Travel
Reflections of an explorer
Explorer-in-Residence Jill Heinerth discusses her time aboard Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth to Alaska
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People & Culture
North star: Reflections on Canada and being Canadian
Space, land, winter — these are the overwhelming realities of Canada, and they have shaped who we are
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The strongest memories of my youth in Montreal are of ice storms roaring out of the Arctic, snapping oaks and maples at the base. I remember boys playing hockey on the St. Lawrence River, slapshots disappearing over the ice floes, the black spire of the Catholic church dissolving in the winter winds that turned sky and land into an infinite whiteness without contour or relief. On school mornings, the sound of snow creaking beneath my boots. Stars sparkling through the branches of the giant elm trees that in those years still thrived in the neighbourhoods of old Quebec. The scars on the thighs of the teacher who taught me to paddle, his eyes still ablaze from the time he had fought off the bear and survived.
This is something that all Canadians know: the presence of the wild even in the heart of the cities. In St. John’s, humpback whales can be seen from the height of the bluffs that shelter the harbour. In Vancouver, salmon spawn in neighbourhood streams and black bears come down out of the mountains to feast upon them. The city spreads in the shadow of snow-crested peaks that run up the coast 1,500 kilometres to the Yukon. Montreal carries the weight of a province more than three times the size of France.
Space, land and winter — these are the overwhelming realities of Canada. The numbers tell an impressive story. A country 7,500 kilometres across, spanning six time zones and encompassing nearly 10 million square kilometres of the Earth. A land of two million lakes, with 30 per cent of the world’s fresh water. A nation that could toss England over its shoulder and the English would never find it.
Demographers are forever pointing out that 90 per cent of Canada’s population resides within 200 kilometres of our border with the United States. But turn the map on its side, and you’ll see the real story, the most compelling feature of Canada’s geography. The distance from our southern border to the northern tip of Ellesmere Island is nearly 5,000 kilometres, a greater distance than that between New York and Los Angeles. Within that immense space is a forest three times the size of Colombia, and beyond, an expanse of tundra larger than western Europe. The territories of the North, a homeland to the Inuit and First Nations, mostly unknown land to the rest of us, make up 40 per cent of Canada, an area 16 times the size of the entire United Kingdom.
This depth is what makes Canada so enticing — the idea that at the southern border you can start walking north and disappear into a land that rolls on to some impossibly distant shore. The sense that a journey, once initiated, need never end.
One way to appreciate the role of landscape in the Canadian imagination is through the writings of Frederick Philip Grove. He was an odd character: German by birth, a bigamist and a dandy who escaped debt in Berlin, changed his name upon landing in Canada in 1909 and found his home among the cacophony of immigrant voices — Swedish, Ukrainian, Icelandic, German — brought west by the railroad to Winnipeg. His life was an intricate web of fact and fiction. When young, he sought fame through personal excess, sexual and scandalous, and yet, ironically, in time and with age he achieved it through solitude.
His memoir, Over Prairie Trails, published in 1922, tells of the trips he made one winter between the school where he taught and his family, who lived some 50 kilometres away on the Manitoba prairie. Grove wrote as a form of meditation, his stories intended only for the eyes and ears of his wife and child, to be read aloud by the evening fire during the weeks of his absence.
Each of Grove’s stories, each journey, is unique. There is movement as in a dream, the poetry of silence as runners pass over soft snow. There is the terror of winter storms, the temperatures dropping so low the leather halters snap and human breath freezes instantly with a crackling sound like the voices of stars. Grove tells of wondrous passages through daylight into the shadow of a winter moon, of marsh fogs fading to reveal the northern lights. He tells of desperate journeys with injured children and dying women across landscapes shaped by snow and wind, where the carcasses of dead animals form dark outlines on the prairie. For Grove, nature is not an entity but a condition, something to be endured rather than heralded.
Grove experienced Canada not as a wilderness but as a neighbourhood where humans and nature had long ago come to terms with one another. Those terms involved a set of relationships to the land that demanded the luxury of space. Within that vast territory of the spirit, in the solitude of the prairie, he discovered what it meant to be of this place.
For the First Peoples of Canada, this sense of place informs every aspect of existence. I once met in the Yukon a Sekani Elder who was completely confounded by a missionary’s notion of heaven. He couldn’t believe anyone could be expected to give up smoking, drinking, swearing, carousing and all the things that made life worth living to go to a place where they didn’t allow animals. “No caribou?” he would say in complete astonishment. He couldn’t conceive of a world without wild things.
