Perhaps that’s just how the human mind handles Confederation. After all, history would seem to suggest, year in and year out and against better logic, that the centre does hold. Those born in Canada to immigrant families might use a hyphen and others will often force a hyphen upon them, but it’s worth remembering that the grammatical purpose of the hyphen is to join, not separate.
A few years ago I stood at the corner of Centre Street and 6th Avenue in Calgary on an early July day and watched the Stampede parade pass by. In a crowd estimated at 300,000 I found myself standing beside a young Sikh, Amritpal Singh, and we began discussing how they were managing to keep an air-filled, four-storey-high plastic bear from blowing clear of the parade in all the wind gusting between the office buildings.
I happened to say that it was the first time I’d ever been to the famous Stampede, which he found astonishing.
“This is the biggest religious celebration of the year,” he laughed. “This is my twenty-sixth parade. I’ll be twenty-five at the end of the month— but I was at my first one two weeks before I was born. I never miss.”
ON ONE WALL at Pier 21 is a plaque to honour a very small baby who arrived here and grew up to become Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire. On another wall are testimonials from such landed immigrants as CBC commentator Joe Schlesinger and writers Denise Chong and Peter C. Newman.
Chong, author of The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided, was born in Canada but has written about her ancestors who came here from South China at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her grandparents found Canada “inhospitable,” yet chose to stay. And for that, Chong considers herself most fortunate.
“In all our pasts are an immigrant beginning,” she once wrote in an essay, “a settler’s accomplishments and setbacks, and the confidence of a common future. We all know the struggle and victory, the dreams and the lost hopes, the pride and the shame. When we tell our stories, we look in the mirror. I believe what we will see is that Canada is not lacking in heroes. Rather, the heroes are to be found within.”
In 1940 Peter C. Newman was among the very lucky, a ten-year-old member of a Jewish family who arrived here in late summer aboard the Nova Scotia. The Neumanns had fled the Nazi occupations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the convoy they joined to cross the Atlantic was twice attacked by German U-boats.
Nearly a half century on he wrote about this experience in an essay for Maclean’s magazine, vividly recalling the first sighting of Nova Scotia from the bow of the ship that carried the province’s name. He remembered being tagged and herded into holding rooms with the same bureaucratic regimentation the family thought had been left behind. But it also struck him, as it can strike only the immigrant, how profoundly life had changed.
To get into Canada, his father had to promise the Canadian Pacific Railway that he’d take up a job he knew absolutely nothing about: farming. City dwellers, the Neumanns were headed into the Canadian countryside.
Another of the testimonials at Pier 21 was written by Nobel Laureate Gerhard Herzberg:
In 1935 I came to Canada, a refugee from Germany and the Nazis. I travelled by train across the Prairies on my way to Saskatoon. As we passed through small railway stations, I would see perhaps two or three houses, a grain elevator. Where were the people, I wondered.
But when I arrived in Saskatoon, I found them. These people were curious, kind and friendly, and they had time to listen to me, and my story. I settled into work at the University of Saskatchewan and found colleagues of considerable repute. Canada is really the country that saved me. I have a sort of hunch that Canada IS my country.
In 2006, 800,000 others around this troubled world wanted to do the same: make Canada their country. This is the backlog of immigrants hoping to cross through today’s equivalent of Pier 21. The figure had risen by a hundred thousand in the previous year alone.
And the country is growing old so fast that, even with Canada surpassing its immigration targets year after year—around a quarter of a million have been arriving annually in recent years—labour shortfalls and retirement realities are on a collision course. The C.D. Howe Institute published a study calculating that the only way the country could keep its retirees-to-workers ratio at current levels would be to take in 2.6 million immigrants a year by 2020 and 7 million by the year 2050—at which point Canada’s population would reach 165.4 million.
And though the doors closed on Pier 21 nearly forty years ago, over the next decades other doors are going to have to open as wide as they possibly can.
IN THE SPRING of 2006 I happened across a recent immigrant in what seemed, on first blush, to be a most unusual and isolated setting: Inuvik, Northwest Territories.
