Canadians (46 page)

It worked. The House voted 266 to 16 to endorse Harper's motion with the fuming Bloc forced to vote with the government.

The country would live for another day. Until the next panic, anyway.

AFTER LEAVING VERCHÈRES and Marie-Eve Lainesse to her tulip planting, I headed east beyond Quebec City and then in a wide loop came back along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence and turned north at Montreal, eventually ending up in the small village of Saint-Lin on a rainy, windy afternoon.

It was here, in this small village that lies in the heart of the farming region of Lanaudière, that Carolus Laurier once farmed a small property and where in 1841 a rather sickly child called Wilfrid was born. There is a small museum here in honour of the prime minister who believed the twentieth century would belong to Canada. And since no one appeared about the wet streets to talk to, I went in and spent a happy hour walking around the artifacts.

Laurier was forty-five years old before Canadians outside the province really began to take note of him. He'd come to some national attention
during the Riel debates, but it was during a trip to Toronto in December of 1886 that he became widely recognized as the powerful speaker he was. Those who came to hear him thought he looked sickly enough to be headed for an early grave—not someone with thirty-three years left in him and three consecutive majority governments yet to claim.

“Below the island of Montreal,” he told the entranced crowd,

the water that comes from the north, from the Ottawa, united with the waters that come from the western lakes, but uniting, they do not mix. There they run parallel, separate, distinguishable, and yet are one stream, flowing within the same banks, the mighty St. Lawrence, and rolling on toward the sea, bearing the commerce of a nation upon its bosom—a perfect image of our nation. We may not assimilate, we may not blend, but for all that we are still the component parts of the same country.

We may be French in our origin—and I do not deny my origin, I admit that, I pride myself on it. We may be English, or Scotch or whatever it may be, but we are Canadians: one in aim and purpose.

Reading these powerful words reminded me of the George Étienne-Cartier statue that stands in Quebec City, its base bearing a chiselled quotation with similar sentiments:

In a country like ours

All rights must be protected

All convictions respected.

The most encouraging words I found in the little Laurier museum, however, came from one of his darkest moments. Laurier had finally lost his majority and his government in 1911 when Ontario suddenly turned against him over trade issues. He was finished, they said. He would, in fact, never again be prime minister.

“We are making for a harbour,” he wrote, “which is not the harbour I foresaw twenty-five years ago. But it is a good harbour. It will not be the end. Exactly what the course will be, I cannot tell, but I think I know the general bearing, and I am content.”

Words worth repeating today.

And again tomorrow.

AT MASSON, a village on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River downstream from the capital, I checked the odometer of my rented car as I waited for the ferry to return from the Ontario side.

Trip: 1125.6 kilometres.

Odometers don't lie—at least not until the expense forms are filled in—but still, it didn't seem like that much. I had spent most of yet another week poking around the country's most fragile province. Not a single road travelled twice. Chatter at every stop. And yet I'd barely scratched the surface of this vast and complicated region.

The Masson ferry that would take me across the Ottawa River to Cumberland was slow in coming, and as I waited I had to wonder if it was only during spring runoff that the distance seems wider than normal. Certainly after that difficult week, after listening to fine young people like Marie-Eve Lainesse say
“C'est fini,”
the gap seemed wider than ever.

I had, as always, been treated magnificently in the province of Quebec. I've never understood those outsiders who claim they were snubbed or that people who could speak perfectly good English refused to use it or even insulted them in a language they don't understand. It has never happened to me. Nor do I expect it to, despite my obvious shortcomings.

And yet, one older man, Fernand Boirier, had spit in the village of Joliette. Not at me, but at the Liberal government in Ottawa and what the Gomery inquiry had taught him about this government. Another man, this time in Boucherville, had told me a story of sailing solo across the Atlantic, the greatest experience of his life, and how all that time for reflection had only served to convince him that it was time to go solo out of Confederation.

I talked to the Masson ferryman for a while.

