Five Thousand Kilometres
in search of Scots-Canada
By HARRY McGRATH
EDINBURGH - In Scotland, if you drive south from Edinburgh to find Perth and north from Perth to look for Lanark, there is only one thing that's certain. You're lost.
Not so, however, if you are in Ontario where the directions work perfectly. The Edinburgh in question is New Edinburgh, once a village close to Ottawa, but now an integral part of its former neighbour.
South of New Edinburgh, you'll find Perth and a wee bit up from that, Lanark. New Edinburgh was named by Thomas McKay, one of the builders of the lock system on the nearby Rideau Canal.
McKay does not seem to have been one of those self-effacing Scots. After naming the village close to the junction of the Rideau and Ottawa Rivers for the capital of his native country (and not Perth, Scotland, where he was born), he promptly named all the streets in it after members of his own family.
There was something prescient, however, about his lack of humility. Today New Edinburgh hosts not only the Prime Minster's residence, but that of the Governor General as well as several national embassies and consulates. It is also one of Canada's richest postal codes.
Photographer Graeme Murdoch and I were in New Edinburgh in September on the last leg of our journey to collect source material on Scottish links to Canada.
This time we raised the stakes a bit. Instead of simply taking or collecting photographs from communities with Scottish connections, we looked to accost people in their homes armed with a video camera.
As always, Canadians were remarkably accommodating when two unkept and slightly whiffy Scotsmen turned up at their doors, sometimes driving hundreds of kilometres to get there.
From New Edinburgh, however, all we had to do was walk a few hundred yards up the Rideau Canal from McKay's lock system to interview Flora MacDonald in her apartment overlooking the water.
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FORMER Canadian Minister of External Affairs Flora MacDonald is now 83 years young and has just returned from Afghanistan.
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Flora MacDonald was, famously, Canada's first female foreign minister and held several other ministerial posts in two Conservative cabinets.
When we met her she had just returned from Afghanistan. She slept in a tent and promoted the foreign aid mission she is involved in as part of CARE Canada. Flora did not ask us to guess her age but, if she had, 83 is not the number that would have sprung to mind.
Our remit from the Scottish Parliament was to get three to five minute interviews with Canadians who had a connection to Scotland.
These will be available for people to listen to in the public lobby of the Parliament building. Flora's interview lasted 30 minutes on camera and was followed by a couple of hours of casual off-camera chat.
She showed us a photograph of the Canadian government in 1979 with rows of middle-aged and old men in dark suits and she, the lone woman, dressed in white and sitting to the right of Joe Clark.
The impression was of a kind of reverse-cult. Four years later, Clark had been replaced by Brian Mulroney and Flora's there again, this time with Pat Carney in the photograph and other (though not many) women in the background.
In terms of pioneers with Scottish connections in modern Canada (as opposed to the well-kent historical ones) it is hard to get past Flora MacDonald who created opportunities for women where there were none, and was named for Bonnie Prince Charlie's companion and protector after the Battle of Culloden.
However, hers is not the only remarkable story. We interviewed Douglas Gibson, originally from Ayrshire, who is the president of the St. Andrew's Society of Toronto and a publisher with his own "Douglas Gibson Books" imprint.
On the table in his kitchen is Alice Munro's latest collection Too Much Happiness which he both published and edited.
In Dundas, by Hamilton, Ontario, we talk to Malcolm Baird, son of John Logie Baird who gave the world television and, as a result, America's Got Talent and beach volleyball. Malcolm tells us that if his father had known how television would turn out, he would not have got involved in it in the first place.
From New Edinburgh we drive through the Canadian Shield and on to the Prairie and, from there, to the mountains and the sea.
On the way, it is hard not to think of Scots like the Selkirk Settlers, many from the Strath of Kildonan in Sutherland, who were deposited at Hudson's Bay and had to make their way to the Red River Settlement in Manitoba without a hired Toyota and its unlimited mileage.
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PHOTOS by Graeme Murdoch
THE statue above honours the early Selkirk Settlers to the Red River Settlement in Manitoba.
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In Winnipeg, Graeme photographed the statue that honours these settlers, placed there by Canadian mining executive Dennis MacLeod, originally from Helmsdale in Sutherland.
Our journey ends with two interviews. One is with Dennis himself who now lives on Vancouver Island. The other is with Shawn Wallace (nee Bruce) who is from the Lil'wat First Nation community in Mount Currie near Pemberton.
Shawn gave us photographs she has taken for the exhibition and a copy of research on her family history that was done by her brother Mervin.
The Provincial Archives of Manitoba shows that they are descended from a Benjamin Bruce who came from Orkney in the 1780s, and that several of Benjamin Bruce's offspring were baptised and registered in the Red River Settlement at Kildonan.
From north of Scotland to the west of Canada, an arc, over two centuries in the making, is completed.
Harry McGrath and Graeme Murdoch would like to thank everyone who offered them hospitality on their journey through Canada especially Dennis MacLeod on Vancouver Island and the Calgary and Canmore Highland Games.
[The "This is who we are" exhibition is on display in the Scottish Parliament from November 3-30. All readers of The Celtic Connection are cordially invited to attend.]
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