Canada

See also Canada & France; Canada & Quebec; Canada & United Kingdom; Canada & United States; Canada & the World; Canadians; Canadians & Americans; Confederation; Dominion; French Canada

The sayd men did moreover certify unto us, that there was the way and beginning of the great river of Hochelaga and ready way to Canada, which river the further it went the narrower it came, even unto Canada.
Jacques Cartier, explorer, journal entry, 26 July 1535, “A Shorte and Briefe Narrative” (1535), The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598), compiled by Richard Hakluyt. This is the first reference in print to the word Canada, which in Algonkian means “huts.”

The simultaneous creation of a new nationality.
Lord Monck, subsequently appointed first governor general, Throne Speech, Parliament of Canada, Quebec, 19 January 1865. The concept of “a new nationality” (as distinct from the American ideal of “a new nation”) originated in 1858 with the Montreal lawyer Alexander Morris, later appointed lieutenant-governor of Manitoba.

I protest against the local Independence man calling himself the only true Canadian. I would retort: “Little he knows of Canada, who only Canada knows.” I claim to be an Imperialist not only from the heart, but also from the head, and one of my strongest claims for Imperialism is that I believe it the only means by which there will ever be a real Canadian nation.
W. Wilfred Campbell, poet and imperialist, address, “Imperialism in Canada,” Toronto, 23 November 1904, The Empire Club of Canada.

So long Canada has remained to me a geographical fact and not anything representing a national personality with a full revelation of her life. I am afraid my present visit to these shores will hardly help me in vivifying my schoolbook knowledge into a deeper relation.
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali sage, “Farewell to Canada,” 13 April 1929, Education and Leisure: Addresses Delivered at the Fourth Triennial Conference on Education Held at Victoria and Vancouver, Canada, April 1929 (1929), edited by S.E. Lang.

Get your bags packed, everybody, and put in plenty of woollen kit. I’ve never been to Canada, but I seem to have heard that the winters there are inclined to be chilly.
Decision of character Major James Bigglesworth in Biggles Flies North (1939) in the once-popular British boys’ series by Captain W.E. Johns. For his sole Canadian adventure, Biggles heads for “Fort Beaver,” Mackenzie, North-West Territories, Canada, to clear up difficulties connected with the disappearance of an English pilot and problems with “Arctic Airways.”

Nowadays, in fact, a wonderful thing about your country is that there is hardly any part of it where something new and very valuable may not spring to life any day either on the surface of the soil or underneath it. It is a very large field but well worth looking at very carefully.
Winston Churchill, British statesman, radio broadcast from Ottawa, 30 June 1954, in David Dilks, “The Great Dominion”: Winston Churchill in Canada 1900–1954(2005).

Canada could have enjoyed: / English government, / French culture, / And American know-how. // Instead it ended up with: / English know-how, French government, / And American culture.
Free-verse poem by John Robert Colombo, “O Canada” (1965), first published in The New Romans (1968), edited by Al Purdy.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.
Jan Morris, Anglo-Welsh travel writer, “On the Confederation Special,” Travels (1976).

It is part of the civic genius—part of the Canadian genius, too—to reduce the heroic to the banal.
Jan Morris, Anglo-Welsh travel writer, “Suddenly Saskatoon,” Saturday Night, July–August 1990.

Canada is distinctly not boring, and it is largely its own fault that the world sees it so…. Canada really is one of the best of all countries—perhaps the best—and that it is boring is only because it says it is.
Jan Morris, Anglo-Welsh travel writer, “In Praise of Canada,” Toronto Star, 15 June 1992.

The French, the English following, ventured westward from Acadia and the valley of the St. Lawrence in the quest for furs and places to plant their flags. They savaged the Indians, quelled rebellions and threw back American invaders. They never grew to like each other much, yet in the end they stopped shooting and left the key under the mat for dreamers from other lands beyond the sea.
Rae Corelli, newspaperman, “The Tracks of History,” Maclean’s, 6 July 1992.

