Borderland: A fascination with borders and boundaries

I’ve long been fascinated by international borders and provincial boundaries. It started back in 1975-76. First, I decided in the Summer of 1975, between Grade 12 and 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School in Oshawa, Ontario, that I might was well catch a bus, head east, and then experience the end of the hitchhiking era. Part of that would involve borders. I recall walking across the Edmundston–Madawaska Bridge, an international bridge which opened in 1921 and connects the cities of Edmundston, New Brunswick, in Canada and Madawaska, Maine, in the United States, across the Saint John River. A new replacement bridge is currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2025.

I’m not sure quite what propelled me to walk over the river and into Aroostook County, Maine, but I think there was something about a girl in a bar in Madawaska (I know, sounds a bit like the opening salvo of a country-and-western song; I believe the legal drinking age may have been 18 in Maine at the time). I remember me back in Canada later sleeping in front of either Edmundston City Hall, or the Edmundston Police Force station (I’ve forgotten which, but the building was downtown, near the old S.M.T. (Eastern) Limited bus station, I think, in those days).

Remarkably, I only had a summer-weight sleeping bag and packsack (and notably no tent) in late June in the Maritimes.

My next stop would be camping out with the same gear in  Charlottetown in the back yard of the Government House of Prince Edward Island, often referred to as Fanningbank, where I was again neither disturbed or arrested, albeit I don’t recall then Lt.-Gov. Gordon Bennett inviting me in for some breakfast either.

A few days later, my sleeping back and I wound up camping out for the night atop some embankment, surrounded by cedar trees, I believe, in Truro, Nova Scotia. When I woke up the next morning my sleeping bag and I had descended about 30 yards down the embankment during the night, while my packsack was still back at top, marking where we had started out.

The following year was the United States’ bicentennial. To mark the occasion in 1976, Canada’s official gift to the United States on its bicentennial was a coffee table-size book, Between Friends/Entre Amis, which was chalk full of exquisite border photographs, and introduced me to the International Boundary Commission. I gave the book to my parents for their anniversary that year.

Between Friends/Entre Amis was where I learned about places like the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, situated at 93 Caswell Avenue in Derby Line, Vermont and 1 Church Street in Stanstead Quebec. It straddles two nations, with one foot in the United States and the other in Canada. A black line running along the floor – a strip of masking tape – marks the international border, separating the towns Derby Line, Vermont, from Stanstead, Quebec. The front door, community bulletin board and children’s books are in the United States; the remainder of the collection and the reading room is in Canada.

In the Summer of 1979, I lived briefly in Blaine, Washington, directly across from 0 Avenue in the Douglas neighbourhood of Surrey, British Columbia. The houses on the north side of the street right were in Surrey, the houses on the south side were in Blaine. My neighbours across the street had British Columbia licence plates visible in their driveways, while neighbours on either side of me had had Washington plates in theirs.

In 1983, I remember tagging along on a trip or two to Akwesasne with Richard Russell, when he was the circulation manager of The Standard-Freeholder in Cornwall, Ontario, and I was a daily newspaper reporter there. This is also around the time I came to love Lancaster, Ontario perch rolls in hot dog buns.

Akwesasne is an incredibly complicated and complex place. Was then and is now.

I may even have enjoyed a pint or two back in the 1980s in the Halfway House, a tavern also known as Taillon’s International Hotel, where the barroom straddles the Canada-United States border between Dundee, Quebec and Fort Covington, New York, and that was built in 1820 before the international border in that area was surveyed. I remember the demarcation line drawn on the floor by the pool table, and admonitions not to transport alcoholic beverages from Quebec into New York and vice-a-versa.

Perhaps this borderland and interprovincial boundary fascination runs in the blood. I remember going to my birth mother’s place for the first time in August 1999. She lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, where the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, with its haunting but not at all unwelcome whistle filling the air, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossing the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on.  This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

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Thanksgiving trivia to feast on

Looking back recently at some old newspaper columns and blog posts, I was a bit surprised to realize how much I’ve written over the years about both Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving. I don’t write about the kick-off to turkey-gobbling season every fall, but many I do.

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

My New England turkey came from Star Market, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? February, April, May, June, October, November: A very moveable feast historically.

