I have crossed the Arctic Circle shanks’ mare and been photographed burdened by a 60-pound pack beside the inukshuk marking that northern latitude. I have seen the stone-grey moraines of the Weasel River Valley blush a brilliant vermilion with the sudden blooming of Baffin Island saxifrage and arctic rhododendron. I have seen set out on gravel the newest soapstone carvings of Inuit artists. I have climbed blue glacial ice and forded chill runoff, and I have camped in the high winds and long shadows of Odin and Thor.
Fact: Mount Thor is the tallest uninterrupted cliff face on the planet, measuring over a kilometre from base to summit. Adventurers will often plan a climb for several months, or even years, before daring an attempt. 
Fact: True magnetic north drifts with the annual rotations of the earth around the sun, and it must be fixed by an expert each year so that navigators might have a reliable compass reading. I have gone to the farthest reaches of Point Pelee and looked south across the turbulent and treacherous currents of Lake Erie and glimpsed Pelee Island through the mist, this being the southernmost point of Canada.
Fact: Pelee Island is parallel in latitude to northern California. The first city north of Windsor, Ontario is Detroit*.
I have been on the rugged eastern coast of Newfoundland and watched icebergs drift in the dazzling blue currents of the cold Atlantic.
Fact: A thousand years ago the Vikings settled on the northern tip of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows, the only authenticated Viking settlement in North America.
Fact: The indigenous people of that island, the Beothuk, account for why native North Americans were sometimes referred to as “redskins”— band members used to paint their faces with ochre (red) dye. Historians suggest that the Beothuk drove the Vikings out of Newfoundland.
Fact: Newfoundland was never part of continental North America, but rather is believed to have broken away from northern Africa and drifted here in the time of great tectonic shifts.
I have been to Vancouver Island and thereby travelled the four compass points of Canada, which is a vast nation whose history it has been to triumph over geography.
Fact: The single electoral riding of Kenora in western Ontario is larger than England. The province of Ontario is larger than France and Spain combined.
Anyone who has spent a winter evening walking the frozen streets of Saskatoon or driven through February sunlight from Regina to Swift Current, or come upon the breathtaking vista of flax or rape or sweeps of ripening grain gone golden under prairie skies driving across the flatlands of Manitoba;
anyone who has been to a small-town rodeo or travelled through the night to attend a Celtic-music kitchen party in Cape Breton, or eaten fresh lobster at a church supper in PEI or been to old Montréal, or visited the Citadel in Halifax, or Poets’ Corner in New Brunswick, or stood upon the stony coast in the coves of eastern Nova Scotia, or ridden the Polar Bear Express through bushland north of Cochrane heading for Moosonee on the southern shores of James Bay, or knows by heart the Quebec phrases “mon pays, c’est l’hiver” or “je me souviens ”—“I remember”;
anyone who has seen the bullet holes in the church from the time of the  North Western Rebellion and the Battle of  Batoche, those bullet holes looking much like the borings of wood wasps; anyone who has been to Drumheller and looked upon the oyster beds and considered the oceans of time;
anyone who has tasted arctic char freshly caught from the fiords of Baffin, or seen the pelicans taking flight over Pelican Lake, Manitoba, or paddled the Nahanni River of the Yukon in a choir of mosquitoes singing like the sirens of Odysseus while testing the strength of your protective insect mesh, or marveled at the  image of buffalo bones at Buffalo Jump, Alberta, knows—this is Canada.
Call it Toronto. Call it Vancouver. Call it Nunavut or Come By Chance. This land of “peace and good government,” once roamed by mastodons and before that ruled by tyrannosaurs, once covered in ice and white expanses of endless snow, is Canada.
Though perhaps apocryphal, there is a tale that suggests that the name for our great nation came about as a result of a miscommunication. An early explorer asked a native, “What do you call this place?” meaning this nation. But the native thought he meant his village, and so he responded, “Canada”—a word meaning “collection of huts.”  We who live in the midst of this “collection of huts” are proud and smile knowingly to ourselves to think it so named.
John B. Lee is Poet Laureate of Brantford, ON. He is an award-winning poet, performer and author with nearly 50 published books to his credit. Black Moss Press published Lee’s most recent book, Godspeed, in 2006. johnb.lee@sympatico.ca
* Detroit, MI, USA
Destination summary—locations in order of appearance

1. Weasel River Valley, NU
2. Baffin Island, NU
3. Mount Thor, NU
4. Point Pelee, ON
5. Lake Erie, ON
6. L’Anse aux Meadows, NL
7. Vancouver Island, BC
8. Kenora, ON
9. Saskatoon, SK
10. Regina, SK
11. Swift Current, SK
12. Cape Breton, NS
13. PEI is the island-province Prince Edward Island
14. old Montréal, QC
15. Halifax, NS
16. Poet’s Corner is the nickname for Fredericton, New Brunswick’s capital
17. Cochrane, ON
18. Moosonee, ON
19. James Bay, ON
20. Battle of Batoche, SK
21. Drumheller, AB
22. Baffin, NU
23. Nahanni River, YT
24. Toronto, ON
25. Vancouver, BC
26. Come By Chance, NL