High Commissioner hails How the Scots Invented Canada

Scotland’s gifts to Canada

January 25, 2012

Robbie Burns statue, Victoria Park in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. The statue was erected by the North British Society of Halifax in 1919. Sculpture by G.A. Lawson.

By Andrew Pocock
January the 25^th is Burns Night, an anniversary globally celebrated. It’s right and proper, therefore, to reflect for a moment on the Scottish contribution to Canada.
I was given a book the other day, modestly titled: How the Scots Invented Canada, by Ken McGoogan.
It points, not without evidence, to the seminal contribution made by Scots to Canada’s exploration, politics, economy, education and literature. It claims that almost 5 million Canadians, a goodly quantum, identify themselves as Scottish. That’s as large as the entire population of Scotland!
Early arrivals included explorers Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and James Douglas, pushing West and North, giving their names to mighty rivers and trees.
On the east coast, Scots landed at Pictou, and named a new Province: Nova Scotia.
Encouraged by Lord Selkirk and John Galt, thousands of Scots moved to the Maritimes and Upper Canada, in search of wide-open spaces, new lives and opportunities, and as much distance as possible from the Sassenachs.
In their wake came the nation-builders like Donald Smith, George Brown and perhaps the greatest of them all, Glasgow-born John A Macdonald, in whose Ottawa house British High Commissioners have lived for 80 years.
And Scots continued, in modern times, to contribute to Canada’s present and future.
They include the media guru and philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who introduced us to the concept of the global village;
The impassioned writer and naturalist Farley Mowat;
Alice Munro, winner of both the Booker Prize and the Governor-General’s Award;
And those Ken McGoogan calls “hybrid Scots”: including Bill Reid, the Haida-Scottish carver of monumental sculptures; John Diefenbaker, with a German name from his father, but a Scottish Canadian mother, whose destination was “one Canada”; and another Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, also the son of a Scottish Canadian mother. . . .
Let’s raise a dram, for auld lang syne.

Wade Davis tackles Mount Everest

Our Hero turns up today in the Globe and Mail, lauding the latest book from Wade Davis:

. . . Into the Silence is a complex, subversive work, a postcolonial refashioning of an imperialist adventure. Davis, a Canadian anthropologist and explorer, is rightly celebrated for introducing indigenous perspectives into the mainstream. Here, he continues that work while telling a terrific adventure story and affirming as sublime the hubristic madness of assaulting the highest mountain in the world “because it’s there.”


The familiar mountaineering story, man against nature, is here vividly rendered: the difficult treks to Base Camp, the struggles to locate a feasible route, the debilitating effects of altitude sickness, the cold, the fog, the wind-whipping snow, the frostbite, the avalanches, the slips and the tumbles, and the life-and-death choices that confront climbers at altitudes above 23,000 feet.


Davis paints an engaging portrait of Englishman George Mallory, the greatest mountaineer of the age, who emerges as brave and athletic but profoundly flawed. Probably we did not need to learn so much about his early adventures in homoeroticism. But the most meaningful revisionism here is broader and more political, in that Davis responds to the attitudes outlined in the first paragraph of this review. Specifically, he sets the record straight about two remarkable “colonials” – one Canadian and one Australian – who, in the countless retellings of the initial assaults on Everest, have received nothing like the recognition they deserve. . . . [To continue reading, click on the headline.]

Canadian Voyage Makes History in Greenland

By Ken McGoogan
(www.travelthruhistory.com)

None of us expected our voyage to make history, not when we boarded the Clipper Adventurer in Kugluktuk (Coppermine), near the west end of the Northwest Passage. True, our cruise was billed as an expeditionary adventure. But we numbered roughly one hundred and twenty, most of us were over sixty, and we were sailing in comfort if not luxury: white linen tablecloths in the dining room, a well-stocked bar in the forward lounge, and a staff of expert presenters that included scientists, Inuit culturalists, and authors Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood.

Hundreds of ships had plied these northern waters since the early 1800s, when the British Admiralty began to chart the Arctic archipelago while seeking a trade route across the top of North America. So nobody even dreamed of achieving a first of any kind. We forgot that climate change has made a difference. We did not anticipate that this year, the Arctic would have the second lowest extent of sea ice in recorded history. We did not expect that, according to the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the pack ice would reach its least extent just as we arrived in northwest Greenland.

But on September 10, one day after it did so, we sailed into Rensselaer Bay, where in the mid-1850s, explorer Elisha Kent Kane spent two terrible winters trapped in the ice. And three days after that, as on Day Thirteen of our voyage we approached the island town of Upernavik, I went to the bridge. As the staff historian, I needed to announce the surprising news.

