Trudeau Canoe on Display in Toronto
5 Nov
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s birch-bark canoe is currently on display as part of an exhibition called Canada Collects at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
The show, which runs through January 6, seeks to illustrate “… the depth and diversity of collecting across the country.” The show features, “… a range of iconic pieces of contemporary and historical art, ethnographic and political artifacts, specimens of natural history, decorative objects and other remarkable items.”
The Trudeau canoe is part of the permanent collection of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough which is the home of more than 600 canoes and kayaks.
Trudeau, himself, was no mere photo-op paddler. Swimming and paddling were the favored activities of his youth and as an adult the important and controversial politician paddled, among other rivers, the arctic Coppermine River in 1966, a trip which is recounted in Eric Morse’s classic book Freshwater Saga.
Trudeau gave THIS speech in 1944 entitled, “Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic of the Canoe,” which contains the wonderful sentence:
“Travel a thousand 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.”
