A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  I know what you’re asking: What about the shining example of a modern-day multinational melting pot that Canada sets for the world? What about our tolerance? What about our modesty, sense of proportion and inherent fairness? I don’t dispute any of that for a second. Except I still feel the urge to tell my kids that as good as things are, once it was different in this country. I want to tell them that there was a time when our hockey teams did not suck and our health care system was not a leaky sieve. Once we had our own retailers like Simpsons and Eaton’s, and our most recognizable brands like Tim Hortons and Labatt had yet to be sold off to foreigners. Once a person could buy a book, musical recording, chair or pair of Stanfield’s boxers in this land somewhere other than in a store the size of an aircraft hangar owned by rich Southerners. Once our national political ethos was not dominated by the kind of mean cant that used to make Canadian blood boil.

  What I’m trying to say is that all progress isn’t necessarily good. And when things go, they are gone forever. It’s hard to imagine a day when we’ll no longer be able to glimpse prairie tall grass. Just as the spirit sinks a little with the knowledge that at some point in the foreseeable future someone will lick the inside flap of a manila envelope, open a mailbox slot and send the last letter ever written by hand in this country on its final journey.

  I mourn for other things too. The ephemera that you don’t miss until it’s just a wistful memory (a stubby beer bottle, a rum and butter chocolate bar). The bits and pieces that populate our collective imagination—grain elevators, lighthouses, drive-in movies, family farms, train whistles—bestowing context and colour on Canadian lives. Where, even, did the plain names we used to call ourselves—Bud and Clyde, Maggie and Ann—go?

  One day I went to a library and pulled from a shelf a Canadian census from a century ago. It made a person wonder. What happened to the abrasive goods makers, the asbestics workers, the canal and commission men who then toiled in this country? Admittedly a hundred years is a long time, but where are the bill posters, the button makers, the liverymen, the gate and bridge tenders? What happened to the trappers, the matchmakers, the mica workers, the milliners and the pattern makers? Where, oh where, have the pork packers, the sash and door makers, the section and trackmen, the tanners and curriers gotten to? What in God’s name has become of all those cartage men, pickle makers, yardmen and roundhouse men? Where did you go, you bleachers and bootblacks, you felt makers and fruit canners, you platers and pump makers?

  If you’re like me, you would be left slack-jawed upon learning that this country once had more conductors on trains than bank managers. That a century ago more people worked in boarding houses and hotels than built new homes in Canada. That this big land of ours used to have as many engravers and blacksmiths as miners. And that once hundreds of thousands of men in hats dragged sample cases from dusty town to frozen enclave, peddling their goods.

  My next question is, have you ever met a “rectifier,” a “notion maker” or a “huckster”? To your knowledge, have you made the acquaintance of a producer of aerated water; a crafter of axles, bags, boxes, brushes, carriages or cigars; or a manufacturer of feathers, glue, gloves, hammocks or lanterns? Run a finger down the list of “occupations of persons 10 years of age and over engaged in gainful employment, arranged in alphabetical order, 1911” and there they were.

  Yet they’re all gone now. As forgotten as buffalo hunters, town criers, cinder wenches, buggy whip makers and cord-wainers. Leaving us all to wonder, who is next? Well, dear reader, the numbers again tell the story. It’s a gloomy one for anyone with an attachment to the iconic, traditional ways of making a living. From 2000 to 2010 the number of fishermen in this country—a land first discovered by European whites when they came in search of cod—were expected to fall by 60 percent. During the same period nearly half of Canada’s farmers were predicted to disappear. That decade was forecast to see an equal proportion of our fabled locomotive engineers finish their last ride.

  The old trades are also dying, no question about it: tool and die makers (down 50 percent from 2000 to 2010); telephone linemen and ship’s officers (down 35 percent); sheet metal workers, shoemakers and printing press operators (down 30 percent). In just ten short years typesetters essentially disappeared in this country. Au revoir, if things keep going the way they are going, barbers, boat builders and stockbrokers. Sayonara, tailors and machine repairers. See ya later, people who wait on others from behind a desk, like travel agents and bank tellers.

  IN my lifetime I’ve seen the pattern play out. My first real summer job was as a gas jockey at a Gulf Oil service station at a spot in mid-Halifax where a ganglia of roads met. It was years before I learned that service stations started out as adjuncts to general stores in Canada, and that gas would be put in buckets and funnelled into vehicles. Eventually service stations became roadside pumps, with an attendant on hand to dispense gas manually. By the summer of 1972, when I clocked in for the first time, gas jockeys were everywhere in this country. They wore coveralls with first names stitched on their sleeves and change belts around their waists. They filled tanks, pumped air into tires, cleaned windshields, and checked and added various fluids.

  Having never worked anywhere before, I was a bad hire. I didn’t understand that sitting down beside the gas pumps between cars failed to convey the kind of snappy image that a multinational oil company wanted. It helped not that the first time I lifted the hood of a car to check someone’s oil was literally the first time I had ever gazed at the engine of a car. Or that my math skills were so rudimentary that at the close of some shifts my cash was off enough that I ended up toiling for almost nothing. Working at the service station still meant a little money and one of the first tentative steps into manhood.

