The Beauty of Canada [antikvár]

ForewordWhat is Canada? A prosaic question, one that has been asked a thousand times in a hundred different ways. A naive one. Perhaps even banal. There are many answers I could give. I could say that Canada is a country of 3,560,238 square miles, second only to Russia. And so what? People tend to think of numbers in terms of ones, twos, fives, and tens - denominations of money - or the number of square feet in their house or the number of miles to their summer cottage. Or I could say that Canada is so big that in the 1900s it took six full days to travel by train from Saint John, New Brunswick, to Vancouver, B.C. - and it still takes almost that long today. There are places in our High Arctic that are closer to London, England, than to Ottawa, Ontario. And the literature of Canada is, in many ways, as vast as its size. Just go into the main Parliamentary Library in Ottawa and its subsidiaries and see how many volumes thereare. On a smaller scale, visit a library in any province and see the books lining shelf after shelf, wall after wall. But what are statistic and old chronicles and theories of the future of this country, maybe 20 years hence, when we are living today and today is where it is all at? That is the purpose of this book, to show you where it is at, and, to use the cliché that must be used, one picture is worth a thousand words. It is all here, our accomplishments, what we have done, what we are doing, and indications of whatwe are'going to accomplish in the future. But there is so much more. There is the land itself. Surely no other country on earth has so much variety. Surely no other land can be so beautiful and yet, at times, so cantankerous. So generous to the human spirit and yet, without warning, so cruel. It islate January as I write this, and flowers are blooming outside my Vancouver studio and the shrubs are bright green; yet the radio announcer says in southern Ontario that the country is blanketed by a blizzard. In St. John's, Newfoundland, impenetrable fog may be rolling in from the Grand Banks and ships at sea are in peril, but in Red Deer, Alberta, brightly clad members of a snowmobile club are rushing through the perfecthard snow in the brightest of sunlight. In Toronto, two middle-aged men may be drinking scotch and soda in the Racquet Club after a good game while far north, in the Beaufort Sea, other men are drilling for oil on man-made islands and cursing the 38-degree-below-zero weather. Most important of all, there are the people. More than 22,000,000 of them. At work, at play, in the cities and the booming suburbs, on the prairies where farms grow larger out of economic necessity, in once-vigorous small towns that are on the point of blowing away like dust before a late spring wind. People on rock-bound, sea-girt Newfoundland like the taxi driver who talks about the big money he could make at the tar sands of Fort McMurray but who doesn't go because "Here's me home, man. I couldn't leave her. It is staying on for me." Some of the friendliest people in Canada live on red-soiled Prince Edward Island and in Nova Scotia, so lovely in spring and fall. Quebec people, both English- and French-speaking, have a profound sense of their heritage and their history on this continent. People in Ontario have their industrial complexes, their farms, their cottage-ringed lakes; while those in Manitoba have even larger farms and that Gateway to the Golden West: Winnipeg. People in Saskatchewan can point with pride to their endless fields of wheat - a crop that feeds the world; while folks in Alberta say there is such an air of confidence that their oil will flow forever that you can reach out and grab a handful of that air and almost feel that confidence. Looming up on the western horizon are the world-renowned Rockies - over them andthen down the long valleys and over more ranges - the Selkirks, the Purcells, the Monashee, the Cascades. And finally the descent into British Columbia, nourished by the broad Fraser River Valley. People there live at a different pace, bounded by the mountains on one side and the mighty Pacific Ocean on the other. And to the north, stretching across the entire continent, is that vast, largely uninhabited region called the Yukon and the Northwest Territories,' with its few thousand whites, Indians, andInuit and its oil and pipelines and nine months of winter. There is so much to see and everywhere you go, there will be the people, friendly, eager to please, asking you to stay but giving you a wave as you move onward. Barry Broadfoot Vancouver, B.C.January 1978