Richard Flynn :: no comment

There is a common stereotype about Canada and the Canadians: that they are nice, but dull. I really wanted to be able to disprove this idea when I visited Canada, but in retrospect I really can’t. Sure, I had fun doing some things in Canada, and there are some exceedingly pretty places, but I have come away with the sensation that if you don’t go to Canada, then, well, you’re not missing much. If you can’t face reading this whole article (I certainly don’t blame you), don’t worry because I am really going to be saying the same thing over and over again.

This is a very lengthy article, because I haven’t written for such a long time. You can read from beginning to end, or else jump straight to the sections on Vancouver, my experience on the trains, Edmonton, Winnipeg, the trip north to Churchill, Niagara Falls, Toronto, or Halifax.

Note that my ‘nice, but dull’ label should only really be applied to the English-speaking places west of the Atlantic Provinces and south of the three Territories. If you had the opportunity to spend an extended period of time—at least a couple of months across seasons—in ‘the North’ (as the three Territories which comprise more than half of Canada’s land-mass are known), I’m sure you would have a fascinating, but challenging, experience. I also found the one place I visited in Atlantic Canada, Halifax, to be very charming, and I’m a little sorry that I spent so long in Vancouver and Toronto rather than going to other places in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Also, my first experience of French Canada was in St-Boniface, which has been incorporated into the city of Winnipeg. I found the whole idea of a small French-speaking community surrounded by the défi insurmontable of Anglophones fascinating,¹ and was happy to spend the morning there poking around the cathedral and the museum. I will be writing about my time in Quebec at a future date (I hope it’s the not-too-distant future), but will cover St-Boniface here.

Vancouver

When I say Vancouver, what do you think of? I’ve been there and I can’t come up with anything more than ‘lots of steel and glass, pretty waterfront, steam-powered clock’. There really is nothing iconic about Vancouver—nothing immediately recognizable on the skyline (except, perhaps, the concrete Harbour Centre, but even then you’d probably have to have been there in order to know it).

My time in Vancouver was affected first by my pulling my ankle again on my first evening there, which slowed me down a bit on the next few days, and by quite a lot of rain. In any case, though, I don’t regret the two afternoons I spent at the cinema because of the rain:² it’s not like I got antsy as I felt that I was missing out on something better or more productive I could be doing in the city.

I went to the Art Gallery, of course, which was packed when I went: it was the Labour Day public holiday, and the temporary exhibition of Dutch masters was about to close. The Dutch masters were nice enough, but when you’re jostling six deep it can be difficult to look at the paintings rather than at the other people. In the permanent collection, though, I enjoyed the structure surrounded by the main staircase, which purported to show typical living rooms for each decade from 1950 the present day on each level. Some you could only look at as you climbed the stairs, while you could go into others. I also spent a long time staring at some photographs printed at enormous sizes: about 12’ x 8’. The one which sticks in my mind is that of the departures board in Frankfurt airport: everything is very clear and sharp, you can read every letter on the click-clack board, and see everyone gathered below, staring up, struggling with luggage, queuing to check in. If you were shown the same photo printed at 6” x 4”, you’d probably look at it briefly before moving on: it’s only when you see it at this size that it gets really interesting. This got me thinking about some of my own photos… If any of you sees an enormous flat parcel coming up your path before Christmas, well, I hope you’ve got enough wall-space.

I also spent an amusing couple of hours at the Police Heritage Museum, which is probably made more interesting because it is slightly run-down. The most striking exhibit is of course the disused autopsy suite (the building is the former police mortuary), where Errol was dissected after dying pretty suddenly. I also enjoyed playing with the identikit software, making some of the most memorable and gruesome criminal suspects I could imagine.

I found Vancouver’s Chinatown to be remarkably sedate, given that there is such a large Chinese community in the city. The most prominent sights are the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Park, which is open to all, and the adjoining Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, for which you must pay to get in: it was here that Sun Yat-Sen really lived on the occasions he was in Vancouver. These are two very pretty places, but visiting them certainly doesn’t take much time.

On my final full day in Vancouver, I went to Stanley Park, which is a large forested area (bigger than Central Park in New York), surrounded by water on three sides. I ended up walking all the way around the edge of the park, and looking at my GPS log that night I realized that I had walked 10 miles during the day. My ankle certainly didn’t thank me.

