Charlotte Gray - The Promise of Canada: 150 Years- People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country

Also by Charlotte Gray

Mrs. King: The Life & Times of Isabel Mackenzie King

Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill

Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake

Canada: A Portrait in Letters

The Museum Called Canada

Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell

Nellie McClung: Extraordinary Canadians Series

Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike

The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial That Shocked a Country

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Copyright 2016 by Charlotte Gray

The extract from Shane Koyczans We Are More is Shane Koyczan, and is reprinted with the permission of the author. www.shanekoyczan.com @koyczan.

The excerpt from the poem New Paths by F. R. Scott has been reprinted with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F. R. Scott.

The excerpt from Further Arrivals in Selected Poems 1966-1984 , by Margaret Atwood 1990 Oxford University Press Canada is reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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Jacket images: Indian Church , emily carr Vancouver art gallery; G.-E. Cartier, Newfoundland, Canada West Library and archives canada; M. Atwood Getty;

E. Harper CP; Steele University of Alberta; B. Wilson Michael Bedford; Medicare Saskatchewan Archives; Carr no. 3 (spine) Douglas Coupland

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gray, Charlotte, author

The promise of Canada : 150 yearspeople and ideas that have shaped our country / Charlotte Gray.

ISBN 978-1-4767-8467-0 (hardback)

1. CanadaHistory. 2. CanadaCivilization. 3. CanadaSocial life and customs. I. Title.

FC51.G72 2016 971 C2016-901487-8

ISBN 978-1-4767-8467-0

ISBN 978-1-4767-8469-4 (ebook)

For Pat and Jimmy Altham, and Nick and Ann Gray, in England, and Jean and John McCaw who arrived here first

Successive generations of Canadians have evolved their own versions of what it means to be Canadian, as I describe in these pages, but most of these visions were expressed in words.

Images are different. For Canadian artists, there were difficult challengesI touch on some of them when I introduce Emily Carr. For the first century after Confederation, the Canadian imagination was cramped by poverty and visual illiteracy. How could European-trained artists capture panoramas that contained no man-made features? How could commercial artists work with such a limited choice of symbols when they wanted to promote national pride in their audience?

Only Indigenous artists were confident in the deeply rooted traditions of their different cultures, and produced extraordinary artifacts that spoke to the land they knew so well. But their work was not respected by newcomers, and it was valued only as trophies or museum specimens.

This has changed.

Within the text of this book, there are dozens of black and white images that relate directly to the stories I tell. But the colour inserts give a parallel commentary on the evolution of the Canadian imagination. My selections are entirely subjective, just as were my choices of whom to highlight in the main text. The colour illustrations are works that speak to me directly. Other people would have made very different choices.

For the first insert, I chose artworks that reflect artists response to past and present, ideas and ideals. Since 1867, Canadian artists have been melding the aesthetic traditions of this northern land with approaches and techniques from every part of the globe. Most of my choices are representational (like the majority of canvases hanging on the walls of established art galleries), but gathering them has been an exciting voyage of discovery. Some of the best sources for exploring the Canadian art world are the ebooks produced by the Art Canada Institute: http://www.aci-iac.ca.

Posters fill the second colour insert. Most of the early examples are vivid attempts to brand Canada (although their creators would not have recognised such Madison Avenue jargon). Later examples intensify the propaganda element, by reflecting the budding postwar pride in country. By the end of the twentieth century, poster art was often protest art, illustrating values that, hoped their sponsors, their viewers might share.

There is no single image that captures our country, just as there is no single narrative in our multi-layered history. Every vision, every story is part of the promise of Canada.

When I immigrated to Canada from Britain, I was stunned to discover the wobbly sense of national identity here. I had arrived in 1979, a year when panic about the future had erupted and there was anxious debate about whither Canada?. The separatist Parti Qubcois was about to hold a referendum on the provinces future relationship with the Rest of Canada (or ROC, as we learned to call it). I recall the passion on both sides of the debate: the fierce speeches by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau about how it was possible to be a Quebecer and a Canadian; the poignancy of Premier Ren Lvesque, facing the defeat of his dream of a sovereign Quebec, as he said to his weeping supporters, la prochaine.

Back then, I was confused. I began to wonder if the whole was less than the sum of its parts. My stereotype of Canadians was of sensible, mild-mannered North Americans who still had the same head of state as the people that I had left behind me. In common with most outsiders, when I thought about this country at all, my mind reeled across a colourful kaleidoscope of static images: blue lakes, glistening mountain ranges, green forests, and police in scarlet tunics. The potential of Canada seemed limitless, given its vast geography, its ability to absorb strangers, its resource wealth. How could this stoic, sprawling federation be in danger of collapse? Yet I discovered in my new homeland an almost palpable sense of the countrys fragility.

When I asked my new compatriots what being a Canadian meant, their replies were often a stuttering medley of generalizations about what it did not mean (Canadian meant not being American, or British, or like residents of other former colonies such as Australia). Often the focus appeared to be on the stresses of the past rather than the potential for the future. I began to understand a remark by one of the few Canadian authors I had heard of, Robertson Davies: This is not a country you love, it is a country you worry about.