Maurice Bourbonnais's family has been connecting Quebec to the Rest of Canada and the Rest of Canada to Quebec since 1939, his father, Eugene, taking over from his maternal grandfather, who started with a little barge that held three cars and charged fifty cents.

Today, Maurice's two sons, Alain and Luc, have joined the business, marking four generations of Bourbonnais ferrymen, and the traffic has risen to 600,000 vehicles a year at considerably more than fifty cents a crossing.

The link is pivotal: federal government workers heading for the capital, travellers looking for a more interesting route between Montreal and Ottawa, vacationers heading both ways summer and winter—winter ferrying made possible ever since they put in an air bubble system and bought an ice breaker.

The certainty of this connection between the two is also pivotal to Maurice Bourbonnais's personal health. He's worked through two frights before—the 1980 referendum and the 1995 referendum—and waited both times for traffic to recover and stabilize.

Since the 1995 referendum business had increased until, ten years later, it not only was back but had surpassed earlier levels. Life had been good, right up until the Gomery inquiry and the latest talk of yet another referendum on the way. “We don't want to see that, for sure,” he said as the ferry pulled out. “None of us want to start back on that again. But what you see today at the federal level—well, it doesn't help, I can tell you that.”

Maurice Bourbonnais's great dream had been to build a bridge from Masson to Cumberland. It would be another bridge over the Ottawa to permanently connect the two largest provinces, but one with a toll gate controlled by the Bourbonnais family. “It wouldn't cost taxpayers any money,” he said. “And I could be ready to go in two years.” He'd already spent $500,000 on a feasibility study and was convinced it would work— providing, of course, traffic patterns remain as they have been.

With Gomery and the fallout that followed, however, had come the decision to “put the project on hold.” He'd wait and see if this crisis passed. He hoped it would. They usually do. No, in fact, they always do. Until, of course, the next one.

“I really think the majority of the people would not go for separation,” he said as we talked about the nervous-making polls of the moment.

It's not just the ferry engine that churns on a day like this. One poll frightens; the new poll comforts; the next poll will be in the morning
paper, results unknown. The talk shows babble, the newspapers scramble, the street talk bounces from side to side like a car that has slipped loose of its emergency brake.

No one could argue, on this spring day when the rain was pelting down and the runoff was in full force, that the distance between Quebec and the Rest of Canada was wider at the moment.

Nor would anyone say that the water was anything but muddied and swirling—at least for that moment. Just as it had been so many times in the past. Just as it would certainly be—luck holding—in the future.

AT THE CUMBERLAND SIDE of the crossing, a new and very large blue and white sign is now the first thing you see as you leave Maurice Bourbonnais's ferry.

“Welcome to Ottawa,” it reads. “Shaping Our Future Together.”

Or so we hope.

Sixteen

North of Summer

“CARE TO SIT UP front for a bit?”

Major Ian Searle looked like a happy-face sticker in uniform: round glasses, round face, grin a semicircle as he repeated himself after first indicating I should pop out one of the red and yellow military-issue earplugs.

“Want to sit up front?”

I'd been hoping for days to sit up in the cockpit of the Twin Otter, and if I tossed out any more hints, I feared, the Department of National Defence pilots wouldn't ask me up front for a look so much as send me back for a jump.

I believed I was stepping into the co-pilot seat. I had no idea I was walking into a revelation.

WHAT THE MOOSE is to the Canadian landscape, the bright yellow Twin Otter is to Canadian air space. Like its smaller and equally recognizable yellow cousin, the single-engine Beaver, the de Havilland Twin Otter is noisy, cramped, and not particularly comfortable, yet so remarkably reliable that neither Searle nor the pilot, Captain Dominique Lassonde, was even born when the newly unified forces took possession of the aircraft in early 1972.

It was mid-June 2005, and Lassonde and Searle were flying the governor general from Base Alert on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island to the Eureka weather station to catch a larger plane heading back, eventually, to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, Canada's newest territory. It was to be
Adrienne Clarkson's final trip to the Far North before her tenure in office ran out, and, while there, she intended to make a political statement on Canada's sovereignty claims.
The Globe and Mail
had sent me along to cover the story.