We flew over Canada of course and this is one of the first areas I saw of Canada. There was blue ice off the coast, this is Labrador. There were other areas too covered by ice and this is how you’d see it in space flight as we travelled from west to east. This is James Bay and, down from the top to the right, is the Moose River in Moosonee and further over the Albany River. When we take all these pictures, the people on the ground make us look good. We had over 3,000 frames from our flight of which 2,700 were taken of the earth. So when we came back we had to have some really smart people figure out where we were. We knew what we were looking at from space because we had a computer telling us where we were, but when we come back that’s a different story.
Roberta Bondar, astronaut, address, “The Adventure of Space,” Toronto, 22 September 1992, The Empire Club of Canada.

Put bluntly, the nation-state called Canada has become an empty shell of its former self. If you hold Canada to your ear, you can hear the ocean.
John Gray, author, Lost in North America (1994).

Too often—as a nation and as individuals—we decry what we lack, instead of celebrating what we already have. Yet to most of the world’s troubled citizens, Canada appears blessed with the mandate of heaven.
Peter C. Newman, columnist and author, “Canada Is the Solution, Not the Problem,” Defining Moments: Dispatches from an Unfinished Revolution (1997).

In a thousand years, Canada won’t be the same country it is now, nor will it probably be the same in five hundred, a hundred, fifty or even ten. My own hunch is that Vancouver will eventually evolve into a city state going as far north as Whistler, as far east as the Fraser Canyon and then to the U.S. border.
Douglas Coupland, author, City of Glass: Douglas Coupland’s Vancouver (2000).

Lately, I often have the strong feeling that my country, Canada, is fading away. We are collectively imagining a different place.
Clive Doucet, Acadian poet, “Farewell to the Place Called Home,” The Globe and Mail, 15 July 2000.

The country never fought a revolution or a civil war, pioneered no great social or political movement, produced no great world leader and committed no memorable atrocities—as one writer put it, Canada has no Lincolns, no Gettysburgs, and no Gettysburg addresses.
Steven Pearlstein, former Canadian correspondent, The Washington Post, “O Canada! A National Swan Song?” The Washington Post, 5 September 2000. Reprinted as “The Eternal Question: Will Canada Survive?” in Toronto Star, 9 September 2000. Pearlstein ignores the Rebellions of 1837–1838, the Antigonish Move­ment, the Pugwash Conferences, Green­peace, and medicare.

For all this, Canada in 2000 is potentially an imagined community of real communities which I would call post-nationalist communities. Each has its distinctive inheritance and outlook, but each is capable of membership in a wider community of shared civic values.
Ramsay Cook, historian, “Canada 2000: Towards a Post-Nationalist Canada,” Cité libre, fall 2000.

If Canada is already an object of envy around the world, imagine what it would be like when all of us—Francophones, Anglophones, Allophones and Native Peoples—decide to accept one another as we are and finally learn to live together harmoniously.
Guy Bertrand, advocate and lawyer, “Let’s Turn Over a New Page,” Cité libre, fall 2000.

We have been able to manage division, encourage commonality, accept difference, and achieve prosperity, all without bloodshed.
Ken Dryden, hockey personality, lawyer, and author, address, Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies, University of Ottawa, “The Canadian Way,” Maclean’s, 13 November 2000.

Canada had seemed to me a tolerable society but also without resolution.
Ted Honderich, Grote professor of mind and logic, University College London, born in Baden, Ont., Philosopher: A Kind of Life (2001).

Canadians may have it wrong when they focus on the founding nations rather than on the nation they founded, a nation where English and French have accommodated each other for more than two centuries, a nation respected around the world for its fairness and honesty, a nation that has fought many wars but is known for keeping the peace. And now a nation that has proved it is willing to stop hiding behind its borders.
Anthony DePalma, former correspondent for Canada and Mexico, The New York Times, Here: A Biography of the New American Continent (2001).

I sometimes think of Canada as the first postmodern nation-state, invented 150 years before the idea of post-modernity.
John Ralston Saul, philosopher, “My Canada Includes the North,” The Globe and Mail, 9 March 2001.

My sense of the Canada of the imagination, as a powerful space between old worlds and new, increased.
Pico Iyer, traveller and writer, “Mongrel Beauties,” Saturday Night, 31 March 2001.

