Canada: True North; No. 102; Where is Here?

<v Speaker>Major funding for Canada. True, North is provided by the Corporation for <v Speaker>Public Broadcasting, this station and other public television stations. <v Speaker>And the William H. Donner Foundation. <v Speaker>New York. New York. <v Robert McNeil>I'm Robert McNeil, and this is the town where I grew up. <v Robert McNeil>Halifax, Nova Scotia. <v Robert McNeil>One thing I did not grow up with was a very strong sense of Canadianism <v Robert McNeil>of Canadian identity. <v Robert McNeil>It wasn't fashionable. Canadians didn't pledge allegiance to a flag. <v Robert McNeil>They didn't have a real Canadian flag until 1965, and they didn't miss it. <v Robert McNeil>We saluted the British flag and sang God Save the King. <v Robert McNeil>The one thing Canadians knew, the one thing that made this a separate country in the <v Robert McNeil>first place is that they weren't Americans.

<v Robert McNeil>But what else? What the difference is, has become a much bigger issue in this generation, <v Robert McNeil>because some people fear that American culture is so dominant that it will wipe <v Robert McNeil>out the fragile Canadian culture. <v Robert McNeil>And there is no Canadian culture to be anxious about. <v Robert McNeil>I'll tell you a story about that. <v Robert McNeil>Right at the end of the First World War, an ammunition ship collided <v Robert McNeil>with another ship right over there and blew up. <v Robert McNeil>It was the biggest manmade explosion until Hiroshima. <v Robert McNeil>Nearly 2000 people were killed and the whole north end of the city was wiped <v Robert McNeil>out. A generation later, a Canadian writer, Hugh Mclennan, wrote a novel about <v Robert McNeil>the Halifax explosion called Barometer Rising. <v Robert McNeil>When he sent it to New York, his agent said, well, couldn't you set it somewhere else? <v Robert McNeil>Some American city. In other words, Canada wasn't a place you wrote about. <v Robert McNeil>Well, it is now. This last generation has produced a flock of good writers <v Robert McNeil>who are defining the Canadian psyche. <v Robert McNeil>You'll meet some of them in tonight's program as they search for the essence of Canada

<v Robert McNeil>in articles for the magazine Saturday Night. <v Robert McNeil>Now, Saturday night is a kind of keeper of Canada's intellectual <v Robert McNeil>conscience, but it has a hard time surviving economically in <v Robert McNeil>the magazine's struggles. Tonight's program finds a metaphor for Canadian <v Robert McNeil>culture. <v Speaker>Let me tell you about a place called Saturday Night. <v Speaker>It calls itself Canada's most important magazine. <v Speaker>The last year I worked there, it was celebrating its one hundredth anniversary <v Speaker>and nobody was paying much attention. <v Speaker>Well, do you think- like, is there any chance is there any way that I can give you a <v Speaker>paragraph of a wonderful sales pitch? <v Speaker>I understand you're an American, right?

<v Speaker>Well, from one American to another, this is Canada's biggest number. <v Speaker>And I mean, there's not going to be another one for a hundred years. <v Speaker>You know, like we're gonna be dead and gone by the time this thing comes down again. <v Speaker>Right. And it's a first. <v Speaker>I mean. And wouldn't you like to be in the same book that Mulrooney is gonna tote? <v Speaker>Good morning Saturday Night group. <v Speaker>Thank you, one moment please. <v Speaker>Saturday Night publishes substantial articles on Canadian politics, business and <v Speaker>culture. <v Speaker>Like the country it writes about, it's never made much economic sense, but <v Speaker>over the years it has become one of the most respected journals in the country. <v Speaker>The color of the people <v Speaker>in the issue are dominant. <v Speaker>It's never made any money, but for its birthday, it's going to risk a costly special <v Speaker>issue. <v Speaker>But I'll accept the piece and say I think it's the anniversary issue. <v Speaker>Just giving myself an out there. <v Speaker>He's given me a large out in his covering. <v Speaker>Gary Ross has commissioned the stories that will appear in the anniversary issue that

<v Speaker>he expects them to reflect a peculiarly Canadian theme. <v Speaker>Canadians tend to be a people whose whose critical question of self identity <v Speaker>is not who am I? But rather where is here? <v Speaker>Where am I? <v Speaker>What am I in the middle of? What is this place? <v Speaker>So that inspired us to think specifically of an issue that took <v Speaker>in which the articles took as their starting points. <v Speaker>Particular places. <v Speaker>Saturday nights places Toronto, Canada's largest, most affluent city, <v Speaker>its intellectuals often feel compelled to explain Canada to Canadians. <v Speaker>Usually Canadians ignore them. <v Speaker>Ever optimistic? Saturday night dispatches 21 writers to write stories <v Speaker>inspired by 21 places across the country. <v Speaker>Robert Lee is one of the first writers Saturday night commissions.

