will. Itâs not a bad old place, taken all in all.â
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. âThe Canada we have just driven through,â he concluded, âis enormously, immensely better than the nation we first crossed thirty-five years ago.â
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 logicâbut 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 professorâlet alone a political scientistâwho 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.
In fact, if a visitor from another world were shown a fat bumblebee with its tiny transparent wings and this massive land mass with its sniping regions, historical disputes, constitutional entanglements, and naysaying populace, the betting, surely, would be much higher on the fat insect staying afloat than on the strange, unwieldy creature called Canada.
And yet this country carries on, seemingly without a flight plan, flitting from one distraction to the next.
Itâs worth pointing out that, in the relative life span of countries, there almost always has been a Canada. Yet again we find the contradictions. Canadians talk and write obsessively about the âNew Canadaâ as if Lester Pearson and Rocket Richard and Wayne and Shuster and Hugh MacLennan and Juliette all fell off some turnip truck a few decades back and the country is just now finding its legs. That black-and-white Canada of the newsreels has been replaced, so many would have you believe, by a colourful, vibrant, updated version that may or may not last, depending on everything from disaffected Westerners to disenchanted Newfoundlanders to disavowing Quebeckers. But the rarely acknowledged fact of the matter is that Canada, no matter how it defies logic, is already a greybeard among countries. And it has proven remarkably resilient.
It is the second-oldest federation after the American federation that came together between 1776 and 1792. The rest all came later: Australia in 1901, others after the Second World War. John A. Macdonald and Georges-Ãtienne Cartier were getting Canadaâs act together, in fact, around the same time as Bismarck and Garibaldi were working to unite the German and Italian states. And while France may be older, it has struggled through five constitutions compared with Canadaâs two ⦠and perhaps counting. The years since Canada became this impossible country have seen fluctuations and convulsions and reorganizations in Russia, in China, in Japan, in Mexico, and in countless other sovereign states.
And yet no one ever talks about
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. âThe Canada we have just driven through,â he concluded, âis enormously, immensely better than the nation we first crossed thirty-five years ago.â
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 logicâbut 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 professorâlet alone a political scientistâwho 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.
In fact, if a visitor from another world were shown a fat bumblebee with its tiny transparent wings and this massive land mass with its sniping regions, historical disputes, constitutional entanglements, and naysaying populace, the betting, surely, would be much higher on the fat insect staying afloat than on the strange, unwieldy creature called Canada.
And yet this country carries on, seemingly without a flight plan, flitting from one distraction to the next.
Itâs worth pointing out that, in the relative life span of countries, there almost always has been a Canada. Yet again we find the contradictions. Canadians talk and write obsessively about the âNew Canadaâ as if Lester Pearson and Rocket Richard and Wayne and Shuster and Hugh MacLennan and Juliette all fell off some turnip truck a few decades back and the country is just now finding its legs. That black-and-white Canada of the newsreels has been replaced, so many would have you believe, by a colourful, vibrant, updated version that may or may not last, depending on everything from disaffected Westerners to disenchanted Newfoundlanders to disavowing Quebeckers. But the rarely acknowledged fact of the matter is that Canada, no matter how it defies logic, is already a greybeard among countries. And it has proven remarkably resilient.
It is the second-oldest federation after the American federation that came together between 1776 and 1792. The rest all came later: Australia in 1901, others after the Second World War. John A. Macdonald and Georges-Ãtienne Cartier were getting Canadaâs act together, in fact, around the same time as Bismarck and Garibaldi were working to unite the German and Italian states. And while France may be older, it has struggled through five constitutions compared with Canadaâs two ⦠and perhaps counting. The years since Canada became this impossible country have seen fluctuations and convulsions and reorganizations in Russia, in China, in Japan, in Mexico, and in countless other sovereign states.
And yet no one ever talks about
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