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The sun is shimmering on the lake through the red pines. The hills are still purple in the early morning. Everything is perfectly still, and quiet. When all the shouting dies, there is still this: the land, the Canadian land.
Three premiers hurl insults at the federal government. Natives protest against their lot in life. News reports warn of Canada's lagging competitiveness. The Prime Minister orders the Department of Foreign Affairs to toe his line, or else.
A new poll shows that Quebeckers, the fiscal disequilibrium settled, don't want separation but prefer the new separatist leader as premier, and want more power and money for their province. Does anything change there or anywhere else in Canada, except for the beauty of the land?
Maybe. In the past year or so, climate change has overtaken health care, however temporarily, as the No. 1 issue bothering Canadians. Or so some public opinion polls have shown. Politicians must think so, too, because parties have been rushing to paint themselves green.
Why? Canadians, as in so many other ways, have a largely false notion of themselves as world-class environmental stewards. For about two decades, Canadians and their politicians did nothing about climate change except talk and make phony promises, amassing the worst record (apart from Spain) among major industrialized countries.
Their stewardship of the land (and air) has been spotty at best.
The national parks are a jewel. They've also been underfunded for a long time. Provincial parks are wonderful, too, so wonderful they're often crowded to capacity. Still, Canadians can take pride in their parks that help connect them to their land.
But what do we do with most of our waste? Fill up land pits. Or, as Victoria and Montreal did, dump it into adjacent water. Or, as Toronto is doing, ship it to Michigan.
In Ontario, coal-fired hydro plants spew greenhouse gases into the air. Smog chokes metropolitan Toronto on hot summer days. Vancouver is lucky – what it sends into the air gets blown down the Fraser Valley, to the consternation of people there.
Ringing every city is the most hideous urban sprawl that gobbles land and renders it a forest of strip malls and outdoor signs. Drive from the Calgary airport to Banff, or into Edmonton from the airport, or west from Toronto along the old Dundas Highway, or into London from the 401, or just about anywhere around any urban centre and ask: Are Canadians great stewards of their land?
In Quebec, lakes are infested with blue algae and, increasingly, with milfoil, a choking invasive weed. This plague has permeated lakes in eight provinces and, if Quebec is any indication, the provincial government doesn't know what to do, there being no easy answers; in its last budget, the province allocated $5-million for combatting blue algae.
Forest-cutting practices have improved, and replanting is now mandatory. How well these requirements are enforced is another matter. Still, it's a shock flying over vast swaths of this Canadian landscape, looking down at the vast clear-cuts.
There's also the “dirty little secret” of aboriginal reserves whose mythology insists residents are supposed to be the country's best custodians of the environment. Visits to reserves disabuse that notion rather quickly.
For a long time, the environment was an afterthought in public policy. It was what economists call an “externality,” something that came after bottom-line considerations. Increasingly, governments have moved environmental concerns into mainstream decision-making, often encumbering projects with multilayered reviews.
Canadian attitudes to the land might have something to do with having so much of it. Need more housing: Sprawl. Need more wood: Cut it. Need more water: Take it. Need another road: Build it. Need more oil: Drill for it.
Sure, this activity might cause environmental disruption, but, hey, since there's so much air, water and land in this wild, huge country, what's a little bit spoiled here and there?
We are not, therefore, the environmental stewards we believe ourselves to be, although we are getting a little better, just as we are not the world's moral superpower or the country with the best health-care system. We are a country gripped with tenacious mythologies, some of them national, some regional.
But, then, all countries are gripped by mythologies. Ours, it might be argued, are less pernicious, or at least less injurious to others than the mythologies that contribute to so much misery and violence in the name of democracy or ideology.
And no amount of national or regional mythologies can obscure the beauty of the Canadian land. It remains, for those lucky enough to see much of it, a tapestry of geography that awes, inspires and humbles. From Cape Spear to Cambridge Bay to Tofino, Canadians on this national holiday weekend can experience all of these emotions.