But in more recent, years Thanksgiving, if you’re in Canada, has meant celebrating on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. Although Thanksgiving falls on a Monday, many Canadians have their dinner and family get-togethers the day before on the Sunday. While the second Monday of October has been the fixed official Canadian Thanksgiving date for the last 62 years, such has not always been the case. Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

An official observance, however, isn’t quite synonymous being an official holiday. Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday across Canada, except for the Atlantic provinces of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. However, Thanksgiving is a designated retail closing day in Nova Scotia. Just to be clear, if we’re talking turkey.

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Hitchhiking down the road to Edmundston, walking across the water to Madawaska, Maine for a few beer, and camping out in His Honour’s back yard

I have fond memories going back to 1975 of my first long-distance hitchhiking expedition from Oshawa at 18, just after Grade 12, to the Baker Lake and Edmundston areas of New Brunswick, and then walking over the Edmundston-Madawaska Bridge, which opened in 1921, from Des Veterans Promenade, as it is known now (not sure about back then)  or Highway 2 to Bridge Street or US Highway 1 in Madawaska,  just across the Saint John River in Aroostook County, Maine.

 

I think there was something about a girl in a bar in Madawaska (I know, sounds a bit like the opening salvo of a country-and-western song; I believe the legal drinking age may have been 18 in Maine at the time) and me later sleeping in front of either Edmundston City Hall, or the Edmundston Police Force station (I’ve forgotten which, but the building was downtown, near the old S.M.T. (Eastern) Limited bus station, I think, in those days).

 

Remarkably, I only had a summer-weight sleeping bag and packsack (and notably no tent) in late June in the Maritimes.

 

Remarkably, no one either disturbed me or arrested me.

 

My next stop would be camping out with the same gear in  Charlottetown in the back yard of the Government House of Prince Edward Island, often referred to as Fanningbank, where I was again neither disturbed or arrested, albeit I don’t recall then Lt.-Gov. Gordon Bennett inviting me in for some breakfast either.

 

A few days later, my sleeping back and I wound up camping out for the night atop some embankment, surrounded by cedar trees, I believe, in Truro, Nova Scotia. When I woke up the next morning my sleeping bag and I had descended about 30 yards down the embankment during the night, while my packsack was still back at top, marking where we had started out.

 

One of my last stops was  Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, where I discovered endless fog and Pizza Delight, which had been founded seven years earlier in 1968 in Shediac, New Brunswick. While it would be another 24 years or so, Chez Camille Take-Out on Chemin Acadie in Cap-Pelé, about 15 miles east of Shediac, and also on the Northumberland Strait, would become my favourite fried clams joint anywhere, with John’s Lunch on Pleasant Street in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, running a close second. Now if I could only make it back to check out the Shediac Lobster Festival!

All in all, this admittedly was not a particularly well-thought out adventure at the age of 18, but I was fortuitous in more ways than one. Along with not being disturbed or arrested, it didn’t’ rain for the 11 or so nights I spent under the starry Atlantic summer night sky, sans tent, and I wasn’t unduly tormented by mosquitoes or blackflies, both of which, I suspect, are not unknown to inhabit the Maritimes that time of year. 

Hitchhiking, at least in much of North America, is something of a lost travel adventure art that more or less disappeared around the time of my mid-1970’s trek to the Maritimes (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up, right? Well, maybe not. About a dozen years ago now, and more than 30 years after my Maritimes saga, I did a fair bit of hitchhiking again in Ontario, down in Prince Edward County on Lake Ontario, or simply “The County,” as it is known to locals.If you wanted to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, all you had to do was stick your thumb out. I did it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton routeOne Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considered to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there were no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owned it, with some help from relatives, he said, still returned most every afternoon from her home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still lived there on Highway 33.

Another time, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home had been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she’d also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she was well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps was the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960.

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This is how Parliamentary democracy works: We change the governing party from time to time

Brian Pallister has been premier of Manitoba going on 12 hours now and as far as I can tell the world hasn’t ended, although Humpty Dumpty no doubt did take a big fall off the wall here in Northern Manitoba in last month’s 41st general election.

There has been a change in government in Manitoba today for the first time since Oct. 5, 1999. That’s how Parliamentary government works. We change governments every now and then. Truth be told, most elections are far more a referendum on the governing party than they are a vote for the imaginative new ideas the opposition parties put forward in any given campaign.

The April 19 election was a referendum on former Premier Greg Selinger, more than anything, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rest of the long-governing NDP. Given how our Parliamentary system of government works, voters (at least outside his Winnipeg constituency of St. Boniface) couldn’t vote “yea” or “nay” to Selinger directly, so they did what Canadian voters have done since before Confederation: They threw the bums out, the lot of them, as the old saying, which probably started in the United States in the 1920s, as a chant by spectators at boxing and wrestling matches, before moving in due course to baseball, and finally politics, goes.

