Coming to Canada
The author in the 1970s as a recent immigrant to Canada, with his son
Coming to Canada
By John Meissner
Half a century ago, I completed the trifecta of reaching my 21st birthday, getting married and immigrating to Canada in less than two months. Following a modest wedding in Minnesota, Chris and I had a brief honeymoon tour through the Upper Ottawa and Madawaska valleys. I secured a job as a writer and photographer for a weekly newspaper − This Week in the Madawaska Valley − out of Barry’s Bay. The job offer gave us the much-needed points required to obtain Landed Immigrant Status.
Being a writer-photographer required a 50-hour week that included getting the papers from the printer (Runge in Pembroke), interviewing, driving on the potholed backroads and delivering the latest weekly edition to the regional general stores. Taking pictures of the remains of wrecks and head-on fatal car crashes (usually involving drinking and teenagers) was a requirement to provide front-page drama that sold papers, which in turn helped sell advertising. Naturally, pay was less than minimum wage if calculated by my hours.
I was often asked whether I was a draft dodger. This could help determine whether I was a potential outlaw that people needed to keep an eye on or a good guy with the courage of his convictions. I did not pass the physical to be drafted into the U.S. army (due to a previous car accident injury). I did, however, hold most of the sentiments of a draft dodger. I was tired of unending years of war in Southeast Asia, political assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK), Nixon’s “war on drugs,” segregation, and the cruel use of clubs, dogs, the military and guns, guns, guns (though I did have a rifle for plinking tin cans – it seemed normal in the U.S.) One friend went to prison for six months after being caught with two joints. I was looking for a fresh start in a more stable and civil society that Canada seemed to offer.
My wife, Chris, and I rented an old log house just off the highway at the bottom of Wilno Hill for $40 a month. We had electricity and telephone but no running water, so the water came from a well-bucket system, and we used the outhouse out back. We heated with wood: a Renfrew Cookright stove on one side that needed to be refuelled every three hours, and a Findley box stove that would stay hot for four to five hours. It didn’t take long to get used to sleeping in long johns and coming downstairs around 3 a.m. to feed the fires. Water in a bucket in the kitchen often had a layer of ice on top.
We were in the middle of the hippie commune territory of the Madawaska Valley that brought out every stripe of alienated but optimistic “back-to-the-landers,” often educated but poor people from southern Ontario attracted to the low land costs in this remote area.
Chris and I straddled the boundaries of several sociological groups. We worked, were young, alien, striving to be with the times and identifiable. Being near the highway with a phone meant that people would drop by to use the phone when they were snowed in or when cars wouldn’t start. On some Saturday mornings, people would drop by to watch “Bugs Bunny” on our little black and white TV that worked with a coat-hanger antenna. In town, as a driver of a 68 Chevy Malibu wagon, a person with a legitimate job and a somewhat outgoing demeanour, we were acceptable, or maybe tolerable, in the Valley’s downside “come from away” take on things. Because I attended every municipal and school board meeting, I stood out less and less over time.
We had to get used to the new ways of doing things. In the pubs there were separate men-only entrances and women could only enter through a different door − if they had an “escort.” To get a bottle of wine, you had to wait at what felt like a teller’s booth and fill out a small LCBO form with a tiny lead pencil. The clerk would then go back out of sight to retrieve the bottle, hidden in a brown paper bag that whispered, “We know what you are doing.”
As alien newcomers, we were also the subject of police interest. by an RCMP officer who wondered if he could have a word. We invited him in and offered him coffee. He wanted to know what we were about. We were polite and friendly and shared a briefcase of our official documents with him. When we entered Canada, I had indicated that I would not be using my car for work. When I learned that my car was indeed required for work, I wrote back to correct my error. I was then billed (by return mail, it seemed) $250 by the CRA, which I quickly paid.
The RCMP officer looked at me in mild astonishment that anyone could be so ignorant as to bring this situation to the surface and volunteer to pay the CRA. The message seemed clear that such an unforced error of flatfooted ignorance could pose no civil threat and that he could make much better use of police inquiry time.
John Meissner is a retired psychologist living in the Glebe who has worked with local school boards, Algonquin College and Carleton University.