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HAPPYCanada DAY6 JULY 2018 Apologies if we have missed any of our donors; our community has shown tremendous support. Proceeds will go towards the GDHS Swim Team. Applied Wiring Assemblies Inc. Atlantis Avionics Bergsmas BFL Canada Circafit CS Flooring CTV Dairy Queen Fallbrook Trail Ranch Foodstuffs Georgetown Little Theatre Georgeview Glazed Expressions Glen Fitness Studio Glen Tavern Golder Associates Goodlife Fitness Harvey's Home Hardware House of Buddha Hungry Hollow Indaba Hair Studio J.V. Clothing La Vita Bakery Little Caesars Lynn and Michael Oles McMaster's Meat & Deli Meldrum Orthodontics North Star Cleaners Premier Equipment Ltd. Ross Family Routes Transport Royal Pizza Shannon Griffiths Southpaw Coffee Bar and Café Swiss Chalet Tim Hortons Town of Halton Hills Twice the Deal Unilock Wild Wings Yorkshire Enterprises Inc. Young's Pharmacy Georgetown District High School Council & the GDHS Swim Team are proud to presentt The GlenWilliams Canada Day Duck Race Lottery License # M483409 July 1, Glen Williams Park, race start time approximately 4 pm We are thankful for the generous support of our sponsors and donors: Over $400 0 in pr izes Tickets will be sold in June at the Superstore, Metro, Mall and Farmer'sMarket The quote: "A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe," was at- tributed to author Pierre Berton in 1973. Berton was fairly certain he never uttered this oft-cited line about a highly specialized Canuck skill. But, says his son Paul, editor- in-chief of the Hamilton Spectator, his late fa- ther thought "it was a good quote and he was happy to take credit if people kept insisting." So, no, dear newcomer to Canada, you will not be required to demonstrate this ability at your citizenship ceremony, nor is there any mention in the oath of promising to make sexy time in the most Canadian of vessels. But the act itself, and why this line endures, is worthy of examination. The search for answers takes us to the Ca- nadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, which in 2014 launched a temporary exhibit on romance and the canoe. It included a trove of old photos and postcards depicting court- ship involving the canoe. That was a thing. To wit, vessels kitted out with record players and without middle thwarts. "In the 1910s, '20s, '30s and even beyond, the canoe was a serious courting device, " says James Raffan, former museum staffer, author of 18 books and perhaps our country's most passionate lover of the canoe. (He did once plan to do it in a canoe on a creek near Love, Sask., but discovered the creek to be dry.) In the spring of 2017, Raffan, 63, took part in a 10-day canoe trip from Ottawa to Kings- ton, a museum initiative and part of Canada 150 that involved around 100 paddlers from First Nations, Inuit and other diverse com- munities. Each paddler came with a question about the future of Canada they wished to explore. As they paddled though rain and, yes, snow, the questions were discussed. "I cried more tears and saw more genuine emotion flood to the surface on this journey than I expected and had anything to do with in a long, long time," Raffan says. "People care deeply about Canada." Perhaps this is the true love the canoe, as spiritual conduit, brings Canadians. It is part of our psyche, a myth, a "kind of archetype of a way of relating to each other," Raffan says. "I think the canoe has beauty and function- ality but I think it also does take us to a place in our collective imagination - and when I say us, I'm talking about First Nations, Inuit, new Canadians. I think we were making love, not biblical, but in the most wholesome and nu- tritious sense, to each other, to the landscape, to the water, to the country in thinking about its future with the canoe." That said, dear reader, if you are going to have actual sex in a canoe, we will offer some practical advice. Raffan suggests a "ratting" canoe, a short, beamy boat favoured by trappers and hunt- ers. "You can probably stand in them and fire both barrels of a 12-gauge at once and still be totally solid in that," he says. If you really want to be a true Canadian, says Raffan, you must do it in a wooden or a canvas and wooden vessel. However, they tend to be "built for beauty, speed, as well as some of the other consider- ations" that fail to contemplate the physics of lovemaking. "So what you gain in esthetics you might lose in functionality of the, ahhh ... um," says Raffan, searching for and ultimately abandon- ing an attempt to find words suitable for print. But he does have a way with words, and deserves the final one, on our love with the canoe. "I will say, without betraying any confi- dences, that to lie in the bottom of a canoe on a starlit night is almost a religious experi- ence," he says. "To be able to see a portrait of time imme- morial in the sky and to feel the earth turning and to be supported in that kind of minimal space between the underworld and the over- world. And to be conscious of north, south, east and west on the horizontal plane and, you know, that's only by yourself. "If you do it with somebody else, it gets way better." Excerpted from an article by Jim Rankin published in the Toronto Star in July, 2017. Canadians love a Canoe Canoedling in the evening, reads the caption on this old postcard, part of a collection of images on romance and the canoe included in a temporary exhibit at the Canadian Canoe Museum in 2013. Photo courtesy of the Canadian Canoe Museum Factoids Pierre Trudeau on Canoeing "I would not know how to instill a taste for adventure in those who have not acquired it. (Anyway, who can ever prove the necessity for the gypsy life?) And yet there are people who suddenly tear themselves away from their comfortable existence and, using the energy of their bodies as an example to their brains, ap- ply themselves to the discovery of un- suspected pleasures and places. I would like to point out to these people a type of labour from which they are certain to profit: an expedition by canoe. What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and in- escapably than any other. Travel a thou- sand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature." -- Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Patriot, Paddler, Prime Minister of Canada for 15 years