Canadians (5 page)

Nor would they have seen his hands, sitting loosely on his lap over the cursed cane. The man who once described Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as having “the hands of a physician” still had, at nearly ninety, the hands of a woodsman, their size and grip shaped more by axe than by acquaintance.

Hutchison's love of chopping wood was, for me, one more reason to admire him. His friend and neighbour at the lake, Percy Rawlings, often told the story of Hutchison splitting wood and then deliberately hiding it from sight because if Dorothy found it “she'd only burn it.”

Hutchison had once said that the simple woodshed “contains not just some fuel but nearly all that mankind has learned, so far, about civilized society.” And that “civilized society,” he'd come to believe, had taken a distinct turn for the worse in recent months in Canada.

Bruce Hutchison had lost faith. He'd turned his back on the great promise he'd found so readily in 1942 and held on to for decades. At the club he moved into his familiar seat at the very same table former British Columbia premier W.A.C. “Wacky” Bennett had eaten lunch at for twenty years—“a
sacred
table!”—and immediately began railing about the state of the nation, barely pausing to take breath or bite.

“This is a
country
we're talking about here!” Hutchison snapped at one point when the discussion wavered into individual politicians. But he himself swept it off into personality when he began to talk about the death of the Meech Lake constitutional accord and the role played in its death by the likes of Manitoba legislator Elijah Harper Jr. and, of course, the accord's most vocal critic, Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells.

“That
bastard
!” the grand old man barked.

Vaughn Palmer said he'd never seen Hutchison so black and pessimistic. On the ride out he'd warned that the old man had taken “personally” the crushing blows Harper and Wells had dealt the previous year. The accord had been well received in Quebec for its “distinct society” clause and Hutchison was one of many who believed this was the only way to keep Quebec in the fold. But instead, he argued across the lunch table, it “was rejected without serious thought by an English-speaking majority who hadn't bothered to learn its contents.”

Not surprisingly, his opinion was not well received by those who had opposed Meech Lake. Some recalled how much he'd always admired Pierre Trudeau—and hadn't the former prime minister declared that the accord, which he opposed, could be rejected without consequence?

“Balderdash,”
said the old man. Quebec couldn't possibly be stopped now from leaving Confederation; moreover, Canada's very justification lay in the experiment it represents: different languages and different cultures coexisting peacefully and prosperously under one flag. If Quebec were to go, the rest must follow.

“People who think the rest of Canada can survive are mad,” he went on. “You can't have a
scarecrow
nation. It would simply fall apart if the Maritimes and Ontario and the West tried to stick it out. The others couldn't deal with such a strong Ontario. The Maritimes would be the first to petition to join the United States and it would be over for everybody else very soon after.”

Hutchison was hardly the only Eeyore moaning and groaning about the land in those days, but being the Grand Old Man of Canadian Journalism, his points had an added edge. And it wasn't only the leaders who'd failed Canada, but Canadians themselves. Sitting in the Union Club stabbing air foes with his fork, he suddenly stopped and smiled. “I came across a quote from Emerson the other day in my reading,” he said. “‘The people are to be taken in short doses.'” He was feeling the same, showing little concern for news of the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future that was then going about the country listening to “ordinary Canadians” vent over what had happened during the Meech Lake negotiations.

Returning to his plate, he spoke to no one in particular: “Democracy is such a dirty, dirty business, isn't it?
How
does it go on?
How
does it keep working? I honestly don't know.

“It wouldn't matter if Lincoln or Ben Franklin was sitting down to write up a Canadian constitution right now. It wouldn't work. It
can't
work. The country is in too bad a temper. This country has lost its soul— it's like they took you and they ripped out your heart, that's what it feels like.”