  That service station is a parking lot now. In fact, finding someone to fill ’er up at a gas station anywhere in this country grows harder with each passing day. The only human working at most service stations is inside, behind a counter or, sometimes, a glass window like a pawnbroker. If so desired, you don’t even need to talk to a human at all: just swipe a debit card right there are at the pump, then go back about your business.

  That got me thinking. One day I decided to make a list of all the jobs I had ever had. I stopped counting at twenty-two. What’s interesting is that so many of them are completely gone or locked into some sort of unalterable death spiral. Oh sure, there are still hospital cleaners, Pinkerton Security guards, house painters, even a few assembly line workers. But paper boys have been replaced by car-driving paper “men” and “women.” No one sells candy, shoes or toys for Eaton’s for the simple reason that global competition put the department store out of business in 1999. Even the small independent retailers where I once toiled have been vapourized by the big-box stores.

  My most interesting summer job was as a labourer for a ship’s chandlery operation on the Halifax waterfront. I spent much of that single summer in a big rubber suit, clambering around inside pipes running from Halifax Harbour to the local power utility. My job was to scrape mussel shells off the walls of the pipes, then load the shells into the wooden box lowered from the surface. Did I mention that I was twenty-one years old and it was summer? Sometimes the sun was rising as I was getting in from the night’s carousing. At noon I would wolf down my sandwich at the end of a waterfront wharf, then lower my head onto a pier and power-snooze for the rest of the lunch break as curious seals popped their heads out of the skanky harbour water nearby.

  That ship’s chandlery operation—like so many ships’ chandlery operations—is long gone now; the site where salt-crusted scows used to dock for repairs has mutated into a high-end office tower. The newspapers where I’ve toiled and still work have to fight for every dollar. Circulation at Maclean’s, the weekly newsmagazine, is about one-third what it was when I joined in 1988. At least it’s still in business. So many of the Canadian magazines I once wrote for aren’t.

  Work, we all know, fulfills an economic imperative: things must b
e done and produced; a living must be made. But when the practitioners go, the skills themselves—often passed down person to person, forming a lineage that goes back to long-ago generations in distant countries—must eventually follow. That’s lamentable for a whole host of reasons. Work steeped in long tradition is a form of living history. When the traditional talents disappear, a piece of our past goes with them. What’s more, most Canadians want more than to trade labour for lucre. Writing some thirty years ago, Studs Terkel, the Homer of working America, championed the “search for daily meaning as well as daily bread” while one goes about one’s daily labours. Meaningful work, Malcolm Gladwell declared in his book Outliers, must offer three things: autonomy, complexity and a direct connection between effort and reward. Which means there is only one possible conclusion to be drawn from the one in eight Canadians who, according to a recent poll, hate to get out of bed to go to work in the morning.

  I can’t say I’m surprised: BlackBerry-wielding wage slaves are always on; 4 percent of the Canadian workforce is employed in call centres, reading canned scripts. As the grandson of a man who went into the Cape Breton coal mines at eleven, I know not to romanticize how livings used to be made in this country. Technology surely makes jobs safer and more efficient. But I know this too: work defines us and is how most of us get our sense of esteem, accomplishment and competence. Equally true is that something is definitely lost when so much of work becomes mindless rather than thoughtful. The world becomes a lesser place when people who once found fulfillment in their jobs are being transformed into automatons rather than artisans.

  THIS book is the quest to distill some essence of our shared experience through people who make their living the time-honoured way. By that I mean in a manner attached to the historic traditions, performed with the kind of pride that comes from doing something right and well, not just for the money, but for its own sake. I wanted to meet these people now because they are as endangered as the rare white-headed woodpecker. Like a Tilley hat—wearing anthropologist, I needed to see them in action in their natural habitat, because someday soon no one will know what a milkman or lighthouse keeper does in the same way we are puzzled by the notion makers and corwainers of olde. I wanted to observe those challenged breeds up close for the same reason that I wanted to talk to ranchers, locomotive engineers and travelling salesmen. The great forces of globalization, technology and what we have taken to calling progress are allied against them. Their time may be coming, just as it seems to be near for drive-in movie projectionists, blacksmiths and doctors who make house calls.

  The reporting for this book took place in the early twenty-first century, when the world was everywhere in turmoil and flux. These, then, are really wistful dispatches from a distant era and a simpler time. The world has changed shape since then, and Canada with it. But the men and women in this book, in the way they make their daily bread, have stood still. (A bold asterisk must follow that last statement, since the breadth of occupations for women has mushroomed in recent decades.) Visiting those people is like having your life played back to you. They make memories rush forward and bubble up. You see your neighbourhood and your childhood unroll before you in someone else’s experience.

