Canadians (43 page)

Agriculture was still profoundly important, but resource development was playing an increasingly key role in the Saskatchewan economy. The oil and natural gas industry and leading-edge science coming out of Saskatoon were bound to transform this province as dramatically as the flood of immigrants had done almost a century before. Only this time, the emphasis would be far more urban than rural.

Some were saying that one day Saskatchewan would turn into a sort of Alberta Lite, but Howe disagreed. “I just don't see Saskatchewan becoming Alberta,” he said. “That would require a 180-degree turn, and I don't see that happening.”

“The reason Saskatchewan has the place it does in Canada,” he continued, “is because interesting ideas come out of Saskatchewan. For the last
forty years, those ideas have been all about how to live well poor. You have to have health care, but that means somebody else has to pay for it because you happen to be poor. I think that, just maybe, over the next forty years, the ideas that will come out of Saskatchewan will be about how to live when you're well off.”

I also went to see former provincial finance minister Janice MacKinnon. She cautioned that the traditional farm, and its psychological hold on an entire province, is not something that's easily abandoned. “The mistake an economist makes,” says MacKinnon, who now teaches history at the University of Saskatchewan, “is to look at the pie and then say agriculture is just not that big a slice. But it's a big part of the psychology.”

AND THIS, REALLY, is the point here. Canada may today be
physically
80 percent urban and 20 percent rural, but sometimes it feels 80 percent rural and 20 percent urban
psychologically
.

Wyndham Lewis, the famous English author and painter, was in fact a “sort-of” Canadian—born in 1882 on a ship moving along the Bay of Fundy—and it was his belief that, no matter how urbanized Canada might ultimately become, it would be forever connected to the vast landscape on which those sprawling cities barely make a mark. “This monstrous, empty habitat,” Lewis wrote, “must continue to dominate this nation psychologically, and so culturally.”

It's something outsiders certainly notice. British-born Susan Buchan, the wife of John Buchan—author of
The Thirty-nine Steps
and Canada's governor general from 1935 to 1940—found that no matter where in Canada she travelled with her husband, no matter where she found Canadians living, “the wild is always there, somewhere near.”

Peter Gzowski once told a story about travelling by train across flat Saskatchewan. An Englishman who also happened to be on-board remarked that the landscape struck him as “the biggest expanse of bugger-all I've ever seen in my life.”

Gzowski stared out the same window but didn't see the same thing. It wasn't “bugger-all” at all; it was the landscape. And the Saskatchewan prairie, he thought, “explains a lot about us, from medicare to unemployment
insurance, from the railways, the CBC, to our inherent decency and sense of politeness. We have a lot at stake here: we huddle together against the cold.”

Margaret Laurence took the connection even deeper in an essay she wrote back in 1971 about her earliest beginnings in the little town of Neepawa, Manitoba:

Because that settlement and that land were my first and for many years my only real knowledge of this planet, in some profound way they remain my world, my way of viewing. My eyes were formed there.

… “Scratch a Canadian, and you find a phony pioneer,” I used to say to myself in warning. But all the same it is true, I think, that we are not yet totally alienated from physical earth, and let us only pray that we do not become so.

In the summer of 2003
The Globe and Mail
launched a massive series looking at new Canadians. The idea was to examine, in depth, the impact recent immigrants were having on the country and, by extension, the impact Canada was having on them. As part of that series the paper commissioned a poll that would look at as many aspects as possible of the immigrant experience—which by this time, of course, was almost exclusively an urban story.

When Canadians of all heritage and history were asked to name what was, for them, the defining characteristic of Canada, the result stunned
Globe
editors: 89 percent chose the sheer vastness of the land.

That's nine of every ten Canadians—eight of whom live in cities— choosing the landscape.

Canadians may indeed be the most urbanized society on earth. And yet, for reasons that are sometimes understandable—a distant family farm, Aboriginal heritage, a history that somewhere includes fishing, mines, logging, the railway—as well as for reasons no one can quite comprehend, there remains among all Canadians this enormous connection with the land and water.

No matter what the address or country of origin.

Fifteen

Nous Nous Souvenons

SHE WOULD STAND equal to—if not greater than—the Statue of Liberty, said the man who envisioned her creation. Let Liberty hold high her flame at the entrance to New York Harbour; Madeleine would stand on the banks of the Saint Lawrence, dress rippling in the breeze off the wide river, loaded musket in hand. And while Liberty would stand for the freedom of the individual, Madeleine would stand for the whole, for the good of everyone. “The contrast,” said the man who believed so totally in the inspiration of Madeleine de Verchères, “… will be wholly in favour of the Dominion.”

The man was an anglophone, Earl Grey.

Not just an anglophone, but a Brit, and as Lord Grey, governor general of Canada from 1904 to 1911, surely the most passionately
Canadian
of all governors general right up to 1952, when the Canadian-born tradition began with Vincent Massey. When Grey left to return to Britain, Sir Wilfrid Laurier said that he'd given “his whole heart, his whole soul, and his whole life to Canada.”

He also gave the Grey Cup, which turned a football game into the most unifying annual sporting event the country has ever known.

And he gave, as well, the political push that erected this towering statue of a fourteen-year-old girl along the south bank of the St. Lawrence in the town that bears her family name.

Verchères, one would think, would stand as the most patriotic of Canadian small towns. Its ribbon-like main street, with small shops and
boutiques, hugs the riverbank as if town and setting had been matched on a postcard. It was here, on December 28, 1842, that Calixa Lavallée was born, the musician who would go on to compose “O Canada.” And it was at little St. Antoine, also in Verchères country, where, on September 6, 1814, George-Étienne Cartier was born. Fifty-three years later, Cartier would be the central francophone force behind Confederation, John A. Macdonald's trusted lieutenant, and the man held most responsible for persuading the French of Lower Canada to join in this curious experiment they would call Canada.