For many years, first in the hunting camps of the Spatsizi in Tahltan territory in northern British Columbia, and later at our home on Ealue Lake, I recorded stories from a Gitxsan Elder, Alex Jack. Born in 1906 in Hazleton on the Skeena River, Alex as a young boy moved with his family to Bear Lake; his father had been a good friend of Simon Gunanoot, the legendary trapper outlaw who had found sanctuary in the Groundhog country, lands known today as the Sacred Headwaters, birthplace of the three great salmon rivers, the Skeena, Stikine and Nass. The traditional stories were all parables played out against the landscape, as We-gyet, the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore, revealed through his folly the proper and moral way for a people to live.
When I asked Alex how long it took to complete the cycle of We-gyet tales, he replied enthusiastically that as a youngster he had asked his father that very question. To find out, they set out on snowshoes in March, a time of good ice, walking the length of Bear Lake, telling the stories as they went along. “All the way there,” Alex exclaimed, “and all the way back, and the story not even halfway done!”
To measure the duration of such epic lore, it was not enough to set a time piece. One had to move through geography, step by step, exposed to the very elements, the wind and the cold, the sibilant tones of the wild that had given birth to the mythic narrative.
Just as the land nurtures, so it can destroy. A friend hunting in the canyonlands of the Stikine was enchanted by the way ravens spun above him in descending vortices, until learning from a Tahltan Elder that this is how the birds kill mountain goats, disorienting their prey until the animals fall from the bluffs to their deaths. When passing an old camp in the forest, Alex Jack would never say, “This is where we lived.” Selecting his words with care as one does when speaking a foreign language — English was his fifth after Gitxsan, Sekani, Tahltan and Cree — he would always say, “This is where we survived.”
Mike Jones, a close friend, was as good in the bush as anyone I knew. But one day, just before Christmas some 40 years ago, he made a mistake, leaving shelter underdressed only to fall through the ice on his trapline at Bowser Lake. Sixty feet of snow fell, preventing the Mounties from getting into the valley until spring, when they found Mike’s body. His dog Chinook, having somehow survived the winter, was found 35 pounds underweight in Mike’s camp at Dead Man’s Point, in a cabin that had once belonged to Simon Gunanoot.
When I wrote about the tragedy for an American magazine, the editors in Chicago refused to believe that such snowfall was possible, even when presented with a corroborating letter from the RCMP in Stewart. They ran the essay, substituting inches for feet. The depth and drama of Canada was beyond their imaginings.
Canada is a mosaic because our geography denies any other possibility. Our landscape is a map of dreams, a mystic endowment essential to our identity.
In the United States outside of Alaska, the farthest you can get away from a maintained road is 30 kilometres. In the northwest quadrant of British Columbia, an area the size of Oregon, there is one road, a narrow ribbon of tarmac that runs north to the Yukon along the flank of the coastal mountains. Some 30,000 tourists run the Colorado River every year as it flows through the Grand Canyon. No raft has ever made it through the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, Canada’s greatest canyon.
Yosemite is visited each year by the equivalent of the entire population of Los Angeles. When I worked as a park ranger in the Spatsizi, a roadless expanse more than twice the size of Yosemite, my formal job description was “wilderness assessment and public relations.” In a three-month season, my partner and I encountered perhaps 20 visitors.
Nowhere is this sense of space more powerful and complete than in the Arctic. The eerie solitude of the Franklin graves on Beechey Island, the grey wooden planks, the grey stones, the foreshore merging with the grey mist and the dark ocean. A twilight moon rising over the coast of Ellesmere, pink and rose coloured on the water. The ice of Smith Sound luring one north into the vice leading to the polar sea. And yet, in the midst of such solitude, there is so much life, in the water and on the wing.
Every summer, in the fortnight leading up to the solstice, the Inuit families of Arctic Bay make camp on a gravel beach at Cape Crauford, on the western shore of Admiralty Inlet, the largest fiord on Earth, a vast inland sea that cleaves the northern shore of Baffin Island. There, beneath the dark cliffs of the Brodeur Peninsula, on a promontory overlooking the richest body of water in the Arctic, they await the return of some 17 million marine mammals and birds that migrate through the open waters of Lancaster Sound. The vast landscape absorbs even such multitudes, and the hunters must wait, hovering along the floe edge where the ice meets the sea, listening for the breath of the belugas and narwhals.
One evening, while visiting the encampment, I came upon a small cross marking the grave of a woman who died delivering a child. Asked about her fate, my friend Olayuk, without looking up from his work, said simply, “She decided to have a baby.”
Such lack of sentiment confused and horrified early explorers. But what the British, in particular, failed to grasp was that in the Arctic, no other attitude was possible. The Inuit, a people of patience and resilience, laughed in the face of starvation and confronted tragedy with fatalistic indifference because they had no choice. In any Inuit community or hunting camp, the most powerful individual is invariably the person who speaks the least. There are no swear words in Inuktitut; one expresses disapproval by saying nothing.