This year the bums happened to be the NDP. Other years it has been the Progressive Conservatives or Liberals. And as grand a day as this is for the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, who won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly April 19 – tying a record for most seats set way back in 1915 when Premier Tobias Crawford Norris’ Liberals also won 40 seats in the Aug. 6 election in a legislature with 47 seats – they will in due course find a time when the people throw them out, and they are the bums again. That’s how government and elections work in Canada.

One good thing about a landslide win, which this was for the Manitoba PCs, is we’re spared the interminable debates that inevitably follow many closer election results in Canada, where the usual suspects argue in favour of either the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system we use in Canada, or more likely in recent years, argue for some form of proportional representation (PR), which is the most common system among well-established democracies.

It’s not that I haven’t taken enough political science courses in university to understand how much fairer PR would be, in theory anyway, compared to FPTP. No, it’s more a case of me being something of a self-admitted contrarian and pot-stirrer. Something like the federal election campaign of 1872 might appeal to me.

During the federal election campaign of 1872 – the country’s second after Confederation in 1867 – voting began on July 20, just five days after the writ was issued, and finished on Oct. 12, which was 89 days after the writ had been dropped – making it the longest in Canadian history, still surpassing last year’s 78-day federal election campaign. In fairness, it is something of an apples and oranges comparison because 1872 was still part of the fading era of multiple day voting, whereas 2015 was a single day contest last Oct. 19. The longest single day contest before last year was the  74-day campaign leading up to the Sept. 14, 1926 federal election.

Back in 1872, in all provinces except Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, elections were held on different dates in different ridings. The system allowed the party in power to hold elections in a safe riding first, hoping in this way to influence the vote in constituencies less favourable to them. The system even enabled a candidate who lost in one riding to run again in another. Steve Ashton might still be our NDP MLA in such a scenario applied provincially, although I’m not sure which constituency we might have him run in, if not Thompson.

The 1872 federal election was in fact the first time Manitobans, who joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870, got to participate in a federal election – and the last before the secret ballot was widely introduced (except for New Brunswick, which had adopted the secret ballot in 1855) , replacing oral voting – which really put a damper on politicians “treating” voters approaching their voting place with offers of cash, alcohol, pork, flour and other foodstuffs. In the 21^st century, politics is a bit more opaque and nuanced then it was in the 19^th century when it comes to those sort of enticements. The transparency was to be found back in 1872.

Let’s face it. When it comes to politics, elections (first-past-the-post or proportional representation or some other form of voting) and democracy, all rolled together, is a bit like sausage-making; the finished product tastes pretty good at the ballpark with a cold beer, or on the grill in the back yard, but you don’t necessarily want to see how the sausage is made. Same with governments. Unless you want to go back to 1872.

My old reporter friend Johnny Driscoll at the Peterborough Examiner used to say that sausage adage applied equally well to newspapering, and he was right.

As former Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”

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Doing right the Acadian way: Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies Ltd. cancels its ads in strike-bound Chronicle Herald

Strike stories can be pretty bleak in general. Newspaper strike stories perhaps even more so in particular, at least from my perspective. So this story was like a ray of sunshine unexpectedly appearing through the Maritime fog of a real pea souper when I came across it earlier today.

Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies Ltd., which got its start in 1975 as Vernon d’Eon Lobster Plugs Ltd., announced it is cancelling its ads in the strike-bound Chronicle Herald in Halifax, where 59 journalists from the Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 have been walking a picket line for 71 days, as the strike enters its 11^th week today with absolutely no end in sight.

This is an employer, after all, who refused a request by the union last month to return to the bargaining table (there have been no talks at all between the two sides since the strike began Jan. 23) and who yesterday held a bit of a party at the paper, as a thank-you to remaining newsroom management, along with the numerous contract freelance journalists and recent journalist graduates, working without bylines, often from home, on everything from an occasional to full-time basis.

Replacement workers. Scabs. Same thing. The terminology depends on your perspective. Hiring temporary or permanent replacement workers during a work stoppage is legal in Nova Scotia. The union has called on Liberal provincial Premier Stephen McNeil and Labour Minister and Bedford MLA Kelly Regan to introduce an “anti-scab law now.”