<v Speaker>He was born in the West, but now he works as a journalist on Parliament Hill. <v Speaker>The place he writes about is in the interior of British Columbia, 200 kilometers <v Speaker>from the Pacific Coast. <v Speaker>It's not quite the House of Commons. <v Speaker>No one gets too worked up about the national anthem. <v Speaker>But he thinks it's a good place to look for a Canadian story. <v Speaker>He grew up with rodeos and he believes that one event above all others <v Speaker>is what the rodeo was all about. <v Speaker>Lee writes about a good looking kid who hitched a ride into town and drew the toughest

<v Speaker>bull on the circuit. <v Speaker>The kid's name is Clayton Kealey, and he's heard about the they <v Speaker>call confusion. <v Speaker>The cowboy has to ride the bull for eight seconds. <v Speaker>Most cowboys hit the ground long before the here. <v Speaker>At the time this was. <v Speaker>An American magazine would have made a hero award for Cowboy, Canada's

<v Speaker>magazine features the bold. <v Speaker>We're going to bring a large backdrop and lower that into the pan. <v Speaker>We're thinking of shooting the ball from the front, from the side and from the back. <v Speaker>So it's almost like a car instead of a human. <v Speaker>Confusion reigns if we use that title. <v Speaker>Let's see. Confusion head on. <v Speaker>The. <v Speaker>First, we heard it was a very friendly, urbane and clever. <v Speaker>The staff of Saturday Night work for a magazine whose standards have been set by one man, <v Speaker>Bob Fulford has been the editor for 19 years, and for 19 years <v Speaker>he's been thinking about Canada. <v Speaker>Why try to sum up Canada in terms of places? <v Speaker>Because that's how Canadians think of their country. <v Speaker>An American may think of the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence <v Speaker>as the key element. The very thing that makes America America not something else.

<v Speaker>Canadians don't think of the BNA Act that way, nor do we think of the <v Speaker>battle on the plains of Abraham in that way. <v Speaker>What we think of is our relationship with this part of Canada or that part in some <v Speaker>cases with a pan-Canadian are really completely enthusiastic country <v Speaker>covering Canadians. It may be 25 places in the country that he thinks of when <v Speaker>somebody says Canada. <v Speaker>Canada is the second largest country in the world. <v Speaker>It contains a smaller population than the state of California. <v Speaker>Fireplug Radio. <v Speaker>No traffic, no traffic. <v Speaker>The Arctic is a place that southern Canadians think of as a barren land, <v Speaker>but Eddie Grubin isn't in it for ten thousand years.

<v Speaker>The union would have known it is a land of plenty. <v Speaker>There's an old pleasure. <v Speaker>Large, urban, broad and displays displace good <v Speaker>cropping country Martin. <v Speaker>Full range boxes. <v Speaker>Dishes are buried there is full, officially loaded with Christmas space. <v Speaker>Now, the Intuit's home has become a place where southerners dream of plenty, <v Speaker>plenty of oil. <v Speaker>Saturday night sends a business writer, Peter Foster, to the Arctic. <v Speaker>He's a pessimist by nature and he's come to witness the collapse of the Canadian <v Speaker>government's most optimistic driven, they dream <v Speaker>that Canadians might someday control Canadian oil. <v Speaker>And they spent billions to push back the frontier of Arctic technology. <v Speaker>And the price of oil fell. It's ironic that you've got people up here with tremendous

<v Speaker>sort of technological skill and tattled. <v Speaker>You could plop them in the middle of nowhere and they will build things like this. <v Speaker>But if you get the wrong economic signals, then they're here and nothing comes out of the <v Speaker>end of it. You know, there are technological advances, but. <v Speaker>It hasn't always been for nothing. <v Speaker>You know, Canada was built was public money. <v Speaker>But Foster's chosen to write about failure, the rigs in the Beaufort Sea are <v Speaker>closing. <v Speaker>The men he interviews are going home to drop the rudder and check <v Speaker>the rudder stock. Pull the tail shaft. <v Speaker>We have done readings on Barry. <v Speaker>He's come to watch a multi-million dollar dry dock lift its last ship from the Arctic <v Speaker>Sea. <v Speaker>For a conservative like Foster, it's a perfect symbol of what's wrong with the Canadian <v Speaker>government's involvement in business.

<v Speaker>They said, you know, we will give you 80 percent of your costs. <v Speaker>And they came up with an estimate. <v Speaker>And then they then they found it unusual that when they offered these things, people were <v Speaker>actually bashing down the door to get the money, because it was it was perverse <v Speaker>because it was reward not for finding oil or for being successful. <v Speaker>It was 80 percent of your costs just for activity. <v Speaker>Just get out there and do it and be Canadian doing it. <v Speaker>And we will give you lots of money for doing it. <v Speaker>When oil money came to a cariboo crossing at the top of the planet, business picked <v Speaker>up for Eddy Grubin and he didn't use a dog sled to do the hauling. <v Speaker>She owned the yard here. The whole yard a whole lot. <v Speaker>You know, you give me a contract over four million dollars that I was completely dodging <v Speaker>for months, hauling gravel 60 miles away from here. <v Speaker>They're the ones that really boosted my business. <v Speaker>This poor girl here. <v Speaker>The Inuit made money when there was money to be made.

<v Speaker>It helps subsidize their hunting. <v Speaker>But they'd seen southerners come and go before. <v Speaker>They weren't surprised when a newly elected government decided to cut its losses and shut <v Speaker>things down. <v Speaker>As far as this is concerned as a whole, we feeling depressed inevitably <v Speaker>because talk is a kind of a depressed place, but also because of so <v Speaker>much technology has been there's been the frontiers of technology being pushed out here <v Speaker>and now it's it's really all going to be lost along with the men who pushed it out, like <v Speaker>these characters who are coming out now are going away perhaps for the last time. <v Speaker>There's hundreds of years of combined engineering and drilling and <v Speaker>marine technology and all kinds of experience here. <v Speaker>And these guys won't be back and they won't even have jobs when they get back down south. <v Speaker>And that's that's a big tragedy there. I think. <v Speaker>Foster leaves the north and the last charter jet out of touch to actor.

