Canada’s heart aches

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/06/2017 (3047 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A LONELY railroad track slices through the mirror surface of blue water. Wooden ties burrow into a cold bed of gravel. Rails race forward, piercing the forest, becoming lost in the shaggy spires of small pines that rise in the distance.

If the world fit neatly inside the borders of a picture, then this photograph would be beautiful. If life were contained by the square edges of an image, if there was no before and no after, then this scene would be idyllic, even peaceful.

This picture could be a promotional photo for Manitoba. It could cover the front of tourism pamphlets. Travellers would thumb through one in the hotel lobby, studying the picture, hearing its teasing whispers about an unyielding wild.

But railways have points of origin, and they have destinations. So this picture plastered in the Free Press this week was a photo of tribulations, of a vital lifeline to Churchill severed by flooding, of damage that threatens livelihoods.

This is the rail line that brings food and fuel into Churchill. Without it, prices will soar. It costs three times as much to move freight by air, Churchill residents say, and volume is limited. They don’t know how they’ll bring in enough fuel.

So now begins the wrangling. Now begin the emergency press conferences and town meetings. Now begin the flurry of various public and private officials tangling over how best to help Churchill, who will pay, and how much.

Here is the railway’s owner, U.S.-based OmniTRAX, which says it cannot fix the flood damage until next spring. So it called on Ottawa and the province to help fund the effort, pleading the case that it has lost $30 million on the route since 1997.

And here is the province, which said it was considering subsidies to get supplies to Churchill by air or sea, but as of mid-week would make no firm commitments. Not enough information yet, Premier Brian Pallister said.

(Of course, all of this comes just one year after the province and OmniTRAX very publicly butted heads over the future of Churchill’s port, a situation far too complex to summarize here; and after decades of dashed hopes for Churchill.)

Meanwhile, in Churchill, businesses lay off workers and fret about a critical tourist season that could flounder, absent the rail traffic on which their profit margins depend. They worry about food. They worry what will happen in winter.

I try to picture that scene, but I can’t. I’ve never been there. Most Manitobans, I wager, haven’t been, either.

So the Churchill I picture is a collage of images gleaned from tourism pamphlets and other people’s travel photos. It’s a visual patchwork, jammed together at odd angles, with little regard for geographic reality or real-world restrictions.

In my mind, the concrete megalith of Churchill’s grain elevator watches over an iceberg, the rusty husk of an old plane and a purple creep of tundra flowers. There’s a beluga in this scene, somewhere. A Tundra Buggy. A bear.

Then the image yanks me back to Winnipeg, back to the lobby of the Hotel Fort Garry, where lithe Europeans bundle into pricey parkas and wait for a ride to the airport. They came here for a Canadian adventure, and they will find it.

What they may not see: a Canada built of places fantasized or re-imagined but often, in practical matters, isolated or abandoned. A country that boasts of a True North, strong and free, but allows its northern ties to lie flooded and weak.

This is about Churchill, and also bigger than Churchill. Canada’s claim to be of the North is built not on Calgary or Winnipeg or Toronto, but on the fact its borders encompass the staggering vastness of the great northern reach.

Ottawa is situated on roughly the same latitudinal line as Portland, Ore. London, England is slightly closer to the North Pole than Winnipeg. Intricacies of climate and geography make us colder, but they do not make us northern.

Yet the North looms large in our mythology. For years, Canada has sold the North to anyone who will buy it. At The Forks, tourists browse polar-bear postcards and tiny ceramic inuksuit, some affixed with a sticker: “Made In China.”

This is a city where a company called True North once debated naming its pre-owned National Hockey League team The Polar Bears, and last year dressed its American Hockey League team in one-off polar bear jerseys; where a zoo invested millions in its Journey to Churchill exhibit.

What sad juxtaposition in that title, now that the actual journey to Churchill is impassable by land.

That is what happens in the North, the real North, the one beyond the plastic gloss of branding. It is the idea of Churchill and places like it that informs Canada’s national mythology; not the place itself. Never the place itself.

Now, that has brought us here: wrestling with the future of a northern community that, for most of us, spans out only in our imaginations. This, in the same year that Canada is flooding $500 million into sesquicentennial celebrations.

So underneath the cheerful light of Canada 150, and all of its branding, a question: do we value the North? Do we, really? When we hear the anthem, do we pause at the words “True North,” and feel an emotional investment?

If we do, then the North must be more to Canada than just a pretty picture, an idea, a symbol. If the heart of Canadian mythology beats loudest in places such as Churchill, then they must be supported, cared for, connected.

Whatever the path forward, Churchill ought not be left to languish. In my mind’s eye, it glows bright atop a map of Manitoba: a tenacious town on the bay, a hub of the region. It seems like a beautiful place.

One day, I will visit.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca