True Patriot Love (16 page)

We followed their route, the old fur-trader trails through Fort Frances, now a pulp town, and wended our
way along the highway to towns like Kenora and Sioux Lookout, stopping at the gas stations that sell fishing licences and rent boats. We passed signs pointing down gravel roads to reservation lands held by the descendants of the Ojibwa people my great-grandfather met in 1872.

On the long traverse of northwestern Ontario and the forested part of eastern Manitoba, the two-lane blacktop, etched into the rock of the Canadian Shield, plunged through deep forest cover. We thought we saw a baby bear disappearing into the bush by the side of the road. The radio would give us the news and more country music and then the signal would grow fuzzy and die away. You could imagine how hard it must have been to cover this terrain in a Red River cart rattling over a plank-covered forest trail.

When we burst through the forest cover, east of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada, we felt some of the awe and wonder George Monro Grant felt that day in July 1872, as the big sky opened up above, the horizon widened out and the sun poured down on the vast prairie pastures all around us.

Near Winnipeg airport, we even found a prairie grass museum, about an acre of native flower–filled prairie grass, the same kind George Grant rode through on horseback, driving the plovers and bumblebees up into the air.

After Winnipeg, we picked up the Yellowhead route and threaded our way slowly through the small towns and farm lands of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We took some
wobbly video of each other in front of gas stations where semis, loaded with pipe and logs, were lined up for fuel. We stayed in small motels where we shared hot tubs or pools with truckers with sunburnt arms and faces. After some delicious roadhouse pie at a coffee shop in Manitoba, we decided to find the best homemade pie in the West.

In central Saskatchewan, near Saskatoon, we stopped at Wanuskewin, once a dry river gorge with steep cliffs where the Cree used to drive the buffalo and, having slaughtered their share, would gather for feasts and ceremonies. Now there is a museum full of headdresses, beaded jackets, moccasins and life-sized buffalo sculptures. The herds are gone, but on one of the ranches nearby, buffalo were being raised for slaughter, and we stopped to photograph the creatures munching grass behind barbed wire.

We took unpaved back roads wherever we could, a big plume of dust rising behind us, the only sound the rumble of the tires on the gravel. The canola was a warm shade of bright yellow and stood waist high in the fields. When we would get out of the car to stretch our legs, the thump of the door shutting behind us would echo for long seconds in the silence.

There were churches everywhere on those back roads, Ukrainian and Russian ones with onion domes, white wood-frame United churches with silver steeples, a few French Catholic ones with images of the Sacred Heart on
the walls, visible through the window panes. All of them were very neat, with the grass trimmed and cut flowers decorating the graves in the cemeteries.

On a hillside above Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Zsuzsanna—who is Hungarian—spent a long time among the headstones commemorating the Bartoks and Nagys, peasant families who were brought out in the 1880s by a CPR land agent called Count Esterhazy. He settled them on homestead plots and left them to fend for themselves. We visited a local museum and saw photos of the sod houses and the unsmiling women in kerchiefs standing outside them and the men with handlebar moustaches leaning on pitchforks, all of them burnt raw by the sun and the wind.

My great-grandfather had dreamed of these pioneers and of the western horizon they would create, with the smoke wafting from their homesteads, their land fenced out and under the plough. It had all come to pass. But the hard faces in the photographs made it clear that creating a home on the plains had been tougher than he had imagined.

From 1885 until the 1960s, all the settlement on the Prairies was strung out along the railroad tracks. But the railroad had long since ceased to serve as the spine of the country. The freights were still running, loaded with grain and pipe and potash, but the passenger trains had all but stopped. We met a former railwayman who cursed when he told us how they were smashing up the remaining passenger
cars for scrap. The small western railway stations—stout, gabled brick buildings with sloping roofs that provided shade while you waited for the train—had been converted into restaurants or boutiques or were boarded shut.