<v Speaker>A realist to the end, he doubts his story will cause much of a stir. <v Speaker>Yeah, I mean, you know, you're right something because I guess you think you're writing <v Speaker>something that's true and you're hoping lymphoid, some supporters, <v Speaker>some feelings or, you know, cause people to do things differently, but you to be totally <v Speaker>sure that it will. <v Speaker>So we've got to get right. <v Speaker>Certainly it isn't going to change the way they do things and talk to the. <v Speaker>For or heading down to the beach now Yeah, <v Speaker>Maybe we should wait till we get to there. <v Speaker>Swimming. In these 20 to. <v Speaker>You weird?

<v Speaker>Know how many? <v Speaker>Just him to this little man standing in the midst of all that hardware, <v Speaker>all that hardware that's now next to useless. <v Speaker>The Canadian flag flying proudly. <v Speaker>What do you like him here? <v Speaker>This series of national dreams always risk failure in Canada. <v Speaker>So the national magazine's publisher, John McFarlane, faces stiff <v Speaker>American competition in a tiny domestic market. <v Speaker>The odds aren't good if we get a quarter of the strong potentials. <v Speaker>That's another 10 to 30 pages practically there. <v Speaker>So Macfarlane has staked the future of Saturday night on the success of the anniversary <v Speaker>issue, and he's depending on his sales manager, Vicki, mongered to sell 100

<v Speaker>pages of advertising pages as actual, not 100 clients. <v Speaker>Right. They're nowhere near. Their goal was to drum up business. <v Speaker>McFarland has recently announced that sales are strong and space <v Speaker>is running out. <v Speaker>Say yes, because we know we're going to have 50 percent of the 50s. <v Speaker>We always do. <v Speaker>So you better know. <v Speaker>You better by no means you are in competition asking. <v Speaker>I'm not. You know. <v Speaker>And you can see it's none of your business but there. But they're going to say, well, <v Speaker>you're right. And don't say that. Say yes. <v Speaker>Well, I have to say yes. Writing all over the place. <v Speaker>I don't. I got to say that. I know I know that even <v Speaker>if you want me to like all like I just wanted a real <v Speaker>winner when it shooting distance of 70 today, my assumption is by Monday will be will be <v Speaker>close to seventy five. <v Speaker>So what we had to we had to run we had to pick the number before we ran <v Speaker>the ad and we picked up. We were pretty damn close.

<v Speaker>Optimistic. Yeah. <v Speaker>The photographer is driving up with her from Toronto. <v Speaker>Who's shooting her? Robert Nelson. <v Speaker>Who did? Charles Richie. <v Speaker>She might try and more or less dictate the photograph. <v Speaker>So he may have to resist that. <v Speaker>Yeah. You know, she always says, for example, why don't you let Graham do it? <v Speaker>Her husband, who is a photographer and who does your jacket, photographs and so on, <v Speaker>and is often quite, you know, almost insistent. <v Speaker>Margaret Atwood is always insistent. <v Speaker>She was born in a country that ignored its poets. <v Speaker>Now her work is internationally acclaimed and in Canada she makes sure <v Speaker>she's never ignored. <v Speaker>For Saturday night, she drives eight hours north from Toronto to write about what <v Speaker>makes Canadians. <v Speaker>Every country has its own conception of itself, its geographical mythology,

<v Speaker>if you like, a place that represents the unconscious <v Speaker>or the mysterious place or the place of adventure or the place you go to <v Speaker>encountering your deepest self in England <v Speaker>in the 19th and early 20th centuries. <v Speaker>That place was Africa, hence Joseph Conrad. <v Speaker>Heart of darkness. <v Speaker>For some people, it's the desert. <v Speaker>You know, you go out into the desert to make this spiritual journey. <v Speaker>And for Canadians, it's the north. <v Speaker>No doubt about it. <v Speaker>I would spend summers here as a child. <v Speaker>Now, whenever she can get away, she comes back to the place she trusts. <v Speaker>When we face south, as we often do, our conscious mind may be directed <v Speaker>down there towards crowds, bright lights, some Hollywood version <v Speaker>of fame and fortune. But the North is at the back of our minds.

<v Speaker>Always there's something, not someone looking over our shoulders. <v Speaker>There's a chill at the nape of the neck. <v Speaker>It's tangling in there and dim and one tree does begin to look remarkably <v Speaker>like another, believes the needles blow it up sound and you begin to <v Speaker>feel watched not by anyone, not by an animal even <v Speaker>or anything you can put a name to. <v Speaker>Just watched you begin to feel judged. <v Speaker>It's as if something is keeping an eye on you just to see what you will do. <v Speaker>Atwood wrote a book called Survival. <v Speaker>It sold well in Canada. <v Speaker>Survival is something Canadians understand. <v Speaker>Part of being Canadian is knowing that few foreigners know who you are or <v Speaker>what you value. <v Speaker>Bad hunters, bad fishers, everyone has the story.