This wasn't just old age railing at the coming night—despair knew no clear demographic in the months following the collapse of the constitutional talks—but Hutchison was undoubtedly feeling the march of time. He still worked on an old manual typewriter and delivered hard copy to the
Vancouver Sun
at a time when the other three
at the table were pressing “send.” He was cared for by a loyal housekeeper, Gladys Veitch (Dorothy had been killed in a car accident in 1969 and daughter Joan, who'd kept house for him, had died a few years earlier). He'd had a heart attack. He had trouble walking.

Later, back at the doorway of his little country bungalow, rain forming dimples on his big glasses, he stopped momentarily and shook his cane. “You know,” he said, “there is nothing about old age to recommend it. Avoid it.
Avoid
it.”

Before that wet day in Victoria was out he'd say that he might have, at best, another year left in him. The country he'd spent a lifetime defining, he said, might have two more years. Bruce Hutchison would prove correct on the one date—he had only one year left.

But he would prove wrong about the country.

BRUCE HUTCHISON'S FAMOUS OPTIMISM did rally slightly in his final months as yet another constitutional initiative, the Charlottetown Agreement, was underway, but he died six weeks before it was voted down in referendum on October 26, 1992.

This rejection would have upset him as much as the death of Meech, perhaps even more so in that the people—the very ones Emerson suggested “be taken in short doses”—were directly involved this time. The journalist who all his life considered himself a man of the people would never have agreed with them on this one.

Bitterness, like arthritis, often seems a common affliction among older Canadians. Hutchison was not the first eminent figure to hit a wall of disappointment near the end of his life. When novelist Hugh MacLennan entered old age—he died in late 1990 at eighty-three—he felt such doom and gloom that he tried to put it all down in one final dark, dystopian novel.
Voices in Time
is a science-fiction account of the hopelessness that prevails decades after a nuclear explosion has destroyed his beloved Montreal. A main character is likened to “a mind trapped in the collapsing vaults of history.” He seems to speak for the author himself.

Such a shift seemed improbable for MacLennan, once the great celebrator of his country through his novels, essays, and such nonfiction works as
Seven Rivers of Canada
. He'd ended one of his earlier novels,
The Watch That Ends the Night,
with “It came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence.” To think otherwise, it would seem, would be to go against even the MacLennan clan motto: “Where there's life, there's hope.”

Yet Hugh MacLennan had clearly lost his. When his last book was about to come out I went to see him at his cottage in North Hatley in Quebec's Eastern Townships, and the old man, sitting under a leafy oak tree on a gorgeous late-summer day, said he didn't know exactly what had happened to his country, but somewhere along the way “the fibre went out of us.”

Bruce Hutchison and Hugh MacLennan were hardly alone. Canada can sometimes seem like the land of Grumpy Old Men.

Robertson Davies, at one time Canada's best-known international author, was so put off by the 1980s rush to enter into free trade with the United States that he became convinced “this is the worst this country has ever seen.”

And historian Donald G. Creighton, a year before his death in 1979, the year before the first referendum on Quebec sovereignty, had come to regard the country he spent a lifetime writing about as “a good place to live, but that's all Canada is now, just a good place to live.”

IF ANYONE WAS GOING TO ENTER his later years in a grumpy mood, I would have expected it to be Walter Stewart.

It stands as one of the good fortunes of my lucky career that I was able to work with, and at one point be hired by, this man. Walter Stewart was the greatest investigative journalist of his generation, a man who muck-raked and took on all comers in the great traditions of William Lyon Mackenzie, the original Canadian revolutionary, and Joseph Howe, the early anti-Confederate.

Stewart, with his mad-professor hair, his bottle-thick horn rims, his cackle, and a squeaky voice that seemed to run on rusty shocks, was at the same time solidly built, muscular, and utterly fearless. He was the very first to take on the instantly iconic Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, his highly critical
Shrug: Trudeau in Power
coming out only three years into
the sixteen that Trudeau would so totally dominate Canadian politics, even when briefly out of power.

