Ottawa is Canadian

I am going to Ottawa this weekend!

I love Ottawa. As a pure-bred Torontonian, you may well ask why. Ottawa is no world-class city (as Toronto so often aspires to be, but is rarely recognized as such ... but that's a separate post altogether). Ottawa is nice, clean, and cold -- hella cold. I was told once by a friend who lived there that it is the coldest capital city -- colder than Moscow. (Actually, this is not quite true. But it is among the top-seven coldest capital cities in the world -- see here for more info.)

But Ottawa is much more than simply nice, clean, and cold (ah, ...the archetypal Canadian stereotype); and the reasons why I love Ottawa are more complex than that. Like the country it governs, Ottawa is many things -- some great, some not memorable. But (perhaps unlike the country it governs, some would argue), Ottawa does seem to have a clear sense of identity. Ottawa knows what it is, and it embraces that.

Ottawa is a political town. It is colloquial; robust; sturdy; a little bit British. Ottawa is parliamentarian. The parliament buildings overlook the Ottawa river (keeping an eye on Hull, Quebec). Ottawa is towering, and strong -- a capital city this far north will never fall. Ottawa is, to me, somehow quintessentially Canadian.

Ottawa is where ambition goes to retire; it is no Wall Street or Washington, D.C. -- but neither is it a city so far gone into the world of politics (as many American state capitals are) that they have lost sight of what life outside of politics is all about. Real people still live in Ottawa. It has all the trappings of a modest cultural centre -- if not the 'buzz' of being the 'it' place to be.

In southern Ontario -- and especially Toronto, which the closest place in Canada to the states without actually being part of or in America -- Ottawa is the closest that one can get to the Canadian North without going too far from home. Just as the United States' capital, Washington, D.C., sits between the northern and southern states as if holding them together with a thumb-tack, Ottawa sits at one of Canada's many fault lines. It is a sign post to the north; it is the pulley that anchors our clothesline of Canadian cities, most of which are less than 200 miles from the American border. It is an officially bilingual city (on a continent of unofficially multilingual cities), and it is that vital link between the English Canadian establishment and the ever-politicized French Canadian homeland, culture, and way of life.

Ottawa is eating Beaver Tails (or "Queues des Castor") on the Rideau Canal (I considered going to school in Ottawa for the sole privilege of being able to skate to class or work every day).

I have not spent as much time there as I would like. Hopefully this weekend will become part of a remedy for that.

'When Maps Fail'

When Maps Fail: Straight Line Metaphors and the Borders and Regions of the Canadian American Plains -- by Peter S. Morris

I found this paper on the web by chance, during a random search. I feel like I've stumbled on a goldmine; it addresses many of the main issues I'm interested in for my "Canadia" project. I recommend reading the whole thing -- it's not too long, and for an academic paper, remarkably un-stuffy and well-written.

But ... just in case you're in a hurry, I'll talk about a few highlights.

One could talk at length about the significance of the international border to this agricultural trade dispute of a few years ago. . . . But the only point I wish to make at the moment is this: quite simply, the Canadian-American border matters. It has not been an invisible line—an irrelevant piece of geographic trivia in North American history. No less so than the U.S.-Mexico boundary, we must conceive of the 49th-parallel border as a significant and ever-evolving component of historical-geographic change in the North American West (my emphasis).

Morris goes on to discuss how little scholarship has focused on the 49th parallel as a boundary and a borderlands area -- a place where there are conflicting views about who is the "Other"; where neighbours on either side of an international border line may have more in common than those who are citizens of the same nation, but live on opposite sides of a continent. Within both counties, there are those whose lives and values reflect a difference in culture much greater than the difference between the cultures on either side of the border line. Farmers in the Midwest and the Canadian prairies are bound to have more in common than those same farmers will have in common with people growing up in urban New Orleans or native people living in Iqaluit.

The question here is, where does one culture end and another begin? Is it ever that cut-and-dried? Can you differentiate between people who have more in common terms of economies, trade, and way of life than those who share currency, a flag, and nationalistic values, but perhaps little else?

