The Regions

It seems to me there is a natural correspondence between specific Canadian provinces and US states; so that one could translate in order to give inhabitants of either country a sense of how the various states or provinces fit in the national psyche.

Perhaps most obviously, BC is Canada’s California, where strange things happen and anything is possible; and Alberta is Canada’s Texas, where everything is bigger than life. Moving eastward, Saskatchewan is to Canada what Kansas is to the US: a heartland, but a place where nothing ever happens. A place very different from the Land of Oz; the land of the everyday. Manitoba is Minnesota: flat, cold, austere, forbidding, yet somehow dignified; and, of course, both are laden with lakes. Ontario is the industrial Midwest: if one had to choose one state, I suppose it would be Ohio. Industrial, solid, overly earnest and a bit dull. Quebec is Louisiana, a party place, a place apart. The Maritimes obviously correspond to New England. Nova Scotia is Massachusetts, PEI is Rhode Island, and New Brunswick is Maine.

And then there’s Newfoundland. Though much smaller and less influential, Newfoundland really corresponds in Canada to the Deep South in the USA: colourful, backwards, rural, hospitable, historic, neglected, and madly prolific in the folk arts.

I wonder if all nations divide into roughly the same regions. I suspect they do: everyone needs a psychic Saskatchewan, an Alberta, an Ontario of the mind. Britain seems to: Cornwall and the West country are its BC, its place of magic, where Avalon was. East Anglia is Saskatchewan, flat and bland; Yorkshire is Alberta; the Northwest and the Lake District is Manitoba; the Midlands are Ontario; the coast from Dover and Kent to Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight are the Maritimes; Wales is Newfoundland. And Scotland, of course, is Quebec.

But one thing Canada needs and sorely lacks; something both England and the US possess: a New York, a London. In a word, a centre. We oddly do not have one, and it is probably not a good thing. It could explain much about our own particular national malaise, our general disunity. Toronto is not one; it is more like Chicago or Manchester than New York: young, brash, and too far inland to be truly cosmopolitan. Montreal was one, but has turned into Boston, or York: a place not of current events but of dignified decay.

Perhaps it will be centre some day again.