At a shop in the Forks Market selling Icelandic wool socks there’s a Manitoba-themed display of local goods. Alongside the beeswax food wraps is a line of shirts and hats with a Middle Province logo, a hipster brand for the province that has Canada’s longitudinal centre. You see it marked by the roadside, just east of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada Highway. In our university days, my high-school friend Marionne wrote a political-science paper on a faux-naive question: “Why is Ontario called Central Canada when Manitoba has the longitudinal centre?”
I won’t hazard an answer to that. But Manitoba’s unapologetic ordinariness makes it my centre of Canada. The place is fixed in time, both in my memory and in its ways.
I spent 1976 to 1994 there, the first 18 years of my life, and return there every summer and Christmas. Each time I leave the Winnipeg airport, passing the same strip malls and steakhouses trapped in 1957, I look in vain for signs of change. The signs are there in billboards for earnest chiropractors and real estate agents, though only their names are different. The signs are there in new buildings funded by Izzy Asper, a broadcasting magnate who railed against public investment in the arts but took it for his sports teams.
The signs of change are here and there, mostly in bridges and roads that are newly repaired. Even the upper echelons of the Manitoba establishment are as fixed as trilobites in limestone. Janice Filmon, the elegant and emotive lieutenant governor (disclaimer: and a family friend) used to be the premier’s wife. In the 1980s.
There’s something deeply reassuring about Winnipeg’s unglamorous ordinariness, its refusal to change.
Now I live in Calgary — which feels like Winnipeg’s flashy younger brother, prone to unstable mood swings and hasty financial decisions. Winnipeg is Calgary’s cautious older sibling. It drives a Corolla, not a Cayenne. It can be stodgy, but it’s always sure of itself. It’s unenvied, yet unenvious.
But what makes it the centre of Canada?
I’m conflating Winnipeg with Manitoba, so look wider and there are aspects of this whole country in its central province. It combines populist socialism with hardy Prairie farming with green energy projects. It has an international seaport where polar bears roam the streets (Churchill), and vast stretches of northern rivers and lakes. Along with huge First Nations and Francophone populations, there are more Filipinos in Winnipeg per capita than anywhere in Canada.
I’m grateful to be from this place, a feeling renewed each time I return. I change, but it seems to stay the same. Maybe Winnipeggers feel that way, too. But maybe, like me, they take comfort in it.
