Canada is a huge country. You only begin to realize just how huge, and how diverse, the country is – in custom and climate – when you set out to travel across it.
Case in point: in the (small by Ontario standards) town of St. Marys, two women, one from the Prairies, one from the Maritimes, were heard recently talking about – what else – the weather.
The woman from Saskatchewan was bemoaning the fact that the Ontario climate was so damp that her hair was frizzy and she couldn’t do a thing with it.
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The woman from Nova Scotia was bemoaning the fact that the Ontario climate was so dry that her hair was limp and she couldn’t do a thing with it.
St. Marys, half an hour north of London (which, as a matter of interest, boasts the 11th largest airport in Canada), is known as The Stonetown. This is not surprising, since many of the buildings are built of locally quarried limestone.
The town was first settled in the early 1840s; there is a sense of living history there, something which is only now starting to develop in many Prairie towns which were first settled much later and which are only a generation or two away from their original settlers.
Case in point: the town’s opera house, built in 1879, has been renovated with shops and offices on the bottom floor and apartments on the upper. Many prairie towns boast former movie theatres, built in the ’30s and ’40s, that could be refurbished and made into town assets.
One of the biggest differences between rural Ontario and the rural west is in the number of people. On the Prairies, it is easy to tell where a town begins and ends. The road runs from the prairie into town and, once through town, one is on the prairie again. Farms and farm buildings are few and far between in many areas.
In southern Ontario, things are different. It takes about half an hour to travel from the London airport to downtown St. Marys. One is never out of sight of buildings, whether they be farm houses, barns, outbuildings or acreages.
There are not the long stretches of “scenery” which we are used to.
On a recent trip, the scenery was cluttered by political signs, many more than were evident in my part of Saskatchewan, at least, throughout the recent election campaign. It was not clear whether there were more signs because there are more people, or more signs because of greater interest in the election.