<v Speaker>You come upon a campsite way in the back of beyond. <v Speaker>No roads into the lake. They must have come in by floatplane. <v Speaker>And there it is, garbage all over the place. <v Speaker>Beer cans, blobs of human poop flagged by melting toilet paper <v Speaker>and 22 fine pickrell left riding on a rock. <v Speaker>Business executives who get themselves flown in during hunting season with their high <v Speaker>powered rifles shoot a buck, cut off the head, fill their quota, <v Speaker>see another one with a bigger spread of antlers. <v Speaker>Drop the first head, cut off the second. <v Speaker>The woods are littered with discarded heads. <v Speaker>And who cares about the bodies? <v Speaker>Canadians don't live in the wilderness. <v Speaker>Most live in cities near the U.S. border. <v Speaker>But Atwood believes that what makes them Canadian is the knowledge that wilderness lies <v Speaker>just to their north, even <v Speaker>as far back as the beginning of the 20th century.

<v Speaker>Canadians are writing animal stories in which the animal, the hero <v Speaker>and the person hunting the animal was the villain. <v Speaker>There does seem to be this collective feeling for animals. <v Speaker>Notice what we put on the money so that on the one hand, although <v Speaker>Canada was built on dead beavers, you know the fur trade, <v Speaker>on the other hand, we seem to have developed as a fellow feeling <v Speaker>for nature, not as a big awesome thing that is going to do you in, <v Speaker>but as something that needs your help. <v Speaker>The industrial heartland of America lies just south of the Canadian border. <v Speaker>And if the North is central to Canadians view of themselves, then nothing says more <v Speaker>about their relationship with the United States than acid rain. <v Speaker>So instead of thing, if thinking in terms of always, there will always <v Speaker>be trees. There will always be resources.

<v Speaker>There will always be nature. <v Speaker>We think in terms of yet it hasn't disappeared yet or we think in <v Speaker>terms of still we still have it. <v Speaker>Those two words have entered the vocabulary and we tend to unconsciously <v Speaker>or consciously stick them into every pronouncement we make about the north. <v Speaker>It's still there. <v Speaker>It hasn't gone yet. <v Speaker>Saturday night commissionʼs A Story on Canada U.S. <v Speaker>relations. The word is no name. <v Speaker>Generally, I don't think that my essays work particularly well when they've chosen a <v Speaker>writer who was born in Canada. I take your point. <v Speaker>He's a famous American now just to see. <v Speaker>They've asked for revisions and they're not surprised by John Kenneth Galbraith <v Speaker>reply. <v Speaker>I do have a slight reservation as to your suggestion. <v Speaker>The piece as it stands, subject 20 needed editorial corrections <v Speaker>is very much in the style with which I'm comfortable.

<v Speaker>Perhaps excessively so, and I am uneasy about <v Speaker>the slight artificiality in the suggestion you make. <v Speaker>The problem is not that he's using his usual style. <v Speaker>The problem is that he's not putting into it any effort [exactly] his pieces, much <v Speaker>less good than his run of the mill reports for The New York Review of Books. <v Speaker>When you look at that piece, you see a problem we have <v Speaker>in commissioning people outside Canada because outside <v Speaker>the country, few people read Saturday night. <v Speaker>You write for Saturday night-. <v Speaker>It's a magazine about Canada. <v Speaker>And what happens in Canada isn't uppermost in the mind of an American economist <v Speaker>saying something. <v Speaker>But basically, I mean, when he speaks in New York Review, he's speaking to <v Speaker>most of the people he knows in the world. <v Speaker>In a speech on Saturday night, he's speaking to a few people who used to know one and a <v Speaker>few people he still knows. And it doesn't really matter. <v Speaker>Few people are likely to recognize Galbraith in Saturday night's photograph. <v Speaker>The photographer Owen Carey illuminated him with a yellow gel on this side and

<v Speaker>a red gel on that side. I don't know what his colors mean. <v Speaker>I mean, it's aesthetic to look at. <v Speaker>But there was a problem because she thought that the Canadian flag colors like red and <v Speaker>green. <v Speaker>Is she a New York photographer? <v Speaker>She's from New York. <v Speaker>But then she defended it by saying that Green was perhaps like the freshness of the <v Speaker>pine trees of Canada. That's [ right.] It doesn't quite work for me. <v Speaker>Living next to the United States sometimes requires a sense of humor. <v Speaker>One of Canada's funniest writers, Mordecai Richler, submits a story <v Speaker>set in the townships east of Montreal. <v Speaker>I didn't think you put anything like that in there. <v Speaker>Well, you want me to read it to you? [ Yeah] you sure. <v Speaker>[ Yeah, read it] I'm feeling so horny. <v Speaker>Even the crack of dawn, looks good to me.

<v Speaker>[ Read it, I got to read it]. <v Speaker>Richler doesn't worry much about where to find Canada. <v Speaker>But he thinks if it can be found anywhere, it's in a place like this. <v Speaker>Well, because it's really still small settlements <v Speaker>strung together, you know, huddling <v Speaker>against that tundra. <v Speaker>The urban culture and cities like Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver <v Speaker>is almost separate from the large sprawl of <v Speaker>small towns and villages with their legion halls and bowling <v Speaker>alleys and Chinese Canadian restaurants and little birds like this. <v Speaker>Richler writes about Canadian places for readers all over the world. <v Speaker>But if he wants to speak to Canadians about Canada, he doesn't necessarily publish <v Speaker>in Saturday night. <v Speaker>Well, I think it's really the best magazine <v Speaker>we have. And that put in American <v Speaker>terms that sort of the equivalent of Atlantic or Harper's.

