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July/August 2001 issue	IN THIS ISSUE: Table of Contents Feature: Orcas The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations À la carte Re:Sources

Photo: Chris Cheadle

He is an avuncular teacher with a soft-spoken manner that belies a fierce intellect. He believes in showing and telling. "To teach geography," he says, "you have to make it visual."

So McCann drags his classes to the house his father built.

The students know Oak Bay as an upscale suburb said to exist behind a "Tweed Curtain." But back when McCann's father, a carpenter, built the family house, Oak Bay was home to proles as well as bourgeois. Today, even a professor's salary is not enough to buy the house he once lived in. There's a lesson in that.

How suburbs such as Oak Bay change is a subject that fascinates McCann, who describes himself as an urban historical geographer.

He is perhaps best known as the author of the popular textbook Heartland and Hinterland: A Geography of Canada, first published in 1982. It is now in its third edition and has sold a whopping 50,000 copies, making McCann the John Grisham of Canadian geographers.

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McCann's scholarly research into Canadian social landscapes, urban geography and Canadian studies, along with his imaginative approach to teaching, earned him the 2001 Massey Medal for outstanding achievement in the field of Canadian geography. The award, established by Governor General Vincent Massey in 1959, is sponsored by the Massey Foundation and administered by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

After a long stint at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B, McCann returned to his home university nine years ago. His office on the bucolic campus is a book-lined warren. A century-old atlas of Canada rests atop a filing cabinet. A framed sheet of eight-cent commemorative stamps portraying the intersection of Portage and Main in Winnipeg hangs on a wall. Rows of black binders neatly labelled with the names of cities across Canada and beyond fill two long bookshelves. The binders are packed with McCann's 20,000 slides.

He has captured images of buildings and landscapes on his travels around the world. When he can, McCann avoids sterile convention hotels in favour of mom-and-pop motels in the burbs — "closer to my material," he says.

These days, he can occasionally be found in a vault at the Oak Bay city hall, searching for archival treasures among forgotten papers. He has been studying the work of land architect John Charles Olmsted, stepson of the designer of Manhattan's Central Park. The firm run by the younger Olmsted was responsible for planning such Canadian neighbourhoods as Mount Royal in Calgary, British Properties in West Vancouver and tony Uplands in Oak Bay. McCann's latest project looks at how such private firms have helped shape public policy.

"It's the best stuff of my career and it lies ahead," he says. "I just have to write it up."

The now retired educator from Edmundston, N.B., has sent three of her students to the national finals of the Great Canadian Geography Challenge since 1995. In May, she watched 13-year-old Pierre-Olivier D'Amours (left, top) capture first.

"I've never been [to the finals], and figured this was the time to go," says Thibodeau, who retired this spring. "It was quite a gift."

D'Amours says his teacher brought the Challenge to his school. "Without her, we might not have become involved."

Walter Chan (left) of Toronto's Upper Canada College placed second in the Challenge, and Joshua Lougheed (right) of Montréal's Royal West Academy took third. D'Amours and Chan will join two finalists from last year's competition — Matthieu Beauchemin of Beauport, Que., and Jean-François Ouellette, a graduate of École Cormier — at the International Geographic Olympiad in Vancouver in August.

Photo: David Trattles

To kick-start the Shoreline Action program — a river-restoration campaign promoted by the Living by Water Project — staff in Ottawa donned rubber gloves, grabbed some garbage bags and headed for the Rideau River, a couple of blocks from head office.

Along with pop bottles and paper, they bagged a tricycle wheel, an Ontario licence plate, a newspaper box and a rear-view mirror. Special projects manager Ian McKelvie (at left, with product marketing coordinator Erin Rogers and webmaster Jean-François Bellemare) even rescued a fish trapped inside a plastic bag.

This summer, the Living by Water Project, a national program aimed at promoting healthy shorelines, is challenging all Canadians to clean up the banks of rivers and lakes.

For more information, visit www.caringforshorelines.ca

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The nesting habits of gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) are as shady as their plumage. But Dan Strickland, a retired naturalist who's spent some 30 years observing the birds, hopes to uncover their mysterious ways by studying them on Quebec's Anticosti Island.

Although a juvenile often remains with its parents after the nesting season, it will be chased away by those same parents at the start of the following year's breeding season, effectively preventing the juvenile from helping to feed the new nestlings.

Strickland believes an extra bird increases the risk of revealing the nest location to predators such as red squirrels. Since Anticosti Island has a large population of gray jays and no red squirrels, Strickland can test his theory by seeing whether the juveniles stay to provision new chicks.

With the aid of a Society grant, he plans to visit the island this fall to colour-band birds before starting observations next March.

It was a weekend of awards for Canadian Geographic in early June, with recognition at the National Magazine Awards and the Canadian Science Writers' Association Awards.

Writer Alan Morantz took home gold in the technology category at the National Magazine Awards for "Control Freaks" (Sept/Oct 2000), a look at Gander's air traffic controllers. Silver medals went to Jamieson Findlay for "Starry night" (Jul/Aug 2000), a travel story on a park for stargazers, and André Gallant in the urban and natural landscapes category, for his ethereal images of New Brunswick's changing seasons (Nov/Dec 2000). CG also earned seven honourable mentions. David Lees won the CSWA prize for environment writing for "Green rebirth" (May/June 2000), a saga of Sudbury's effort to erase its industrial past.

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