E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

January/February 2005 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Range roamers In-depth: Canada’s bison The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

The invisible divide
Anyone who has picked up and moved from one province to another can tell you how burdensome it is. You need to get a new driver’s licence and medicare card, to start paying (or not) health-care premiums, to figure out whether auto insurance is public or private. Move to Quebec, and you have to file a provincial income tax return, in addition to the federal income tax form, both of which have their own rules on deductions and credits. Canadians have never been more mobile, and yet the borders within this country have never been more inhibiting to interprovincial movements.

Those differences, as vexing as they might be, represent an accumulation of decisions by the people of each province about what sort of society they wish to inhabit. And nowhere are the choices made by abutting neighbours so starkly divergent as Alberta and Saskatchewan.

In this issue, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan, writer Aritha van Herk plumbs the debate at the turn of the century that led to the imposition of the border on the 110th meridian. The two provinces are an immutable fact of Canada now. But in 1905, a very different West — and a very different country — might have emerged from the often testy exchanges of views between Frederick Haultain, then premier of the old North-West Territories, and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier.

Also in the issue: Allan Casey takes readers a kilometre under the prairie for a story on how Saskatchewan has quietly become the world’s largest exporter of potash, which is vital to agricultural production everywhere. Candace Savage follows the trail of one of the only remaining purebred herds of plains bison in Canada. Our photo essay, by Kristen Wagner and Tim Van Horn, features portraits of Albertans. Gordon Laird recalls the legacy of his great-great-uncle David Laird, who negotiated many of the treaties with the prairie First Nations. And Laura Leyshon photographs the people of the border city of Lloydminster.

Accompanying this issue is our latest poster map, which features Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905 and, on the reverse, a satellite view of the two provinces from 700 kilometres above the Earth. Cartographer Mary-Ellen Maybee worked for six months on the map, rooting through archival materials on railway lands, treaties, surveying and settlement, trading posts and the North West Mounted Police. Our goal was to give readers a portrait of the human presence in the West 100 years ago and, on the side featuring the satellite image, an arresting visual of the geography of the same area. With the assistance of CN, the Historica Foundation of Canada, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Canadian Council for Geographic Education, copies of the map will be given to high school students enrolled in history courses across the two provinces. While van Herk’s essay points out how different the two prairie siblings have become, the map shows that when you strip the area to its geographic essentials, it really is just one big province.

— Rick Boychuk

top