Ontario [antikvár]

Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet. If you asked a random sampling of Ontarians for their official motto - and its meaning - how many could tell you? Probably not too many: Latin is barely alive in the province's schools, and Ontarians are diffident flagwavers at the best of times. Patriotic braying and breastbeating are just not the Canadian way. Yet, history's record shows that Ontario began loyal. And the prosperous peace of the present-day province seems to indicate that loyal she definitely remains. Just what modem Ontario is loyal to, however, is a bit of a mystery. And thank goodness. Debating what makes Ontario tick provides undergraduates and would-be Ph.Ds vrith an ever-ready theme for their essays and dissertations, and is always worthy of a few columns in the newspapers on a slow day. Budding PoIySci majors usually lay the foundation for their treatises with a recap of the province's British-to-the-bootstraps past. All goes well as the obligatory cast of heroes and mediocrities - there aren't too many outright villains in Ontario's past - do their bit - or try to - for Mother England. Things start to bog dovra when the lights come on again following the Allies' victory over Fascism in WWII. War's end and the decline of the British Empire bring new faces to Ontario - and Canada: immigrants from Middle and Eastern Europe, and more recently from Asia, Afiica, the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean and Central and South America, who have rapidly changed the demographic make-up of Canada's major English-speaking province. What does the Queen of England and all the monarchy stand for to a Hungarian? a Pole? a Turk or Chilean? Not too much. Yet mutli-cultural Ontario does work. To be sure, there are strains: prejudices, both homegrovm and imported, do surface from time to time to sour the good life most Ontarians enjoy. And in a province as large -approximately one million km2 - as Ontario, economic disparity, especially in the north, continues to be of ongoing concern. But old and new Ontarians appear firmly united by an unspoken idea of what their province stands for - peace, order, security and, above all, freedom. Freedom to live and work where you choose; freedom fi-om political, religious and sexual oppression, persecution and discrimination; freedom from the soul-desb-oying shackles of poverty. As individuals, Ontarians claim these freedoms for themselves; as citizens of the province, they are committed to according these fi-eedoms to each other. In the process, Ontarians have established the judicial, economic, and social safeguards to ensure the peace, order, and security in which these freedoms may flourish. It is to these sentiments, at once lofty and pragmatic, that today's Ontarians pledge their loyalty. Mind you, on a hot day in July, an Ontarian's overriding loyalty is to "the cottage" - that wilderness retreat by one of the province's counfless rivers or lakes that is the apogee of the Ontario dream. For the most part, nature has been good to Ontario - a fact generously attested to by all those sparkling lakes and rivers that abound in Cottage Country and cover one-fifth of the province. This natural beneficence has done much to shape the cast of today's Ontario - and not only in the area of recreational real estate! The Ontario of historical record is relatively recent: the French, who were the first Europeans to settle here, arrived in the seventeenth century. They found the land cold and inhospitable - a vast and gloomy primeved forest. The Native inhabitants, on the other hand, viewed the forest wilderness quite differently. To the tribes of the Cree, Ojibway, Algonquin, Mohawk, Huron, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Tobacco and Seneca nations, the forest offered food and shelter. And while these nations were not always the best of fiiends, all had an abiding respect for the land and its riches, both of which they invested with deep spirituEiI significance. As to the land itself, we know that about 20,000 years ago Ontario lay buried deep beneath a year-round coverage of ice and snow. Over the next 10,000 years these Pleistocene glaciers were to melt and reappear four times. The present geological configuration of Ontario is the product of these recurring Ice Ages. In the north, tiie craggy Canadian Shield, with its myriad lakes and streams, and its rich mineral deposits, dominated. The more recently formed landscape in the soutii evolved when the last great glaciation melted, some 10,000 years ago. The retreating ice created the Great Lakes and Uie lowlands of the St. Lawrence River, which took shape about 6,000 years ago. In time, the