To Grapple with the Land

The Ethos of the Canadian

Fort McMurray, Alberta

As I shiver amid the first chills of the northern autumnal breeze—a sublime portent of the frigid winter to come—I am put in a state of fearful awe. My body stiffens, and in a microsecond I feel the numb extremities, freezing appendages, and frustrated aims of the impending cold season. I understand that in this distant hinterland, I am utterly at the mercy of the land and its caprices.

The rhythms of the intensely variable seasons and the vast and diverse geography of this land have dictated the economic activity, the infrastructure, the history, and the spirit of this country. From the fur trade, to the Atlantic fisheries, to the settlement of the prairies, to the oil booms, and beyond, this frontier bears a great wealth in resources for those brave enough to endure the hazards she wantonly pours forth. It is our attraction to these resources, and our determination to seek them out at any cost, which has shaped Canada as we know it today.

Canada has been pejoratively called a nation of “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” using a biblical phrase to denigrate our fierce exploitation of natural resources. We have a reputation as being a band of rugged frontiersmen, lumberjacks, settlers, and voyageurs, who brave these remote and inhospitable northlands. Though Canada today is mostly urbanized and reliant upon the service sector, less dependent on the trade of staple resources than ever, this perception persists, and for good reason. For, the reputation we have garnered doesn’t merely pertain to the professions of our denizens, but to the guiding ethos which this land has imbued in us since arriving on her shores.

It may be an extraordinary claim, but I wager that there is no land which has posed such a distinct problem for man as Canada has, and no people besides Canadians who so acutely feel the gamut of nature’s ravages.

Some lands invite man to live in blithe pastoral bliss, with fertile soil or teeming fruit trees. Some lands draw him into a friendly contest, forcing him to settle atop rugged hills and in winding valleys. Some lands yet challenge man with natural hazard and hostile fauna, but yield to him once he has subdued its more bellicose aspects. Some more quixotic lands present man with a Sphinxian riddle—be it persistent flooding, arid heat, or towering mountains—which, once solved, gives way to an uneasy harmony.

The Canadian landscape, unlike any other, declares war on man every second of his existence, sending volleys of flies and mosquitoes to assail his every crevice, freezing him out in the sordid winter and then drowning him in august heat. Canada sweeps the ground out from under his feet, sucking him into the miserable mire of muskeg, and then presenting him with a vast and impenetrable slab of Precambrian granite, unfit for any settlement at all. Wide open prairies—dry and barren with rolling blazes—and sheer mountain ranges all conspire to deny man the very provisions for life.

Canadians well understand the hazards inherent in our quotidian existence. The frozen winter highways, covered in glare ice in early winter, map out a blueprint for disaster. The frigid winter, which may veer well below -30 degrees Celsius, may inflict frostbite on skin exposed to the open air in a matter of minutes. Behemoths and Leviathans haunt our forests and waterways, from grizzly bears to killer whales. And indeed, the vast swaths of wilderness which encompass our land may easily swallow you whole should you stray from the beaten path.

This subservience to the seasons manifests in concrete ways in our economic life, documented by Canadian economic historian and philosopher Harold Innis. Innis, in his voluminous history of the Canadian fur trade, makes the argument that Canada’s role as an exporter of staple products—primary goods, from furs to wheat to lumber—to large manufacturing centres (Britain, the United States) created and then cemented Canada’s role as a subordinate “resource hinterland.” He writes,

The economic history of Canada has been dominated by the discrepancy between the centre and the margin of western civilization. Energy has been directed toward the exploitation of staple products and the tendency has been cumulative. The raw material supplied to the mother country stimulated manufactures of the finished product and also of the products which were in demand in the colony. Large-scale production of raw materials was encouraged by improvement of technique of production, of marketing, and of transport as well as by improvement of the finished product.¹

It is the fur trade which fostered Canada’s tie of dependence upon Great Britain which America did not share. Canada’s lack of domestic manufacturing capacity, due to sparse population and distance from markets, ensured its reliance on Britain for the success of its key primary industries. In short, the fur trade is why America fought for independence and Canada did not.

