In my experience, few Canadians and even less non-Canadians know little about how Canada came to exist. For most of my life, I only really knew about the two superstars in Canadian history:
The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, whose real name was Thayendanegea.
The British General Isaac Brock.
I had heard about Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, but not much else. So, I started my Substack The Story of Canada: Beyond Brant and Brock to fix that. This site provides supporting material for my Substack articles.
Flipping through the pictures of a wall calendar of Canada, I learn that
Canada is hockey.
Canada is baseball.
Canada is basketball.
Canada is fishing along rivers catching perch or on a lake landing a muskellunge (Musky).
Canada is the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
Canada is the great open plains of the West and big sky country.
Canada is the majestic peaks, glaciers, mountain streams and thick forests of the Rockies.
Canada is the long backroads heading off into the horizon past farms, villages, forests, and lakes. Canada is a beaver dam, a moose wandering amongst trees in the boreal forest.
A dozen images in a calendar captures snapshots of this vast and diverse nation but it doesn’t tell a story. My Substack is that story written Beyond Brant and Brock attempts to describe in serialized form how that identify was formed.
Subscribe now to my Substack: Visit Beyond Brant and Brock and select the Subscribe to receive my latest articles directly to your email inbox. My release cadence is approximately one article per month.
I am a Canadian from Toronto now living in Berlin, Germany. For over 40 years I have worked as a Technical Writer in both Canada and Germany.
As a tech writer, my job has been to help users understand and use software. Key to this has been the ability to research user needs and product capabilities. This means I am a researcher at heart.
Learn more: If you want to know more about my tech writing activities, take a look at my LinkedIn profile here.
I am also a seasoned carpenter. Before attending the University of Waterloo, I worked for almost ten years as a tradesman in New England and Ontario. I remodelled beach houses in Rhode Island, installed slate and cedar roofing in Massachusetts and built retaining walls and gardens as a landscaper in Ontario. Basically, its a family thing to know how to work with wood and build things.
