Prominent Canadians share love letters to Ontario in 150 words
A nervous refugee’s hand held on the subway. A “for sale” sign on an old dock in Algonquin Park. Ontarians share their thoughts about our province as it turns 150 this year.

thestar.com
Feb. 22, 2017

For the province’s sesquicentennial, Lt.-Gov. Elizabeth Dowdeswell asked 150 Ontarians to write 150 words about what makes Ontario Ontario. The result is a new book, 150 Stories, some of which is excerpted here.

ANNE MICHAELS

From our bed we listen to the trains crossing the city, their dark weight slipping through back gardens. We sleep between Hudson’s Bay and the Great Lakes, below geese migrating their secret paths under the stars. Here, where great rivers of history converge, travelling through the night to wake in another language. It is a city where many work in one language and dream in another, sing children to sleep in a language they do not speak. To be born in one language and fall in love in another. To sleep in one landscape and wake in another. These great transporting rivers of language converge where we live, here, where there are more than 150 words for loneliness, for shelter, for wounds, for fear, for forgetting, for memory, for gratitude. For night and for morning.

Anne Michaels is Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her books have been published in more than 45 countries.

BRIGITTE SHIM

Like most Ontarians, I was born somewhere else. My Hakka Chinese parents and all of my siblings were born on the sunny tropical Caribbean island of Jamaica. Upon arriving in Canada, we stepped off the airplane and quickly descended into a gigantic freezer.

A few days later, a February blizzard hit Toronto and I caught my first glimpse of snow. The dull urban fabric magically transformed into a winter wonderland overnight. My first snow angel has long since melted but the extraordinary experience of being enveloped by little teeny snowflakes which, when multiplied, have the capacity to create mountain ranges for tobogganing, as well as armies of snowmen, still resonates with me.

Experiencing snow for the first time as a child has left an indelible mark on me, and it is somehow connected to my deep respect for and appreciation of our remarkable Canadian landscape.

Brigitte Shim, CM is a principal with Shim-Sutcliffe Architects and teaches architecture at the University of Toronto.

NINA LEE AQUINO

In 1994, we were living in the Philippines when my mom (a diplomat) got her next out-of-country assignment: Toronto, Canada. I was 17 years old, about to go into a prestigious university. I suppose I should have been terrified with the idea of uprooting myself but, as the daughter of a diplomat, I’d never gotten attached to any one place; it was something that I was taught, a way to stay rooted for the rootless.

But all that changed when I arrived in Ontario. Walking through Pearson Airport, something felt different. Even though I didn’t know what life had in store for me in this country, inexplicably, there were a few things I knew instantly. I remember saying to myself: “This is where I’m going to build my career, find the love of my life, have a family and raise my child...this is going to be, finally, my home.”

Nina Lee Aquino is the artistic director of Factory Theatre.

NINO RICCI

As a child, all I thought of Canada, or at least of the particular corner of southwestern Ontario that was all I knew of it, was how to leave it. A trip my family had taken to Italy when I was 12 had left me with the sense I’d been born out of place, and a determination to right the mistake as soon as circumstances allowed. When I finally got a chance to live in Italy in my late 20s, however, it proved to be not quite the land of dolce vita I’d hoped, for all its beauties. Canada had ruined me, with its quaint notions of embracing diversity and encouraging divergent thought and giving rewards based on merit. I returned to Canada after a year, and felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. More than that: a sense of the freedom, rare in the world, to be whatever I wanted.

Nino Ricci, CM is a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

PENNY OLEKSIAK

The team and I are in the ready room before the race facing swimmers from all over the world. Some are famous. Some older. Some have better times. But we’re wearing the maple leaf, and we know what we have to do. It has been 28 years since our last women’s relay medal. From different parts of Canada, speaking different languages, it doesn’t matter that we competed against each other to get here. Today we are one team focused on one goal. We lock arms and walk out to the pool together. The speakers boom out our names followed by “Canada.” A cheer goes up from our fans wearing red and white and waving our flag. It’s up to us. Individual efforts may have brought us here, but we are better as one team swimming for the maple leaf. The drought is broken. We have just begun.

Penny Oleksiak is Canada’s youngest Olympic champion. She won four medals during the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

CAMERON BAILEY

My sister Maxine and I landed from Barbados in 1971. We’d been apart from our parents for four years, living with grandparents as one small slice of a vast trans-Atlantic migration that linked the Caribbean, Great Britain and Canada. We were strangers to our mother, and strangers to our new home.

One summer weekend, our mother took us to Ontario Place. It was like stepping into the future. We did everything: the boats, the food, the games. But it was when we stepped into the Cinesphere and watched the pioneering IMAX film North of Superior that I was truly awed by the scope and beauty of this place.

I never forgot that experience, and every time I sit in the dark, dwarfed by a big screen, I can recall myself as a dazzled newcomer to Ontario.

