| Charlotte Gray has written about figures of Canadian literary and historical fame in the bestselling books Sisters In The Wilderness and Mrs. King. |
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Being a Canadian by choice rather than birth — I was 28 when I arrived — it took me a while to realize my own "Canadianness." For my first few years I was too busy missing raucous British humour, gentle English landscapes and the noisy buzz of London. But my new nationality gradually crept up on me. I admired the no-nonsense stamina of my new women friends (the Englishwomen I grew up with never portaged anything in their lives). |
| I enjoyed the wry self-deprecation that is a mainstay of Canadian jokes. And I took pride in watching my three über-Canadian sons grow up in a country where race, class and gender stereotypes don't have a stranglehold. Mind you, I wish I had managed to teach them British manners! But then, I am not alone in any of these feelings. More than a century ago another British immigrant, Susanna Moodie, expressed these same sentiments exactly. |
| Kevin Major's book As Near To Heaven By Sea: A History of Newfoundland and Labrador has gained rave reviews from readers across the country. |
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Newfoundland and Labrador is the newest part of Canada, but the oldest part of North America. We came into Confederation in 1949 with 450 years of sustained European contact behind us. It has been a thousand years since the Vikings landed, and nine thousand since the first natives arrived. We've had little more than 50 years to think of ourselves as Canadian. |
| This is never more apparent than on Canada Day. In Newfoundland and Labrador it is also the day we remember July 1st, 1916, when in an hour we lost hundreds of young men in the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel, the single greatest tragedy in our history. Now, as Canadians, we share that moment, and as Canadians we stand with our newest generation of soldiers who have tasted war. Being Canadian is sharing our separate pasts and holding together in thankfulness for the peace that fills our land. |
| A founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, Margaret Somerville is the author of The Ethical Canary, which addresses the ethical challenges of Canadians as they face the opportunities of a technologically and medically advanced age. |
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For five generations my family, on both my mother's and father's sides, have been born, lived and died in the Australian Outback. I was the first family member to attend university and came to Canada as a Commonwealth scholar in 1975, never intending to stay. I am deeply connected to Australia — the Australian aborigines believe that we irreversibly bond to the land on which we are born and that it determines the "dreaming" that guides our life path. |
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But now, 27 years later, I am also deeply attached to Canada. Whichever direction I travel across the Pacific, I describe myself as "going home."
My feeling of "at homeness" in Canada became clear during the 1995 Quebec referendum-on-sovereignty, as I realized how much I cared that Quebec remain in Canada. I participated in meetings and rallies and was part of the huge crowd in Montreal that passed the giant Canadian flag from hand to hand. Watching the final votes come in was heart-stopping. But, though at that time I had lived in Canada for 20 years, I could not vote because I was not a Canadian citizen. Australia would revoke my citizenship if I became Canadian and my heart could not cope with that loss. However, after much campaigning, the Australian Citizenship Act was amended last April — I could be both Canadian and Australian. I am now waiting to hear whether Canada will accept my application for citizenship.
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| Roy MacGregor's books A Life In The Bush and The Home Team tackle such classic Canadian topics as the Canadian wilderness and hockey. |
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Being Canadian means you value summer far more than the vast majority of people on this earth. This is not a bad thing, for it makes summers so precious to Canadians that it has largely formed our personalities. Canadians are a people who have learned to survive the cold — hockey might come to mind here — and who conduct their public lives for 11 months of the year merely to subsidize their private lives. |
| Our private lives are revealed only to family and friends in those precious few days and weeks when we can get away to the lake or the cabin or the bush or, for that matter, to the very soul of Canada for a brief and fleeting time. We love our summers. They are our secret time and our best time. Thank you winter, for making summer so special. |
| Carolyn Abraham is a journalist and the award-winning author of Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein's Brain. |
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For me, it was not love at first sight. When my family came to Canada I thought it an odd land of large driveways and funny woollen hats. My parents used to chuck us in the car, pack picnics and blaze out on the highways to show us the "real" country. We watched the sun rise at Wasaga Beach, ate maple taffy off the snow at Black Creek Pioneer Village and fired up our first Hibachi at Heart Lake. |
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Along with mine, families from all corners of the world filled the parks on weekends, as they still do, sending intoxicating scents of chicken curry and souvlaki drifting through the air. In this united nation of nations, we were at home. In retrospect, my relationship to Canada has developed as any good one should, as a slow burn, with one discovery after the next. But of course to be Canadian is never to get too big for one's snowshoes. We're more likely to brag about its attributes to strangers than we do amongst ourselves, knowing all the while that Canada is like the perfect lover, giving and open-minded, gentle and exotic, spectacular-looking and full of secrets.
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| Jack Layton's work as a writer and politician is devoted to raising awareness for social problems such as Homelessness and creating room for positive change. |
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Today, being Canadian is different than it once was. Gone is the easy optimism of those whose star was rising. Now, Canadians watch their familiar surroundings sadly slip, helplessly and needlessly, into a smorgasbord of urban crises like homelessness, sprawl and smog. |
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Still Canadians, because they were once globally celebrated city builders, are not despairing. They are calling upon their fellow urban dwellers to rise up and claim the attention by governments that their communities deserve. These Canadians even show a gambler's indignant optimism that their governments might actually take notice, listen and act.
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| Acclaimed science writer Heather Pringle is the author of The Mummy Congress, which investigates our strange obsessions with death and preservation. |
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Being Canadian, I suppose, means being head-over-heels in love with this incredibly beautiful country. One of the coolest times I ever had was a week I spent with a grizzled old archaeologist in the northwestern Yukon, searching for ancient archaeological sites. |
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We went out by helicopter early every morning and spent the day flying over mile upon mile of wilderness — no seismic lines, no roads, no pipelines, no settlements, just muskeg, river and mountain. It was Canada in all its innocence, looking just as it did before the first Europeans arrived. Breathtaking.
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