Stewart was the ultimate iconoclast in Canadian journalism, the fourth son of committed CCFers in ultra-conservative London, Ontario, and a top student who once described his hobbies as “reading, writing and arguing.” He was writing about the perils of globalization before the rest of us could even fit the word in our mouths. He took on the banks, the food industry, the insurance industry, the historians—and even Canadians' very notion of themselves.

As he once wrote in a rant against government cutbacks, “There's just not enough voices out there saying,
‘Hey, wait a minute!'
”

Stewart, who died of cancer in 2004 at the age of seventy-three, worked for the
Toronto Star, Maclean's, Today
magazine, and the
Toronto Sun,
wrote some twenty or more books, and served as director of the School of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax. “Approach each story as if you just arrived in town that morning,” he would advise young reporters, me included, “and write each story as if you're leaving town that night.”

He travelled the country extensively, but disliked driving. He had a driver's licence—claiming it had been issued by a local garage even though he ran into a gas pump during the test—but poor vision in one eye made depth perception difficult, so he rarely took the wheel. Instead his wife, Joan, did the driving while Walt sat in the back seat, happily typing away and periodically looking up through his thick glasses to shout
“Are we there yet?”

One of his books,
But Not in Canada: Smug Canadian Myths Shattered by Harsh Reality,
took a bit of the stuffing out of this gentle, polite, caring country. Stewart had become so put off by Canadians wallowing in their own silly superiority that he believed “smugness has become a national religion, a national disease” and traced its then most recent rise to the American crisis in political trust that had grown out of the Vietnam War, the Watergate break-in, and the impeachment threat that finally forced Richard Nixon from presidential office.

How, Stewart wondered, could Canadians feel so great about their own political process when, only two years before Watergate, a handful of Quebec indépendentistes known as the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) had kidnapped British diplomat James Cross and murdered Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte—and, with almost every Canadian politician backing the decision, the government of the day had brought in the old, rarely used War Measures Act? After calling out the army, Trudeau's Liberal government had tossed more than four hundred people in jail without charges or trial and made it illegal to belong to an organization that had been perfectly legal only the day before—never bothering to explain its actions surrounding an “apprehended insurrection” that became known as the October Crisis.

“We view ourselves as a superior people,” Stewart wrote, “a sober, peaceable people, a people of extraordinarily decent instincts and firmly entrenched civil liberties, and we reject any contrary evidence.”

He'd become convinced that Canada had become “captive” to its own largely self-created myth of the world's most reasonable citizen—patient, neighbourly, sure to stand up against violence and racism and anything that might threaten civil liberties.

“In short,” Stewart wrote in his typical take-no-prisoners style, “all the things your average wild-eyed, gun-toting, bigoted, loud-mouthed, venal, aggressive, tyrannical bastard of an American is not.”

Walter Stewart did nothing in halves that could be done by the dozen, and he chased after the myth of the perfectly behaved Canadian like a dog suddenly given wings in a forest full of squirrels. He talked about the October Crisis of 1970 and the troops on Parliament Hill and the suspension of civil liberties that had been so widely applauded by the vast majority of Canadians. He cited previous laws passed in Canadian legislatures that required no proof and allowed no defence. He talked about a Native girl who'd been raped and killed by three white youths in Williams Lake, B.C., only to have their convictions amount to two $200 fines and charges dismissed against the third young man. He told the story of how angry whites had once rounded up Chinese “Coolie” workers they believed had
taken their railway construction jobs and driven the terrified workers over a cliff to their deaths.

For a country with such a reputation for tolerance, Stewart often found Canada quite lacking in Christian charity. He talked about the Second World War when those Canadians, many of them from Quebec, who refused to volunteer for active service overseas were tagged “Zombies” and openly attacked, spit upon, and sneeringly handed white feathers as a sign of their cowardice. He talked about how sailors from the Canadian navy were often afraid to go ashore in Quebec City, convinced they'd be treated as enemies by those who opposed the war and attacked and kicked in the side streets.