ABSTRACT
A little over a decade ago, the then-President of the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) recalled Northrop Frye’s observation that the paradoxes of Canada’s culture and identity have tended to be interrogated in Canadian literature not so much in terms of ‘Who am I?’ as in terms of ‘Where is here?’ (Villeneuve 1993: 98). Until fairly recently, this preoccupation—in literary criticism and in Canadian Studies more generally—with Canadians’ relationships to place, the specificities of region and how these moulded senses of identity remained imbued with the intertwined legacies of white settler-colonialist standpoints and a certain degree of environmental determinism (Warley, Ball and Viau 1998). The latter was albeit somewhat justified given the enormous logistical challenges posed to the spatial, economic and social development of the settler ecumene and to the creation of Canada as a nation ‘in people’s minds’ (Warkentin and Simpson-Housley 2001: 282) by the vastness of scale and the harshness of climate and environment in most parts of the country. It is then, understandable that the discipline of geography in Canada has long had a strong ‘applied’ orientation expressed through close relationships with the public service, its focus on geographies of Canada, and a concern with exploring conjugations of Canadian and Québec identities with ‘place’ and ‘territory’.