In Manitoba and Saskatchewan people were leaving the farms and small towns and heading for Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon. Little towns were struggling. The old wooden grain elevators were being torn down. Stores were boarded up in main streets all across the West. The Canada that George Monro Grant had dreamed of was passing away, but a new Canada was taking shape in the downtown universities and research institutes, the law firms and the business parks.

The Canada that he thought was already doomed in 1885—Aboriginal, Metis, Cree and French—was still vividly present, especially so in one place. We found the crossing point on the South Saskatchewan River that Fleming and Grant had taken in August 1872. We crossed on a ferry hooked to a wire, which took us over the hundred yards of fast-running river in about ten minutes. They had forded the river with the horses, breasting the current waist high, laughing and wet because they couldn’t find a boatman to take them across on a scow. There was supposed to be one, but he wasn’t there that day.

The boatman working the crossing that summer, so the records tell us, was one Gabriel Dumont, Metis scout, guide and later rebel leader. The Grant-Fleming party also missed
Xavier Letendre, the Metis trader nicknamed Batoche, who was to build his trading post and liquor store on the river bank and whose name was given to the crossing place.

At Batoche we went up the hill and talked to the carpenters restoring the old plain plank church. We went over to the graveyard, the final resting places of the Cree and Metis who made their last stand here against Middleton’s troops in 1885, the soldiers Macdonald had sent out on the railway. It was here that the army took Louis Riel prisoner. The photographs show him manacled, bare headed and unkempt, a broken visionary of a West that was Cree, Metis and French.

When we reached Edmonton, we headed straight out to West Edmonton Mall. My children—Theo and Sophie—had joined us by then and they had been told the mall was the largest in the world. There was a beach with plastic palms, terrifying (at least to me) water slides, a pirate ship in the middle of a supermarket and other wonders to behold. It took some doing to imagine that one hundred and twenty-eight years before, my great-grandfather had ridden into Fort Edmonton, nearby, and had himself photographed in his riding chaps and buckskin jacket.

From Edmonton, we made our way toward Jasper, where, after much searching up and down the river bank just out of town, we found the lobstick—the giant pine, its topmost branches cut away—and the rusty railway spike
Fleming and Grant had smashed into the gnarled base of the trunk.

West of Hinton, Alberta, on the Yellowhead Highway, we spent a night at the Black Cat Guest Ranch so we could do some horseback riding in the foothills. The shale tracks, through deep forest cover, leading to the Yellowhead Pass, had been the most exhausting stretch of the Fleming-Grant expedition. We spent a late afternoon on docile quarter horses, slowly going up the trails until we reached a summit with a view of the mountains ahead, their crags and peaks touched with golden light. While we were resting at the top, we heard a rumble and saw one hundred and forty boxcars—the children counted them—snaking through the gorge below us. The lonesome wail of a train whistle rose up in the evening air, echoing off the canyon walls.

In the days that followed, we crossed the Great Divide, drove through the Yellowhead Pass and began making our way down to the Pacific. We drove through the sagebrush country around Kamloops. We passed through the narrow river gorges where Grant had seen the sweat lodges of the river people. In the Fraser Canyon, we stopped for a cappuccino at a trading post where they sold bentwood boxes made by Aboriginal inmates at the local provincial prison.

We finally found the best pie of the journey—it was made from Okanagan peaches—at a Ukrainian family’s café, somewhere along the Thompson River valley.

We doubled back through the Selkirk Mountains to Craigellachie. The kids clambered aboard the steam engine on the siding, and we toured the gift shop. You could buy pictures of Fleming and Smith, in their top hats, standing among the labourers as the last spike was driven in. Replicas of the last spike were on sale, some in bronze, some in inflatable plastic, but we didn’t buy any.

Down the highway through the Fraser Valley, in driving rain, visibility close to zero, the trucks’ backwash dousing our windscreen, we reached journey’s end, in the auto shops, tract housing, malls and fast food restaurants of the Lower Mainland. When George Monro Grant arrived here in 1872, by steam launch down the Fraser, there had only been looming pines and silence broken by the keening of gulls.