<v Speaker>But Canadians are very curious people. <v Speaker>They're much more intimidated by what appears elsewhere. <v Speaker>So that the last very long pieces I've written about Canada, <v Speaker>we're an Atlantic Monthly and <v Speaker>attracted far more attention here than had they appeared on Saturday night, had <v Speaker>I written the same things on Saturday night. <v Speaker>Because Canadians are very self-conscious and anxiety-ridden <v Speaker>and tend to worry about what appears in America. <v Speaker>Ad sales are going slowly. <v Speaker>Even John McFarland's worried he's got a lot riding on the anniversary <v Speaker>issue. <v Speaker>And what does it say about this country if a magazine like Saturday night <v Speaker>ceases to exist? And indeed, I think that's why the magazine has survived,

<v Speaker>because no one can, can, can bear the thought that Canada can't <v Speaker>have a magazine like Saturday night any more than they can bear the thought that we can't <v Speaker>have the CBC, the National Gallery or. <v Speaker>That may seem to inflate what Saturday night is, but in its own small way. <v Speaker>I think it it it's it's like those <v Speaker>institutions, if we don't have those institutions, if we're simply the consumers <v Speaker>of other people's art galleries and art collections and other <v Speaker>people's films and movies, and if we're can if we're <v Speaker>condemned to read The Atlantic and Harper's and not to have our own journals <v Speaker>like this, then what's the point? <v Speaker>Right. OK, well, listen, I appreciate you reconsidering it. <v Speaker>Don't have to beg too often, but once it comes out, I'll make sure you get a copy. <v Speaker>I think you'll really like it. <v Speaker>What are you going to do if we don't get to 100?

<v Speaker>Because I'm running out fast. <v Speaker>Ok you gotta get me a list. pick uh, get together an advising. <v Speaker>Things don't look very good. <v Speaker>But McFarland's hoping the Royal Bank will buy 16 pages. <v Speaker>Hello. Hiya. <v Speaker>Good, how are you? <v Speaker>Really? Oh, that's too bad. <v Speaker>The largest bank in the country and thinks ten thousand dollars a page is just <v Speaker>a little steep. OK. <v Speaker>Thanks. Bye. <v Speaker>It's hard to do business in a country that lacks a consensus about itself. <v Speaker>But some people believe that might just be Canada's greatest strength. <v Speaker>I think Canadians have built a pretty good nation state, one

<v Speaker>that mostly keeps out of their way. <v Speaker>It provides the services they want and it doesn't demand blind allegiance. <v Speaker>It doesn't demand a quasi religious devotion. <v Speaker>It asks us to be good citizens to it, to pay <v Speaker>our bills, pay our taxes and so on. <v Speaker>And then it it says that within this context you can believe what you want to believe. <v Speaker>You don't even you can believe in anything. <v Speaker>And you don't have to believe in Ottawa. You don't have to believe that there is a super <v Speaker>natural quality to the Canadian federal state. <v Speaker>There isn't. It's a political arrangement. <v Speaker>And within that political arrangement, any kind of regionalism <v Speaker>or localism can flourish. <v Speaker>A quarter of Canada's population speaks French. <v Speaker>But the anniversary issue doesn't have much to say about Quebec.

<v Speaker>It concentrates on a smaller place. <v Speaker>A tiny French speaking world in the province of New Brunswick clings to the Atlantic <v Speaker>coast. <v Speaker>For Saturday night, Anthonine m.i.a. <v Speaker>writes about Acadia. <v Speaker>She was born here in bucktoothed. <v Speaker>Now she is one of the most celebrated writers in the French speaking world. <v Speaker>For Saturday night, she comes back home and writes about discovering buried <v Speaker>treasures, treasures and stories from Acadia, and they were <v Speaker>passed on to her by her aunt. <v Speaker>Eventually, she would say aunt <v Speaker>Evangeline that she has seen many men <v Speaker>gone in the morning and not come back in her long life because Aunt <v Speaker>Evangeline lived for, I think, ninety five years and her- in her life. <v Speaker>She has seen many. <v Speaker>She has seen some of her sons that she thought were not coming back. <v Speaker>One of these sons, Ivan, right here.