We'd been flying south along the east coast of Ellesmere when, a couple of hours into the long trip, we turned inland to follow Archer Fiord as it stabs deep back into the huge island. From Archer Fiord we headed into the mountains, caught the path of the Dodge River, and finally reached one of the great ice fields of the High Arctic.

There are no words to describe such scenery, but since so few have been there, it is necessary to try.

It was a perfect, sunny day—though we were so far north in mid-June it could just as easily have been a perfect sunny night. The shadows were sharp, the cliffs dramatic, and the ice below blue and white and, from time to time, that incomparable polar azure that comes when bright sunlight falls on the melting ice that lies over pockets of water.

The pilots chose the lowest flight path they could safely travel, though at times it seemed as if the towering black cliffs of the fiord were so close that, had my father been along with one of his Player's roll-your-owns, he might have stuck an Eddy match out the window to scrape it along the rocks for a light.

The passengers were all hooked up by intercom—a necessary safety feature in the noisy aircraft—so they could not only hear messages coming from the cockpit but also exchange comments among themselves. The outbursts of incredulity proceeded to steamroll over each other as the plane rose and turned and twisted over the river path, mountains rising sharply on both sides.

But then, an hour into this extraordinary flight—with me now giggling in the co-pilot's seat, enjoying the ultimate in Mordecai Richler's
entrée
— Captain Lassonde suddenly pulled back on the controls and the plane rose, like a leaf on a high wave, up out of the river valley and up, up over a spreading plateau of white.

The commentary mounted as we did:

“So beautiful!”

“Outstanding!”

“Extraordinary!”

And then we all went silent.

We'd risen over a world so deep and distant and white that bare eyes couldn't bear to look at it. The plane, which had somehow seemed significant as it twisted over the gorges and above the riverbed with its fractured ice and blue reflections, now took on an
in
significance that was then unexpected and remains inexplicable.

The plane seemed to shrink, little more than a mosquito flying over a gigantic white shoulder of a country with more faces than even Statistics Canada can keep up with—but not a single one of those thirty-two million-plus faces here on this vast spot. Perhaps there never had been anyone here.

No one in the plane spoke. No one dared speak, each passenger and crew struck with his or her minuteness in a land so large and diverse not even the imagination seems capable of capturing it.

I had no idea where I was. I had never dreamed such a place existed on the entire earth, let alone in my own country. The sense of …
ignorance
… was almost overwhelming.

I'd thought I knew this country. Now, in an instant, it seemed such an impossible conceit, such foolish arrogance.

Perhaps you could never know it. Perhaps it was unknowable.

AL PURDY CALLED the Canadian hinterland “north of summer,” and in the late springs of 2005 and 2006 I took two very long journeys into that northern hinterland, first with the governor general into the eastern Arctic of Nunavut all the way to the polar ice cap, then, on my own, into the western Arctic of the Northwest Territories, all the way to the Beaufort Sea. After thirty years of travelling through the ten provinces I was really just beginning to grasp the sheer size of Canada. So vast is this northern land mass that the only way I'd ever see it all was to leave Canada altogether and head for outer space.

But the landscape was only part of the revelations that came out of those two extensive trips north. The people were equally surprising. And
in their own way, just as breathtaking.

The next summer in Behchoko, a small Dogrib community in the Northwest Territories, I sat one long afternoon and watched as eighty-year-old Elisabeth Chocolate scraped the fat from beaver pelts using a traditional tool fashioned from the leg bone of a caribou. Then her sonin-law, Patrick Adzin, stretched the pelts for drying by nailing them carefully to plywood sheets. The pelts would bring in $25 a piece, but he couldn't care less about the money. The following day Patrick was off to another rotation as a heavy-equipment operator for one of the diamond mines. Trapping beaver—the job of his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and so many generations back he couldn't even count—had become his hobby, his …
golf
.