Dazed on the Trains

It feels like about half my time in Canada was spent on trains. In fact I spent a total of six nights and four days on trains as I travelled on The Canadian from West to East (breaking the journey from Vancouver to Toronto at Edmonton and Winnipeg), and travelling north through Manitoba to Churchill. I also took a few much shorter day-trips by train (Toronto to Niagara Falls and return; Quebec to Montreal; and Montreal to Toronto, returning by plane the same day), but in reality a pretty small proportion of my time in Canada was on trains.

Still, I got pretty used to sleeping on trains. Some nights were much rockier than others, particularly the two nights for the trip north. In spite of the fact that I was properly asleep, when I woke up in the mornings I generally felt absolutely exhausted. I began to wonder if all the long-distance trains are scheduled to leave late in the evening so that people will get on the train, go to sleep (badly), and spend the rest of the long journeys in a daze; docile and dazed passengers are less of a burden for the staff to deal with. I know, I’m a cynic.

More about single sleeper-cabins on Canadian trains than you could possibly want to know

My abundance of night-trains meant that I was able to road-test (or rather, rail-test) each of the three designs of single sleeper cabins that are operated by Via Rail.³ First was the one which you have to step up in to. The bed swings down from the rear wall of the cabin to cover the lavatory; the sink unit folds down and drains into the wall when you fold it back up; there is a small rack for luggage on the front wall. This was my least favourite cabin-design: the step up was far too high, when the bed was down it was very difficult to stand up, and the cabin stank of urine (this last was of course not an inherent design flaw, but it further marred my experience of the cabin).

Second is the cabin with no step and a fold-down bed which tapers off at an angle at the foot end. This curious shape is to accommodate for the basin which stands in the corner of the cabin, and thus is always accessible. There is a luggage-rack of the same size as the first cabin, this time on the back wall (above the seat/head of the bed). This was probably my favourite cabin-design, because with the shape of the bed you can stand up to dress even with the bed folded down. The narrow foot of the bed didn’t bother me: I don’t flail my legs about in my sleep and you’re well enough tucked-in that you don’t necessarily realize that your calves and feet only have about half as much space as the rest of your body. And, for Heaven’s sake, you’re on a train; what do you expect? I had this cabin-design for the one night between Edmonton and Winnipeg, and the two nights between Winnipeg and Toronto.

Third was the cabin which I had for two nights for the trip north from The Pas to Churchill. In this cabin the bed slides out from a space in the front wall, travelling over the lavatory and seat-cushion to click in to position when it reaches the seat-back. The basin, like in the first cabin, folds down and drains when you fold it back up. There is a luggage rack on the front wall, but the really good thing about this design is that you have a space under the bed when it’s slid away to put bags and other belongings. The only downside is that there is not as much room to stand when the bed is out, although it’s fairly trivial to slide the bed back a little way and stand in the space thus made available.

The reason for the variety of cabin designs is that they all fit together within the train carriages: when you put away the bed of the third cabin-type, you slide it under the floor of the first (step-up) cabin-type which is next door. However, I am unsure why you need to have these two interlocking cabin designs when the second (fold-down tapered-foot bed) is entirely self-contained, and at corridor level. Perhaps there is machinery under the floor of the step-up cabins by the side of where the next-door bed slides in?

Edmonton

Edmonton is a nice-enough city which is spectacularly dull. I’m surprised they don’t make its dullness an actual tourist attraction. It’s a city founded for mining, but it’s no longer solely devoted to mining; I’m not sure, but I think at some point the people decided that everyone being a miner would be too exciting, so they introduced some other industries to water it down a bit.

Probably the most famous attraction in Edmonton—certainly the Rough Guide makes a fair bit of it—is the West Edmonton Mall, which is the largest shopping mall in the Americas. I went to see what I could find, and it’s certainly an impressive structure: it’s only two storeys but is spread out over a very large area. What is perhaps slightly surprising for such a continentally pre-eminent centre of retail is quite how down-market the whole place is. I suppose it is catering to the needs of the local people.

Winnipeg, including St-Boniface

When I was in Denver Elizabeth asked me what on earth I was going to find to do during the two days I would be in Winnipeg, which she had visited and found pretty boring. She has never visited Edmonton, because Winnipeg almost felt cosmopolitan in comparison. Certainly when I later arrived at Winnipeg after my four days in the north of the Province, it felt like I was coming into the big smoke.

