On the first of July, Canada Day, there was a Canada Day quiz in the Edmonton Journal. One question was: how much of Canada is taken up by cropland, including pastures and orchards ? The answer was 6.6 per cent of Canada’s land is used for agricultural purposes, in contrast -just one per cent is ranked as ‘built up” (presumably towns, cities, etc.). Now, as a farmer’s daughter, this delighted me. I would much rather think that so much of our beautiful Canada is green and producing good healthy food than that most of it is taken up by busy, noisy cities. But busy noisy cities also provide jobs, good schools and better-equipped hospitals, etcetera but it does give us something to think about and it reminds us what a great country we live in.
Another question was what year was a dinosaur skull discovered in
Drumheller? The answer was that Joseph Tyrrell discovered the skull in 1884. Of course we know that the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology was named after this man and rightly so. But my viewpoint is a little different because my husband worked in the mines of Drumheller as a young man and he often spoke of the glitter of the exposed bones in the valley and of the stories told by the miners 60 plus years after the discovery of the skull.
What year was the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened was another question - answer was 1962, although it was not actually finished until 1970 ! I have a rather personal memory of the Trans-Canada Highway as an old neighbour of ours on the farm actually was working on the building of the Trans-Canada. At least I thought he was old but when you are very young you think everyone is old. There must have been certain times that he came home to put his crop in before going back to building that famous road that stretched from St. John’s N.L. to Victoria, B.C. and I remember he and my father sitting in easy chairs talking about the actual construction.
There were 35 questions in the Canada Day Quiz and all of them made me realize how personal is our relationship with our country and how we must pay attention to what is happening now and in the future.