EXPLORING THE EASTERN TOWNSHIPS

I’m not proud of this: My sixthgrade classmates and I thought we had really accomplished something when our new French teacher fled the room in tears. “Why,” I’d say with a sneer, “would I ever need to learn French?” So the irony was not lost on me when, as a university graduate, I landed my first teaching job: Beginner French. It was precisely that linguistic animosity that Hugh MacLennan described when he coined the title of his 1945 Canadian classic Two Solitudes. Both French and English citizens have struggled with the barriers of language and culture. I know many travellers who have avoided Quebec for fear of an inability to communicate. And that is unfortunate.

For my part, it wasn’t an aversion. It was just that there were so many places in the world to see — places far from my Ontario home. So when Covid-19 shuttered our borders with the United States and I began taking a second look at our own country, I realized that, like residents of Niagara who have never seen