And so Canada, although you are not my home or native land, we will always share this bond of your unstinting hospitality to people who descended upon you as frightened strangers, and received nothing but solace and solidarity in your embrace of goodness. So Canada, because we beat as one heart, from Evangeline in Louisiana to the intrepid Mr. Sukanen of Moose Jaw, I will stand on guard for thee.
Stephen Jay Gould, zoologist, “An Ode to Human Decency,” The Globe and Mail, 20 Sept­ember 2001. Gould and his family had their Milan–New York City flight diverted to Halifax on 11 September 2001 in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster.

A plain vanilla place.…
Conrad Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, publisher and historian, describing the blandness of Canada, address, Fraser Institute, Vancouver, 15 November 2001, in Greg Joye, “Black Hails His Own ‘Act of Patriotism,’” The Globe and Mail, 16 November 2001.

O Canada, as the anthem goes, / scene of my boyhood summers, / you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table, / you are the dove-soft train-whistle in the night, / you are the empty chair at the end of the empty dock.
Lines from the poem “Canada,” by Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress, found on his website bigsnap.com, 25 June 2002.

Rather, like one of those places whose existence we assume because of a name on a sign above a platform, glimpsed at as our train stops and then rushes on, the word “Canada” awoke no echoes, inspired no images, lent no meaning to my port of destination.
Alberto Manguel, Canadian author, born in Argentina, “Destination Ithaka,” Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (2002), with preface by Rudyard Griffiths.

Canada is like an intelligent, thirty-five-year-old woman.
Douglas Adams, novelist and humorist, curious statement, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (2002).

The best thing about Canada is that it is not this. It is this and that.
George Bowering, poet, characteristic remark, in Erin Anderssen, “Irreverent Bowering Named Poet Laureate,” The Globe and Mail, 12 November 2002.

My name is Bono and I am a rock star…. I’m a fan of Canada. The world needs more Canada.
Bono, lead singer with U2, performing at the Liberal Convention, 15 November 2003, in Heather Sokoloff, “‘I Believe the World Needs More Canada,’” National Post, 15 November 2003.

“What is Canada really like?” she asked, her remark prompted not by the desire for a response but a wish to show she came in peace.
“Canada is knowing where your wallet is,” I replied.
Dialogue from Edward O. Phillips’s novel A Voyage on Sunday (2004).

Canada is a country that works in practice, but not in theory.
Stéphane Dion, Quebec political scientist and Cabinet minister, in Peter C. Newman, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion, and Power (2004).

A place belongs to whoever claims it most ardently. That’s why I spent a good deal of my energy proclaiming Canada as my turf.
Peter C. Newman, journalist and memoirist, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion, and Power (2004).

I don’t see any cosmic problem in Canada. I’m optimistic. Canada will endure beyond all expectations. The days of staying up all night agonizing are long gone. People will say it’s going to hell in a hand basket, and that the politicians are all bad—but really, this is a spectacularly successful country. Canada’s a good idea, it’s as simple as that. There are some things that are just us. And it’s more than just being American.
Keith Spicer, former first Official Languages Commissioner and former chair of Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, in Roy MacGregor, “This Country,” The Globe and Mail, 16 November 2004.

Some time, not too long ago, while no one was watching, Canada became the world’s most successful country.
John Ibbitson, columnist and author, opening sentence, The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream (2005).

Canoes

“Now, I think that it much better that, as we all go along together, that every man paddle his own canoe. That my thought.”
Speech of an Indian character in Frederick Marryat’s novel The Settlers in Canada (1844). This is said to be the first appearance in print of the folk expression for self-sufficiency “Paddle your own canoe.”

Slowly as a cloud we go, / Sky above and sky below…
Couplet from poet Archibald Lampman’s lyrical poem “Morning on the Lièvre,” a dream-like description of canoeing in late September on the Lièvre River, the second-largest tributary of the Ottawa River in Quebec, Among the Millet (1888). The National Film Board documentary Morning on the Lièvre (1961) made affecting use of this couplet as a refrain.

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in canoe and you are already a child of nature.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, canoeist and future prime minister, “Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe” (1944) in Wilderness Canada (1970), edited by Borden Spears.

A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe.
Pierre Berton, media personality, interviewed by Dick Brown, The Canadian, 22 December 1973.

