Oh Canada

Oh Canada

I’ve had a funny relationship with Canada over the course of my life. My first exposure to the great north country was when I lived in Maine from 1966 through 1968. We had moved to Maine so my mother could start the first women’s Job Corps center on the campus of the historic Poland Spring Resort, home of the famous no-mineral water that went from being a unique upscale cure for Nineteenth Century ills (sold in glass Moses bottles) to the ubiquitous plastic bottles found in every bodega in the Northeast. In 1966 we neither knew what Poland Spring Water was all about nor that the world would create a massive consumable product out of bottled water and that Poland Spring (with the help of Nestles) would take a big market share. We also didn’t realize the extent to which life in places like Maine that border Canada are significantly impacted by what is a more foreign country than most American’s imagine. Many Americans think Canada is just like a 51st State. I mean, how different can it be given that 80% of its population live within fifty miles of the United States?

Maine has 611 miles of border boundary with Canada. Only Alaska and Michigan have more. And given the largely uninhabited nature of the Alaska/Canada border and fact that Michigan and Canada share mostly Great Lakes water boundaries, Maine enjoys several unique aspects to its Canadian border. First of all, Canada has very much five or six distinct regions, none more notably different from the rest than Quebec, with its distinctly French heritage and the reason why Canada is a bilingual country to the extreme. Half of Maine’s boundary is with Quebec, with its relatively populous areas near Montreal and Quebec City. The other half of the boundary is with the very Anglo and independent Maritime Provinces (in their case, New Brunswick). Maine has as its license plate logo “Vacationland”, promoting tourism in its alpine parks, its snowy ski mountains and, mostly, its kitschy and quaint rugged coastline. Canadians have plenty of the first two, but apparently not enough the third. People might be surprised that what seems to most of us as chilly summer ocean waters (63-68 degrees), is considered balmy to the French Canadians of Quebec. Many of them migrate down to the Maine coast for their fun in the summer sun. Most of those who do are the French Canadians that are a bit rougher around the edges, so it tends to leave an impression for a new resident who has no idea that French Canadian presence gets so big in summertime Maine.

I bet if you asked most Americans what they most associate with Canada, they would say hockey. The American colleges that have most adopted the sport of hickey are those which are near the Canadian border, places like New England, Upstate New York and Minnesota. Cornell is one such University that takes its hockey very seriously, recruiting a fair share of Canadians who grew up with the sport to join its ranks. Frankly, its hard to tell if a place like Cornell gets the smartest of the Canadian hockey players or if it just gets the Canadian hockey second string, since Canada is still the dominant hockey country by far.

The next time Canada came into stark focus for me was in the late eighties when it was added to my array of Emerging Market countries for which I had responsibility. Shortly after that when I hit one of my career walls, my punishment was to be sent to Toronto (a rather dramatic demotion)to be the CEO of our Canadian bank for a two year tour of duty. During those two years, I got to know Canada as someone living in Toronto and someone who spearheaded opening new offices in Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. I also spent time in almost every Province since we did a great deal of business with the Provincial Goverment investment offices. Several of the guys who worked in my operation in Canada went on to be very big wigs in Canadian finance and even British finance, given the strong ties between Canada and England. Besides seeing a lot of the country, I feel I got a better understanding of Canadians and why they have such a significantly different country from the United States, despite the proximity of the population to the U.S. Many of the most successful people in business and entertainment in the U.S. are transplanted Canadians. There must be a reason for that.

One theory I have about Canada and why it has a noticeably greater bent towards Socialism than the U.S. is that it is a more harsh environment than that in the lower 48, an environment that required a higher degree of collectivism to survive and thrive. That overt socialistic tendency also leads many more-driven Canadians to drift to the south towards the more rabidly individualistic country of the United States, where individual ambition has an easier time distinguishing itself. Strangely enough, hockey is still one of those distinctly Canadian skills which it has retained its dominance over, even though the U.S. occasionally sneaks up on them with an exceptional team, like at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, held in the very Canadian-like place of Lake Placid, New York.

Since my days as a temporary Canadian, I have done some vacationing in Canada, but mostly in the west. While there, I skied all across the country, but more recently I spent most of my visiting time in the west, taking the family to Banff and Lake Louise and then the Rocky Mountaineer train across from Alberta to British Columbia, and taking several other trips to Vancouver. Kim and I also spent some time in Quebec City and Montreal. The part of the country that I have spent the least amount of time in has been the far eastern Maritime and Atlantic Provinces. That strikes me as strange as it was the part of Canada that was closest to the areas of Maine which gave me my first exposure to the Canadian experience.

We are rectifying that gap by design. I suggested this trip specifically because I felt that I really hadn’t seen these provinces when I had fully explored the rest of the country. We are in Nova Scotia to start and we will end our trip once again in Nova Scotia. In between, we will spend a day on Price Edward Island and one in New Brunswick. When I think about PEI, I think about Anne of Green Gables. I am hoping to convince my gang that taking a detour to see such a girly site is worthwhile. As for New Brunswick, other than the ferry crossing back to Nova Scotia across the bay of Fundy from Saint John, it’s a visit to Hopewell Rocks in the upper bay, where the tidal movements are epic.

I don’t know whether this trip through the Maritimes will change my impression of Canada, which is generally quite good, but it certainly should fill in the remaining gaps (other than Newfoundland and Labrador, which I have limited interest in exploring).