  The urgency is great, because as Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, points out, we’re reaching the end of nostalgia as the distinctive landscape of our past is replaced by a reality that is pretty much identical whether you’re in Pouch Cove or Portage la Prairie. We all know there’s no turning back in the midst of a transformation of the global economy every bit as significant as the Industrial Revolution. The factories close, the mines go silent, the last person who knows how to do something—catch a fish, fix a car, build a wall that’s plumb—hangs up his tools and closes the door behind him. It’s not a happy thought. That is just how these things tend to go. Which is why I need you to come with me now. There are a few people I want you to meet, while there’s still time.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  ACROSS THIS LAND

  NORTH from Toronto, through tracts of industrial land and suburbs, they made for the hard edge of the Canadian Shield. Past strip malls, telephone wires, barns, farmhouses and electrical transformers. Beyond cattle and scattered horses, homes where hard-working country folk slept and saloons where ne’er-do-wells lurked. From their perch in the glittering steel engineer’s cab twenty feet above the standard-gauge rails, Craig Stead and Jordan McCallum have an unobstructed view of the frozen-in-time towns that snap by like postcards. The two men shift down and up. They hit buttons and pull levers. They talk into microphones and to each other. They look. They listen. They sound the horn. A couple of hoggers on the night train. Running the varnish into the black as the land changes from gentle plain to upturned granite.

  Three hours ago their train hissed like a prehistoric beast in the rail yard of Toronto’s Union Station. The Canadian tonight has eighteen cars plus the locomotive, each of them roughly twenty-five metres long. That makes the train shorter than the CN Tower then looming over its right flank but still four football fields in length. Plenty of room, in other words, to carry the 172 passengers waiting inside, amidst the Belle Époque opulence of Union Station, to Pacific Central Station in Vancouver, British Columbia.

  The last time I was at Union Station, in the early 1990s, it was alive with humanity: commuters grabbing the GO train; jacked-up merchant bankers eager to spend their spoils in the alehouses of Yorkville; weary secretaries bound for the peace and quiet of the burbs. It was Toronto, so no one lost it completely. But people shoved and ran. Voices were raised.

  Not like tonight. Granted, 8:30 p.m. is long past rush hour, and a lot of the traffic through the station is subway riders anyway. Still, I take it as symptomatic that in the busiest rail transportation hub in the country I can see only a smattering of humans amid the Missouri stone walls, the Tennessee marble floors, the Bedford limestone columns. Railways built this country. Confederation would never have happened without the Canadian Pacific Railway: British Columbia made a transcontinental railway a condition for joining the country. On the opposite coast, Prince Edward Island was only lured in when John A. Macdonald agreed to assume the huge debt from the island’s own ill-fated railway scheme and promised a communications link to the mainland.

  Before the CPR’s completion Canada was a string of unconnected settlements separated by huge expanses of forest and prairie. The snort and hiss of the locomotive and the feats of the rail line’s civil engineers—the 94.2-metre-high bridge traversing Alberta’s Oldman River, the eight-kilometre tunnel through the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia—became a shining symbol of what this new country could accomplish. The CPR tied the country together “like a line of steel from coast to coast,” Pierre Berton, the author of The National Dream and The Last Spike told me once. “Our cities and towns popped up along it like beads on a string. Without it we would have developed vertically rather than horizontally. We became the nation we are because of the railroad.”

  But that was before two-car families and long-haul jets that could make it coast to coast without refuelling. People stopped taking the train. Freight, especially bulk commodities, became the dominant railway service. Built to create a nationwide passenger carrier similar to Amtrak in the United States, Via Rail Canada gradually assumed all of the country’s main rail passenger services. But successive federal governments slashed funding. Twenty years ago Via cut its passenger network in half, axing some of its most crowd-pleasing runs. Today most of Via’s traffic is on the commuter run in the Windsor-Quebec corridor. Even freight carriers have been closing stops in smaller cities to boost profit margins.

  Still running, though, is Via’s flagship train, a replica of the original Canadian, which made its first trip in 1955 and has been refurbished to harken back to the great age of rail. Its 2,775-mile route takes in most of Canada’s scenic panorama. Who knows for how long in this age of quicker is better and everything must pay its way. That’s why I was in the all
-but-empty grandeur of Union Station, joining the trickle of passengers pushing luggage carts and pulling wheeled suitcases toward the check-in counter: the Asian tourists, the middle-aged woman with the T- shirt that said Don’t Piss Me Off, the chunky brunette sporting a Swimmers Do It Better In The Water top, the trim old dude in a trilby and a tartan tie. Nobody—particularly not the guy with the middle part in the short-sleeved dress shirt who looks unnervingly like Dwight Schrute—is cool. They’re mostly white and getting up there: men in sensible pants with elastic waists up around their nipples, ladies with plaster of Paris perms.

  Maybe it’s the anticipation of a transcontinental trip on one of the world’s great passenger trains—perhaps it’s happy hour at the Panorama Lounge—but they’re also, to a person, exceedingly happy. Giggling, goofing around, their laughter ricocheting down the corridor. That makes them starkly different from the average wretched air traveller. This, in my view, is perfectly understandable. The trains run on time. A seagull never gets sucked into a diesel locomotive engine, causing the train to begin a death spiral five miles above the earth. At a train station no homeland security type stands before you, working his fingers into a rubber glove in anticipation of a body-cavity search. Instead a crinkly-eyed Québécois dude flirts with the ladies as he takes tickets and gets everyone organized.