Canadians (6 page)

The war and the lead-up to it was indeed a time of widespread intolerance, the most famous being when the
St. Louis,
a ship carrying nine hundred Jewish refugees, was turned away from Canada, the passengers' last hope, and forced to head back for Germany and the Holocaust, where most perished. The prime minister of the day, Mackenzie King, thought there were already too many Jews around Ottawa. According to Irving Abella and Harold Troper's
None Is Too Many,
in Canada in those days “refugee” was code for “Jew.” The director of immigration, E.C. Blair, considered Jews inassimilable, a people “who can organize their affairs better than other people” and who therefore were a threat to good Canadians.

To dismiss the myth of the law-abiding, peaceful, nonviolent Canadian, Stewart offered an entire chapter on Canadian riots. Riots to start a rebellion back in 1837–38 and riots over giving reparations to those who'd rebelled in the first place. Riots during Orange parades in “Toronto the Good.” A riot in Regina when unemployed men came through on their way to ask Ottawa for help finding jobs—a riot that cost a life and, Stewart argued, was entirely orchestrated by the state to put the labour organizers in a bad light. A riot in Halifax to celebrate V-E Day that saw liquor stores looted and drunken men and women having sex in the streets and even in the local cemetery. A riot in Montreal over a hockey game that became, many believe, the first sound in the Quiet Revolution that would transform Quebec politics.

Many years after writing
But Not in Canada,
Stewart retraced the route he'd taken decades earlier for the
Toronto Star Weekly,
a cross-Canada trip by car. Joan, of course, was in the front seat, driving. And Walt, of course, sat in the back, happily hammering away at accepted wisdom.

THE CROSS-COUNTRY TRIP is as much a tradition in Canadian journalism as talking about the weather is at Tim Hortons. There's something about the 7714-kilometre-long Trans-Canada Highway—in reality, series of highways—that provides not only the natural narrative of a journey but a continuing metaphor for unity. And considering that so many such trips are undertaken in an effort to understand this confusing behemoth called Canada, and often in times of national crisis, the attraction is obvious.

It was the approach Bruce Hutchison chose for
The Unknown Country
. It was what Walter Stewart decided to do, first for the magazine and then for his book. Like Stewart, Thomas Wilby, Edward McCourt, Charles Gordon, and John Nicol travelled the route by car. Kildare Dobbs and John Aitken tackled it by bus, Dobbs saying that the Trans-Canada allowed the nation's scattered communities to be “strung like tiny beads on an infinitely strong thread.” David Cobb did it on motorcycle. John Stackhouse hitchhiked. As he wrote in
Timbit Nation: A Hitchhiker's View of Canada,

There was no better way to see a country and meet its people than to beg for rides along the way, to have long conversations (sometimes very long) with strangers, to test public generosity, to overcome fears, within oneself and in others, and to see the road, and feel it. Standing on a remote rural road, you could see the vastness of what it was attempting to connect. On a suburban on-ramp, you could feel the pulse of a society as it rushed from office to mall to home. And climbing into the cars of that society—at the invitation of a stranger, who had everything to lose, as did you—you could sense the openness of the nation, along with its fears and prejudices. In short, you could stand on the roadside and put an entire nation on the couch.

Stackhouse ended his journey decidedly more enthusiastic than McCourt was at the end of his trek in the early 1960s. While McCourt agreed with the importance of bringing the various parts of the country closer together, there was a sense of defeat in his overall assessment of the country he had just tried to grasp. “In Canada,” he wrote, “there is too much of everything. Too much rock, too much prairie, too much tundra, too much mountain, too much forest.”

Vancouver's Daniel Francis took the most recent journalist's journey in
A Road for Canada: The Illustrated Story of the Trans-Canada Highway,
published in late 2006. Francis, who calls the road Canada's “Other National Dream,” uses archival material to show where the road began as well as where it ends in both Victoria and St. John's—both marked Mile 0—and includes Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's remarks at the official opening of the highway on September 3, 1962.

Diefenbaker, even then, saw it bringing “a renewed sense of national unity” to the country—though none of us can remember what the crisis was back then. “This highway,” he thundered, “may it serve to bring Canadians closer together, may it bring to all Canadians a renewed determination to individually do their part to make this nation greater and greater still.”