We are a nation of canoeists, and have been since the earliest days, paddling our way up the St. Lawrence, across the lakes, over the portages of the shield, west along the North Saskatchewan through the Yellowhead gap and thence southwest by the Columbia and Fraser rivers to the sea. When someone asks you how Canada could exist as a horizontal country with its plains and mountains running vertically, tell him about the paddlers.
Pierre Berton, historian, Why We Act Like Canadians (1982).

When such children read Pauline Johnson’s “The Song My Paddle Sings” in their school readers—as they did, until the 1960s—they knew that the paddle in the song was not just Pauline’s paddle but their paddle too.
Margaret Atwood, author, referring to generations of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, “The Grey Owl Syndrome,” Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995).

Canada is a canoe route.
Attributed to historian A.R.M. Lower by Will Ferguson, Canadian History for Dummies (2000).

Pierre Berton once declared that a Canadian is someone “who knows how to make love in a canoe.” But Pierre was just bragging. Or lying. If average Canadians ever tried to “pull a Berton” they’d end up looking like Mr. Canoe Head. (For those of you unfamiliar with His Canoe-Headedness, Mr. Canoe Head was a superhero whose head was permamently stuck inside a canoe. But it was okay, because he wore disguises to hide it. You know, fake beards and whatnot.)
William Ferguson and Ian Ferguson, writers, How to Be a Canadian (Even if You Are One) (2001).

Canada is more than a canoe route after all. Canada is a road trip. And like any road trip worthy of the name, it is ultimately about freedom in its purest form.
Will Ferguson, author, Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada (2004).

Currency

Loonie & Toonie.
Nicknames for, respectively, the one-dollar coin (which features a loon on the reverse side), introduced in 1987, and the two-dollar coin (formed of two metals) introduced in 1995.

I do have to fine you. That will be a thousand dollars Canadian, or ten American dollars if you prefer.
Dialogue spoken by the character created by the actor Dan Aykroyd in the movie Canadian Bacon (1994).

Why are you so happy? Did you find someone to take that Canadian quarter of yours?
Rhetorical question asked by Jerry of the character George in the episode “They Come Back” of the TV series Seinfeld during the 1998 season.

Place Names

See also Cities & Towns; Places

Place names had always been the most permament things in the short little human story.
Observation of a character in Hugh MacLennan’s novel Voices in Time (1980).

You would like it here for we have some beauties which originated in the minds of homesick surveyors—Albion, Caledon, Asphodel and the like. They sit strangely on the Canadian landscape but are much more to my taste than Moose’s Gut, Wolf’s Cave and Bear’s Grease and Indian names meaning all sorts of strange things. Our aboriginal people insist that these are part of what they call Our Heritage. Not my heritage, dammit, and now and then I long for Wales.
Robertson Davies, man of letters, letter, 17 July 1989, For Your Eye Alone: Letters, 1976–1995 (1999).

Arcola, Sask.

Movie Town 1976 / There are no strangers here: / Only friends you haven’t yet met.
Message on badges worn in Arcola, the Saskatchewan town where Who Has Seen the Wind was filmed in 1977.

Banff, Alta.

The hotel, a huge baronial edifice that would not have been out of place in Bavaria, was echoing with out of season emptiness, but his room was warm and comfortable with a magnificent view of cataracts at the bend of the river below and the summit of Cascade Mountain pink-sugared where the setting sun kissed the first dusting of snow.
Narration from actor and writer David Niven’s novel Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly (1981).

Canso, N.S.

The constitution of the universe will radiate from these islands of Canada.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, India-born spiritual leader and promoter of Transcendental Meditation, dedicating two islands for a school and conference centre near the town of Canso, N.S., October 2005, quoted by James Keller, “Indian Guru Who Taught the Beatles Sets Sights on Canada,” The Globe and Mail, 17 October 2005. Past projects include an international spiritual theme park for Niagara Falls and the Natural Law Party and its “yogic flyers,” which ran candidates in the 1993 federal election.

Climax, Alta.

Climax / Do Come Again.
Wording on the sign on Highway 18 on driving west from the southern Alberta town of Climax, said to have been in place in the 1950s.

Cobalt, Ont.

For we’ll sing a little song of Cobalt. / If you don’t live there it’s your fault.
Refrain of “The Cobalt Song” (1910), in J.B. Macdougall, Two Thousand Miles of Gold (1946).

