MacGregor - Canoe country: the making of Canada

NONFICTION

Wayne Gretzkys Ghost: And Other Tales from a Lifetime in Hockey

Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him

Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People

The Dog and I: Confessions of a Best Friend

The Weekender: A Cottage Journal

Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada

A Loonie for Luck

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The Road Home: Images of the Ottawa Valley

The Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey

The Seven A.M. Practice: Stories of Family Life

Quantity Time: Words of Comfort for Imperfect Parents

Road Games: A Year in the Life of the NHL

Chief: The Fearless Vision of Billy Diamond

Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada (with Ken Dryden)

FICTION

Canoe Lake

The Last Season

FOR YOUNG READERS

The Screech Owls Series

The Highest Number in the World

Forever: The Annual Hockey Classic

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2015 Roy MacGregor

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacGregor, Roy, 1948 , author

Canoe country : the making of Canada / Roy MacGregor.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-307-36141-7

eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36143-1

1. Canoes and canoeingCanadaHistory. 2. CanadaHistory.

I. Title.

GV776.15.A2M32 2015 797.1220971 C2015-902187-1

Cover art: AlgonquinHomage to Tom Thomson, Ken Danby

v3.1

For Fisher, Sadie, Raphael, Hawkley and Noemiewho will run their own rivers in life

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
The Old Rangers Chestnut

CHAPTER 2
Songs along the Dumoine

CHAPTER 3
The Two Icons

CHAPTER 4
The Nile Expedition

CHAPTER 5
The Mission

CHAPTER 6
A Place of Power

CHAPTER 7
The Man Who Measured Canada

CHAPTER 8
The Craft

CHAPTER 9
Lost on James Bay

I T NEVER OCCURRED TO ME that my love affair with the canoe might one day lead to a death threat.

In the spring of 2007 I was coming to the end of a five-year, five-columns-a-week stint on the treasured page two of The Globe and Mail. The assignmentto tour this sprawling nation, writing about its people and placeshad been the brainchild of then editor Edward Greenspon, as had been the title for the column, This Country, and it was this unelected office, surely, that led the CBC to ask that I serve as a juror for a contest the public broadcaster was launching to identify The Seven Wonders of Canada.

The exercise began innocently. The idea had come out of a story meeting for CBC Radios morning show Sounds Like Canada, and host Shelagh Rogers had invited listeners to send in their submissions for a national list of wonders. She and her producers expected a couple of thousand entries, at best, and were overwhelmed to receive more than 25,000. Clearly, the show had tapped into something.

Many of the nominations were obvious, such as Niagara Falls and the Rocky Mountains, but some others were delightfully eccentric and personal, such as Mums House in Scarborough. This nominator charmingly argued that the simple stucco home that her parents had come to from Holland in 1958, two weeks after their marriage, and where, a half century later, they still lived and patriotically flew the red maple leaf over the wraparound porch, is a legitimate wonder. It reminds us, Marilyn Arts Butcher wrote, of where so many of us come from, and it is the physical fulfillment of a dream held by a young couple starting out a new life together in a country new to them.

How could the CBC resist?

The plan was to measure the nominations first by number of votes, then pare the nominations down to fifty or so before bringing in a panel of three judges to rank the top seven selections. Seemed simple enough. The two other judges asked to presideno pay, but inside work and no heavy liftingwere Ra McGuire and Roberta Jamieson. Ra is leader of the legendary Canadian rock band Trooper, famous for such hits as Raise a Little Hell and Were Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time). Ra came from British Columbia but knew the country intimately after more than thirty years of touring. Roberta, a former ombudsman of the Province of Ontario, is a Mohawk from Six Nations in southwest Ontario and head of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation.

The judging panel was far from perfectno francophone, no easterner, all roughly the same agebut the three of us were about as familiar with the country as it is possible for any three citizens to be. The vastness of Canada verges on the incomprehensible: David Thompson, the great nineteenth-century explorer who travelled more than eighty thousand kilometres by canoe, foot and dogsled while mapping nearly four million square kilometres of North America, believed he had seen but a small percentage of the land mass that a decade after his death would become Canada. A small percentage indeed.

Throughout April and May the CBC knocked the master list down to fifty-two. The fifty-two included the fully expectedthe Rockies, Niagara, Old Quebec Citybut also familiar landmarks such as Gros Morne National Park, Perc Rock, the Cypress Hills, the Northwest Passage, the Cabot Trail and Haida Gwaii. There were human creations as well: the CN Tower, the Vimy Memorial, the Rideau Canal, the Manitoba Legislative Building, the Stanley Cup and, of course, Mums House in Scarborough. From that long list of fifty-two wonders, listeners voted for their favourites. And this is when it really got wild. CBC received more than a million votes. At times the voting was so heavy that the computers doing the calculating crashed.

And then began the accusations of cheating

The greatest vote-getter of all, much to the surprise of the CBC and other nominators, turned out to be the Sleeping Giant, a rock formation on a Lake Superior peninsula that, viewed from the harbour of Thunder Bay, looks uncannily like a giant in repose. The Giant tallied 177,305 votes to finish first overallan impressive display of community involvement, considering that the population of the Thunder Bay area was then listed at 120,370.