She’s gone now. Queen Elizabeth II died last Sept. 8, and was eulogized at Westminster Abbey 11 days later. Her son, the Prince of Wales, immediately acceded to the British throne as King Charles III.
“We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished Sovereign and a much-loved Mother,” Charles said the day she died. “I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country … and by countless people around the world.”
While I’ve never considered myself a monarchist, I nevertheless do owe Her Majesty a debt of gratitude. It was just a few years after her coronation in 1953 that she opened Parliament in Canada by delivering the Speech from the Throne. In it, she spoke of the innovations and policies that then Members of the House of Commons and Senate would soon debate and legislate into action.
Among them, that very year, would be the creation of the Canada Council, this country’s very first federal agency to fund public arts. The Council emerged from recommendations made in 1951 by the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts.
“No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer or other writer … can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his work in Canada,” the report decried, and “must be content with a precarious and unrewarding life in Canada, or go abroad where talents are in demand.”
And so, with visions of writing my first book, in August 1973, I sat down to compose a pitch to the Explorations Program of the Canada Council in hopes of receiving a writing grant. I had the idea that an important portion of the Confederation story had gone missing.
I suggested, were it not for the steamboats operating on prairie waterways between Fort Garry (Winnipeg) and the Rocky Mountains, what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta might well have become America’s 51st state.
I even went so far as to say that “the spotlight on tales of western steamboaters and their paddelwheelers (were far too long) dominated by the stories of Mark Twain,” and that the real story of the birth of our nation “lies waiting to be discovered.”
I spent that summer budgeting the rental of recording gear, office supplies, photocopying and photographic costs and my travel expenses of crossing the prairies in a rented VW bug the following summer.
My budget request to research, retrieve, transcribe and write the manuscript over the following year was $4,842. In December 1973, the Canada Council adjudicators awarded me $5,785. I was over the moon!
In September 1974, I reported my progress back to the Council and published and mailed a newsletter to the hundreds of interview sources, archivists, librarians and friends about the work I and my co-researcher (later my wife Jayne MacAulay) had completed.
I calculated that we had travelled 20,000 kilometres by car, interviewed more than 400 sources (107 hours of cassette tape), gathered more than 2,000 pages of documents, and diarized the entire trip in 450 pages of a journal.
And Jayne had even discovered a potential title for the book in the Manitoba provincial archives. In a First Nations dictionary she found the Plains Cree word for “steamboat,” translated literally as a canoe with fire emerging – Fire Canoe.
Then, the very year McClelland and Stewart published Fire Canoe, in 1977, Queen Elizabeth returned to Canada to read the Speech from the Throne again. During that nationwide official royal tour, she covered 24,000 kilometres, shook the hands of nearly 5,000 people, and attended 61 formal functions – unfortunately not my book launch.
However, I felt so impressed by the way her royal visits and my book’s lifespan had paralleled each other, that I sent a copy of the book to Buckingham Palace. Of course, I received a form-letter thank you. But I didn’t mind. The best was yet to come.
In 2012, as a number of us campaigned to ensure that longtime Uxbridge volunteer and Second World War vet Ronnie Egan made the list to receive the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal “recognizing Canadians who continue to build this caring society and country through their service and achievement,” I learned that I had been recommended to receive the medal as well.
Frankly, I felt as honoured to be in Ronnie’s company in that moment as that of Queen Elizabeth, but who am I to judge? And when Ottawa contacted me in 2022 about being among the Platinum Jubilee Award recipients, I felt even more humbled.
So, it turns out I owe much to Queen Elizabeth’s 70-year reign. I hope this belated thank-you column expresses some of my gratitude.