<v Speaker>He was declared dead. He wouldn't come back. <v Speaker>Tante Evangeline wouldn't believe that. <v Speaker>And she refused to go to the funerals, to the mass <v Speaker>that was said for the lost boy, she said no. <v Speaker>Something tells me that he's going to come back and he did. <v Speaker>One day he just came back, he was alive. <v Speaker>So tante Evangeline was that type of woman that would not believe that <v Speaker>death could be stronger than her own instinct of life. <v Speaker>She had felt life in her bosom, in her body, and she knew the son is <v Speaker>still alive. <v Speaker>Long ago, it was instinct that kept the Acadians together. <v Speaker>When the British forced them from their land. <v Speaker>They fled south and wandered through America for years. <v Speaker>Some stayed and became the Cajuns. <v Speaker>But Evangeline loved to tell the stories of the few who were determined to come back

<v Speaker>before they died and the stories of a struggle to return to the difficult land <v Speaker>they called their home. <v Speaker>Here she raised her 15 children, spinning tales of her people's history <v Speaker>from the events of ordinary lives. <v Speaker>Looking at a thing like that where the kids look at the ball going away. <v Speaker>That would inspire eventually and say, well, it's not <v Speaker>a ball that we had. We had men and we couldn't reach <v Speaker>them. And the women were here on this side of the ocean <v Speaker>and they were getting up to their knees in the water, having their arms like that. <v Speaker>Trying to tell the men how to cross the gully. <v Speaker>And they would see the boats rolling, tipping, <v Speaker>see some men drowning, see others go further. <v Speaker>And they were trying to tell them, go, don't try to come. <v Speaker>Just go beyond, Go as far as Prince Edward Island and go as far as England.

<v Speaker>But don't come back because you can't make it. <v Speaker>Aunt Evangeline past the treasures of Acadia onto Antonine Myia. <v Speaker>Now the stories are acclaimed in Paris and Montreal. <v Speaker>But Evangeline wouldn't be impressed. <v Speaker>For her, stories were just a way of remembering. <v Speaker>Evangeline tante Evangeline. <v Speaker>Oujourdhui c'est vous le symbol de l'Acadie. <v Speaker>C'est vous que m'avais dit, une Evangeline c'est pas fait pour être debout sur un <v Speaker>socle au train de garde l'occident, une vierge de 18 ans. <v Speaker>La vrais Evangeline, c'est vous, qui avait vécu jusqu'a 95 <v Speaker>ans. Qui avait eu 15 enfants. <v Speaker>Qui avait sortie des enfants de la mer. <v Speaker>Qui avait etait celle qui a regardez vers l'avenir, qui avait le país, <v Speaker>il est a nous. <v Speaker>Move that flag further this way. Yeah.

<v Speaker>It's a it's a very unusual way to present somebody that, you know, <v Speaker>flat out and becoming part of the landscape with with the newness of <v Speaker>of the future sort of growing out of her face. <v Speaker>It's it's really something that um. <v Speaker>Art directors like to pursue unusual images. <v Speaker>They aren't always what editors have in mind. <v Speaker>Fortunately, Saturday night's subject is Canada and few people share the same <v Speaker>vision of what Canada is. <v Speaker>Canada is a place that. <v Speaker>Cannot be said to have developed a consensus about even its own past. <v Speaker>Even the most important moments in its past in certain <v Speaker>countries, many countries, there are key moments in the national <v Speaker>past which everyone agrees upon. <v Speaker>Everyone is expected to agree about the French Revolution. <v Speaker>For example, it would be a good example.

<v Speaker>Britain's victory over Hitler would be another example. <v Speaker>The Revolutionary War in the United States. <v Speaker>Another example. Most countries have these key moments. <v Speaker>Which provide them with an ideology unifying point <v Speaker>of view, a something to begin with, when they begin talking <v Speaker>about their history or their life or why they are doing what they're doing. <v Speaker>We haven't got that. <v Speaker>Canadians don't even mythologize their wars. <v Speaker>They don't expect to be remembered as heroes. <v Speaker>They keep their own memories. <v Speaker>They hold their parades, not to celebrate victories, <v Speaker>just to remember their dead. <v Speaker>Saturday night commissionʼs a story about the fading memories of a legion hall in <v Speaker>the Atlantic province of New Brunswick. <v Speaker>Purley Haines has lived here all his life.

<v Speaker>He was 16 when he enlisted. <v Speaker>Every year on November 11th, Purley drives to the Royal Canadian <v Speaker>Legion Hall in Fredericton to mark Remembrance Day with his friends. <v Speaker>For 40 years, the ritual hasn't changed. <v Speaker>There was a time when Canadians fought for England, but after two <v Speaker>world wars, the British Empire is just a memory. <v Speaker>Now poppies grow on the graves of Canadian soldiers who died in Uganda. <v Speaker>It's very often a lot more of a case for more

<v Speaker>than. <v Speaker>Yesterday, all the candidates. <v Speaker> play our part <v Speaker>here. Oh, it's a male. <v Speaker>He admits that many junior. <v Speaker>After the parade, Purley visits his old friend Lloyd in the veterans hospital

<v Speaker>where he's been for more than 20 years. <v Speaker>Well, here. <v Speaker>Now you will reptile's on D-Day. <v Speaker>They landed on the beaches of Normandy, along with 20000 other Canadians. <v Speaker>They fought through France, Belgium and Holland. <v Speaker>For Lloyd, those were the good old days. <v Speaker>Would you go back? Loved it. <v Speaker>Loved it, loved it. Why Jesus Christ. <v Speaker>You know, if we had the same bunch. <v Speaker>We lost quite a few to the con and called Bel Air. <v Speaker>We had a pretty good bunch, we had a good bunch. <v Speaker>There's a name from that bunch. Lloyd can't remember. <v Speaker>It's Remembrance Day in France and memories are all he has left. <v Speaker>I just lost me. <v Speaker>I know that. A death panel.

