How I Became a Canadian History Buff

Abstract

As a budding young broadcaster, and while working in the public system, I was fortunate to be enlisted as a member of a select group of communicators. We were about to learn a lot more about our country. Canada was approaching its Centennial in 1967; there would be many special programs to mark the occasion. One of our supervisors told us: You lucky people are about to embark on the most meaningful few years of your careers. He was certainly right about that! One of the icons of the times, the late broadcast commentator Byng Whittaker, growled at us got to go out there and get this country in your blood. If you intend to broadcast to it, and about it, you've got to know it. And that's a challenge I've tried to heed through the years. In the two-year period leading up to the Centennial and continuing through all of 1967, I had what amounted to a cultural and political history tour of this glorious land. I put together programs in places like Frobisher Bay, now Iqualuit, where, for the first time, I stood on muskeg and later, at Resolute, marveled at the snow still sitting on the low sand hills in the middle of summer. On the way across the western Arctic to Inuvik and Yellowknife, I was able to piece together remarkable stories of natives and newcomers to the region who had stayed on to conquer the challenges of living in the north and then couldn't be pulled away from the land they had come to love. In British Columbia, and on the Prairies, I was able to rhapsodize about the awesome beauty of the mountains and the endless sky over Edmonton, Moose Jaw, and Winnipeg. Toronto and Montreal, although entirely different, still captivated in the same way with their distinctive cosmopolitan charms. Atlantic Canada stirred the soul and calmed the spirit with the easy charm of the people and a landscape that alternated between the rugged and the pastoral, much of it rimmed by the quixotic Atlantic. At the same time, I became more aware that Sir John A. MacDonald's comment about Canada being a hard country to govern, echoed since by several other political leaders, has been a fact of our existence for as long as we've been around as a nation. The West, Quebec, and the Atlantic regions have very different histories and, as such, often see the nation's problems from different perspectives. Ontario, home ground to so many whose ancestors fled the American Revolution, has always looked upon itself as the great unifier. That approach is often resented by the others who rail at the media and corporate elites who have gathered in the country's most populous province. Yes, it takes skill, patience, and often daring to run Canada, but that doesn't necessarily make us any harder to govern than several other federations across the world that also face the push and pull of regional differences. What struck me during my first foray across the country, and on the many others since then, is the way we keep growing and evolving into a modern, tolerant nation in the face of many threats to our unity. These challenges, the direct ones coming through Quebec referendums, have not diminished the appeal of the Canadian idea. In fact, it can be argued that over the last few years, with the country's finances under control, we are more secure than ever. At least, it can now be said to those who complain: Hey, Canada works. During Lester B. Pearson's days as Prime Minister in the sixties, someone in government suggested that as many young people as possible should have a chance to travel across the country. …