And the pattern of Canada being a resource hinterland in relation to a manufacturing heartland has been replicated evermore. The relationship between Canada and the United States is markedly one of Canadian natural resources flowing south to make manufactured products which we buy back in turn. In the case study of the oil industry, the vast majority of oil from Alberta is sent south to the slew of refineries along the Gulf Coast. We historically lacked the large markets for refined oil products which America has in spades, and so our oil travels south.

Even domestically, there is a pattern of trade resembling a resource hinterland and manufacturing heartland. The Canadian West is agrarian and rural, possessing vast natural resources. The myriad farmland of the endless prairies, the oil sands of northern Alberta, the potash mines of Saskatchewan, and the vast old growth forests of British Columbia mark the economic activity of the Western provinces. Ontario and Québec, on the other hand, specialize in manufactured products, including automobiles, aerospace, steel, and aluminum. The East comprising the centre, and the West the margin, of Canadian civilization entail that the pattern which Innis describes applies within Canada now as much as ever.

Canada, and especially the boundless and rugged West, remains a land of lumberjacks, farmers, and roughnecks.

Innis also argues that the difficulty of the terrain, the distance from markets, the intensely variable climate, and the sparse population of Canada created prohibitively large initial and overhead costs for industry. As a result, the resources of Canada could only be penetrated by large foreign firms with capital to spend. The fur trade, for instance, was dominated by the chartered monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The first to exploit Canada’s vast forests for timber were large French and British firms. And when oil was discovered in Alberta, it was American capital funding the wildcat drillers, leading to a disproportionately high American ownership of Canadian oil which persists to this day.

The result of this phenomenon has been disproportionately high industry concentration and high foreign ownership of Canadian resources. Canadians are not as entrepreneurial as our southern neighbours, and there is a concrete reason behind this. The Canadian climate does not permit a man to pull himself up by his bootstraps in the same way as America’s—but rather, he needs equipment, financing, transportation, and infrastructure to bring whatever good he wishes to market. The capital for such endeavours is found in the pre-established commercial centres, and not the frontier nation.

Canada’s very existence, and indeed the existence of any “resource hinterland” is predicated upon the existence of a frontier—a sparsely inhabited region at the fringes of civilization which is abundant in natural resources. As natural resource production ramps up, populations move to the region for work, which inevitably pushes the frontier further back. Whereas at one time anything further inland than Toronto and Montreal constituted a frontier, today the frontier is found in the last region to be settled—the arctic. This region, replete with oil, gas, and critical minerals, constitutes the final frontier for Canada. Once there is no more frontier, and once the resources therein have been exhausted, a resource hinterland implodes under its own weight.

Because of the punishing climate, the success of our industrial achievements has come only through a certain indomitable vivacity of the men who inhabit these lands. Lesser men could not have built a great railway through muskeg, over the Canadian shield, and past the towering Rockies to connect the disparate lands of our boundless nation. Lesser men could not have settled the hostile Canadian prairies, nor built an oil industry in the bituminous sands along the Athabasca River.

The intrepidity of the Canadian in the face of hardship knows no bounds. It is perhaps not a flashy and bombastic spirit as found in Americans, but rather a quiet, humble, and indomitable resolve.

But, however much we may puff up our chests at our great achievements, it is undeniable that a country could only have been constructed on the harsh northern half of this continent through the tools and technology developed by a pre-existing industrial civilization.

Indeed, our relationship with the land was marked from the very outset by the fact that we had certain empowering tools at our disposal, be they engines, farming implements, or weapons. It is these which put us on an equal footing with the land, allowing us to grapple with her for mastery, rather than merely being dominated by her roughshod reign.

