The Speares

Living the life in Muskoka



Canada
Our Home and Native Land




Welcome to my flights of fancy!

They have a saying in hell: It's about the journey, not the destination. So with all of the spare time I find I have at the moment, that moment being in the middle (he said, naïvely) of a Covid pandemic, I have decided that there can be no better way to occupy my days than to go on an epic journey with no clear destination. Therefore I have decided to fly around the world in my Pitts Special. Of course, it's not a real plane; it's really more of a video game I suppose. But back to hell for a moment.

They have another saying there, at least in the ninth circle where they keep the journalists: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. So while I'm flying around I'm going to write about my adventures and these stories will be at least 85% true (plus or minus a bit), based on my best approximations of what the internet is telling me.

So let's get going. First stop is Canada.

Canada is a Parliamentary Democracy and also a Constitutional Monarchy in the Westminster tradition. That means there's a Prime Minister who takes their authority from the Monarch by way of the Governor General whom, oddly, the Prime Minister appoints. The reason that doesn't make us an Autocracy is that literally anyone who can find 250 signatures can form a federal political party and run candidates in the election. That means that there is a high likelihood that the Prime Minister will head a minority government and will have to kowtow to one or more other parties to get anything done, and will fairly regularly face a confidence vote which could get their party kicked out of the top spot. So it all kind of works. In fact, in 2020 Canada ranked 11th in the world for its lack of political corruption right alongside Hong Kong.

The country is, at present, divided into ten provinces and three territories. The provinces have their own unicameral (no senate) parliaments and a fair degree of autonomy over such matters as health care, but defer to the federal government for other things like national defence and high-level interactions with foreign powers. The territories also have their own legislatures but they are not sovereign and have less autonomy than their provincial counterparts.

The confederation of the provinces and territories into the country of Canada is celebrated on Canada Day, July 1st, and the entire country takes part in the festivities. Except for the Québécois who are all partied out from their own Fête nationale (Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day) the previous week, or the indigenous peoples who see the whole thing as a celebration of colonialism. The date, of course, is the anniversary of the passing of the British North America Act (1867). But in reality, all that happened in 1867 was that the colonies of Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick became the new federal dominion known as The Dominion of Canada, a realm of the Commonwealth of the United Kingdom. Since then, the formation of Canada has been a work in progress, the latest changes being the creation of the territory of Nunavut from a large chunk of the Northwest Territories in 1999, and the striking out of the words "Province of Newfoundland" wherever they occur and the substitution of the words "Province of Newfoundland and Labrador" in the Constitution by way of the Constitution Amendment 2001 (Newfoundland and Labrador).

So that is where the story of Canada is at present. As for the start of the story, why you could start at pretty much any point you like. The Canadian Shield, also known as the Laurentian Plateau, is the rocky backbone of the country and is over four billion years old. It had, at one time, mountains taller than Everest. Of course, there were no people at the time and so the land couldn't be considered a nation. To get nations, you need to start your story a little more recently. People are thought to have started arriving in places such as Old Crow Flats, 300 or so km north (as the crow flies) from Dawson City in the Yukon, as early as 14,000 years ago. They likely walked here from Siberia and fanned out generally from the north-west to the south and east, forming nations as they went. Millennia later, people from Europe started arriving in what would become Canada. They initially arrived in the easternmost parts of the New Founde Lande and progressed west, south and north from there, to some degree retracing the route the first peoples had taken, only backwards.

The southern colonization is part of another story, and not Canada's. So we'll be following the Europeans west and north. On the way I'll be telling my stories about the places we'll be visiting. These stories will be historically accurate, just like History class was. I remember when I was a kid in history class, studying the second world war. I asked the teacher exactly how many countries had to be involved to make it a world war, by which I meant did the the Chimbu Skeleton Dancer people of Papua know that they were at war, and if so, whose side were they on. The teacher chuckled and ignored the question, by which he meant that all of the white commonwealth countries were at war, and even a few of the off-white. That made it a world war. The history lesson that day was that history depends very much on who is telling the story. And as it happens, I am telling these stories. So from that point of view these stories will all be 100% historically accurate (previous estimates notwithstanding). But I hope these stories are not the ones you've heard before.

So let's go hear how Canada became the best country on Earth!