ON GUARD FOR THEE
The Ceremonial Guard leave Parliament Hill after the first Changing of the Guard ceremony for the 2015 season Monday. For our complete guide to Canada Day in the nation’s capital,
SATURDAY. JULY 1, 2017.
The alarm goes off at 6 a.m., with Gordon Lightfoot’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy doing its best to coax me from a sleep that had already been interrupted at midnight by the church bells, carillons, car horns and vocal cords of Canada Day celebrants anxious to call attention to the nation’s 150th. I slowly extricate myself from the reverie of a dim and faraway dream in which my mother was softly shaking my shoulder to wake me. “Time to get up,” she said. “We have a train to catch.”
And we did, 50 years earlier, from Ottawa to Montreal and Expo 67, where my younger brother and I rode every ride and marvelled at space capsules, upside-down pyramids, kangaroos and geodesic domes, and had a glimmer for the first time of the unfathomable enormity of Canada and the rest of the world.
I was not quite seven then and the memories are now distant, broken and few. But for the nearly 70 per cent of Canadians born after me — more than 24 million of them — and the millions more who arrived here in the last five decades, the country’s centennial year is just other people’s old stories. They didn’t have a 1967; the celebration they’ll (let’s hope) remember culminates today, on Canada’s sesquicentennial birthday. I’m anxious to see it all, but hit the snooze button anyway; the Lightfoot song will be finished in nine minutes, I figure, and THEN I’ll get going.
The first thing I notice when I awake is the sweet smell of crabapple blossoms. Outside, tens of thousands of saplings have been planted on lawns all across the city, seemingly overnight. I can only imagine the sight and scent that will greet visitors when the trees reach maturity in a few years.
But I do not linger on the trees. I am eager to get to the official unveiling of the UFO landing pad, a blue, 130-tonne concrete structure built entirely by volunteers and without dipping fingers into the public purse. The world’s first such edifice, it’s intended to emphasize Canada’s welcoming inclusiveness. The scheduled highlights of the day’s launch, so to speak, at Nepean Point included a mock spaceship landing, a parade of officials dressed as Martians, and the ceremonial ribbon-cutting by no less than Minister of National Defence Jason Kenney. I’m hoping that someone there will be able to explain where extraterrestrials in ships too large for the 12-metre pad are expected to go, but my efforts to reach the landing pad are hampered by numerous distractions, including a surprising number of horses.
A group of cowboys in Mexico apparently thought it would be fun to send birthday greetings to Canada by Pony Express, and so riding clubs from across Canada and the U.S. are participating. Amid all this clipping and clopping, I run into a woman, also on horseback, who is celebrating the sesquicentennial by riding her horse, Cobber, between 25 and 30 km every day from Vancouver to Ottawa, a journey that has taken months, and six pairs of horseshoes, to complete.
Another woman tells me she has spent the past two-and-a-half years hooking a 10x14-foot rug portraying the Houses of Parliament and provincial flowers.
The mood wherever I go is festive, even slightly deranged. Strangers embrace and dance together. People on every street corner, many displaying commemorative sesquicentennial hairdos or beards, or wearing sesquicentennial-themed tuques, are singing a jangly little anthem penned specifically for the occasion. Despite its insipid lyrics, the song has become the most successful single downloaded in Canada, outselling LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem hit from 2011.
An Ottawa man, meanwhile, has opened his own Bytown Bottle and Glass Museum, where he’s displaying his collection of 10,000 bottles. Nearby, a dry cleaner has started a “Fly a Clean Flag” program, drycleaning people’s Canada flags for free.
I ride my bike to Lansdowne Park, where a choir of 1,000 children is serenading Prime Minister Stephen Harper, while hundreds more choirs in churches, schools and community centres from hither to yon are also singing for all who care to hear. Their soaring voices are hardly even dinted by the “aooga”s of a hundred antique autos parading by along Bank Street on THEIR way from British Columbia to O-Town and Parliament Hill. Remarkably, some of these cars are owned by area residents who, so deeply impassioned to be part of the sesquicelebrations, had shipped their Model Ts to Vancouver by train, then flew out there just to drive them all the way back.
Leaving Lansdowne, I follow a bathtub race down the Rideau Canal, passing civic improvement projects too numerous to fully list: Sesquicentennial Public School, Sesquicentennial Park, the Tony P. Clement Pedestrian Bridge and The Sir John A. Macdonald Centre for Performing Arts (replacing the aging National Arts Centre), to name a handful. In places where I expect to see empty fields, sports arenas and libraries have sprouted.
Out on the sparkling Ottawa River, teams of canoeists, each comprising six paddlers representing a province or territory, are completing a race that began more than 100 days earlier and 5,300 km away, in the town of Rocky Mountain House, Alta., near Red Deer.
The windows of the nearby Chapters bookstore, meanwhile, display stacks of the just-published Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, a lexicon, 13 years in the making, far more fascinating than its title might suggest. Callibogus, anyone?
I’m struck by the civic participation in these birthday celebrations; it’s overwhelming, with folks everywhere doing SOMETHING to make the country cleaner, kinder, more welcoming, more hopeful. I run into a handful of youngsters who have sold off a number of their toys and comic books and are taking the resulting bag of coins to donate to The Ottawa Hospital. At the airport, bus terminal and railway station, long queues of youths await planes, trains and buses that will take them on eye-opening exchange programs to other parts of Canada. Groups are staging historical re-enactments, sports tournaments and neighbourhood beautification projects. Everywhere I turn, there are concerts, picnics and essay-writing contests. Poetry, even.
At LeBreton Flats, the Ottawa Exhibition, fallow for the last half dozen years, has been revived as a world-class fair, with nations from around the world taking part. The scale of the celebration is such that there were even talks with the French about dismantling the Eiffel Tower, shipping it here and reassembling it, a plan at which the Parisians ultimately balked, believing they might never again see their beloved monument.
In the distance, I hear train whistles. For Canadians who can’t travel to Ottawa to join in the frolicking, artifacts and displays are travelling to hundreds of communities across the country aboard Sesquicentennial Trains and Caravans, with an excited public lining up eight deep in sub-zero temperatures in some cases to view the travelling museums. When it went to the Yukon, 50,000 visitors, out of a population of just 34,000, took part.
I double back to Parliament Hill, where Queen Elizabeth is cutting into a massive birthday cake and handing out slices to the public. As I wait my turn, I consider everything I’ve seen throughout the day. This really is a remarkable country, where, despite our many differences, we can all join hands in such a large celebration of our history and of our future. It appears that no project is too big to accomplish, yet none so small as to go unrecognized.
As she hands me a piece of cake, I thank the Queen and take a bite. I immediately feel woozy and, like some modern-day Alice in Wonderland, begin to shrink. As I become smaller and smaller, the revelry surrounding me grows distant in my ears. The sounds of the choirs, train whistles, horses, marching bands, UFOs and fireworks all fade, and are replaced by — my god, what is that? Nickelback? — on my iPhone. It is 6:09 a.m. on Sat. July 1, 2017, Canada’s sesquicentennial. Everything I just dreamed already happened, but 50 years ago, at Canada’s centennial celebrations.
I turn off my phone, quickly dress and head outside. I’m anxious to see how we’ll top it.
I’m struck by the civic participation in these celebrations; it’s overwhelming, with folks everywhere doing SOMETHING to make the country cleaner, kinder, more welcoming, more hopeful.