“Connected By Canoe” – A Journey By Canoe From Kingston to Ottawa Encouraging a Candid Conversation About the Future of Canada

The idea was a simple one. Use the canoe as a symbolic device into which a range of people with diverse profiles could be accommodated; go on a paddling journey long enough and challenging enough and with many discussion opportunities and see what unfolds.  Let it became sort of a “floating conversation” about the future of the country.  Design it also so it could encourage discussions with people in the locales through which the group passed.

The vessel was a 36-foot Montreal canoe, one used by early fur traders that could hold 16 people. Pulled together by CCM’s director of external relations (and former executive director) James Raffan, this Connected By Canoe journey was a nine-day paddle from one of Canada’s oldest cities, Kingston to the nation’s capital.  We followed the Rideau River and canal system for 200 kilometres.  This waterway was appropriate, it being a historical passage both before and after European arrival.

The organizers of this sesquicentennial project were two Canadian institutions (it also included the support of Parks Canada) who are keenly aware of and involved in Canadian history and who have organizational mandates to advocate for community interests.  The one, through its extraordinary collection of canoes and kayaks and historical artifacts and its important work as a catalyst through this collection and its educational programming, was the Canadian Canoe Museum (CCM).  The other, through its Canada-wide philanthropic endeavours that improve the lives of Canada’s citizens, was the Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) along with one of its 191 foundations across Canada, the Ottawa Community Foundation.

We were an eclectic mixture representing all manner of skills, professions and experience that included young and old, male and female, CCM staff and board members, First Nations, Inuit, plus a newly arrived student from Kenya. 

There was both a relaxed camp-like environment as we travelled, combined with a serious thoughtful dimension to the experience.  We carried out a blanket toss late one afternoon – a trust experience.  We sang songs in the evenings and some played musical instruments.  We met with community leaders and high school students in community centres.  Asked to bring an open-ended question about how to “build an equitable, sustainable and inclusive future for Canada” we debated constantly.  We all followed this up after our journey providing a personal answer to our question. We told our stories and made personal connections of which many will continue. 

We plowed through snow storms (it was early May), hail and rain, some high and fast rapids, portaged around the 45 locks and encountered flood water conditions that took us off the water system for two days upon advice from Parks Canada.  In the evening our accommodations were varied: motels and hotels, a private high school for international students, the RCMP training barracks in Manotick.

But it was the dialogue that counted.  When you throw diversity together you get diversity back.  Knowledge and understanding did emerge along with respect for positions taken.  One evening we all engaged in the Kairos blanket exercise, an unusual, graphic and respectful way of illustrating what First Nations, Métis and Inuit have experienced since Europeans began to discover, explore and exploit this new (to them) country.

We were as connected as one can imagine as we paddled across Dow’s Lake into downtown Ottawa on the final ceremonial day to bring greetings to the attendees at the CFC annual conference.  We were joined by four other large canoes, along with a variety of supporting canoes and kayaks, all populated by an equally wide range of individuals.  In the course of this paddle we stopped to listen to a First Nations leader’s welcome and counsel, a wonderful fiddler, an Inuit throat singer, and a song from our Kenyan paddler.  A quite memorable moment occurred as all five canoes rafted up by the Pretoria Bridge and over 75 paddlers sang O Canada. 

So it was, that this writer encountered the subject of why reconciliation is a critical challenge for Canada’s future health and maturity. As a past chair and a continuing CCM board member I had been eager to participate.  I now feel my involvement was personally important.  I thought I understood the key issues, particularly those surrounding the injustices suffered by Canada’s Indigenous people, but realized quickly mine was a somewhat naïve understanding.   The importance of the issues we were exploring has since infected my psyche.  I anticipate this will involve my further involvement in somehow effecting change.

As a country we have extraordinary strengths but this is one critical flaw that needs addressing.   I am hopeful in my belief that one of our strengths is our ability to closely examine our national flaws, first to learn more, but then to seek understanding– and eventually reconciliation.

On this journey the canoe did emerge as a metaphor for reconciliation.  We are all in this craft together; we are all pulling forward; we are all sharing the task hopefully with honest intentions.  Perhaps I, and my canoe mates, had some innocence in us but culture, background, gender, age and experience didn’t seem so important when we sat down and had these candid chats.

Repeating this in many creative and parallel ways can contribute to reconciliation with some sort of equitable, sustainable and inclusive future for this country.

Note: A beautiful six-minute video by filmmaker Goh Iromoto and Courtney Boyd has been released. It captures in dramatic fashion the spirit of the project and can be found at: https://www.canoemuseum.ca/connected-by-canoe/.   (The film won the 2018 Paddling Film Festival’s Best Canoeing Film Award.  It then travelled with the World Tour, screening at up to 120 locations across the globe!)  Through this release the CCM is hoping others will pick up the idea and take on their own projects of discovery under the “Connected by Canoe” banner.

This article was written as a follow-up to the canoe journey I took in May 2017 on the Rideau River to Ottawa. It appeared in the 2018 Summer Edition of The Islander, a publication of the Association of Stoney Lake Cottagers.