Dawson City, Y.T.

Up the Pole! I went to Dawson City to open it. It’s day and night. All night all day. I can’t stay awake all day at night! When I got back to New York, I couldn’t sleep when it was dark!
Beatrice Lillie, comedienne, recalling the invitation extended by Bert Lahr, friend and comedian, to accompany him to Dawson City to open the musical Foxy in 1964, as noted by Bruce Laffey, Beatrice Lillie: The Funniest Woman in the World (1989).

Fort McMurray, Alta.

Fort McMurray’s lively (read: rowdy) expat community (read: highly paid rig workers) has transformed this remote, landlocked city into one of the largest Newfoundland communities outside St. John’s. Newfoundland, in turn, can be considered an outpost of Iceland … and on it goes.
Will Ferguson, travel writer, “On the Road with Will,” Maclean’s, 15 October 2004.

Hamilton, Ont.

There’s something very, very strange and striking about it.
Werner Herzog, Austrian film director, referring to Hamilton, Ont., interviewed in Toronto by Susan Walker, “Herzog Finds Poetry in Buddhism,” Toronto Star, 25 April 2003.

Hull, Que.

“Papa,” I asked, “is it true Hull is wicked?”
“Not in the part where they play baseball,” my father assured me.
Dialogue from “Got Hit a Home Run,” The Happy Time (1945), a memoir set in Ottawa, by Robert Fontaine.

Kananaskis Park, Alta.

Big enough for a group photo, but small enough that nine would be a crowd.
Description of Kananaskis Park, a small provincial park located in the Rocky Mountains between Calgary and Banff, Alta., selected as the site of the Group of 8 summit meeting scheduled for 2002, as quoted by Bruce McCall, “Unreachable? It’s an Ideal Summit Site!” The New York Times, 29 July 2001.

Kingston, Ont.

A mirage, like all of Kingston. A soft-voiced mirage; nothing brash about the townsfolk. It is the capital of an imaginary country, that old Loyalist Canada that, despite achieving self-consciousness, never actually happened.
David Warren, columnist, “Kingston: Larger Than Life and Twice as Quiet,” National Post, 2 August 2003.

Kitchener, Ont.

Kitchener is big enough to have two clocks.
W.L. Mackenzie King, prime minister, address delivered from the steps of Kitchener’s City Hall in the mid 1940s, where one of the city’s two public clocks lacked hands.

Lachine, Que.

I am here as a kind of testimony to the fact that it’s possible for a child from Lachine to do some things which have been called—not by me but by others—extraordinary. It also fits very well with my own resistance to that deterministic philosophy that tells you that the place you come from makes you absolutely; it does not. The human soul has its own way to declare its freedom and to develop itself, and it is not true to say, “Show me where you came from and I’ll tell you what you are.”
Saul Bellow, novelist born in Lachine, Que., address, dedication of the Saul Bellow Municipal Library, Lachine, Que., 12 June 1984, in James Atlas, “Last Days of a Ladies’ Man,” Saturday Night, 14 October 2000.

Un grand écrivain né à Lachine, conscient de ses origines et orienté vers la compréhension humaine; America’s greatest urban novelist, Lachine-born, slum-raised, streetwise kid, Chicago-made, world-renowned writer.
Wording on the bilingual plaque unveiled in the presence of Lachine-born Chicago-formed novelist Saul Bellow at the dedication of the Saul Bellow Municipal Library, Lachine, Que., 12 June 1984, in James Atlas, “Last Days of a Ladies’ Man,” Saturday Night, 14 October 2000.

Lake of the Woods, Ont.

These islands are books in themselves … you could think of the lakes as libraries.
Louise Erdrich, Minnesota-based author born of an Ojibwe-French mother, writing about the collections of glyphs and books in the region, Books and Islands in Ojibway Country (2003).

London, Ont.

Zurich is … the size of London, Ontario, but a great, international hub.
Tyler Brûlé, Winnipeg-born marketing consultant based in London, England, and responsible for the newly named airline “Swiss,” interviewed by Anne Kingston, “Poised for the Next Big Thing,” National Post, 6 July 2002.

Medicine Hat, Alta.