Morris rightfully mentions how little scholarship there is on Canada-U.S. relations and our "shared borderland". Canadian and American scholarship, as he says, is mostly divided along nationalistic lines:

That this would be true for scholars from south of the border should be no surprise. It is virtually a national pastime in the United States to ignore our northern neighbors—Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once referred to the border as a “one-way mirror.”

As much as I enjoy the validation Morris gives to the non-visibility of Canada in the Unites States, it's important to understand Morris's next point, which is the astute observation that, while Americans and American scholarship have predictably often ignored Canada and how Canadian borderlands history relates to it's own, Canadian scholarship has also tended to have a nationalistic focus: Canadians also "limit their studies to the people, places, and events on just one side of the border." He also offers a good reason for this, with which I agree:

Canadians, like most peoples, have sought a distinctive national identity in the histories they have written, and perhaps the strongest and most enduring bond linking the various Canadas together—West to East, French-speaking to English-speaking—has been a common desire to not be “American.”

Morris does well by paraphrasing former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's famous quip (also, coincidentally, quoted at the bottom of this blog) that being next-door neighbour to the United States is like sleeping with an elephant: the enormous bunkmate is impossible to ignore -- and every insignificant twitch and grunt that the elephant makes is felt in Canada tenfold. Therefore, it is by necessity, and because of the U.S.'s overbearing presence, that Canada has always focused on creating a strong nationalistic vision that is separate and different from the history of America, rather than being a part of it. (As for why the U.S. has made a national past time of ignoring Canada ... well, no excuse is given.)

'Skunked' at the border

I couldn't resist posting this ... about a month ago, a wild skunk was found asleep inside a shipment of piping from California. The skunk had to be returned to it's native habitat, or it wouldn't survive; I guess it's telling (and perhaps a little comforting) to know that even a skunk will have to deal with hassles at the Canada-U.S. border.

Smell you later: Skunk is off home
http://www.thestar.com/article/178959

Feb 07, 2007 04:30 AM

Bill Taylor
Feature Writer

Dorothy the skunk is on her way home to California. But not without a stink at the border.

It wasn't because of Dorothy spraying. It was U.S. customs officers who, though the skunk's paperwork was all in order, couldn't believe she might not be an illegal immigrant, says Nathalie Karvonen, director of the Toronto Wildlife Centre.

It took more than an hour for rescue worker Alison Cooper to talk her way from Windsor to Detroit, Karvonen said yesterday. "It was a different officer to the one we'd been dealing with and the reaction was, `You're doing what?' Cooper finally had to leave her passport as surety and retrieve it on her way back."

The skunk showed up in Mississauga Jan. 5 in a truckload of piping that had been on the road from Torrance, south of Los Angeles, for a week. Dorothy had crawled into a pipe before it was loaded and fallen asleep.

The problem was returning her. Not only would it be illegal to release her into the wild in Ontario; skunks are territorial and she wouldn't survive long.

The centre needed a volunteer to drive Dorothy the 3,500 kilometres home. Not everyone is prepared to share their vehicle with a skunk, though, Karvonen pointed out, "they're very gentle animals who ... are not very quick to spray."

Once her plight was made public, the centre had offers of help from as far away as Switzerland. And she'd found a name.

The centre is careful never to think of its charges as anything but wild animals. Pet names are a no-no. But some people started calling the skunk Dorothy, after the heroine of The Wizard of Oz. "She fell asleep and woke up somewhere totally strange," Karvonen said.

Trace Nealy, host of a California radio station morning show, and her producer, Ryan Miller, took vacation time to pick up Dorothy from Detroit in an RV. They collected her from Cooper on Monday.

"She's awfully cute," they said yesterday in a blog from the road. "It smells fine so far. No problems yet."

The trip will take about four days and each night they'll stop at a wildlife refuge where experts will tend to Dorothy.

"We expect her to be released Friday evening," Karvonen said. "She should be fine."