I enjoyed the time I spent at the Manitoba Museum, which has a history of the whole province, beginning with the arrival of the native peoples, and continuing to the present day. There was good information about the varied landscape of the province, with particular concentration on the arctic tundra in the north, as well as about the legends of the native peoples (which are evidently extensive and well-developed). Probably most interesting, though, was the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company—which owned much of the land of modern Canada, and which still exists today, most prominently as the Canadian department store The Bay/La Baie—and of the Hudson’s Bay Railway. The railway was an enormous undertaking, and construction could only continue during the summer months because of the harsh winter conditions. It was, of course, the Hudson’s Bay Railway which I would take from The Pas to Churchill.

As I’ve already mentioned, though, what was really fascinating in Winnipeg was my trip across the Red River to St-Boniface, a French-speaking settlement which was only incorporated into the city of Winnipeg in 1972. I went first to the ugly modern cathedral, built in the shell of the previous cathedral which had burned down in 1968. The new cathedral is supposed to resemble a wig-wam, and just looks pretty silly when compared with the rose windows and vaulted arches of the church whose remnants still stand on the site. I then spent quite a while at the Musée de St-Boniface, which of course covers the history of the settlement, as well as that of francophones in Manitoba as a whole. Manitoba—the first province after the original four to join the Canadian Confederation,⁴ formed from the Northwest Territories—was founded to pay particular attention to the needs of the Métis people, that is those with mixed native–European (mostly French) parentage. The champion of the Métis was Louis Riel, revered as a saviour by the other Métis, and considered a revolutionary by the rest of English Canada at the time, but who was almost entirely responsible for the foundation of Manitoba as a separate province.

North to Churchill, via The Pas

When I booked my long-distance Canadian trains in April I arranged to take the Hudson’s Bay railway line north all the way from Winnipeg to Churchill, which is a port on the shore of the Hudson’s Bay itself. However, when I was in San Francisco I received an email to say that because of work on the line my train wouldn’t run all the way from Winnipeg, but would instead start in The Pas: I should therefore take a coach to The Pas. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the train would leave The Pas at 2.30 a.m. What was I saying earlier that they carefully schedule things to make the passengers as tired as possible? I then looked at maps and timetables and realized that The Pas is quite a long way north, and would take ten hours to reach by coach. There was no way that I would willingly endure sitting on a coach for ten hours. Therefore I booked a flight on a dinky little Saab propellor plane to take me from Winnipeg to The Pas, stopping on the way at the amusingly named Flin Flon. I could deal with 90 minutes cramped on to a little plane instead of ten hours on a bus.

Getting to The Pas

On the plane we were asked if anyone one need a taxi after landing, because supposedly they were going to arrange it from the air. When I arrived and collected my bags from through the little window (no carousel here) there was a taxi outside the tiny airport. I asked the driver if he was waiting for me, and he assured me that he was not. He said that he would be able to take me in to town as well as his reserved fare, but I thought I should wait for the taxi which had supposedly been arranged for me. Well, after a while the reserved fare came out, hobbling along as he leaned on his stick, and the driver got out to help him in. At this point I learned that the driver too used a stick to walk. My taxi was nowhere to be seen and this driver insisted that I could come with them, so I put my bags in the boot and climbed in to the back of the people-carrier.

The conversation from the front seat didn’t involve me in the slightest, beginning with, ‘Did you hear about so-and-so’s accident: he’s paralysed from the waist down,’ (I never heard what actually happened) and when that topic soon dried up, ‘Well, the hunting season will begin soon.’ But rather than listen too intently I was watching the meter with a heavy heart. Never have I seen a taxi meter spring up so quickly: at one point it was climbing at a rate of 10c every four seconds. Admittedly we were on the deserted road from the airport to the town travelling at 100km/h, but I didn’t expect the airport to be so far from the town. When we pulled up in front of the station building the meter was at about $200 CAD. I had just enough cash to cover my share, but when I got out, the driver got out, opened the boot, and then said, ‘Bye, then’ and walked back to his door. The other passenger said, ‘Bye, then’, and together they left me, cash still in my pocket. Thank you, nice walks-with-a-stick taxi-man.

Filling the time at The Pas

I was then at the station with my bags. A sign on the door said that the station wouldn’t open until 11.30 p.m. Just then it was about 7 p.m. What on earth could I do with my stuff? I walked around the station building and on to the platform and a man came out of a door marked ‘Maintenance’. He seemed momentarily surprised to see me, then asked, ‘Here for the 2.30 train?’ I said that I was, and asked desperately if there was anywhere I could leave my stuff. He said that it would be fine for me to leave my things in his workshop, and that he had to stay there until the train left. I thanked him profusely and took my leave.