His name was Salah Malik, a forty-nine-year-old Sudanese. Like so many of Canada’s recent immigrants, he and his wife, Amani, and their two children, five-year-old Mohammed and two-year-old Lana, were fleeing civil war. They had come to Inuvik by a convoluted route that included time in Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Edmonton. Once in Inuvik, Malik found work as a security guard at the local hospital and a second job pumping gas at an isolated station out toward the little airport.
It had been an extraordinary experience for the family. From hot sunshine to bitter cold and long winter days when the sun barely seemed to exist. From huge populations to hardly anyone at all. But also from civil war to civil peace.
They’d been in the Far North for three years, and it had taken some adjusting. But now there were eight Muslim families—Sudanese, Saudi, Lebanese, Syrian, and Libyan—who had created their own mosque in the town. When the CBC launched its comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie it might just as well have been Little Mosque on the Tundra. The children were thriving in school, Malik was making fairly good money, and the family was adapting to the differences in lifestyle.
The greatest shock since they had arrived, Malik said, wasn’t the cold, or the dark, or the lack of shopping, but the day his wife called him in a panic. Someone had dropped a caribou head off on the front porch of their little home. They had no idea who had done so or what it meant. Some Godfather-type message to get out of town or else?
Worried, Malik contacted the authorities and asked about it, only to be met with smiles and giggles. His Inuvialuit neighbours had been lucky on their hunt. And in true northern fashion, they were sharing their bounty. The caribou head was considered the finest gift they could offer the quiet newcomers from Sudan.
“The people here,” Malik told me, “remind me of Africa.”
I laughed.
“No, I’m serious. They have the same culture of sharing, of helping out each other. In so many of those other places we lived, everybody was scared of each other. But not here. It reminds me of Africa.”
But as much as Malik liked the people of Inuvik and as much as their children were thriving, Amani had made it clear that she didn’t wish to stay here much longer. As soon as they had enough money saved the family was heading back south, likely for Edmonton.
And if not Edmonton, another Canadian city.
Eleven
Prairie Ghosts
THERE HAD BEEN WHITEOUTS all along the Yellowhead Highway since I’d left Saskatoon earlier in the day, the small towns along No. 16—Floral, Clavet, Elstow, Colonsay, Viscount, Plunkett, Guernsey, Lanigan, Jansen, Dafoe—fading in and out like the first television set that came to town.
As I turned south on Highway 6 toward Regina, the little towns vanished completely—this time on the map—until I reached the crossroads at No. 15, a secondary road that follows the old Canadian Pacific Railway line. When the rail went through this part of the West—the tracks that would carry human cargo from Pier 21 to delivery along the prairies—there were so many water stops and grain elevators that the builders evidently tired of looking for original names. Instead, they took to naming stops after the letters in the alphabet: Fenwood, Goodeve, Hubbard, Ituna, Jasmin, Kelleher, Lestock … Punnichy, Quinton, Raymore, Semans …
Like an old chur
ch sign, some of the letters are missing. Whatever became of M? Where is N? O? … Why no T?
I come to Raymore often. My wife Ellen’s grandparents—John and Ellen Whitlock—homesteaded here at a time when Christmas and birthday cards arriving from England said “Mr. and Mrs. J.E. Whitlock, General Delivery, Raymore, Northwest Territories, Canada.”
They were living here in 1905, when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces. They had their first two children, Ted and Flossie, in a sod house, their next two, Rosa and Fred, in a white clapboard farmhouse with green shutters that still stands on a quarter section of rolling land just south of No. 15. Two boys and two girls, both girls heading off to nurse, Rosa to the east, Flo to the west, while the boys stayed on to work the farm. Not an unfamiliar story on the Canadian prairies.
