Canada Day

By Walter Kish

I celebrated Canada Day this year in typical Canadian fashion – by spending the long weekend up at the family cottage, located near the aptly named little hamlet of Maple Leaf, not far from Bancroft, Ontario.  I am grateful to my in-laws for having made this investment some decades ago, as my family has long enjoyed the escape to the clean air, the vast tracts of forest and a fine piece of beach frontage on Lake Papineau. The lake’s water is clean and you can wade out a hundred yards before your chin makes contact with the water’s surface.  On nights when the sky is clear, you can easily make out the “Milky Way” and literally see “billions and billions of stars” to quote the late popularizer of astronomy Carl Sagan.  I particularly make it a point to come in late August when we are treated to the spectacular annual meteorite showers known as the Perseides.  In the fall, when the leaves turn colour into a myriad of intensely brilliant variations of red, orange and yellow, the spectacle is dazzling beyond description.

I think it particularly appropriate to spend Canada’s national holiday in the wilderness, since despite many centuries of colonization and development, most of Canada still remains resolutely a land of lakes, forest and tundra, mostly devoid of human presence.  Drive north four or five hours anywhere along the line formed by the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, and aside from small pockets of inhabitation here and there, you are enveloped by an immensity of trees and water.  Most people who have lived their lives along the narrow strip of land bordering the U.S. and never ventured north of the Laurentians in Quebec or North Bay in Ontario, find it difficult to appreciate how “wild” most of Canada really is.   This is true in the Western Provinces as well where the population density is even sparser than here in the East.

I was fortunate enough to have been born in a small mining town in Northern Quebec where my back yard was a forest that literally stretched almost undisturbed all the way to James Bay.  My youth was spent roaming the woods, chasing animals, fishing in lakes undisturbed by any human presence, picking wild blueberries in the summer and building vast complexes of snow tunnels in my front yard in winter, when the accumulation of snow was seldom less than five or six feet.  The fact that the temperature, come January or February, was frequently minus twenty or thirty made little impression on us kids, bundled appropriately in multiple layers of clothing, mitts and scarves.  Not having lived elsewhere, to us it was normal and hardly a reason to forego the opportunity of playing outside.

I was as quintessential a Canadian as you can get – the son of ethnic Ukrainian immigrants, born and raised in a passionately French environment in Quebec, attaining upper middle class success in the Anglophone world of business in the moneyed streets of Toronto, and comfortable in three languages – English, French and Ukrainian.

It was not until later in life when I had the opportunity to travel extensively and see other countries and continents that I realized the uniqueness of Canada, both from a geographic and cultural perspective.  In most of Europe for instance, after several millennia of population growth and development, forests have almost entirely disappeared, and rivers and lakes are both dangerously polluted and over-exploited by industrial, transportation and agricultural use.  Eastern Europe was particularly devastated in this respect by Communism’s callous disregard of the environment, and my extensive travels through Ukraine brought home to me how much damage has been done to that country’s ecosystem and natural resources.

I am glad that here in Canada, despite the fact that we are not without sin in terms of our stewardship of the land we inherited, by and large most of the country is still in good shape from an ecological and environmental perspective.  In particular, I am especially pleased that three hours drive from my current home on the fringes of the sprawling mega-city of Toronto, I can get lost in the woods and walk for hours without encountering any sights, sounds or smells of twentieth century civilization.  Happy Birthday Canada!