There is plenty of evidence that this long road—as criticized for its construction work as for its potholes—connects in mysterious ways with Canadians. This is the road travelled by Terry Fox in 1980 when a return of his cancer forced the one-legged runner to stop his valiant run near Thunder Bay, roughly halfway to his destination in Victoria.

Those who would say Canada's most inspirational hero made it only halfway have no sense at all of the country.

This is also the road another one-legged cancer survivor, Steve Fonyo, ran from one end to the other after Fox's attempt. It is the road wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen travelled and then headed the rest of the way around the world. Their triumphs are so much the stuff of legend now that they've inspired an annual summer cottage industry of similar quests, most of which go unnoticed.

There's also evidence that this journey had symbolic value even before the Trans-Canada Highway was a suggestion, let alone officially opened.
Five years after Confederation, in 1872, Sandford Fleming—who would later give the world time zones—decided to lead a grand expedition across the new country to see what had come out of all that big talk in Charlottetown and Quebec City. The Fleming expedition went from Halifax to Victoria, covering an estimated 1687 miles by steamer, 2185 miles by horse, including coaches, wagons, packs, and saddle horses, nearly 1000 miles by train, and 485 miles in canoes or rowboats.

George M. Grant, the man assigned to keep a written record of the journey, described what had already become known as “The Great Lone Land.” It is a name that stands up today. Great, and lone, but powerful. The new Dominion, recorded Grant, “rolled out before us like a panorama, varied and magnificent enough to stir the dullest spirit into patriotic emotion.”

Even then, it was about unity.

WALTER STEWART was approaching seventy when he wrote
My Cross-Country Checkup,
but he was still up to taking the stuffing out of Canada and Canadians. One of the first stops he made was in the Maritimes so that he might harangue his fellow citizens for an early form of ethnic cleansing.

In 1755 as many as twelve thousand Acadians were driven out simply because these hard-working French-speaking settlers weren't particularly keen on swearing allegiance to an unfamiliar British crown they weren't exactly sure had that much staying power under the circumstances of the day. For dallying, those Acadians who didn't escape into the dense bush were arrested, had their families torn apart and their homes burned, and for the next eight years until England and France finally reached a peace agreement, were sent by the hundreds and thousands to the south, to Europe, and even to the Falkland Islands. Their land, much of it cleared and perfect for planting, was then offered up to thousands of “planters”— the preferred English word for “settlers”—with the only restriction that no Catholics be allowed. Out with six thousand Catholics, in with as many as eight thousand Protestants, most moving up from the southern “Yankee” colonies. Out with the French, in with the English.

Ethnic cleansing seemed like a pretty fair comment.

One of Walter Stewart's most endearing qualities was an ability to embrace outrage and humour at one and the same time. While passing through Nova Scotia's Grand-Pré National Historic Site, he stopped to watch the devout pray before the statue of Evangeline that stands in the little cemetery at Saint-Charles-des-Mines. “Evangeline,” of course, is the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about the Acadian couple separated on their wedding day by the expulsion. Evangeline spends her life searching for her lost husband only to find him in Louisiana years later, lying helpless on his deathbed. Gentle Evangeline, unable to save her beloved, dies herself from the shock of seeing him in such a desperate state.

Longfellow, Stewart delighted in pointing out, wrote his poem nearly a hundred years after the expulsion. He'd never visited Grand-Pré. And Gentle Evangeline never existed. The devout Canadians, therefore, were kneeling deep in prayer before a fantasy that existed entirely in the mind of an American poet.

It was the kind of story—the irony, the wonder, the sheer madness of it all—that put the squeak in Walter Stewart's voice and the magnificent tweak in his writings.

JOAN DROVE HER HUSBAND twenty-five thousand kilometres, much of them on the Trans-Canada, much off, over those long months Walt spent doing one final check of his country. He made up a list of “Deep Thoughts”—“Unisex washrooms at gas stations are not an improvement” and “‘Country Cookin' means over-cooked in grease”—and entertained himself by jotting down the best and worst of everything they saw. “Best road for scenery—The Dempster Highway.” “Worst road for driving— The Dempster Highway.”