He had seemed a close presence all along the way.

The Canada of the Grants was a small-town nation of modest brick houses with white verandas, Protestant and Catholic churches on wide, leafy streets and the railway station within walking distance. George Parkin Grant’s
Lament for a Nation
was a cry of grief and rage at its passing. But that Canada is still there. Just go to Richmond, Quebec, or London, Ontario, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. There are beautiful streets in each of these towns where this Canada still
remains. But there is a palpable sense that time is passing this Canada by.

A new Canada has been built up around it—condominium towers, suburban tract housing, shopping plazas, sixteen-lane highways and the multicultural bazaar of downtown. This is now our home and native land.

The Canada of the Grants may be slipping away, but their way of thinking about the country still offers enduring lessons. They believed in the country’s future with an enthusiasm that can still inspire. They thought the country was unfinished, that there was a great nation still to be built. They thought that it ought to have a purpose and a meaning. They were romantics.

But there is more to their inheritance than romance.

They also understood the deeper logic of the country.

My great-grandfather and his generation—John A. Macdonald, Sandford Fleming and Donald Smith—were nation builders. They understood that Canada was called into being by an act of choice and that it could only be sustained by continual acts of political faith and willpower.

They understood that the political ties that bound the country together ran east and west but the economic ties that kept Canada going ran north and south. The political task in Canada, these ancestors understood, was to build steel rails and bonds of citizenship from east to west to hold the country together in the face of the economic and geographic ties running north and south. If the east–west links
of steel and citizenship were strong enough, then the country could survive and prosper. This remains the logic of Canada to this day. If we want a country to hand on to the next generation, we will have to strengthen those east–west linkages—of citizenship and common life together—to offset the north–south drift that fragments us.

Are the east–west linkages strong enough to sustain us today? We have had free trade with the United States for twenty years, yet we still do not have free trade in labour and capital among Canadian provinces. We still do not maintain a single economic space from ocean to ocean. We still maintain barriers that prevent Canadians from doing business with each other or from pulling up stakes and moving where the work is. Our forefathers would not understand why we lack the will to pull them down.

The ribbon of steel that used to tie us together is almost gone. Now we have the airlines and the bus companies and we pretend to have a national highway. In many places—northern Ontario or the interior of British Columbia—it dwindles down to two-lane blacktop, and the local residents will tell you these narrow sections make our national highway a death trap. We could do better. The Americans completed a four-lane national highway system fifty years ago. We are still awaiting ours.

The Europeans have used high-speed railways to tie Europe together. After fifty years of studies, we are still considering a high-speed rail link to connect Windsor to
Quebec City, Vancouver to Calgary and Calgary to Edmonton. If we want to tie Canadians together, if we want to be nation builders, we would start on them right now. Here the nineteenth-century buccaneers—Fleming, Van Horne, Rogers, John A. himself—offer an example of the political grit and daredevil entrepreneurship that Canada has always called upon when it truly wants to achieve great things.

Those ancestors would look at our incredible panoply of resources in energy and say to us our work of nation building is not yet done.

They would want to know why so much of the oil and gas we produce flows south without even being processed. We ship oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan to the American states while importing large quantities from Venezuela and the Middle East to meet the demand in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. Does this make sense? Why are we one of the few countries that has never created a petroleum reserve to protect our citizens against fluctuations in supply from foreign countries? In the future opening up before us, our children will judge us harshly for having no apparent national energy strategy whatever.

It is possible we do this because we do not take ourselves seriously enough. My uncle George argued, like so many thinkers in the 1960s, that Canada was a mere branch plant of the United States. We are such captives of
these worn-out clichés of dependency that we fail to grasp our newfound strength. We haven’t noticed that times have changed and so have the terms of trade with our neighbour. Nowadays, we export more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. If energy is power, then we ought to have plenty of it. We have cards to play at the table of nations, and if we play the energy card with determination, we can build a country that commands respect—the respect that comes from being not just a good neighbour but a powerful one, too.