It is these tools and technologies which the native peoples of North America lacked, and for this reason they could never hope to master nature, but only placate her. It is the deification of nature and natural phenomenon, and the impetus to live within her designated boundaries, which marks the ethos of the native peoples of this land. This ethos clashed deeply with the Europeans who arrived possessing the means to conquer the land, exploit her resources to their gain, and break free from her regal decrees, as history would quickly show.

These different attitudes towards the land ought to be viewed merely as products of the presence or absence of tools, rather than being judged as a merit or flaw of either civilization. No one, possessing the means to be liberated from a tyrant, would continue to grovel at her feet. The native peoples, after all, quickly adopted whatever new technologies they could to vie for mastery over nature.

George Grant writes,

[Canada] could not be ours also because the very intractability, immensity, and extremes of the new land required that its meeting with mastering Europeans be a battle of subjugation. And after that battle we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the new forms of conquest which came with industrialism.²

This first encounter shaped the entirety of the Canadian ethos thereafter. Rather than living with the harsh injustices of nature, man could meet her on an equal footing and do battle with her to mitigate her vicissitudes. For Grant, this forever impaired our capacity to spiritually bond with the land and make her ours. Grant continues,

That conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object.³

However, I’m not sure that he’s right—at least not entirely. For, the modern Canadian can never view nature as a mere object to subdue, lest he become complacent and fall into her dread grasp. There are still echoes of spirits in the trees, in the waterways, and in the wanton beasts that roam about. Western technological society can never truly eradicate the traces of folklore which emanate from and pervade the land

Because of man’s elevated relative status, the relationship between him and nature can never again be one of adoration or worship. A man should never love what seeks to destroy him. But he must remain fearful and suspicious always—for despite our many contrivances, nature still retains the power to ultimately destroy us if we are not careful. We must necessarily recognize a latent power, agency, and autonomy in the land before us. There is an irrepressible spirit in this frontier land with which we must do battle.

If it was Israel’s lot to wrestle with God, then it is ours to grapple with the land.

Indeed, the Canadian ethos evinces more respect for the land, despite our contest, than the American’s. They can drain lakes, maul forests, and conduct nuclear tests in the desert without a second thought. The Americans never battled the land as furiously as we have; rather, it conceded to them without resistance. Whereas they treat the land as wholly under their dominion, we will be at war with her always. And where she has been conquered, the memory of our battle still lives on our skin, and so we have pity for our valiant fallen foe.

Moreover, we are reminded at every point in the year of our complex relationship with nature, for the cyclical seasons are a display of her power to destroy, if only we didn’t possess our tools and technique. The hot summers are contrasted with the bitterly cold winters. The 18-hour days we experience on the summer solstice contrast with the few meagre hours of daylight we receive on the shortest day of winter. The drought of summer, the beauty of autumn, the snow and ice of winter, and the deluge of spring are all reminders of our eternal quarrel.

And yet, for these reasons, Grant is right—so long as we grapple with it, nature can never be ours, namely, we can never be one with it. It forever remains essential otherness. So long as we attempt to elevate ourselves above her, we are alienated from the land. In Canada, and in the technological age, the relation between man and nature is inherently hostile. One only wonders which of us cast the first stone.

If one interprets such words as angry denunciation, let him think again. For, it is my habitation in this nigh-uninhabitable realm which is my greatest point of pride. The Canadian ethos to grapple with the land manifests in every aspect of our national life. Rather than spend the winter shivering, we boldly venture upon the frozen surface of the lake with skates tied tight and play hockey until our toes are frozen. We swim in our great lakes, whose smashing tides threaten to overpower. We hike in mountains as a pastime—the very mountains who took the lives of countless prospectors and surveyors.

We are, to the core, a nation of hewers of wood and drawers of water. But far from a mark of our inadequacies, it is this very ethos which makes our nation humble and strong.

1. Innis, Harold, The Fur Trade in Canada (1970), University of Toronto Press, pp. 385.

2. Grant, George P. “In Defence of North America” in Technology and Empire (1969), Anansi Press, pp. 17.

3. ibid, italics my own.