It was George-Étienne Cartier who was so essential to the “great coalition” that pulled Lower and Upper Canada out of deadlock and that launched Macdonald's Conservatives, George Brown's Clear Grits, and Cartier's
Bleus
toward a federal union of all British North American colonies. In his earlier years Cartier had even authored a song, “O Canada / mon pays, mes amours!,” that seemed likely, until Calixa Lavallée came along with his patriotic tune, to be adopted as the national anthem of the new country.

John Ralston Saul has argued that it was actually Cartier, far more than Macdonald, who deserved credit for the transcontinental railway that solidified Confederation and brought British Columbia into the fold. In
Reflections of a Siamese Twin
he calls Cartier “the real force behind the idea” and the one who understood what a national rail line would mean to this young country. It would be a line to cut off those Americans still dreaming of North American expansion. It would put the onus on British Columbia to join Confederation. But it would also challenge the nation itself to “demonstrate that it had the energy and the desire to exist.” Cartier applied his mind not to how the railway could be built or paid for, but to what it would eventually mean. “It was,” Saul writes, “a great creative idea—an act of invention—in the sense that a scientist understands a discovery before proving that it is there.”

In his distant past, however, Cartier had been involved in the rebellions of 1837 and 1838, after which he'd been forced to flee to the United States. When he returned he became a ranking member of the ruling class he'd once fought against, even serving as solicitor for the Grand
Trunk Railway. Saul remarks on the irony that Cartier, the early musket-wielding rebel, would later create the Canadian army, the first military in charge of the protection of Canada. So it's understandable how, in later analyses of his life and times, Cartier would come to be seen in different light. Some Quebec academics—including Léandre Bergeron, author of
Petit Manuel d'histoire du Québec
—consider Cartier a classic
chouayen,
a sellout.

Today they call pretty Verchères “The Village of the Patriots.” It was here in Verchères that Ludger Duvernay, the founder of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, was born. It's here where Parti Québécois leader Bernard Landry lives along the riverbank, the fleur-de-lys alone snapping in the wind over his drive. And here, of course, is where the statue of Madeleine de Verchères—which Lord Grey believed would one day inspire Canadian citizenship—performs a quite different role.

Today, she stands as the symbol for defiance of the forces that surround Quebec.

ON A LOVELY LATE-APRIL DAY in 2005 I came to Verchères in the hopes of talking to locals about what was then widely presumed to be a fast-coming federal election.

The Liberals had been in power for a dozen years, including three straight majority governments under Jean Chrétien. Those majorities had come to an end amidst a growing scandal over the federal government's sponsorship program in Quebec. The program intended to create a warmer feeling toward Canada after the failed 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty was now seen across the country as a diabolical scheme to spread federal tax dollars among a small circle of conspirators, most of them in the advertising industry, a few of them in the federal government. The current prime minister, Paul Martin, had trusted that in calling for a special inquiry he would deflect attention away from himself and his minority government, a strategy that had failed miserably. The daily revelations of the Gomery inquiry had become the national soap opera of 2005—with Martin certain to pay a price whenever the election was called.

I went to the small park dedicated to Marie-Madeleine Jarret de
Verchères and stood for a long while admiring the three-storey-high statue of the heroine of New France, her dress and her bronzed hat seeming to flutter in the wind, her musket ready for the next attack.

There are historical plaques around the statue, but the story is told in much richer detail by Colin M. Coates, director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and co-author, with Cecilia Morgan, of
Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord
. Writing in
The Beaver,
Coates tells of the adolescent girl who took charge of the family fort here with only two younger brothers and two aging, frightened soldiers for help and how she somehow bravely held off an Iroquois war party for eight days.

It's a wonderful, inspirational tale—no wonder Lord Grey was so swept away by it—but it's also one that leaves many historians rolling their eyes. Madeleine was fourteen in the fall of 1692, the fourth of twelve children but the eldest of those who'd survived those tough years of high infant and child mortality. Her amazing story, curiously, didn't even come out until some seven years after the event. She was then twenty-one and applying for a small pension for herself. If the authorities couldn't see fit to offer that, she hoped, then perhaps they might consider a better posting for a brother who was then a cadet in the colonial New France army.

To help make her case, she told how, when she was only fourteen, she'd been left in the fort while her parents were away and had disguised herself as a man to fight the Iroquois.

It was a tale dramatically told: the young girl racing for the fort, an Iroquois warrior catching her by the scarf just as she reached it, her spinning out of the scarf just as she slipped through the door and was able to bolt it tight. She put on a soldier's hat as she climbed to the bastion, where she fired off the cannon to warn others of the danger.

She chose to write to the wife of a minister, who was much impressed by Madeleine de Verchères's words: “Although my sex does not allow me to have other inclinations than those demanded of me, nonetheless permit me, Madame, to tell you that I have feelings that draw me to glory as do many men.”

The royal court was fascinated by the story, and the King's officials asked the colony's authorities for verification. It came, but without much enthusiasm, according to Coates, though it did speak warmly of her father's long years of loyalty. Madeleine was, in the end, granted a small pension, but apparently more on account of her father than of her incredible tale.

Nearly thirty years later she went after an increase—and this time really spun out the story. Now there were forty-five Iroquois, shots were flying, the old soldiers in the fort cowering. Madeleine took charge “without regard for my sex, nor for the weakness of my age.” With the help of the terrified old soldiers and her young brothers she fired the cannon and shot at the invaders until they retreated.

Over the coming days, with the Iroquois surrounding the little fort and periodically attacking, she was able to slip out four different times to complete various and often bewildering acts of bravery. Once she rescued passing canoeists before they fell into the clutches of the Iroquois. Once she risked her life to pick up the laundry that had been left down by the river.