The trouble was, though, that I still had to find some way to fill the time before I could come back to the station and wait for the train. I walked a little around the town, getting barked at by increasingly menacing packs of dogs. I can also report that the local branch of Burger King stays open until 9 p.m. At that point it was dark and I began to despair of finding anything to do, until I realized that there was a cinema across the street. Gracious fortune struck again, this time in a 9 p.m. showing of The Time-Traveller’s Wife.⁵

We poured out of the cinema at about 10.45 p.m., at which point I decided to go along to the station to collect my bags and wait for them to throw open the doors at 11.30. The man I’d met earlier invited me in to his little office where we had a pleasant conversation about railways and the upkeep of sheep. The most revealing thing he told me, though, was that there was no maintenance work going on on the line between Winnipeg and The Pas. Instead, Via Rail simply couldn’t be bothered to run the train all the way in both directions three times a week, so decided that they would make one of the trains originate at The Pas. In other words, it was a bare-faced lie when I was told that I could not take the train all the way from Winnipeg because of ‘line maintenance’.

On the Hudson’s Bay Railway

After 11.30 the man led me through to the station where a couple from Florida had arrived to await the train. In fact it would only be the three of us catching the train from The Pas, and for most of the following day. Although the train was in the siding, we couldn’t get on until after the crew would arrive at about 2.15 a.m. The lady from the station brought me some coffee, and kindly photocopied an elderly document with precise details about the route for the three of us. Fortunately the crew seemed to arrive a little earlier than had been predicted, and we were able to climb aboard the train and get ready for bed at about 2.10 a.m.

The first stop the next day didn’t come until the middle of the afternoon, at Thompson. At that point quite a lot of other people got on, two or three taking open berths in the sole sleeping car, the others all in the coach cars. Most people—aboriginals—got off at some of the various native communities through which the train passed that evening, such that there were about fifteen or twenty of us who got off when we arrived at Churchill at about 8.30 the next morning, two nights after leaving The Pas.

Finally, at Churchill

After two nights on a very rocky train, I was wrecked when I arrived at Churchill. Fortunately I was able immediately to check in to the place I was staying and crash on the sofa for a couple of hours. I then spent the afternoon wandering around the town a little, and visiting the Eskimo Museum which is run by the Diocese of Churchill–Hudson’s Bay.

The town is small, with a transient seasonal population which averages at about 1000 throughout the year. I was there at precisely the wrong time, between the summer months which offer fascinating flora, and the winter months when the town is under thick layers of snow and ice (the Hudson’s Bay itself freezes over in winter) when the polar bears are very much in evidence.

In fact Churchill bills itself as ‘polar bear capital of the world’, and apparently there were lots of polar bears to be seen on the tundra around the town. There are famously, however, signs which warn against wandering off in to the wilderness so as not to be attacked by the bears (which, despite their cuddly white appearance, are ferocious beasts). What are offered are polar-bear-spotting tours of the tundra in specially designed ‘buggies’. The trouble, was, though, that the low season and my own lack of organization meant that I couldn’t go out on one of these tours: the offices were all closed on the Sunday and Monday when I went, and I should have tried to make arrangements on the day I arrived, Saturday.

For all that, I wasn’t too disconcerted not to see any polar bears, and was perfectly content to spend three days doing not very much other than catching my breath and watching life in such a small and remote sea-port. The only access to Churchill is by rail, air, or boat; there is no road connecting it to Canada’s highway system. I thought that was rather impressive until I read about the Nunavut Territory (formed as a territory separate from the Northwest Territories in 1999), where there are no highways at all!

My day at Niagara Falls

I had arranged to make a day-trip from Toronto to Niagara Falls by train. When that day dawned I refused to be put off by the rain in Toronto as I left. When I got to Niagara Falls the rain had stopped so I got my camera out and started walking down from the railway station to the falls themselves. About halfway there, it began to rain. Hard. Like, so hard that I was wetter than I’ve ever been in my clothes.⁶ The trouble was, though, there was no shelter anywhere along the path I was on. I was desperately trying to keep my camera under my flimsy waterproof until I got to a little wall next to a house under a few trees, when I peeled my bag off my back, put the camera in its compartment, and pulled out the bag’s waterproof cover (which tucks in to the lining of the bag when it’s not in use). Eventually I got to a large hotel which had a Starbucks at street level. I disappeared into their facilities to try—in vain—to wring water out of my socks and then sat for a while drying off.