But back to Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies, located in West Pubnico in the Yarmouth and Acadian Shores Region of Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. After being contacted by Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 about their advertising in the Chronicle Herald, the retailer and wholesaler of commercial fishing gear replied to the union by saying “Hello: Thank you for letting us know about this,” and went onto to say that they had decided as a company “to cancel our Ads until your strike is over. Good Luck with getting them back to the table and hopefully the writers back to work.”

On its own, not a lot turns on Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies’ advertising decision, as welcome as it no doubt is by the union. But there were also about 50 other advertisers, big and small in today’s Chronicle Herald. If even a fifth of them followed the lead of Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies in cancelling their heavily discounted or free ads, the commercial fishing gear wholesaler and retailer’s principled decision would be seen as casting a much larger net. Fishing is like that. Bites can surprise you after long and patient waiting with nothing, and then all of a sudden the fish are “on the bite,” as we like to say here in God’s-own-fishing-country for pickerel, at Paint Lake, and hundreds of other small freshwater lakes like it, in Northern Manitoba.

Vernon d’Eon started the business he called Vernon d’Eon Lobster Plugs Ltd. as a family-owned concern 41 years ago. Originally a manufacturer of lobster plugs, the company diversified and expanded over the years until it operated seven stores in Nova Scotia and one on Prince Edward Island.  The Nova Scotia stores are located in West Pubnico, Barrington, Cape Island, North Sydney, Pictou, Shelburne and Yarmouth. The Prince Edward Island store is located in Souris.

Lobster plugs were small pointed pieces of pinewood that were used to keep the lobster’s large claws shut. West Pubnico, in the heart of Acadie, would eventually become known as the “lobster plug capital of the world,” but not before the originally French colonists were expelled by the British in 1755 during the Grand Dérangement, returning a dozen years later as still proud Acadians and retaining a traditional way of life, Millions of lobster plugs were made in West Pubnico during the 20^th century. In 1984 the industry made a change to elastic bands.  With lobster markets beginning to develop all over the world, lobsters were being shipped over long distances via planes, and rubber bands proved to be more suitable toward this changing market for live lobsters.

When Mr. d’Eon decided it was time to slow down several years ago, he looked for a potential buyer with the same business philosophy as him who would continue to operate his stores and keep his 40 employees on after the sale, as well as making sure his customers would be looked after and continue to receive the service they had come to expect.

In October 2013, Vernon d’Eon Lobster Plugs Ltd. was sold to Entreprises Shippagan Ltée, a father and son partnership made up of Gilles and Marc André Robichaud, and re-named Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies. The two families had known each other for years and shared mutual values, the Robichauds said at the time of the sale, adding they were “honored to have been entrusted with Mr. d’Eon’s legacy and the opportunity to extend his company’s longevity.”

Based in Shippagan in northeastern New Brunswick on the Péninsule acadienne, the Robichauds also own International Seafood and Bait Ltd., one of the largest exporters of snow crab and herring roe in Canada, Sea-Alex Inc., a manufacturer of plastic buoys and other fishing and aquaculture related products, and an ACE retail hardware store.

Vernon d’Eon Fishing Supplies continues to be headquartered in West Pubnico and Entreprises Shippagan Ltée in Shippagan.

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Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

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Sister Andrea Dumont, Thompson’s longest-serving religious, will receive the St. Joseph Award April 23, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows for outstanding missionary work

Sister Andrea Dumont, Thompson’s longest-serving religious, will receive the St. Joseph Award April 23, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows, at the annual Tastes of Heaven Gala at Bellvue Manor in Vaughan, Ontario, which includes the amalgamated towns of Woodbridge, Concord, Maple and Kleinburg, and is just a few kilometres north of downtown Toronto. The gala is hosted by Cardinal Thomas C. Collins, archbishop of Toronto and apostolic chancellor.

The St. Joseph Award is the highest award for outstanding missionary work bestowed by Catholic Missions in Canada, which was founded in 1908 as The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada. The organization comes to the aid of isolated missions across the country where a lack of resources makes it impossible to maintain a Catholic presence without outside financial help.

Three years before the founding of The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada, the Vatican in 1905 had changed the official statuses of the Catholic Church in Canada and the United States from being “mission” churches, receiving missionary funding for their operations, to being “independent” churches having to finance their own operations, presenting challenges and difficulties in numerous areas.

