The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The place where people say ‘have a nice day’ – and actually mean it
Canada’s reputation as the friendliest nation on Earth is well deserved, says Anthony Peregrine
I’d just come through the security arch at Ottawa airport, the sort that pings. It had pinged. I’d forgotten to take off my belt. “No worries,” said the uniformed security chap. “I wouldn’t want my trousers falling down here either.” He smiled. A real smile.
Moments later, his colleague also smiled at the (even) older lady who followed me through, then helped her get her bag off the conveyor belt thingy. So… two charming airport security people in two minutes, which was two more than I’d encountered anywhere else. We’d arrived in Canada some time before, with all the “Canadians are so nice” stuff ringing in our ears. Oh yeah. Very likely. Canadians are people, people aren’t all nice.
It seemed that we were wrong. During early days of roaming eastern Canada, we’d undergone an unrelenting blitz of pleasantness. Clearly, the staff everywhere – bars, restaurants, hotels, shops – had been awaiting our arrival to make their happiness complete. “Hi! How are you?” they cried. “Fantastic!” we replied, and lunch time (plus dinner time, drinks time, breakfast, supermarket time) took off. That airport security people should also be amiable was the clincher. Canada was living up to its billing.
Granted, the image has taken a knock in recent times. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s honouring of an old Nazi, Yaroslav Hunka, in the Canadian parliament in Ottawa in September didn’t help. Neither did the unsavoury row over the country’s Covid vaccine mandates and Freedom Convoy. And rumbling on is the issue of Canada’s historic attempts to turn First Nation children into Euro-Canadians by help one another, they get lost and freeze. Secondly, niceness is also “a way to relate to the overbearing superpower south of the border,” one academic has said. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, father of Justin, once explained that it was like “sleeping with an elephant”.
There are other theories, yet the likeliest is my conclusion: that any country with the moose as national animal and poutine as the national dish needs a sense of humour and a sense of humility – but also the self-confidence to stand tall. After 21 days there, I’m sure this is correct.
Like everyone else, Canadians may get carried away. The new 2023 law banning outdoor smoking within nine metres (30ft) of a door or window appears excessive when, behind those doors and windows – if they belong to pubs or restaurants – people are consuming burgers, chips, pizzas, fries, poutine as a main dish, fried chicken, sausages, chips, fish ’n’ chips, poutine as a side dish, and desserts the size of a big dog’s head.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a sucker for all this. I ate like a hog. If I’d stayed a week longer, I’d have had a BMI in triple figures. I would have had anyway, were it not for friends giving me a break by preparing lovely lighter-touch cuisine apparently not commercially available in Quebec, Ontario or New Brunswick. But not everyone has such friends. And the main diet does seem to render being outdoors and within, say, 20 feet of health issue.
But that’s not my affair. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I was a guest in the country and revelling in everything from the lean smoked meat of Schwartz’s, the Montreal takeaway owned by Celine Dion (“Will she be serving?” “Probably not”), to the extraordinary Saint Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal, and sky-rises that are astounding to a bloke living in a French village where there is little taller than he is – not to mention the appeal of the Canadian rail system.
Although this is limited and outstanding. Even big city stations have just a handful of trains a day. Passengers queue calmly around the concourse before being ushered to the platform, then to the trains by charm ing and playful staff.
I revelled, too, in the possibilities of limitless space, not least on Lake Ontario – smallest of the Great Lakes but still more than 1,250 times bigger than Lake Windermere. (Canadians claim not to feel claustrophobic in Europe, but do so, certainly, to spare our feelings.) I revelled a lot, in short, from the Thousand Islands on the St Lawrence River via governmental Ottawa and the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau to small Ontario towns where you just knew they had cake-and-maple-syrup-based festivities and fine little coffee shops.
Notable, too, were the entwined undercurrents of Britishness and Frenchness bursting through the surface. The best examples were in Quebec City where colonial history – French kicked out by the British – had left a citadel, the fullest old fortifications on the continent plus a civilised atmosphere of European and North American parentage: old stones, 18th-century houses, big bars with “Please wait to be seated” on the doors, monumental items (the Hotel Château Frontenac could accommodate the entire population of Quebec, with panache) and a preserved British officers’ mess in the Artillery Park.
This past means the present Quebecois speak French, but it also means they do so as if wrestling a foreign language into submission. They speak English the same way. I found the ambiguity fascinating, though I understand that anglophone Canadians may be less thrilled.
But that’s not my affair either. I liked them all because they all liked me. I especially liked the distracted lady who, in Ottawa, bumped into a lamp post and then turned to apologise. Apologising to lamp posts is quintessentially Canadian. Canadianness became even more precious in hindsight. We passed through Charles de Gaulle airport in France on the way home, where a hatchet-faced security woman chucked a perfectly sized – thus legitimate – little shampoo bottle into the bin, refusing to give an explanation, or even damn well speak. a cigarette a minor