Canadians by Roy Macgregor

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