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instant potatoes, snowblowers, AM radio, the BlackBerry, electric stoves, IMAX, the Robertson screw, Muskol, the snowmobile, the paint roller, five-pin bowling, the Wonderbra, and Trivial Pursuit.
    But Canada’s greatest gift to the world—and perhaps to itself— might have come from J.D. Millar back in 1930. Millar, an engineer with the Ontario Department of Highways, had an idea so simple that,eventually, his small experiment in northeastern Ontario was adopted around the world.
    The line down the middle of the road.
    Just maybe it required a Canadian to realize that forces headed in opposing directions might need a little safe space between them, a little order to the traffic.
    And perhaps the secret to Canada can be said to lie somewhere between the lines.

One
    The Unknown Country
    ON A RAINY DAY in the spring of 1991, I headed off to Victoria to pay a visit to Bruce Hutchison.
    It was the year following the failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord. Meech Lake—no matter what one’s opinion of the political initiative to turn Confederation into one big, happy, supportive, sharing family—had been a pivotal moment for this country as the century that was supposed to belong to Canada came to a close. Many firmly believed that Meech’s death was the end, which it wasn’t. What it was, undeniably, was the beginning of a long, perhaps irreparable rift between the governors and the governed.
    A civil war without the shooting—but hardly without casualties.
    For much of the previous nine months I’d been on the road “taking the pulse of the nation.” This, of course, is journalese for moving about the land in airplanes and rented cars, staying in four- and five-star hotels, eating and drinking at company expense, putting in for overtime and generally visiting old friends—but still, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to suggest that Canada was in the midst of the Second Great Depression. Only this one was of the mind, not the pocketbook, and the drought far more one of political imagination than of prairie fields.
    I had gone deliberately to Victoria to visit with Hutchison. After all, who better for a wandering journalist holding a stethoscope instead of a pen to call on than the one known as “the conscience of the nation”?
    Hutchison had written more than anyone before—or since—on the elusive Canadian identity. In thousands of columns and several books he’d sought to analyze and advise this country, its politicians, and even its people. His writing was vibrant, his optimism renowned. For someone setting out to travel the country in search of answers, Bruce Hutchison was an obvious destination.
    Some might even say he invented us.
    The man called “Hutch” by older journalists had long been a personal hero as well. He was, after all, the author of The Unknown Country, surely the most important book published in this nation over the previous half century. Three times he’d been given the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He’d also been named to the Privy Council and made an officer of the Order of Canada. He had, years earlier, evolved into an icon for just about every working Canadian newspaper columnist, revered as much for his prolific output and common sense as for the fact that he might have been the first to realize that it’s possible to avoid the newsroom and send your work in to sit at the desk for you. And this in the days before data transmission.
    Bruce Hutchison would turn ninety that year. Born in small-town Ontario in 1901, he was still writing a weekly column for the Vancouver Sun, still living on his small acreage just outside Victoria, still obsessively splitting firewood at his rustic cabin retreat farther up Vancouver Island at Shawnigan Lake.
    I was coming to visit at a time when many believed that the sometimes blue, sometimes overcast yo-yo that is the sky over Canada might, for once,