Cameron Bailey is the artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival.

SANJAY KHANNA

Late-night Uber home mindlessly perusing emails on smartphone. In this woeful self-absorbed state, I realize I’m ignoring the driver who, on closer observation, appears wan and distant. Wondering how I might penetrate his raw loneliness, I gently ask: “Are you able to find meaning in making ends meet?” The driver perks up and replies, somewhat ruefully, “No one’s asked this question before.” Navigating midtown Toronto in the dark, he confides few people evince concern about him. “It’s hurtful,” I say. “One feels invisible.” Soon, we near my apartment. The driver parks beside the building. Rather than bring our conversation to a close, we sit leisurely and converse more freely. We discuss his unrealized aspirations as an educated immigrant (and mine as a writer). We explore where to find meaning amidst life’s vicissitudes. We depart smiling, thanking each other, knowing it’s unlikely we’ll meet again, yet understanding that one another’s inner light was, in a sacred act of listening, briefly evoked.

Sanjay Khanna is a futurist who helps Canadians adapt to 21st-century challenges such as climate change.

JANICE STEIN

On a crisp fall day, I ducked into the subway for a quick ride downtown. I looked for a seat in the crowded car, but it was full. Within a few minutes, a young man stood up and offered me his seat. I accepted with gratitude and asked him where he was from; I could tell from his halting English that he had recently arrived. He told me that he had come from Aleppo and we began a lively conversation about a city that I had visited more than once.

Just then the subway lurched, stopped, and the lights went out. The young man began to tremble; he told me that when he finds himself in a confined dark space, he returns to the cellar he hid in when Aleppo was bombed. I reached out to hold his hand and reassured him that he was now in Toronto. He grabbed my hand and held tight - to Toronto.

Janice Stein, CM, OOnt is the founder of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

THE TERRY FOX FAMILY

Ontario is the only province where collectively as a family we were able to take in the Marathon of Hope. On day 91, July 11, 1980, we were witness to Terry arriving in Toronto where crowds lined the streets cheering him on and where donation boxes were replaced by garbage bags to receive the city’s generosity. This would be the Marathon of Hope pinnacle where the awareness and support that Terry dreamed of while running 2,148 Canadian miles previously was now all around him. It was also at this moment that Terry’s vision would crystallize, where he would articulate that he was only one Marathon of Hope member, that he was equal with everyone who had given a dollar, that he was no better and no worse. The province of Ontario embraced our son and brother as if he was one of their own, and that enthusiasm has not waned close to four decades later.

Terry Fox, CC was an athlete, humanitarian and activist for cancer research. This story was submitted by his brother, Darrell, on behalf of his brother Fred, sister Judith, and nine nieces and nephews.

ADAM VAN KOEVERDEN

My first trip to Algonquin Park was with my Grade 8 class in the spring of 1996.

We kayaked at Camp Tanamakoon, and I recall thinking how lucky I was to be from Ontario, with so many beautiful lakes and rivers to explore by boat. I returned in the spring of 2008 while preparing for the Beijing Olympic Trials. I saw a “for sale” sign on an old dock and committed the phone number to memory. The Algonquin cottage lease was owned by a man who had recently passed away. His widow insisted that it be purchased by “the right person.” Thankfully, I fit the description and bought a tiny cabin with no electricity or running water. It’s my favourite place and most cherished possession, which has allowed me to share the beauty of our province with friends from around the world as well as my fellow Canadians. A great park thrives with ambassadors and great stewardship, and it’s with tremendous pride that I hope to maintain that obligation for years to come.

Adam van Koeverden, a lifelong Ontarian who calls Algonquin Park “home,” is a world and Olympic champion in kayaking.

HUGH SEGAL

When I was a senator from Ontario, I visited the Canadian Forces serving NATO in Afghanistan. One event touched me deeply. At a forward operating base deep in Peshawar District, I noticed a three-storey birthday-cake shaped building some 250 metres outside the “wire.” It flew the flag of Afghanistan. A Canadian armoured personnel vehicle was stationed in the yard.

“What is that building?” I asked the young female Canadian officer accompanying us.

“Well, Senator, before we cleared the enemy out of here, it was the Taliban HQ for the region. Sharia law, prisons, some torture, especially for teachers. Not a happy place.”

“What is it now?” I asked.

“Senator, it is a girls’ school, under the protection of the Canadian Forces, sir!”

It was not Vimy or Juno Beach. But it was an important expression of Canadians at our modest, unassuming best. A small ray of light defended by Canadian Forces in a very difficult part of the world.

The Hon. Hugh Segal, OC, OOnt is an author, political commentator and the Master of Massey College.

This excerpt from 150 Stories is printed with the permission of the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. For more information about the project and to view all 150 stories and associated images, please visit http://www.lgontario.ca.