<v Speaker>Oh, Jesus. <v Speaker>Oh, they worked there. <v Speaker>Jesus Christ. <v Speaker>Worked towards. <v Speaker>Oh, shit. No, please. <v Speaker>Yeah. <v Speaker>Yeah. <v Speaker>Well, we could transfer it in my mind. <v Speaker>I could probably tell you who. <v Speaker>I can't say I <v Speaker>no. <v Speaker>You feel real good to see some of your old comrade again. <v Speaker>If you feel real bad when you see someone who are <v Speaker>less fortunate, you are.

<v Speaker>You feel bad for them. <v Speaker>Purloin. We are here. <v Speaker>Here and here. <v Speaker>You know, I don't know what maybe man, probably better off dead, <v Speaker>but they don't look out that way. <v Speaker>Life is just sweet. Delivers it to you and I guess. <v Speaker>I didn't expect it. My name's Robertson Davis. <v Speaker>English Canada's finest novelist, has written an essay for the anniversary issue. <v Speaker>Gary Roth's reception inspired by a cathedral in <v Speaker>downtown Toronto.

<v Speaker>The essay is concerned with the Canadian soul. <v Speaker>Canada is a country which has to be viewed psychologically if you're going to understand <v Speaker>it at all, because externally it is not <v Speaker>a country of remarkable differences from the United States or indeed from any other, <v Speaker>in a broad sense, civilized northern country. <v Speaker>But psychologically, it has its own individuality and it's a very important <v Speaker>one. It's the soul of people comfortable. <v Speaker>I think it's far more to the Scandinavians. <v Speaker>And if I did say it to an American audience, to the Russians, <v Speaker>than it is to Great Britain or to the United States, it is introspective. <v Speaker>It is a very sober, very quiet, very introverted <v Speaker>and full of strong feeling. <v Speaker>The editorial deadline is fast approaching, satisfying look after the war. <v Speaker>Oh, listen, I get your or I'm going to see if it occurs to <v Speaker>me.

<v Speaker>I'm going to say what the other are the words as exceptional as the design. <v Speaker>Boy, those are fighting. Those are fighting words. <v Speaker>Hey. <v Speaker>We've already gone around this whole question of are the lines sucky or <v Speaker>the lines form or that was the headline, etc.. <v Speaker>What was the headline? And also the underlying using the phrase a celebration and so <v Speaker>on. <v Speaker>I think this case is closed, Sergeant, since. <v Speaker>The ad deadline is today. <v Speaker>It's really great. He says he hasn't any money now. <v Speaker>They're only really after a ball. Sure. <v Speaker>OK. <v Speaker>That's one page, one more page. <v Speaker>Macfarlane is within the reach of his goal. <v Speaker>They've sold almost 100 pages of advertising to pick up, but editorial <v Speaker>keeps spending money. I know it's having problems with its last story. <v Speaker>I'm less happy with it. And I think perhaps the others are.

<v Speaker>And I think David has to go back one more time and rework it. <v Speaker>It's such a dicey thing. <v Speaker>The themes are so need to be so delicately handled or they're <v Speaker>banal in a way that is the cycle of life and death, the country values <v Speaker>versus urban values. The man or men and the women are women in a traditional way that <v Speaker>they aren't cities. <v Speaker>David McFarland had never set foot on a farm before he came from downtown Toronto <v Speaker>to Red Deer, Alberta, to write about Bob La Grange. <v Speaker>You know, some of the best land in the world here. <v Speaker>Rich black loom. <v Speaker>La granges work 900 acres, growing barley to feed their pigs.

<v Speaker>Saturday night's editors expected an article on the economics of farming. <v Speaker>What they got was a little more earnest. <v Speaker>If they had been described to me before I came out here, I'm not sure that <v Speaker>I would have said perhaps I wouldn't have liked them or I wouldn't have ended up <v Speaker>respecting them as much as as much as I have, because our lives are so <v Speaker>different. Our values are so different. <v Speaker>What I admire and respect most about them, I think, is that <v Speaker>they're so firmly committed to them, they really understand what their values <v Speaker>are and they live by them. <v Speaker>Mcfarlin thought he'd learn a few things if he helped with the chores. <v Speaker>That's pig language. All right. <v Speaker>But women La Grange has let him work in the Barnes. <v Speaker>It wasn't the price of hogs that caught his attention.

<v Speaker>Now, this is a male and he has two little testicles that have to come <v Speaker>out and a very simple surgical procedure. <v Speaker>Care of that? <v Speaker>And we're even so good to him that we don't see any blood. <v Speaker>Very clean cut. They're gone forever and the animal doesn't even miss him anymore. <v Speaker>He's gonna go right back to his mother and nurse. <v Speaker>He learned that the Lagrange is a devout Catholics and that for them, God can <v Speaker>be seen in the cycles of birth and death that they live by. <v Speaker>Well, I love the miracle. I love to watch. <v Speaker>I love to watch it. I never get tired of watching it. <v Speaker>It's beautiful. <v Speaker>And it's very simple. It's the way God intended it to be <v Speaker>very uncomplicated and very beautiful. <v Speaker>Every fall, the La Grange is harvest their barley.

<v Speaker>Everything they have depends on the weather. <v Speaker>But this fall, the rain hasn't stopped long enough for the grain to dry. <v Speaker>How bad the harvest is the latest it's ever been. <v Speaker>And the is cannot wait much longer. <v Speaker>Three. Yeah. Hey. <v Speaker>Okay. Yeah. <v Speaker>That would be dry. No, it doesn't feel right. <v Speaker>You just slip through your fingers at home. <v Speaker>Macfarlane learned that for the La granges farm, life is more than just agriculture. <v Speaker>Public greens moved his family here so they could live by the values he believes in. <v Speaker>18 years old when I married her. <v Speaker>There were never been on a farm in her life. <v Speaker>But she's the kind of a gal that was willing to follow her man anywhere he <v Speaker>went. She's a mother of seven children. <v Speaker>Grandmother of four. She runs that combine just as good as any man.

<v Speaker>She cooks, she can sew. <v Speaker>I don't think she'll ever get old. <v Speaker>Keeps me young, too, but the heck else can I ask for it, eh? <v Speaker>I'm a lucky guy. <v Speaker>Going don't think she's just as lucky. <v Speaker>She married a young Mountie. And in those days, Bob looks like Elvis Presley. <v Speaker>Oh, it was great. It was really great. <v Speaker>I was the envy of everybody at school, especially. <v Speaker>I think the fact that he had a bright red uniform that was going <v Speaker>to be of all the girls. <v Speaker>But no, those were the good days. <v Speaker>They're still good. I think I did very well. <v Speaker>Yes, could I have a long range weather forecast, please? <v Speaker>OK, I've got it.

<v Speaker>My teacher said that you're going <v Speaker>to have cold Arctic low come in and <v Speaker>she's going to have snow close to the foothills. <v Speaker>I think we'd better go. <v Speaker>That means we only got about four days left <v Speaker>already at this time of the year and it's just late in October. <v Speaker>You don't wait. You move. <v Speaker>We had winter set in on the 9th of October one year and died. <v Speaker>You just don't take any chances. <v Speaker>It could be beautiful like this. <v Speaker>And then within an hour, everything turned black and snow. <v Speaker>You just don't wait. <v Speaker>Time is running out on the La granges firm, faith and Family Values

<v Speaker>or a matter of survival. <v Speaker>I don't care who you are, you're going to be faced with a trauma, a crisis in your <v Speaker>life sooner or later. <v Speaker>You just can't escape, it doesn't matter what kind of a family you have, <v Speaker>how strong and impregnable you think you're your walls are, <v Speaker>you're going to have a crisis or a trauma, something sad. <v Speaker>And you need you need other people or you need a faith, you need something to hang <v Speaker>on to. <v Speaker>When I come to a place like this and meet people like the La granges. <v Speaker>They affect me in a way, perhaps in a way that's surprising to me. <v Speaker>I don't expect them to have that effect on me. <v Speaker>I have to go back home and think hard about things that either I've taken <v Speaker>for granted or haven't thought hard enough about. <v Speaker>It's pretty easy to go through life without ever really deciding whether you believe in <v Speaker>God or not. They've decided. <v Speaker>They've they've really decided. <v Speaker>As the Arctic front approaches, half their crop is still lying in the fields.

<v Speaker>The next day, winter arrives in Red Deer. <v Speaker>Before he returns to Toronto, McFarland decides to show the La Grange as his <v Speaker>story. It's a serious piece about life and death <v Speaker>and he's anxious to know what they'll think. <v Speaker>I'll tell you for an eighth till when we might not get our crop <v Speaker>and sure, this is sure good entertainment, <v Speaker>it should be said. And but I'll tell you everything. <v Speaker>Oh, isn't that nice? That's fantastic. <v Speaker>That has a beautiful story. That's a beautiful story. <v Speaker>That, is really beautiful. <v Speaker>I just can't imagine.

<v Speaker>To put in such a way that would be so funny with what we think is rather just a routine <v Speaker>life, too. <v Speaker>That's what writers do. <v Speaker>A year after the first writer was commissioned, the anniversary issue rolls <v Speaker>off the presses. <v Speaker>Wait a minute, there's some mistake. These are too heavy. <v Speaker>John McFarland thinks his gamble has paid off. <v Speaker>Now he has even bigger plans for Saturday night. <v Speaker>All the time, maintaining a high standard of leader in the field. <v Speaker>I know they believe you think Vicki <v Speaker>Monger suspects that whatever he has in mind, it will be a hard sell? <v Speaker>Yeah, yeah, sure. Bruce was sure.

<v Speaker>Any easy knocking cover up Bob Fulford <v Speaker>is pleased to note that the anniversary issue arrives at no consensus about <v Speaker>what Canada is. <v Speaker>I just love touching. <v Speaker>I have never enjoyed touching a magazine quite as much as this one. <v Speaker>But this issue was one of his last. <v Speaker>Six months later, Saturday night sold. <v Speaker>John McFarland was replaced as publisher. <v Speaker>After his first meeting with the new owners, Bob Fulford resigned. <v Speaker>Somehow we never imagined it could be run by anyone else. <v Speaker>When we were all working together at Saturday night, we believed we were telling <v Speaker>important stories about our country. <v Speaker>Maybe we were. <v Speaker>It just never occurred to us that it might slip away.

<v Speaker>Major funding for Canada. True, North is provided by the Corporation for

<v Speaker>Public Broadcasting, this station and other public television stations. <v Speaker>And the William H. Donner Foundation. <v Speaker>New York. New York.