Canada's Last Good Day
We can’t go back, and we’re still not going forward
August 20, 2024 was the eighth anniversary of Canada’s last good day. I was going to mark the occasion on the day itself, but I didn’t have time. I was going to wait until the ninth anniversary but then told myself, no. That would seem very tardy indeed.
On August 20, 2016, I traveled south from Montreal, first on Autoroute 15 and then, after crossing the American border, along Interstate 87, to eventually arrive at a cabin on Ausable Beach on Lake Champlain. This part of America is one of my favourite places in the world. There is no outdoor experience I’ve had anywhere that quite measures up to climbing Black Mountain in the Adirondacks, going up slowly, protected mostly by the shade of trees, to eventually emerge at the peak where in summer there is always a congregation of dragonflies, and you can sit and eat a sandwich, hear the wind turbine flapping at the air, and look into the distance at the surrounding peaks and down to the pleasure boats silently moving in their stately way across Lake George.
That weekend was different. I wasn’t in the Adirondacks for hiking. I was on the shore of Lake Champlain to do some writing. The writing wasn’t going well, even though I had everything I needed: books, bread, cans of beans, fruit, whiskey, and a reliable laptop with access to the internet. The beach stretched out beyond the window and after that, the vast surface of the glittering body of water. Lake Champlain was once counted among the Great Lakes, along with Superior and Michigan. It enjoyed this status from March 6 to March 24, 1998. It’s a large lake, but not nearly as vast as the big five.
From my vantage point beside the lake, I was fully in the embrace of the territory of America. I looked back at Canada. The hour of the final Tragically Hip concert approached. I navigated via the internet to the CBC. I watched the live footage coming out of Kingston, Ontario, and I became a bit weepy—in spite of myself. Watching the cancer-stricken Gord Downie performing in his characteristically quirky yet charismatic fashion, I became convinced that this was an important collective moment.
Northop Frye once defined a Canadian as “an American who rejects the revolution.” That’s about as good a definition as I’ve ever seen. Our British inheritance means that change comes only incrementally, through small steps forward, or small steps backward. Or alternatively, dismantling steps altogether so as to deny progress for others. In the historic victory of the English over the French, Canada became a place of consensus-seeking, compromise, and complacency.
“We're in good hands, folks,” said Gord Downie, beckoning toward Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from the stage. It was a bit disorienting to see our recently elected PM in the audience. The extent to which Downie had convinced himself that Trudeau would be a great leader was confusing to me. I honestly wondered: does Gord Downie know something the rest of us do not? No matter, I chose to believe him—for the night.
Downie had been elevated to the status of a secular saint. Yet Downie was far from a saint. In the Tragically Hip’s extensive canon, I would be reluctant to pick a favourite song, but if a tyrant were for some reason to banish me to a desert island with just one Hip song, it would be “The Luxury,” in which Downie makes it clear he’s well acquainted, through direct experience or otherwise, with the less savory parts of the male psyche.
The Golden Rim Motor Inn
Soft water and a colour TV
Ah, so consumed with the shape I'm in
Can't enjoy the luxury
The luxury
She said, “and why are you partial to that Playboy con?
When you can see me naked any time you want?”
If I had loads of money to make me tame and sour
I could pay you to remind of my baby by the hour.
But in remembering the night of the Tragically Hip’s concert, maybe I am not remembering Canada’s last good day. I am self-indulgently conflating my personal experience with broader history. Maybe what I am remembering is the flickering torch of my youth—before my father died, before I myself became a father, before I took on a mortgage. In 2016, my standard unit of measurement for leisure was an afternoon or a long weekend, rather than a few hours or minutes grabbed here and there. I am saying goodbye to those days with sadness. It is an accident that the reign of Justin Trudeau coincides with the end of my youth.
Downie has a reputation as a teller of Canadian tales, helping to spin the yarn of Canada’s mythology, yet the Downie I like even more is the Downie who is intentionally ambiguous about where his tales take place and to whom. “Locked In the Trunk of a Car,” could be an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s book, The Killer Inside Me. Yet its appeal is broader as a meditation on shame and guilt.
“I found a place, it's dark and it's rotted
It's a cool, sweet kinda place
Where the copters won't spot it
And I destroyed the map, I even thought I forgot it
However, everyday I'm dumping the body
It'd be better for us if you don't understand
It'd be better for me if you don't understand…”
Just copying these lyrics from the internet, I can feel my chest headed toward inclement weather. The words recall for me countless instances of feelings of guilt and shame. Back when I lived in Montreal, I found the proximity of America a helpful release valve to my emotions, because none of my lived experience had occurred in our neighbouring country; there were no visual reminders of places and people that dragged up the old feelings.
I don’t know if I will ever get back that feeling of liberation.
Moreover… grow up! That isn’t how reality works.
The day after the final Hip concert, I worked very hard on the manuscript, but as I re-read large chunks I could see my work was mostly flat and lifeless. I knew better than to keep trying. The light of the day was still reflecting off the lake, and there was a chance to salvage some pleasure. I dragged the kayak across the beach and paddled out into the water. This time I tried to paddle to the very centre of the lake, approaching the Vermont side.
