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Canadians: A Portrait Of A Country And Its People
Who are we? Not since the publication of Bruce Hutchison’s bestselling The Unknown Country has there been as ambitious, entertaining, and incisive an answer to that eternal question. As a journalist and author for more than thirty years, Roy MacGregor has travelled this vast country more than any other Canadian in pursuit of the often elusive national identity. A modern-day Canadian Zelig, he has gained privileged entrée into the most interesting and significant moments in recent Canadian history, and spent time with some of its most memorable people. In this perceptive and entertaining work, MacGregor takes the full measure of Canadian life as he has known and observed it. Against the backdrop of pivotal events such as Meech Lake, the funeral of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the 2006 Winter Olympics, and in a sparkling blend of historical, anecdotal, and reflective writing, MacGregor captures essential truths about who we are and what makes us tick, shedding light on everything from hockey, our “national id,” to our highly exportable, and perhaps highly debatable, sense of humour, to our ever-shifting self-image, both at home and abroad. With trenchant wit and deep intelligence, he maps the fault lines of our national psyche, finding it rife with contradiction on everything from our attachment to the land to our fatalism about the future, our complex relationship with each other to our on-again, off-again affair with our neighbour to the south. Learned in perception, deft in delivery, Canadians is a love letter, a wakeup call, a session on the couch, and a celebration of the richness and diversity of this country and its people.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryCanada
Hardcover
First published April 3, 2007
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About the author
Roy MacGregor
125 books92 followersRoy MacGregor is a Canadian author of fiction and non-fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 21, 2025
Canada stands out in size – at almost 10 million square kilometres (or 3.85 million square miles), it is the second-largest country on Earth – and in the beauty and richness of its landscape. And life for the 38 million people who call Canada home is filled with both challenges and opportunities, as Roy MacGregor takes pains to point out in his 2007 book Canadians.
MacGregor may be best-known for his work as a columnist for Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper – a paper that holds the same national-newspaper-of-record status in Canada that The New York Times retains in the United States of America. Yet he has also written for more regionally oriented Canadian newspapers such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star, as well as for Canada’s national news magazine Macleans. He is, in summary, a journalist with decades of in-depth experience reporting on the contemporary Canadian scene – and accordingly, he is singularly well-qualified to set forth this Portrait of a Country and Its People (the book’s subtitle).
With a restrained brand of wit that itself seems very Canadian, MacGregor engages the mysteries and contradictions of Canadian identity; a chapter titled “A Canadian Is…” recounts the well-known episode when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran a contest inviting viewers to complete the expression “As Canadian as…” MacGregor dryly notes that “The winner, to wide general approval, was ‘As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances’” (p. 41). Such a self-effacing slogan would not go over on this side of the U.S./Canadian border, but it captures the sense of balance and proportion that often characterizes many facets of Canadian life. I like that approach to life. Canadians get so many great things done, in every field of human endeavour, and they do so without drawing attention to themselves.
As a hockey fan, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Canadian national sport that MacGregor aptly terms “the National Id.” Framing the chapter is MacGregor’s account of meeting two men from the Saguenay region of northern Québec who had driven hundreds of kilometres to attend the open-casket ceremony at the Molson Centre honouring the legendary Montréal Canadiens player Maurice “Rocket” Richard after Richard’s death in 2000, but had arrived five minutes after closing. MacGregor helps the men get in anyway, is moved by the depth of their grief, and reflects that “I hadn’t expected this. Trailing them, I was astonished to think that I’d be the last mourner to pass by the Rocket’s open casket. I had no right to be there” (p. 101). In the direct and open way in which MacGregor sets forth his emotions at that moment, one gets a sense of the role that hockey plays in Canadian national life.