He poured his love of history and his love of truth into the book. But there is also a love of the landscape, a respect for the natural world that might be expected from a man whose parents, Miller and Margaret Stewart, had once co-authored a long-forgotten book on the natural world they called
Bright World Around Us
.

Walter and Joan Stewart covered every province and then drove north up through the Northwest Territories toward the Beaufort Sea. They visited L'Anse aux Meadows, the ancient Viking site on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. They toured historic Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and drove across the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island. They sat by the statue of Lord Beaverbrook that stands in Fredericton, a statue of a man of astounding wealth built by the nickels and dimes of New Brunswick schoolchildren. They travelled to Quebec City where, three decades earlier, they had driven straight into a language-rights demonstration and Joan, honking the horn and screaming, in English, “KINDLY … GET … OUT … OF … MY … WAY!” had pushed through the crowd to get to their hotel while Walt cowered as close to the floorboards as he could get. This time, a much quieter time, they kept running into the same couple from Boston who, at every encounter, extolled the beauties of this glorious city, the middle-aged American woman admonishing Walt to be careful with the way English Canadians treat French Canada because, well, “You wouldn't want to lose this.” In Ontario they saw the sights, travelling from the Martyrs' Shrine at Midland to the huge roadside goose at Wawa. They meandered across the prairies talking about everything from rebellion to elevators and asking such pertinent questions as “Why do they paint the barns red?” (Red was the easiest paint to make. Just put iron scraps into a bucketful of buttermilk and wait for the rust to turn the whole mixture the colour of a handsome barn.) They toured over the mountains and down through the Okanagan and talked about everything from ginseng farms to the Nisga'a land claim.

The trip had a profound effect on Stewart. The man who, many years earlier, had written a three-part series he called “My Farewell to Quebec” found now that he'd softened—or perhaps Quebec had softened. He found Canadians warm and open. He found them interesting. And he found the place much changed.

In the final chapter of
My Cross-Country Checkup,
Stewart said his country could still be intolerant, even racist, but that most Canadians now considered these “matters for shame, not pride.” Yes, there was still a
vast gap between the wealthy and the poor, but there remained the possibility of that gap narrowing over time. The most promising change of all, he said, was that Aboriginal issues were now being addressed not by force but by law.

A modern traveller across this country, he felt, would recognize its vastness and variety but would also gain “a sense that there are no problems we cannot meet, no challenges we need to fear, no wrongs we cannot right, given the political will. It's not a bad old place, taken all in all.”

Stewart, who dealt in harsh truths and was never shy in sounding the alarm, did not in the least share the bitterness that marked the later observations of the old newspaperman Hutchison, of the old novelists MacLennan and Davies, of the old historian Creighton. Iconoclastic to the end, he would happily contradict their pessimism with his own surprising optimism.

At the end of what would be his final trip across his country, Walter Stewart stood on a hill near Inuvik, close by the Arctic Ocean, stared back through his thick glasses over the vast landscape he and Joan had just covered, and smiled. “The Canada we have just driven through,” he concluded, “is enormously, immensely better than the nation we first crossed thirty-five years ago.”

He had found it infinitely different from the Canada he and Joan had first explored in the 1960s. More interesting. More diverse. More hopeful.

I HAVE COME, over time, to see Canada as the Bumblebee of Nations. It flies, somehow, between all its various contradictions, not least of which would be Bruce Hutchison, the eternal optimist, losing hope and Walter Stewart, the grumpy iconoclast, finding hope. It defies logic—but it flies. Somehow.

I know that scientists have gone to considerable lengths to show how bumblebees do actually fly despite the fixed-wing aerodynamic calculations that suggest otherwise. Poor Canada, however, has yet to find a zoology professor—let alone a
political
scientist—who can explain the secret of this country. For bees, it might well be, as some researchers suggest, the extra lift acquired by the air expelled during rapid wing clapping,
hence the buzzing sound. But the forces that keep Canada airborne are rather more elusive. Apart from rumours of cabinet shuffles and possible hockey trades, Canadians emit no buzz at all.