In Hollywood, about twenty years ago, I met Hedda Hopper, who was so influential she could make or break a career by just leaving a name out of her column. Later, she wrote, “All my life I’ve wanted to meet someone who actually came from Medicine Hat! Now one of my life’s ambitions is realized!”
Roloff Beny, globe-trotting photographer, born in Medicine Hat, address, “What Is Wrong with Loving Canada?” Toronto, 27 October 1983, The Empire Club of Canada.

Moose Jaw, Sask.

It’s going to be the biggest social event Moose Jaw has seen in years.
Line spoken by Lou (Burt Lancaster) to Sally (Susan Sarandon) about the delivery from Atlantic City of six dozen roses to a funeral in Moose Jaw in the movie Atlantic City (1980), directed by Louis Malle.

Opeongo Lake, Ont.

Now that the boys are dead and gone / And grim old age is mine, / A phantom team and teamster start / From Renfrew, rain or shine—// Aye, dreaming, dreaming, I go teaming / On the Opeongo Line.
Anonymous fragment composed by a former teamster on the Opeongo Line, a colonization road extending nearly 100 miles from Farrell’s Landing on the Ottawa River to Lake Opeongo, Renfrew County, Ont., opened in 1854, reproduced by N. Brian Davis, The Poetry of the Canadian People, 1720–1920 (1976).

Peterborough, Ont.

A few years later Gerald Robinson, a Toronto architect, applied the superellipse to a parking garage in a shopping centre in Peterborough, a Toronto suburb.
Martin Gardner, columnist and polymath, uncharacteristically uncertain of his geography, “Piet Hein’s Superellipse,” Mathematic Carnival (1957).

Porcupine, Ont.

Rings on my fingers, corns on my toes, / God up in Porcupine, everybody knows. / Put on your snowshoes, and hit the trail with me, / For P-o-r-c-u-p-i-n-e—that’s me!
Verse of the traditional “Porcupine Song,” Canada’s Story in Song (1965), edited by Edith Fowke and Alan Mills.

Red Deer, Alta.

Red Deer, you are beautiful and you always will be.
Stockwell Day, newly elected leader of the Canadian Alliance, celebrating his electoral victory in Red Deer, Alta., 8 July 2000, in Daniel Girard, Toronto Star, 9 July 2000. Day first won the Red Deer North riding in the Alberta legislature in May 1986 and was re-elected three times.

Resolute Bay, N.W.T.

Welcome to Resolute Bay Hotel / Reasonable Rates / In the Heart of Canada’s North Land / Surrounded by Miles and Miles of Nothing but Miles and Miles.
Sign in the hotel at Resolute Bay, N.W.T., noted by Leonard Brockington in 1954.

Saint John, N.B.

The city of Saint John, New Brunswick, has boasted on many occasions that Walter Pidgeon was born there, but at the time of writing nobody in authority had chosen to name a street or perhaps a square or park after this gracious star, who brought nothing but credit to the city in which he started life. If anyone out there is listening, perhaps it is still not too late to make amends.
Charles Foster, biographer, referring to Hollywood star Walter Pidgeon (1898–1984), native of Saint John, Once Upon a Time in Paradise: Canadians in the Golden Age of Hollywood (2003).

Strathroy, Ont.

There was acre upon acre of farmland, and all we could see—though I pressed my forehead against the cold window—all we could see were little lights here and there. And I was wondering: What kind of people live in those houses? And what kind of people worked in this part of Canada? And lived and loved here?
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, prime minister, musing about a train trip made through Strathroy earlier that evening, which he mentioned to reporters at the airport at London, Ont., 13 October 1983. One recalls Ontario Premier John Sandfield Macdonald’s question in 1871: “What the hell has Strathroy done for me?”

Wadena, Sask.

For me, the centre of the universe will always be Wadena, Saskatchewan.
Pamela Wallin, broadcaster, Since You Asked (1998). The town’s main street is named “Pamela Wallin Drive.”

Waterloo, Ont.

Re “Canada’s Physics Shangri-La” (April 10): As an erstwhile resident of Waterloo, Ont., I take exception to the depiction of my hometown as a “cultural vacuum.” Surely, you have confused Waterloo with Kitchener.
Rob Woolstencroft, resident of Oakville, Ont., Letters to the Editor, The Globe and Mail, 14 April 2004.