Like the United States of America, Canada faces a reckoning with regard to the nation’s treatment of its Indigenous people. For a chapter titled “The Invisible Founders,” MacGregor recalls a visit to the James Bay Cree people of northern Québec. Bad weather caused MacGregor and his Cree hosts to be stranded on Obeijwan Island for three days, and MacGregor recollects how “It was one of the nicest three days of my life”, as his Cree hosts used their thoroughgoing knowledge of their harsh landscape to make sure that everyone had the warmth, shelter, comfort, and safety that they needed. As with his chapter on “Rocket” Richard, so with his chapter on First Nations Canadians, I appreciated the way in which MacGregor described how his experience as a reporter, seeking out stories that would be new to him and to his readers, changed his sense of himself as a Canadian and his approach to Canadian life:
From that point on, I wrote increasingly about Aboriginal issues. For every encouraging story like the James Bay Crees, there seemed a dozen discouraging tales of poverty and despair and tragedy, but there was also a sense that a larger awakening was taking place – partly through the courts, partly through the media, partly because reality could not be ignored any longer. Change wasn’t coming fast enough, but at least it was coming. (pp. 202-03)
A chapter titled “Nous Nous Souvenons” (“We Remember”) engages the ever-thorny issue of the linguistic, cultural, and political relations between Québec and the rest of Canada. Readers from outside Canada may need to do a bit of reading up regarding historical moments like the October 1970 crisis, the 1982 promulgation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the unsuccessful constitutional accords that took place at Meech Lake (1987) and Charlottetown (1992), and the 1995 Québécois-sovereignty referendum in which the province narrowly voted against sovereignty (50.58% against, 49.42% for).
But one needn’t wander that far into the political weeds to get a sense that almost anything can quickly stir the cultural poutine to a boil-over: an article in the Globe and Mail, an act of violence by a deranged young man, an off-hand remark by a Liberal Party official. MacGregor seems somewhat impatient with the number of times that “the fragile egg that is Canada [has] seemed on the verge of rolling off the stove” – even if, to date, the resolution has always been that “The country would live for another day – until the next panic, anyway” (pp. 305-06).
Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People abounds in thought-provoking insights. I liked, for example, MacGregor’s remarks regarding the persistent problems facing the maritime province of Newfoundland and the prairie province of Saskatchewan. A chapter on immigration bears the evocative title “Pier 21 to Pearson”; where immigrants to Canada used to arrive at Halifax's Pier 21 (a site that holds the same historical significance in Canadian life that Ellis Island does in the U.S.A.), today they are much more likely to be flying into Toronto Pearson International Airport to begin their new lives as Canadians.
And a chapter on “The Canada of the Imagination” reminds the reader that, when Canadians in 2005 were asked by the CBC to name the Greatest Canadian, they did not choose a hockey star like Wayne Gretzky, or a pre-eminent prime minister like William Lyon Mackenzie King (who led Canada during the Second World War). Rather, they chose Tommy Douglas, the prairie politician who can be called the “father of universal health care, patron saint of the social safety net.” MacGregor approvingly notes how the people of his country chose, as the Greatest Canadian of all, “[a] man who believed a country’s greatness wasn’t measured by its heroes, its great leaders, its military victories, or its size, wealth, or literature, but ‘by what it does for its unfortunates’” (p. 141). That philosophy of “let’s look out for each other” seems to me to be profoundly Canadian – an ethic that we “rugged individualists” of the U.S.A. would do well to emulate. MacGregor’s Canadians is a resonant and thought-provoking look inside the life of a great nation.
MacGregor may be best-known for his work as a columnist for Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper – a paper that holds the same national-newspaper-of-record status in Canada that The New York Times retains in the United States of America. Yet he has also written for more regionally oriented Canadian newspapers such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star, as well as for Canada’s national news magazine Macleans. He is, in summary, a journalist with decades of in-depth experience reporting on the contemporary Canadian scene – and accordingly, he is singularly well-qualified to set forth this Portrait of a Country and Its People (the book’s subtitle).
With a restrained brand of wit that itself seems very Canadian, MacGregor engages the mysteries and contradictions of Canadian identity; a chapter titled “A Canadian Is…” recounts the well-known episode when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran a contest inviting viewers to complete the expression “As Canadian as…” MacGregor dryly notes that “The winner, to wide general approval, was ‘As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances’” (p. 41). Such a self-effacing slogan would not go over on this side of the U.S./Canadian border, but it captures the sense of balance and proportion that often characterizes many facets of Canadian life. I like that approach to life. Canadians get so many great things done, in every field of human endeavour, and they do so without drawing attention to themselves.
