odd flush of crab waste. “Watch this,” he said.

He walked over to his boat and returned with a handful of herring bait. He threw a couple down into the water and then stood, holding the bait high in a Statue of Liberty pose. The gulls swarmed him instantly, an image that was less a gentle East Coast postcard than something from a Hitchcock film.

But Larry Tremblett doesn't need a horror movie to frighten him. There are payments on his boat. And his two boys, who were supposed to join him on the boat, have left the province in search of work. He has no idea
if they'll ever be back. “This,” he said, spreading his hands over the scene, “is turning us into a senior-citizen town. The young people get out of school and pack up and go—they've got no other choice.”

The mayor of Bonavista, Betty Fitzgerald, worries about her town losing its young, worries about distraught fishermen turning to drink, to violence, to suicide, worries about what the rest of the country—which she says she loves—thinks of her and her fellow Newfoundlanders. “You won't find any harder working people in the country,” she said, her long, strawberry-blond hair flying in the wind that snaps the flags outside the town hall offices. “We're caring, kind, hard-working people—so why put us down? Because we're such laid-back people who don't speak out? Why? … This really bothers me, that people would blame us. I don't think of myself as lazy. Tell me that to my face and they'll be sorry.”

Fitzgerald puts in eighteen-hour days at a job that pays nothing in an attempt to salvage some future for the little town. The John Cabot statue attracts the occasional tourist, but hardly enough. If the fishery takes too long to recover, or never does at all, towns like Bonavista are as surely doomed as the Tates and the Smuts three and a half time zones west.

The decline of the Newfoundland fishery has spawned as many theories as gulls drifting over the quiet Bonavista Harbour. The only thing everyone agrees on is that bad management played a part—but whether it was Ottawa's or the province's remains open to question.