At that time of my life, I had a colleague who had a close friend that had drowned in Lake Champlain. I have a bad habit of thinking about exactly the things I should not think about at the exact moment that those thoughts will be the most undermining. So I was thinking about death even while enjoying the water underneath me, the blue sky above me, and the green hills of Vermont on the horizon. Gradually the sky clouded over, and this provided me with some relief from the glare of the sun. I forgot about that person, uknown to me, who had drowned many years ago. I felt happier than I had in many days.
Then the sun set. It happened very quickly. An experienced outdoors person would not have been caught so unprepared. As it turned dark, the warmth emptied out of the day. The shoreline, where previously the cabins, houses, shacks and boats had been distinct and recognizable, had completely disappeared. Fortunately there was no storm in the making, only the faintest breath of wind.
Briefly the moon came out, and the strength of its light was sufficient that I had an inkling of where on the beach I should go. But as my kayak drew closer, a small sandbank emerged, and I could tell I was far from the right place. I paddled away again, embarrassed. The moon was swallowed up by an especially thick cloud. The night fell even heavier. I heard the distant chug-chug of some kind of boat and I became afraid that it would run into me. On the shoreline, the flickering yellow lights of camp fires had emerged. I told myself it was still possible to convert this experience into some kind of epiphany. I was getting a free adventure, a glimpse at the lake as it might have looked to paddlers two hundred years ago, before the invention of electric light.
I paddled closer to the shoreline. I speculated that the camp fires would blind the people on the shore. They would not be able to see me. My sudden appearance might startle them. My very next thought was this. This is America. Everyone is armed to the teeth.
I became scared of being accidentally shot. I told myself this was preposterous. I wasn’t in Texas. I was on Lake Champlain. This thought didn’t help me. Upstate New York is not a renowned bastion of liberalism or progressive living. During that moment, I wished I was back in Quebec—back in Canada. I felt sure that a hearty, “Bonjour!” from me, from the north shore of Lake Champlain, would have prompted a friendly response and guidance on getting to my destination. It is maybe at this very moment that I, originally an immigrant to Canada, finally accepted the country as my home—my permanent home.
Eighteen months later, Gerald Stanley, a white farmer in Saskatchewan, was acquitted for having shot and killed a Cree man called Colten Boushie. I had not paid much attention to the case until his acquittal and it’s only now that I have looked at the entry about it in the Canadian Encyclopedia that I have realized that Boushie was killed less than two weeks prior to the events I have just been describing on Lake Champlain.
Boushie was just 22 years old. He and his four young friends left the Red Pheasant First Nation by car, driving out to find a place to go swimming. They got a flat tire and ended up on Stanley's farm. Two of the youth exited the car and made an attempt to start one of Stanley's all-terrain vehicles. In the confusing scene that ensued — Stanley running out of his house and toward the car with his adult son — what the evidence shows beyond all doubt is that two shots were eventually fired directly into the car from close range, killing Boushie. The acquittal hinged on the “hang fire” defense, that Gerald Stanley didn’t mean for the gun to go off. He was brandishing the gun merely to scare away the trespassers. The all-white jury believed him.
In August 2016, I was just about naive enough to think that Trudeau could start to heal the divides that were increasingly apparent in Canada. But by the summer of 2024, those hopes were long over. Trudeau couldn’t even enjoy himself on the beach while on holiday with his children without being harassed by a reporter. When he became testy about having his privacy violated, he was mobbed online by trolls who had absolutely no sympathy for him—not only for Trudeau the prime minister, mind you, but also for the human being, the father. I will sound about seventy-eight years old in saying this: there is no decency left. It’s worth asking how much further the angry passions can be stoked before this country becomes close to ungovernable. What kind of miscreant would want to be our leader under the current conditions?
The Northrop Frye quote about Canadians rejecting the revolution used to bother me more than it does today. I had once hoped Canadians would find a cause compelling enough to rise up and smash the shackles of the cartel corporatism (sometimes called “three corporations in a trenchcoat”) that control this country. But thinking back to the feeling of genuine fear that gripped me as I drifted ten metres from the shoreline of Lake Champlain, I have a gentler response to Frye’s words.
There is not much that is worth getting shot for. Not on all-terrain vehicle. Maybe not even the revolution.
That August weekend in 2016, no one shot me or even came close to it. Cheerful revelers pointed me in the right direction when I told them the address I was going to. I paddled for another ten minutes, found my bearings, pulled the kayak back to the borrowed cabin, got inside, had a hot shower, got dressed in dry clothes, and poured myself a cold whisky.
The truth about Canada is we’re no better than America. We’re on the same level. Yet we could still choose other priorities. We could still be the North Americans who rejected the revolution, not because we’re cowards, but because there’s not much that is worth being shot for. We could still be the North Americans that choose to live together peaceably and honour life instead of its opposite.
PUBLICATIONS
An interview I conducted with one of Canada’s leading palliative care experts came out recently. Check it out.
My article about the development of Alberta’s social studies curriculum is online at Alberta Views. It’s a long and vexing story about the increasingly politicized process to figure out what kids should learn.
NOTES
Justin Trudeau gets testy on the beach
(https://x.com/Anthony__Koch/status/1816514437517541383?t=l6XfoYLJxr0PJSfCDTXE0A&s=03)
Gerald Stanley Case, Canadian Encyclopedia
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/gerald-stanley-and-colten-boushie-case
Photo
Lake Champlain