After lunch things cleared up a bit and I was able to see the falls properly. And, while Niagara Falls are impressive, they’re not nearly as spectacular as they’re made out to be. It could be that my overly pessimistic attitude comes from the fact that I spent that day soaked to the bone. Certainly, the falls are a natural wonder, and people should probably go and see them if they get the chance. I pulled my camera out and turned it on, and… nothing. The camera wouldn’t turn on in spite of my best efforts to keep it relatively dry. The thing is, though, in all that rain, ‘relatively dry’ means ‘really quite wet’. As a result, I was stuck taking photos with my iPhone. All things considered, I’m not displeased with the photos I got but results would have been markedly, um, different if my proper camera had been working.

Before long, though, it was pouring with rain again, and just wouldn’t let up. I went down to the ‘tunnels behind the falls’ where you can see the more-impressive Canadian, or horseshoe, falls both from the front (but half-way down the creek wall) and from behind. I got pretty wet again, again from water falling from the sky rather than that plunging over the waterfall. Feeling that it had to be done, I dutifully queued up for the Maid of the Mist boat trip. I’m glad that I did; I was wearing my flimsy waterproof and two tourist ponchos (the first from the tunnels, the second from the boat people), but still I got soaked.

When I got back to Toronto that night I charged the battery from my camera and left the camera’s two doors open in an effort to let things dry out. The next morning I put the battery in and, bingo, the camera turned on. But I was rejoicing too soon: before long I would realize that all was not well with the camera.

Toronto

My day at Niagara Falls was in fact my second-last full day in Toronto. I said earlier that there is nothing ‘iconic’ on the skyline of Vancouver. Well, that holds true for Toronto too, with one significant exception, the CN Tower. Or, as I quickly began to think of it, the upright-needle-spearing-a-giant-lump-of-chewing-gum. I would have gone up the tower to see what I could see, but while in Toronto I had to deal with migraines, poor weather (cf. Niagara Falls, above), and cameratic malfunction (ditto, and below).

I did, however, get to Fort York, which is the original British military settlement which spawned the city of York, later renamed Toronto. (At no point did I see any explanation for why the name of the city changed.) The fort is very well preserved, as well it should be, having been violently defended throughout the years as urban expansion, and highway-building in particular, has called for its crushing.

I also spent a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has a very large, and impressively varied, collection. I began with the ships’ models in the basement, worked through the European renaissance art, and got to the modern stuff on the top two floors—among which was some extremely pleasant photography—before ending up in the Canadian artists’ galleries. I have to say I could do without the somewhat dull (there’s that word again) work of those darlings of the Canadian art scene, the Group of Seven, but I did really like the work I saw by William Kurelek, a Catholic convert.

The day after my time at Niagara Falls I was on my way to the Royal Ontario Museum when I decided to test my camera. Well, it turned on, but that was about all it would do. Pressing the shutter would result in error messages until the camera was turned off and on again, the lens wouldn’t autofocus, I couldn’t set most of the basic exposure settings. In short, it was acting as if it had been soaked in water. Oh, wait, it had. Evidently I had to deal with this rather than go to the R.O.M., so I searched Google for a likely-looking camera shop with a service centre, and walked there. It turned out to be quite far. They looked at my camera and listened to my litany of problems, and said that they could send it to Canon for service, which would take at least 21 working days. The trouble was, though, that I would be leaving Canada in two weeks. Oh, they said, you should go direct to Canon since they are in a position to be able to expedite individual repair-jobs. Thank you very much, I said.

The headquarters of Canon in Canada, including their service centre for professional photography equipment are in Mississauga, an industrial satellite-city of Toronto. When I tell you that Toronto’s busiest airport is in Mississauga, you might reasonably expect (as I did) that getting there by public transport wouldn’t be too difficult. Well, sorry, buddy, it is. Regional public transport out of the centre of Toronto is handled by a mob called ‘Go Transit’ who might be more truthful if they called themselves ‘Go if you can work out how and where Transit’. I knew that their hub is at Union Station in Toronto, so I went there, examining their website on my phone as I went. You know how in most city transit websites you can type in a starting and ending address and it shows you a route including walking and line-changes? Well, not in Toronto. Toronto is only the largest city in Canada and yet their public transit agency can’t tell you how to get to where you want to go. So, I asked at ‘Traveller’s Aid’ in Union Station. The sweet old ladies there dutifully asked me for the exact street address where I wanted to go, looked it up in their gazetteer, scratched their heads for a while, and then suggested that I take the subway as far as it would go (changing lines half-way) and then catch a bus. I tried doing this, but no bus—or bus stop—was in evidence when I got to the end of the line and had to take a taxi. Getting back in to Toronto was no less of a tortuous experience, involving two buses, two subway trains, and far more time than that warranted by a journey of about twelve miles.