On Sept. 23, 1908, Monsignor E. Alfred Burke from the Diocese of Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island, founded The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada to raise funds to help “cultivate the missionary spirit in the clergy and the people,” and “to preserve the Faith of Jesus Christ among Catholic immigrants” then resettling in the Canadian West.

Papal approval and pontifical status were granted to The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada by Pope Pius X on June 9, 1910, for “the protection and diffusion and the preservation of the Catholic Faith in the territories of the Dominion of Canada.”

In the early days, The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada undertook to bring Roman Catholicism through a Catholic Church presence to thousands of Catholics settling in Western Canada. It began using funds collected in the east to build small chapels across the Prairies and in the mountain areas. Later, it encouraged priests in the Atlantic provinces to go west and serve in the remote and priest-less parishes. As the need for missionaries grew, the society began supporting the education of seminarians.

In 1999, the name of the Society was changed to Catholic Missions In Canada to better reflect its mission and outreach, which today includes missionaries, catechetical programs, ministry among First Nations peoples, church building and repair, religious education of children and youth, leadership formation of lay people, and seminarian education for ministry in its mission dioceses.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas takes, where Sister Andrea currently serves here in Thompson, takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and comprises the northern parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. The farthest point west is LaLoche, Saskatchewan, near the Alberta border. The farthest point north is Lac Brochet here in Manitoba and the farthest point east is Sandy Lake in Northwestern Ontario. There are 49 missions in the archdiocese: 27 in Manitoba, 21 in Saskatchewan and one in Ontario. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) established the first mission at Ile-À-la-Crosse, Sask. in 1860.

Sister Andrea, who first trained as a nurse, and candidly admits to dragging her feet and delaying on any call to become a nun initially – and for some years thereafter until she finally accepted it – spent 14 years in Guatemala until the mission closed and since returning to Canada has lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work is in adult education, which includes training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are no parochial Catholic schools in the area. As well as Guatemala, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto at one time also had foreign missions in Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti. They continue to serve in Honduras and Haiti.

Sister Andrea is originally from St. Catharines, Ontario and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, who are the same sisters who taught some of my high school classes from September 1971 to June 1976 growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, just east of Toronto, when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English and literature classes – and Grade 10 general math – with little success in the latter through no fault of her own at Oshawa Catholic High School (now Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School) https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/high-school-redux/

In the truth is stranger-than-fiction category, almost 40 years after my high school days ended, I’ve been encountering Sister Andrea, who is good friends with Sister Conrad and Sister Dorothy, regularly over the last eight years since I moved here to Thompson in Northern Manitoba and joined St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church parish.

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Ry Moran, director of the new National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NRCTR), will be at UCN in Thompson March 11 for a ‘community engagement session’

Ry Moran, director of the new National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NRCTR), based at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, will be in Thompson March 11 for the launch of the centre’s community engagement sessions in Lecture Theatre Room 302A at the University College of the North’s new Thompson campus at 55 UCN Dr., adjacent to the Thompson Regional Community Centre (TRCC).

More community engagement sessions are scheduled for The Pas on March 12; Iqaluit on March 19; Vancouver on March 25; Prince George. B.C. on March 26; Montreal on March 31; Saskatoon on April 16; Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia on April 21; Edmonton on May 5 and Toronto on May 15.

Moran will meet with survivors of Indian residential schools here in Thompson Wednesday between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. and inter-generational survivors between 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.  Health supports will be available on site and refreshments and a light supper will be provided.

Moran wants to learn what Northern Manitoba survivors’ “hopes and dreams” are for the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

Establishing a national research centre and archive to forever preserve the truths of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools was one of the most important responsibilities given to the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As part of its legal mandate, the responsibility is spelled out in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, signed in 2007 by representatives of survivors, aboriginal groups, including the Assembly of First Nations (AFM) and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the federal government and the churches.

In order to carry out the national research centre and archive part of its mandate, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission convened an international gathering of experts on aboriginal community control, and on national and international principles, protocols and best practices for indigenous and human rights archiving.

The National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has a 10-person staff and is located in Chancellor’s Hall at 177 Dysart Rd. on the University of Manitoba’s Winnipeg campus. It will work in co-operation with a wide network of partners across Canada and is set to officially open this summer. Current partner organizations include the University College of the North; University of British Columbia; Lakehead University;University of Winnipeg; Red River College; Université de Saint-Boniface; St John College; St Paul’s College;Legacy of Hope Foundation; National Association of Friendship Centre’s; Canadian Museum for Human Rights; Archives Manitoba; Manitoba Museum; Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources and the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre.