By now, everybody on board knew that we had reached a latitude above 79 degrees. We had achieved a "farthest north" for Adventure Canada, which regularly runs voyages like this one into the Arctic. Everybody knew that, although a number of explorers had travelled by dogsled in this region, very few ships (if any) had entered Rensselaer Bay since 1853, when Kane got trapped there in the Advance. And everybody knew that in 1855 -- decades before Ernest Shackleton made his name with a spectacular, small-boat voyage in the Antarctic -- Kane led sixteen men in an extraordinary, 980-kilometre escape along the Greenland coast. . . .
(To read the rest, click on the headline)

Into the Northwest Passage

Readers of Fatal Passage may recall that a dozen years ago, with Cameron Treleaven and Louie Kamookak, I erected a plaque honouring Doctor John Rae at the spot where he discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage. This August, I'll be sailing Into the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada. We are hoping that, for the first time, we will be able to visit that plaque. This will involve finding a landing spot near Point de la Guiche, but I vividly remember that locale and we have our fingers crossed. For details re: this voyage, which has a superb itinerary, click on the headline above. Maybe see you in August!

Online writing through the New York Times

Anyone looking for an online writing course might want to check out The New York Times Knowledge Network, which is offering The Art of Fact: An Introduction to Writing Nonfiction: January 23 - March 30, 2012
Instructor: Ken McGoogan

The hallmarks of Creative, Literary or Narrative Nonfiction are truth and personal presence. The genre includes subjective and objective streams, and encompasses memoir, autobiography, biography, history, adventure, travel, and true crime. The writer of nonfiction employs memory, imagination, analysis, and research, and adapts literary techniques from fiction, journalism, and the essay. This craft-oriented course aims to enhance your ability to tell true stories. We will explore point of view, scene-making, flashbacks, fast-forwards, fat moments, personal presence, and the rolling now. The instructor will introduce a concept or technique and provide examples and illustrations. Participants will apply that idea in an exercise, and share exercises and assignments through the Discussion Board.

Related Institutions: University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies

Find out more by clicking on our headline.

Scotland's First Minister proves a discerning reader

Rumour has it that Alex Salmond, an aficionado of the poetry of Robbie Burns, knows a good book when he sees one. As Scotland's First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, he has provided this appreciation of Our Hero's latest book:

"In 'How the Scots Invented Canada', Ken McGoogan has delivered a celebration of the inextricable and treasured ties between our two great nations. His insightful and intelligent portrayal of our shared heritage surely draws its inspiration from the many Scots who have led the way in shaping Canada, from early settlers who carved Nova Scotia from harsh northern lands to Glasgow born Sir John A Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, who united Canada with his national vision and the construction of the world's longest railway.

"In the intimate portrayals of Scots-Canadians past we see the enduring strengths and qualities which have helped make our countries great today. In our world-class education systems, thriving creative industries and cutting edge technology we see Scots on both sides of the Atlantic as diverse, radical and passionate as the first explorers who set foot on Canada's shores hundreds of years ago."

Our Hero reviews the winner of the Weston Prize

And the winner of the inaugural Writers' Trust Hilary Weston Prize for nonfiction, which is worth $10K more than the Giller, is . . . Charles Foran! The winning book: Mordecai:The Life & Times. Our Hero reviewed the tome in the National Post in October 2010.


Yes, this is it, the definitive biography of Mordecai Richler, one of the greatest role-model writers this country has produced. It reads more like a literary work than a scholarly one, as if flowing naturally from an immersion so deep that no note-taking was required. Yet the book is so detailed, so exhaustive, so astute and authoritative, that one can’t imagine there is anything more to add.

Biographer Charles Foran is a beautiful writer: a stylist. By 1948, he tells us, when Richler was a 17-year-old student at Sir George Williams University, already he was a “heat-seeking teenage journalist.” Within three years, Richler would be in France, working on a first novel called The Rotten People — “a screed cross-eyed with self-absorption and judgmental to the point of being hateful.” A few years later, Foran tells us, Richler would be yearning to resume work on St. Urbain’s Horseman, “a book he had been writing for too long in his head and not long enough in his study.”

So the language sweeps us along. But let’s be clear: This 727-page door-stopper is written for readers who have completed Richler 101. Those who haven’t, and who might welcome a potted biography at this point, should refer to excellent biographies by Michael Posner and Reinhold Kramer.

Mordecai: The Life & Times is a tough-minded book, worthy of its subject. It’s a warts-and-all portrait of the artist as street-fighter: ruthless, committed and lethal when cornered or simply rubbed the wrong way. Of course, the Saidye Bronfman anecdote is here. At the Montreal premiere of the movie version of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, she speaks from on high: “Well, Mordecai, you’ve come a long way for a St. Urbain’s street boy.” Our hero responds: “And you’ve come a long way for a bootlegger’s wife.”

Afterwards, in Foran’s telling, Mordecai’s wife, the long-suffering Florence — a Nora-Joyce figure but with brains and critical acumen — admonishes her husband for speaking to an elderly person in such a manner. One imagines him taking another sip of whisky.

Read the rest by clicking on the title above . . .