My time at the Canon Service Centre, though, was remarkably quick and easy. The woman who dealt with me went out of her way to be helpful, and assured me that while there was no way the camera could be repaired by the time I was to leave Toronto for Halifax the following day (I never expected any such thing), they would be able to diagnose and repair the problem before I was to leave the country a fortnight later. What’s more, they would do the repair under warranty. In fact on my first morning in Halifax she rang me to say that the camera had been repaired, and was ready for collection: it had only been at the service centre for one full day. However, I wouldn’t be able to return to Toronto to pick it up until I would get to Montreal, when I spent the day going by train and coming back by plane. Until then I was able to put to good use the little camera I had got as an emergency in Toronto before leaving for Halifax.

Halifax

I really enjoyed my time in the city of Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia. The landscape is so different from anything else I saw in Canada—although I would have said that it’s more like Cornwall than most of Scotland—and the people seemed even more pleasant than the other Canadians I had met.⁷

The three principal attractions I visited in Halifax were the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, the Art Gallery, and the Halifax Citadel. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic—like much of the city—was overrun by American tourists who had arrived on their cruise-ship that morning. The most striking exhibits are those relating to the sinking of the Titanic by the terrorist iceberg on the night of 14th/15th April 1912; it was boats from Halifax which were the first to arrive at the scene, and many of the victims’ bodies were transported to, and some later buried at, Halifax. The stories of the constant arrival of fresh bodies for several days, particularly those of the unidentifiable bodies, were pretty devastating.

The Halifax Art Gallery is an impressive little collection given that the city is hardly on the world circuit. There were a number of modern pieces produced by aboriginal artists—that is to say, not traditional Inuit/Eskimo/aboriginal art but rather pieces which reflected on contemporary aboriginal self-identity. There were also a few slightly-too-ambitious modern installations which were entries for a competition, and then some mixed Canadian and European art of the last few centuries. I was particularly glad to see another couple of William Kurelek works!

The Halifax Citadel is very impressive: it is a preserved barracks which had been built by the British to defend against—who else?—the French before the hostilities over the control of Quebec later broke out. I spent an enjoyable afternoon wandering around the citadel, exploring every nook, watching the guides playing the bagpipes and wearing military uniforms from the period of the citadel’s most active service before the heavens opened once more and and the rain dropped therefrom as does gentle mercy, thus forcing me back to my hotel.

After tortuously twisting the bard’s words I can but conclude

Look, I’ll be honest with you. When I started writing this several days ago, I knew it was going to be long, but I didn’t think it would be nearly 6,500 words. If you’ve read every single one of them, well, you are to be congratulated. Pat yourself on the back. Buy yourself a drink.

And so I return to my original dismissal of English-speaking Canada as ‘dull’. Don’t get me wrong: it’s very interesting to compare the country as a whole with, for example, Australia because they have so much in common and yet there is probably one big difference in particular: Australia doesn’t share the longest border in the world with the U.S.A. I’m inclined to think that Canada and the Canadians have fixed themselves in the mindset that they are always duty-bound to play second fiddle to the U.S.’s lead, which isn’t true, and is sad. However, I suspect that this in large part is what makes English-speaking Canada so ‘nice, but dull’.

Certainly this idea fits in with my suggestion that the non-dull places in Canada are the North, the francophone parts, and the Atlantic provinces. The Atlantic provinces and the northern territories are distant enough from the U.S., with no significant land border, not to worry about identifying themselves with their powerful southern neighbour; the harshness of life and the concentration of native peoples in the North means that those parts simply cannot fit in with some dull cookie-cutter ideal of ‘North America’ (whatever that means in practice). In the same way, the francophone parts (Quebec and French-speaking Manitoba) can use their culturo-linguistic difference as a barrier to the imposition of some ‘like the U.S., but not as good’ identity. Pretty much wherever I went in Canada I found that the Canadians love their history, love their Queen and constitution, and are proud of their country. What is sad, therefore, is that so much of the country can’t find a really strong identity other than ‘nice, but dull’.