The National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation will operate within the academic and administrative structure of the University of Manitoba with Moran reporting administratively to the office of vice-president (research and international), as he manages the day-to-day operations of the centre.

The centre was established in a June 21, 2013 National Aboriginal Day agreement between the university and the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will wind up its six-year mandate in June. The centre’s archives will hold millions of documents collected by the commission including nearly 7,000 video-and audio-recorded statements from survivors, inter-generational survivors, and others affected by the schools and their legacy; millions of archival documents and photographs from more than 20 departments of the Government of Canada and nearly 100 Canadian church entities archives; works of art, artifacts and other expressions of reconciliation presented at Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission events; and research collected and prepared by the commission. Justice Murray Sinclair, who chairs the three-member commission, has said the research centre is an important part of the commission’s legacy.

The National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is guided by a seven-member governing circle, who have two-year terms. The current members are Eugene Arcand; Andrew Carrier; Catherine Cook; Grand Chief Edward John; Gregory Juliano; Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux; and Jennifer Watkins.

The governing circle ensures Indigenous control over the materials held by the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. It provides guidance on the centre’s policies, priorities, and activities, on ceremonies and protocols, on methods and sources to expanding the center’s holdings and resources and on prospective partners.

Three members of the governing circle represent survivors, their families or ancestors (one First Nation, one Inuit and one Métis), two represent the University of Manitoba, and two represent the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation partner organizations. At all times, at least four members of the governing circle must identify as aboriginal.

Moran was appointed director of the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation on Feb. 3, 2014, coming directly from the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where had served as director of statement gathering since January 2010.

Before joining the commission, Moran, who is Métis, was the founder and president of YellowTilt Productions, delivering services in a variety of areas including aboriginal language presentation and oral history. He had hosted internationally broadcast television programs, produced national cultural events, and written and produced original music for children’s television. Moran’s awards including a National Aboriginal Role Model Award, and a Canadian Aboriginal Music Award. Moran is a Masters of Business Administration candidate, and holds a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate degree from the University of Victoria.

The first Indian residential schools opened in the 1880s in western Canada and eventually, they operated in every province and territory except Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland. The system was at its height in the 1920s with compulsory attendance under the Indian Act and over 80 schools in operation. Most Indian residential schools were run by entities of the Roman Catholic church, with others run by the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and later the United churches.

Here in Northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas was involved in four residential schools at Beauval, Sturgeon Landing, Guy Hill and Cross Lake. Through the Corporation of Catholic Entities Party to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement (CCEPIRSS), created in 2006 to oversee the undertakings of the group of 54 Catholic dioceses and religious congregations under the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), the Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas was obliged to provide $1 million in cash over five years, $1.6 million of in-kind services and community work over 10 years, as well as support the fundraising Canada Wide Campaign (CWC).

The archdiocese met that obligation by paying out $200,000 a year, beginning in 2007 until the $1 million was paid. The Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement ended litigation facing the federal government and the four churches that ran the schools, where rampant abuse occurred, for more than a century, and which former Archbishop Sylvain Lavoie, who resigned for health reasons July 16, 2012, called, “a system that is now acknowledged as a flawed policy of colonization and assimilation.”

In a Dec. 17, 2009 pastoral letter, Lavoie wrote: ” We would encourage those from our archdiocese who attended the schools, or had family members and relatives who attended, to contribute to the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] process, so that the historical record can be accurate. Whereas over the past few years many held back from sharing positive experiences out of fear of being politically incorrect, now is the time to speak your truth so that it is heard and recorded.”

The Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in its current incarnation, was appointed by the federal Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper through orders-in-council on June 9, 2009.

The Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was originally established on June 1, 2008. Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Harry LaForme, a member of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation in Southern Ontario, was appointed by the Harper government as the first commission chair, but resigned in October 2008. Claudette Dumont-Smith, of Gatineau, Que., a native health expert, and Jane Brewin Morley, of Victoria, a lawyer and public policy adviser, were also appointed originally as commissioners, but announced in January 2009 that they would resign, too, effective June 1, 2009, leading to the entire three-person commission to be replaced by the current commissioners.

The chair, Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Murray Sinclair, from near Selkirk, was Manitoba’s first aboriginal judge. Sinclair was appointed associate chief judge of the provincial court of Manitoba in March 1988 and elevated to the Court of Queen’s Bench in January 2001.

