“Joe Clark described Canada as a community of communities. Fogo Island innkeeper Zita Cobb, who in her grace and generosity embodies the spirit of Newfoundland, counters that we are a place of places, with culture being but the localized response to the power of landscape, the whispered messages of the wild, of which there are so many in a nation so vast. Within British Columbia, a family driving north from Vancouver to Prince George, a distance of 800 kilometres, passes through more distinct languages than would be encountered by a traveler moving overland from Moscow to Madrid. Canada is a mosaic, Zita would say, because our geography denies any other possibility, as it always has.
**Our landscape is a map of dreams** [emphasis added], a mystic endowment as essential to our identity and destiny as the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms that liberated us to be the nation that we have become. Our legal system, in the words of former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, "rep-resents our desire to be a fair country, our expectations as Canadians to be treated with respect as equals, both in our rights and our fundamental human dignity." The full measure of a nation embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. […]
‘Loving a country,’ Michael Ignatieff writes, ‘isn’t as obvious as it might seem. It's impossible, actually, to love all of it. What you can love is the part of it you know, and that part has to stand for the whole... If we're in a battle to preserve our country, then slogans, flags and indignation will only carry us so far. What we'll need is to conjure up all the feeling we have for the Canada we know, the one that's in our bones, wherever life has taken us, and put our stake in the ground there, and defend it with all the imagination and tenacity that the country has given us.’”
Excerpted from the printed version of “North Star: Reflections on Canada and Being Canadian,“ (2026) by Wade Davis, a lengthened version of an essay by the same title, published in 2025 by Canadian Geographic: https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/north-star-reflections-on-canada-and-being-canadian/. Image from the online article, where it bears the caption: “As Canadians, we live in a world of multiple voices, multiple pasts.”
Print version of the essay available at: https://shop.canadiangeographic.ca/products/north-star-reflections-on-canada-and-being-canadian-by-wade-davis