Apart from Fred’s war years as a bomber navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force, the two brothers never left the farm and were still known locally known as “the boys” long after their parents died—both at age ninety-eight, both staying on the farm virtually to the end, in typical Saskatchewan fashion. Ted and Fred were still “the boys” as they hit their sixties, their seventies. When Ted was well into his eighties he became ill with leukemia and died. When Fred hit his eighties he married Virginia, a widow he’d met at the Royal Canadian Legion in Victoria, where he spent his winters, and the two of them drove across the country in a silver Mustang convertible before heading out for a tour of Australia. When they returned, they came back to the farm.
I was going to dinner that cold, blustery night at the home of Don and Marcia Harris, goodhearted schoolteachers who had, over time, become the family Ted had never had. I stopped in at the little Raymore liquor outlet to pick up a bottle of wine.
And that’s where I found the missing T.
T for Tate.
There was a bin near the cash register containing special Christmas gift suggestions from the provincial liquor control board. For $29.99 you could purchase a little red ceramic grain elevator filled with ten-year-old whisky and bearing the name of a town carefully stencilled on the side by the clerks of the various outlets. Depending on where the liquor store was, the popular names might be Climax or Eyebrow or Mozart— Saskatchewan leads the nation in place names, Newfoundland a close second—and here, in Raymore, the bin was filled, predictably, with Raymore and Semans and Southey and Wishart and Nokomis … but also several grain elevators bearing the name Tate.
People in town knew where Tate was—or at least where it had been. Just past Semans and, a few kilometres west, turn right and go north to just beyond the railroad tracks. I tried the next day, but the drifting snow made passage impossible. Highway 15 was plowed and open, but the turnoff to Tate hadn’t seen a snowplow in years, perhaps decades. It was a place to check out in finer weather.
I came back to Tate, Saskatchewan, on a summer’s day when the flax was in magnificent bloom and the Saskatoon berries ripe for picking. Ellen and I came with our children as well as the Harrises and their children, Don carrying an old map he’d found somewhere that seemed to show where things once were in Tate. Through a long, hot afternoon we walked what’s left of the streets of this ghost town that once had its own grain elevator, a hotel, Chinese restaurant, hardware store, post office, school, church, cemetery …
A few buildings were still standing, or half standing, a couple with hornets in the eaves and wild-animal droppings over the broken floors. The old post office still had “Tate” on the sign, the town named after D’Arcy Tate, a solicitor for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The whole place was overgrown with caragana and lilac that would have been planted by those who never for a moment imagined their dream would simply disappear. Abandoned cars were in the fields, their model years—1940s, early 1950s—a rusty reminder of when it all began to turn the other way.
Since that summer day we spent walking silently about the graveyard that is now town as well as cemetery, the post office has also vanished, burned down one late-spring evening by local high schoolers during what some say was a “bush party.” Now there’s hardly any sign at all of Tate.
Not so with Smuts, which can be seen from a distance by anyone driving along Highway 41 running north and east of Saskatoon. Little Smuts came into existence in the 1920s, when the Canadian Northern pushed a spur line through to bustling Melfort and decided to name the key watering spot after a now largely forgotten politician, Colonel Jan Christiaan Smuts.
Smuts was the longtime prime minister of South Africa and has the honour of being the only signatory of both treaties that ended the two World Wars. Canada was obviously once quite struck by him, for there is a summit, Mount Smuts, near where the Rocky Mountains cross the 49th parallel into the United States. And, of course, there was once Smuts, Saskatchewan.
It was another wintry day when I came, in a different year, and the snow was crisp and fresh fallen under blue skies, the odd lasso of loose snow swirling in gusts across the open fields. At one turn in the road a single coyote, grey and sleek, sat on a small knoll of field staring at the traffic going by this winter’s day. One car, one driver—we were the only two creatures for miles around.
There’s not much left of Smuts. The houses are abandoned, the few storefronts boarded up. Where once the “Red & White” sign invited travellers to turn in off the highway, now the D dangled upside down in the wind. The boards had greyed and dried under the summer sun; locked doors had broken backward from their hinges. The only tracks, it seemed, belonged to the coyote, the deliberate wanderings of a night watchman as he moved from door to door to door in search of rabbits and rodents.