AS CANADIANS WE LIVE IN A WORLD of multiple voices, multiple pasts.
For most of our history, ours was a mercantile economy based on a fashion statement, the beaver hat. For its first 240 years, what would become Canada was not a settler society; it became such only in the mid-19th century. Until the building of the railroad, our transportation system was the lakes and rivers; we travelled by canoe. The early French and later the Scots were by no means kind to Indigenous communities, but they never set out to slaughter them. Alliances with First Nations were essential to a trade that, from the start, depended on their knowledge and skills. The fur traders did not murder the people, as author John Ralston Saul quips; they married them, and in doing so moved up in the world.
Mercifully, even as the nation reckons with a complex past, not to mention a troubled present, Indigenous people are still here, in ways stronger than ever, their voices very much part of a national dialogue that will determine the future of the country.
The path ahead will be long, but the fact that Canada has embraced the challenge of reconciliation is remarkable. Few nations would have the courage or decency to do so. That this collective journey — difficult, costly and painful — has drawn political support across the country speaks to the character of ordinary Canadians: wranglers and guides in the mountains of the West, fishers working the nets in the salt chuck off the coast of Nova Scotia, trappers who disappear with the frost into the forests of Saskatchewan, prospectors scratching for gold from Labrador to the Yukon. All those who live on the trails of the Rockies, in Gaspé, by the lakes and streams of Ontario’s woodlands and across the limitless tundra — immigrant children of the world, but Canadians all, drawn together in a landscape whose very indifference breeds tolerance and respect.
The world is in Canada, as Prime Minister Mark Carney has said, and Canada is the world. Vancouver is as much a part of Asia as it is a city of North America. Fully half of those living in Toronto were born outside of Canada. In the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, the school district has students speaking 126 languages. Montreal is so thoroughly bilingual that a new language is emerging as young people move effortlessly between French and English.
Former prime minister Joe Clark described Canada as a community of communities. Fogo Island innkeeper Zita Cobb, who in her grace and generosity embodies the spirit of Newfoundland, counters that we are a place of places, with culture being but the localized response to the power of landscape, the whispered messages of the wild, of which there are so many in a nation so vast. Within British Columbia, a family driving north from Vancouver to Prince George, a distance of 800 kilometres, passes through more distinct languages than would be encountered by a traveler moving overland from Moscow to Madrid. Canada is a mosaic, Zita would say, because our geography denies any other possibility, as it always has.
Our landscape is a map of dreams, a mystic endowment as essential to our identity and destiny as the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms that made us the nation we have become. Our legal system, in the words of former chief justice Beverley McLachlin, “represents our desire to be a fair country, our expectations as Canadians to be treated with respect as equals, both in our rights and our fundamental human dignity.” The full measure of a nation embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives.
Our national motto may not be much of a slogan, certainly nothing to inspire revolution, but “peace, order and good government” is precisely what we’ve had since the birth of the nation. Asked how Canada will be remembered 150 years from now, former prime minister Brian Mulroney replied, “Fair. Now there was a country.”
None of this came about by chance. Canada works because of our social contract, the bonds of community, our trust in each other and our institutions, our health care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as a rental property. To be Canadian is to understand that the measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.
British travel writer Jan Morris once remarked that in Canada you could “drown in niceness.” She had bumped into someone in the streets of Vancouver and been astonished that the person had said, “I’m sorry.”
Jan didn’t understand that in Canada “I’m sorry” is less an apology than a mantra. It’s a way of saying: “Look, you and I live in this impossibly vast and icebound country, and you did not want to hit me, and I did not want to be hit by you, and we live in a civil society where I need you as much as you need me, and neither of us wants any trouble, and so I’m sorry.” One does not apologize as much as share regret for the awkwardness of the moment.
Not three months before his death, Martin Luther King spoke of Canada’s place in the firmament of freedom. “Deep in our history of struggle,” he said, “Canada was the North Star. The Negro slave, denied education, de-humanized, imprisoned on cruel plantations, knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave, if he survived the horrors of the journey, could find freedom.
“The legendary Underground Railroad started in the South and ended in Canada … Our spirituals… were often codes. We sang of ‘heaven’ that awaited us, and the slave masters listened in innocence, not realizing that we were not speaking of the hereafter. Heaven was the word for Canada, and the Negro sang of the hope that his escape on the Underground Railroad would carry him there. One of our spirituals, ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd,’ … contained directions for escape. The gourd was the Big Dipper, and the North Star to which its handle pointed gave the celestial map that directed the flight to the Canadian border.”
Canada works because of our social contract, the bonds of community, our trust in each other and our institutions.