As a hockey fan, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Canadian national sport that MacGregor aptly terms “the National Id.” Framing the chapter is MacGregor’s account of meeting two men from the Saguenay region of northern Québec who had driven hundreds of kilometres to attend the open-casket ceremony at the Molson Centre honouring the legendary Montréal Canadiens player Maurice “Rocket” Richard after Richard’s death in 2000, but had arrived five minutes after closing. MacGregor helps the men get in anyway, is moved by the depth of their grief, and reflects that “I hadn’t expected this. Trailing them, I was astonished to think that I’d be the last mourner to pass by the Rocket’s open casket. I had no right to be there” (p. 101). In the direct and open way in which MacGregor sets forth his emotions at that moment, one gets a sense of the role that hockey plays in Canadian national life.
Like the United States of America, Canada faces a reckoning with regard to the nation’s treatment of its Indigenous people. For a chapter titled “The Invisible Founders,” MacGregor recalls a visit to the James Bay Cree people of northern Québec. Bad weather caused MacGregor and his Cree hosts to be stranded on Obeijwan Island for three days, and MacGregor recollects how “It was one of the nicest three days of my life”, as his Cree hosts used their thoroughgoing knowledge of their harsh landscape to make sure that everyone had the warmth, shelter, comfort, and safety that they needed. As with his chapter on “Rocket” Richard, so with his chapter on First Nations Canadians, I appreciated the way in which MacGregor described how his experience as a reporter, seeking out stories that would be new to him and to his readers, changed his sense of himself as a Canadian and his approach to Canadian life:
From that point on, I wrote increasingly about Aboriginal issues. For every encouraging story like the James Bay Crees, there seemed a dozen discouraging tales of poverty and despair and tragedy, but there was also a sense that a larger awakening was taking place – partly through the courts, partly through the media, partly because reality could not be ignored any longer. Change wasn’t coming fast enough, but at least it was coming. (pp. 202-03)
A chapter titled “Nous Nous Souvenons” (“We Remember”) engages the ever-thorny issue of the linguistic, cultural, and political relations between Québec and the rest of Canada. Readers from outside Canada may need to do a bit of reading up regarding historical moments like the October 1970 crisis, the 1982 promulgation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the unsuccessful constitutional accords that took place at Meech Lake (1987) and Charlottetown (1992), and the 1995 Québécois-sovereignty referendum in which the province narrowly voted against sovereignty (50.58% against, 49.42% for).
But one needn’t wander that far into the political weeds to get a sense that almost anything can quickly stir the cultural poutine to a boil-over: an article in the Globe and Mail, an act of violence by a deranged young man, an off-hand remark by a Liberal Party official. MacGregor seems somewhat impatient with the number of times that “the fragile egg that is Canada [has] seemed on the verge of rolling off the stove” – even if, to date, the resolution has always been that “The country would live for another day – until the next panic, anyway” (pp. 305-06).
Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People abounds in thought-provoking insights. I liked, for example, MacGregor’s remarks regarding the persistent problems facing the maritime province of Newfoundland and the prairie province of Saskatchewan. A chapter on immigration bears the evocative title “Pier 21 to Pearson”; where immigrants to Canada used to arrive at Halifax's Pier 21 (a site that holds the same historical significance in Canadian life that Ellis Island does in the U.S.A.), today they are much more likely to be flying into Toronto Pearson International Airport to begin their new lives as Canadians.
And a chapter on “The Canada of the Imagination” reminds the reader that, when Canadians in 2005 were asked by the CBC to name the Greatest Canadian, they did not choose a hockey star like Wayne Gretzky, or a pre-eminent prime minister like William Lyon Mackenzie King (who led Canada during the Second World War). Rather, they chose Tommy Douglas, the prairie politician who can be called the “father of universal health care, patron saint of the social safety net.” MacGregor approvingly notes how the people of his country chose, as the Greatest Canadian of all, “[a] man who believed a country’s greatness wasn’t measured by its heroes, its great leaders, its military victories, or its size, wealth, or literature, but ‘by what it does for its unfortunates’” (p. 141). That philosophy of “let’s look out for each other” seems to me to be profoundly Canadian – an ethic that we “rugged individualists” of the U.S.A. would do well to emulate. MacGregor’s Canadians is a resonant and thought-provoking look inside the life of a great nation.