In one home, an old picture album lay on a bare floor, the photographs of a waving young family so faded they no longer had faces. In the old school, half-renovated, then abandoned as a home, a clean blue dress with white polka dots and a red sash was still hanging in a closet, perfectly fitted to a hanger and swinging oddly in the sudden wind that sent snow in through the window and caused the room to sparkle, magically, in the sunlight.
But the magic, like the town, did not last long.
In a far corner, the October 2, 1964, edition of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix lay iced to the floor, the front page warning of Hurricane Hilda slamming into Texas and heading north. In another room the Wakaw Recorder of September 3, 1964, leads with “Rainfall continues to hold up harvesting.”
The fall of ’64—Final Harvest.
Driving back down the 41 toward Highway 5 that would take me back to Saskatoon, I check the knoll for the coyote, but he was gone. According to prairie Native legend, when everyone else has left, the coyote still remains.
Someone, perhaps, to turn out the lights.
WHATEVER BECAME OF the 800,000,000 souls? That number is correct: eight hundred million.
Back in 1887 the Government of Canada, desperate to attract settlers to the Canadian West, dispatched Edmund Collins to New York City to see if he could get the word out that Canada was open for business. Collins certainly did his best. In an address to one of the influential business clubs on “The Future of the Dominion,” he offered up the incredible expert opinion that, “Alone, the valley of the Saskatchewan, according to scientific computation, is capable of sustaining 800,000,000 souls.”
Tate and Smuts would have settled, in the end, for one soul willing to stick around.
Collins was hardly alone in his wild ambitions for that part of the country. Sir Charles Tupper, one of the Fathers of Confederation, told the House of Commons in 1879 that “we believe we have there the garden of the world.” It was a common theme and remained in use for decades. Before he became premier of the province, Tommy Douglas would tell his Baptist congregation in little Weyburn that they would build a new “Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.” As recently as 1944, the great seer Edgar Cayce was prophesying that rich, fertile, open Saskatchewan “must feed the world” that was surely coming.
But no one saw this coming—at least they didn’t in the early years. By 1912 Saskatoon was calling i
tself “the fastest-growing city in the world” and predicting its population would crest two million by 1931. At that point, it was claimed, Saskatoon would join St. Louis and Chicago in the “great family of Western Cities.”
Of course it never happened. The Crash of 1929 was followed by nine successive years of drought and crop failure. It got so bad during the 1937 Dust Bowl that, in a small town near Regina, a young baseball player was said to have lost his directions after rounding first and was later found three miles out on the prairie, still looking for second.
Today fewer than one million people live in Saskatchewan, even fewer than there were a generation ago. In most years more people leave than come in, those leaving usually young families and young workers, those coming in often retirees returning for reasons of nostalgia and cost. Some communities have been known to offer lots for as little as a single dollar, livable homes for not much more. There was once approximately a thousand communities in the province, but today for every little Raymore that keeps its hockey rink and gets a high school there’s a Tate that vanishes or a couple of smaller communities just down the line—Semans to the west, Quinton to the east—that are fast fading. Only the very large communities—Saskatoon in particular, with its university and high-tech growth and increasingly diverse industry—can be said to be thriving. Everywhere else it’s a struggle just to hold steady.
Drive a secondary highway almost anywhere in the grain belt, Roger Epp and Dave Whitson, two Albertan political scientists, wrote in their introduction to Writing Off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments, and the Transformation of Rural Communities,
and the picture that emerges is not one of prosperity. The horizon is bereft of the familiar elevators that once announced towns and villages. The pavement is likely patched or broken. The road is virtually empty save for tandem trucks that spin a rock at your wind-shield or crowd you onto a shoulder. At strategic points along the remaining rail routes, near towns that survive as service centres in a contracting economy, you can see their destinations: high-volume terminals bearing the names of grain barons like Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, and what were prairie wheat pools before their corporate makeovers.
Canadians Page 28