Commissioner Wilton Littlechild is a member of the Ermineskin Tribe Cree community, near Hobbema in central Alberta. He was the first Treaty First Nation person to acquire his law degree from the University of Alberta in 1976. His law firm is located on the Ermineskin reserve. He also served as a Progressive Conservative MP for the Alberta riding of Wetaskiwin from 1988 to 1993.

Commissioner Marie Wilson grew up in Sarnia in Southern Ontario. Wilson, who lives in Yellowknife, is a well-known former CBC broadcast journalist and manager, who spent most of her career in the North, and is a member of the United Church. She served as CBC’s senior manager for northern Quebec and the three northern territories of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.

A component of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the commission is an independent body that oversees a process to provide former students and anyone who has been affected by the residential schools legacy, with an opportunity to share their individual experiences in a safe and culturally appropriate manner.

The Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission is unique from other commissions around the world in that its scope is primarily focused on the experiences of children. Its focus of research spans more than 150 years, one of the longest durations ever examined.

It is also the first court-ordered truth commission to be established in Canada. As such, the court plays an ongoing role in the implementation and supervision of the commission.

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Home Routes returns Feb. 6 after its 2½-month Christmas hiatus with St. John’s traditional folk singer and acoustic guitarist Matthew Byrne

Anyone in Thompson from Down East? How about more exactly “The Rock” a.k.a. Newfoundland and Labrador? Eh b’y, thought so.

Matthew Byrne, a traditional folk singer and acoustic guitarist, gets the kitchen party started next Friday night for the second half of Home Routes’ sixth season in Thompson over at Tim and Jean Cameron’s place at 206 Campbell Dr. Show time is 7:15 p.m. Feb.6 and tickets are $20 at the door and the coffee will be on. For more information give Tim or Jean a call at 204-677-3574 or send them an e-mail at: cameron8@mymts.net

Tim and Jean Cameron moved here from Ashern three years ago. The Camerons were also Home Routes hosts in Ashern for three years before coming here. Tim’s day job is as a uniformed armed peace officer with Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship – the province’s chief natural resource officer. Jean Cameron is the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) branch manager here. Tim is also known as a guitar-playing folkie from the late 1980s, whose talents were first on display here long ago at the old Thompson Folk Festival, during an earlier stint working and living here in his 20s. He’s even been known to pick up an acoustic guitar the odd time at the end of a Home Routes concert here and join the performer and whoever else wants to jam in keeping the kitchen party cooking awhile longer.

Home Routes is coming off its traditional 2½-month Christmas hiatus after three fall shows, which featured Allan Fraser and Marianne Girard last Nov. 20; Jolene Higgins, better known by many perhaps by her stage name of “Little Miss Higgins” on Oct. 22; and Deep Cove, Nova Scotia area country bluesman Morgan Davis, who kicked off season six here on the Borealis Trail Sept. 23.  Other stops on the Borealis Trail beside Thompson include Flin Flon, The Pas and Minitonas and Swan River Valley in Manitoba and in Saskatchewan, Buena Vista, Annaheim, Prince Albert, Napatak, Melfort and Greenwater Lake Provincial Park. Other circuits on Home Routes include the Yukon Trail; Salmon-Berry in British Columbia; Cherry Bomb and Blue Moon in British Columbia and Alberta; Chautauqua Trail in Saskatchewan and Alberta; CCN SK in Saskatchewan; Central Plains in Saskatchewan and Manitoba; Jeanne Bernardin in Manitoba, Agassiz in Manitoba and Ontario; Estelle-Klein in Ontario and Québec and the Maritimes in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Byrne was born into a family of  Placentia Bay, Newfoundland music makers and his repertoire is heavily influenced by that singing tradition that thrives on the two basic elements of the song – the weaving of a great story with a beautiful melody. His parents moved from Placentia Bay to St. John’s during the period of the so-called “No Great Future” and other government resettlements where 307 communities were abandoned between 1946 and 1975 and more than 28,000 people relocated in a farbed up bid to bring rural residents from fishing communities in danger of financial collapse to the capital for some urban modernization with its requisite central regulation.

Byrne’s first album, Ballads, was released in 2011. His most recent album, Hearts & Heroes, was released last May 31.

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Canadian beaver trumped by moose from Maine: Iconic Roots Canada Ltd. prunes its operation with closure of last franchise store in Prince Edward Island Jan. 3, as Charlottetown Roots becomes a Maine-based Cool As A Moose®

When franchise owner Chris Cudmore or one of his employees locks the door at 156 Queen St. for the last time at the close of business Saturday, it will mark the end of an era for Roots Canada Ltd. as its last retail franchise store in the country in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island closes Jan. 3.