To a remarkable extent, Canada has both internalized its values and successfully carried them into the world, with an impact out of all proportion to the size of our population, the scale of our economy or the strength of our military. As a founding member of the United Nations, one of the original 51 nations to sign the UN Charter in 1945, Canada arguably invented international peacekeeping, with Lester Pearson leading the way in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis, for which he was awarded the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize.
Canada played a pivotal role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational document that in 1948 distilled the very dream of the United Nations, was written by a Canadian, John Peters Humphrey. Pierre Trudeau, a liberal prime minister, led the way on nuclear disarmament. A decade on, Brian Mulroney, a conservative, rallied the world against apartheid.
Canada is a nation committed to peace. But not for a moment should this commitment be misunderstood. Only a bully could view civility, generosity, humility and kindness as signs of weakness. Only a bone spur warrior with no knowledge of history could remain blind to the strength that lies at the core of the Canadian character.
That we fail to define freedom as the right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry does not imply that as a people we don’t know how to fight. Quite to the contrary. We have never lost a war. In 1774, when the people of Quebec did not respond to a letter from the Continental Congress inviting them to join the rebellion, the Americans dispatched an army of liberation, an invasion that ended in their own humiliation and disaster.
Benjamin Franklin travelled to Montreal in 1776 to intercede directly with the French Canadians, who had every reason, he assumed, to hate the British and join the revolution. He too was rebuffed. A generation later, Canadians joined British forces as they burned Washington to the ground.
Canada’s very identity as an independent state, free of the shadow of the British empire, was forged by its fighting forces, the martial skills of its soldiers in the agonies of the Great War. In April 1915, at Ypres, when the Germans attacked using poison gas for the first time, the Canadians alone held the Allied line. At the Somme in 1916, we fought for four months; the boys of Newfoundland perished in an hour.
The spring of 1917 found the Canadian Corps in the shadow of Vimy Ridge. The Germans had seized the heights in 1914 and repulsed every subsequent British and French attack. On Easter Monday, the Canadians, fighting together as a single force for the first time, went over the top. Within three days, Vimy Ridge was theirs. For the rest of the war, Canadians served as the shock troops for the Allied cause. In August 1918, we spearheaded the offensive at Amiens, the battle that turned the tide on the Western Front. It was the beginning of Canada’s Hundred Days, a nonstop engagement as the Allied forces, with the Canadian Corps in the vanguard, pushed the Germans east until their final surrender.
The carnage continued until the end. The guns fired until the eleventh hour. One of the last Allied soldiers to die was a Canadian private, George Lawrence Price, killed two minutes before the armistice went into effect.
A generation later, it would be the same story in Hitler’s war. On D-Day, the Canadians landing at Juno Beach pressed further inland than either the British or American forces on their flanks. Only the Americans at Omaha Beach suffered higher casualties. And we fought for three years before the Americans showed up.
When asked recently about American challenges to Canada’s sovereignty, Graydon Carter, a Canadian and for many years editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, replied, “I think Canadians should take this lunatic threat seriously. By the same token, Trump should take Canadian resistance every bit as seriously. Beneath that affable, welcoming exterior, Canadians are remarkably tough. You don’t get through those brutal winters without building up a sturdy resilience. And Canadians can fight and skate at the same time.”
ELBOWS UP, AS EVERY CANADIAN knows, is not a defensive position, let alone a posture of weakness. I learned to skate at three and had my first hospitalizing injury at five; my career ended with a slapshot to the head at 15. Hockey was my life, and for many of us it remains our most powerful metaphor.
In 2016, when I was appointed to the Order of Canada, it was my immense good fortune to share the ceremonial moment, seated with my cohort of 50 recipients in alphabetical order at Rideau Hall, with the late Bob Cole, the legendary CBC announcer of Hockey Night in Canada.
There was a strong feeling that we were not being singled out for recognition as much as the nation itself was being honoured through the remarkable collection of citizens in that room. It was very Canadian, as was the sense many of us shared that somebody must have made a mistake in adding our names to the list of honorees. I certainly felt this way, and I could tell that Mr. Cole did as well.
Making small talk, I asked him about the essential skills necessary to do his job. He replied that one needed five octaves in their voice. I was delighted but confused. Then he explained. The lowest tone was to welcome people to the broadcast. The highest octave naturally was reserved for a goal or a great save. But what of the other three?
With an actual twinkle in his eye, he replied, “to bring alive on a radio crackling with static the fastest game in the world to a lonely trapper on the banks of the Yukon River, bathing in the glow of the northern lights.” Tell me that this wonderful, kind, generous and deeply humble man did not deserve our country’s highest civilian honour.
Elbows up, Mr. Cole, wherever you are.
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This story is from the July/August 2025 Issue
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