Another Place & A Small Part Of Another Experience
Emil van der Poorten
The prohibition on the publication of material that might relate to the General Election due to be held on the day after the Sunday newspapers hit the stands this week, has offered me the opportunity of taking a journey down memory lane to a small piece of my existence more than 30 years ago.
There are going to be many diversions in this story and for them I’ll make no apology because I think they are relevant to that narrative.
It was 1981 and I was about to take my second trip back home to Sri Lanka when I was asked to present myself for an interview in Slave Lake, in the northern half of Canada’s western province of Alberta, colloquially known in Canada as “the land of the blue-eyed sheikhs,” thanks to it producing huge quantities of oil and natural gas which had the province’s coffers overflowing with petrodollars, leading, on one occasion to the government of the day, faced with a huge budget surplus, giving every man, woman and child a cheque for $1000. This had some unexpected political embarrassment attached to it when it was discovered that some older folk who were born in the province but had moved away in their infancy, qualified for and received this payment! This proved to be the one time that my family were direct beneficiaries of the fossil-fuel-generated wealth of the province!
Since my arrival in the southern part of the province, I’d worked in the livestock feed industry, first as a commodity buyer, buying feed grains for what was then Canada’s biggest (cattle) feedlot with a capacity for 50,000 head, despite the fact that I’d proclaimed to those who interviewed me for the position, that the only cereal grain I was familiar with was rice and that the job I held since my arrival in Canada in 1973 – as an accounts clerk at British Petroleum – in no way qualified me for the position. For whatever reason, they hired me and I started working in Alberta in December of 1975, having driven across the part of Canada that separated Toronto from Alberta in early winter, with a young Sri Lankan for company, leaving my wife and two children in Canada’s largest city to join me later in December.
One of the commonest (polite!) questions asked of people of colour in Canada then was, “What was the extent of your culture shock when you moved from a very different warm, southern Asian country to what is a predominantly ‘white’ Canada?” My stock (and honest) answer to that question after I took up my new position in Slave Lake in northern Alberta, used to be, that moving from Sri Lanka, (essentially as political refugees long before the term came into common use!) did not jar us in a cultural sense, given the fact that we belonged to a class that was raised with ‘western’ norms and values. However, moving in December 1981, from Claresholm in Southern Alberta, from a countryside dominated by white ranchers, producing more than 60% of Canada’s beef and where the “conservatism” practiced was more akin to fundamentalist, right-wing Christianity of the most reactionary kind – to the land of the Cree and the muskeg – was a cultural shock!
Alberta (the south of it, anyway) was predominantly “cow country,” and was often referred to as “the Texas of Canada, except that, in Alberta, the b.s. is on the outside of the (cowboy) boots!”
Alberta (the south of it, anyway) was predominantly “cow country,” and was often referred to as “the Texas of Canada, except that, in Alberta, the b.s. is on the outside of the (cowboy) boots!”