The Cudmore family, however, won’t disappear from retailing in Charlottetown with the closure of its Roots franchise store.  Previously a partner in the independent retail clothing store retail Henderson and Cudmore, which was a fixture in downtown for Charlottetown for decades, the space occupied by the present Roots store will be reopening a few days later as a Cool As A Moose® franchise store. Cool As A Moose® is a specialty retailer featuring Maine-themed apparel, gifts, souvenirs and sunglasses company, founded in 1986 in Bar Harbor, with stores in Maine also in Portland, Brunswick and Freeport, and in Canada in Halifax, Quebec City, Banff, Whistler – and next week, Charlottetown.  Cool As A Moose® – now owned by American Kip Stone, a competitive Open 50 class Rhode Island sailor, who also lives in Maine and also owns Westbrook, Maine-based Artforms – was named the 2011 Merchant of the Year by the Maine Merchants Association.

About eight of the current Roots employees have been offered employment at the new  Cool As A Moose® store on Queen Street in Charlottetown.

More than 200 company-owned Roots and Roots 73 stores are not affected by the end of franchise operations in Canada. Cudmore had been operating the Roots franchise in Charlottetown for about 25 years .  “At one time there might have been 15 or 20 franchises across the country, but we’re the last franchise standing and we really didn’t fit the Roots model anymore,” Cudmore told CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster. “They had an infrastructure just to service us. They had two or three employees dedicated to looking after the franchises.”

While Roots is in many ways an iconic Canadian brand, the privately-held company was founded in 1973, ironically, as well as iconically, by two Americans from Detroit, Michael Budman and Don Green. Both had been campers and later on staff at Camp Tamakwa on South Tea Lake in Central Ontario’s Algonquin Park.  Camp Tamakwa was founded in 1936 by naturalist Lou Handler, a former prizefighter from Detroit, and canoeist and famed Canadian solo paddler Omer Stringer, and is a summer home to 250 to 300 boys and girls – ages seven to 16 – and more than 130 staff. Tamakwa campers are mostly Canadian and American with some campers coming from Mexico, Israel, England, France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. Canadian campers are mostly from the Toronto area and Americans are mostly from the suburbs of Detroit, but others are from places like New York, Illinois, Florida and California.

Budman and Green first thought up the idea for Roots and did the initial planning for it in Algonquin Park in 1972.  By then they had both moved to Canada and were living in Toronto. They both still have cabins in Algonquin Park. The well-known Roots logo  – featuring the Cooper font and the quintessential Canadian beaver – was created by graphic designers Heather Cooper and Robert Burns.

Roots has more than 200 company-owned retail stores in Canada, the United States, and in China and Taiwan in Asia. Roots began with a small store in Toronto selling a “negative heel” shoe, designed to keep the heel slightly lower than the rest of the foot to promote proper alignment of the spine. Unlike traditional footwear, which elevates the heel and shifts a person’s center of balance forward as they walk, negative heel shoes work with the foot’s natural motion, with the heel striking the ground first and bearing the most weight. The shoes are also designed to be wider at the front and narrower at the heel to support the foot comfortably and avoid crowding the toes. Developed by Danish yoga instructor Ann Kalso in the 1950s, the shoes mimic the traditional Tadasana, or mountain pose, taking the stress off one’s back, hips and knees and putting it on the leg muscles.

Starting in Toronto with footwear, Roots evolved to include leather bags, jackets, accessories, natural fiber clothing and home furnishings. Roots also has a network of approximately 40 outlet stores throughout Canada called Roots 73.

Roots still has a leather goods factory in Toronto on Caledonia Road, operated by the Kowalewski family. The Kowalewskis were originally from Poland and then Argentina before immigrating to Canada. Jan Kowalewski had a small family business, Boa Shoe Company, on College Street in Toronto, and manufactured negative heel shoes for Roots in its earliest days, before Roots purchased the Boa Shoe Company.  Family patriarch, Jan, along with his sons, Richard, Henry, Karl and Stan, worked for Roots for years and the latter three continue to, as the Kowalewski family is now in its third generation working with Roots.

Unable to compete with offshore manufacturing companies, Roots outsourced the manufacturing of much of its apparel line to Chinese and other Asian factories a decade ago.

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