July 12, 2017
An excellent account of what constitutes the vast territory of Canada & its diverse population(10 yrs ago). In his wide travels throughout the country pursuing his journalistic career Roy MacGregor who was born & raised in the Algonquin park area, had his grandfather & father working in logging, & was raised on the love of hockey & fishing, grew up to journalism & writing & in the course of his work, got to know a lot of movers & shakers in Canadian politics, business , culture & sports. He has a deep knowledge of Canadian history & love of his country & capably transmits that in his book.
September 4, 2018
Definitely a read about Canada, for Canadians; the people and events referenced are tough for non-Canadians unfamiliar to the history to know much about. MacGregor has a very fluid way of writing and really paints a picture of the people he meets and the country we live in. Great read.
March 31, 2018
It was very informative from the perspective of a Canadian Journalist. From the beginning of the start of the country and it's first settlers to indigenous people surviving the onslaught of disease and displacement along with the continuous battle of being considered equal in the eyes of the federal government. Also how certain provinces survived after the first and second world wars and their survival amongst all the political changes in Ottawa from cabinet ministers to prime ministers. If you are not Canadian, you could really get a good perspective of what a Canadian mindset might have been like before 2007. It was a very easy read and nothing was too complicated and it seemed to flow rather rapidly and at some points it was hard to put down.
September 2, 2016
Canada, a country that so often makes no sens at all.
Canada, a country that, every so often, makes total sens.
The Bumblebee nation is broadly and passionately explored in a simple and humorous fashion. The book is - as announces the title with all evidence - about Canadians, who are not only at the heart of this essay, but its writer's too. Roy MacGregor, a journalist that's travelled across the country so frequently his description of it supersedes any other's in that is honest, complete, and broadly accurate, is an exceptional storyteller. Presented to us is a nation that prides itself on the vastness of its land, on its idyllic nature and landscape, on its peaceful reputation, a nation so full of contradictions that's very own identity, argues MacGregor, is, just like a teenager in the middle of an existential crisis, to set on an endless quest to find one. The author's words, at times critical, at times optimistic, yet always plausibly realistic, can make any Canadian smile and get into self-conscious reflection.
Objective, optimistic, touching, Canadians is a book for those who hold dear this enormous landmass and the nation and the cultures it encompasses.
August 18, 2008
I'm less than 100 pages in but want to give this a high rating to encourage people interested in Canada and who Canadians are...to read this.
I bought it when I landed in Toronto last week and have been mostly curious to know if Canadians define themselves by not being American.
As a dual citizen of both countries I've never thought much about what 'being Canadian' means. Please give this book a whirl to experience a wonderful writer in MacGregor, interesting windows of Canadian history, and an honest look at the 32 million people who inhabitat this gorgeous country.
I bought it when I landed in Toronto last week and have been mostly curious to know if Canadians define themselves by not being American.
As a dual citizen of both countries I've never thought much about what 'being Canadian' means. Please give this book a whirl to experience a wonderful writer in MacGregor, interesting windows of Canadian history, and an honest look at the 32 million people who inhabitat this gorgeous country.
March 21, 2008
I liked the breadth of the book and the writer's ability to really evoke events, whether it was the gathering of people reaching out to touch Trudeau's funeral train and the sound of skin touching train being audible inside, or the meeting with Elijah Harper as Meech Lake was about to collapse.
May 20, 2009
Roy MacGregor is the best hockey writer in Canada. I'm not as big a fan of his political writing as I am of his hockey writing, but this is a very well-written and interesting survey of the Canadian identity circa early 2000s. This would be a good book for an intro Canadian Studies course.
December 17, 2009
Pretty fantastic book - shed much light on this weird thing called Canada. It was nice that a Canadian officially stepped up and described Canada's dual superiority and inferiority complex it has about America. And now I know who Trudeau is. Win-win.
September 29, 2012
I really enjoyed this book. Macgregor has been traveling around Canada for a lifetime and has shed a light for me on much that previously were disconnected snippets of Canadiana. He does a good job of spanning 100s if years if history without making it feel tedious.
July 16, 2008
what is the canadian identity?
sounds-interesting
November 25, 2008I've always thought of Canadians as having a lot in common with Australians, but I don't really have any hard evidence to back it up.
January 22, 2016
Thoroughly enjoyable. Worth the time spent.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews