Ontario is Canada at its most Canadian

For the past few years, Mario Gionet has been having the same dreams: his grandmother, by a fire, in a clearing of cedars. “She gives me my teachings,” Mario explains as we walk in Hiawatha Highlands, mist rendering the deep forest appropriately dream-like. “She speaks in Ojibwe, and I’m speaking it too.”

This is odd, because in waking life Mario can’t, much. Though 50, he’s only now learning the language of his ancestors. “It’s hard,” he admits. “The words are so long!” (“Blueberry pie”, for instance, has 66 letters: miinibaashkiminasiganibiitoosijiganibadagwiingweshiganibakwezhigan.)

“I never used to remember my dreams,” he continues. “I think it’s because my mind’s more open now, and I’m finally learning about my culture.”

Mario is of a generation of indigenous Canadians whose parents were sent to residential schools, brought up estranged from his heritage. Now, he’s not only embracing but sharing it. With his partner, Cheyene Nanie, he’s launched Walk Among the Trees, which offers hikes laced with both tradition and honesty: medicinal plants and identity crises. It makes the experience eye-openingly authentic.

“We can share what we know and what we’re learning,” Mario says. “I don’t mind people seeing that struggle in us.”

“Our parents were more ashamed; they couldn’t talk about things,” Cheyene adds. “Now we’re breaking that chain. Recently I realised, I didn’t lose my culture; it was just sleeping.”

Hiawatha Highlands is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, the ancient bedrock that shapes half of Canada. It’s also on the outskirts of Sault Ste Marie. “The Soo”, as the city is known, lies in northern Ontario’s Algoma Country, between lakes Superior and Huron, at the edge of Canada itself: Michigan is visible across the roiling St Mary river. But despite being so close to the United States – or maybe because of it – this region might be Canada at its most Canadian. I’d come to find out.

The Soo’s story is very Canuck. It was a gathering spot for First Nations peoples long before French missionaries and fur traders arrived in the 17th century. And way before the Sault Ste Marie Canal opened in 1895, the last link in creating a navigable waterway from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. 

The canal is now a National Historic Site; most of the original machinery still operates the enormous lock – 253ft long, 44ft deep – though purely for pleasure traffic these days. Watching the great trough empty in a blink, I’m not sure I would fancy paddleboarding through it.

The Soo is also home to the hangar-size Bushplane Heritage Centre, which celebrates airborne exploration and protection in this vast nation. The irrepressible guide Tim Murphy shows me around the various historic craft used to fight wild fires. Grimly, this couldn’t have been more topical: Canada’s 2023 season was the worst recorded, with 6,669 fires destroying 18.5 million hectares. 

The museum charts the extraordinary innovations over the years, from fabric-winged Noorduyn Norsemans to the development of roll tanks, which pilots fill with water by skimming lakes with extreme precision. Though I question modifications to the iconic Beaver, which included ashtrays for every passenger.

Next, in the Soo’s Art Gallery of Algoma, I’m introduced to the Group of Seven. This early-20th-century collective set about capturing the essence of Canada through contact with nature – and were repeatedly drawn to the landscapes of northern Ontario. Their bold, emotion-filled, impressionistic paintings of the region helped shape the artistic identity of a burgeoning young nation.

I soon encounter this cohort again. Driving north from the Soo, I pull over at Chippewa Falls. Here, an information board in the shape of an artist’s easel – one of several on the Moments of Algoma Group of Seven trail – marks where AY Jackson painted the rapids. Water chunters over the billions-of-years-old pink granite and a fisherman is casting a line. I’d put myself in a very Canadian picture. I had also put myself at the heart of the country: Chippewa marks the halfway point of the Trans Canada Highway; both Victoria and St John’s were now 2,300 miles away.

The coast-to-coast highway was completed in 1962, easing travel by car. But it’s the canoe that really defines the country, binding Canadians to nature, each other and their heritage. I head into Lake Superior Provincial Park, 600 square miles of lakes, islands-in-lakes and indigenous pictographs, where sugar maples give way to boreal forest, to give one a try.

First, getting there. The section of Trans Canada Highway from Chippewa through the provincial park is arguably one of the country’s most spectacular drives, the road toying and twisting with vast lake’s shores, endless trees and ancient rock. But there is barely any traffic. 

The busiest spot is Batchawana Bay, where I stop – as I’d been urged to do – at Voyageur’s Lodge for their apple fritters. “They taste of delight!” says a sugar-lipped guy outside. I order one: hot, fresh, heavy as a steak. It takes me the whole 90-minute drive north to my canoe rendezvous to eat it.

Dusting fritter bits off my lap, I meet Shana Shipperbottom and Ryan Walker of outdoor operator Forest the Canoe at the turn-off to Mijinemungshing Lake. They will be taking me on a one-night back-country adventure. Mijinemungshing (”where loons feed”) is the park’s biggest lake, with a handful of well-scattered camping pitches. We load up two boats and push off, paddling into fair skies, dark waters and silence – it’s July but there doesn’t appear to be another soul here. 

We soon haul up on a small isle and set up our tents; there is a fire pit, picnic table and, hidden in the trees, a thunderbox (bush loo). Basic. But then Shana brings out the “canoe-terie” – a spread of local smoked trout, cheese and pickles served on an upturned canoe, on our own beach – and life feels more five-star. She’s forgotten the coffee filter funnel, so Ryan fashions one out of birch bark. 

“The canoe is part of the national consciousness, but we’re always taught about them from the coloniser perspective,” Ryan, who’s part Mohawk, tells me as we paddle out again late-afternoon, gliding by bays and beaver dams. “The canoe is an ingenious indigenous invention. When settlers came, indigenous people taught them their ways – the settlers would have died otherwise.” 

Our mini-adventure contains no such peril. Shana and Ryan have brought enough food to feed a flotilla, the water laps gently, and the fire ban has just been lifted, so we can spend the evening chatting around the campfire. I feel Canuck-ness sinking in deeper every time a Canada jay whispers. The night is cloudy – a shame, the park’s Dark Sky Preserve is one of the darkest around. And the day dawns damp. But Shana and I “take a bath” anyway: a verging-on-transcendent lake swim, light rain skimming sideways, no one for miles.

With no urgency whatsoever, we breakfast – bacon, pancakes, maple syrup. Ryan teaches me to fish (I catch a stick). Then we pack up and push off, taking the long way back to the jetty, via tiny islets and archipelagos of lilypads. It is a wrench, leaving what felt like a private wilderness. Fortunately, my final stop, a few miles up the road, provides a gentle reintroduction to civilisation.

Rock Island is a greenstone peninsula jutting out where the Michipicoten River pours into Lake Superior. David Wells, a keen canoeist, came to paddle here in the 1990s, and it blew him away; he bought a cottage. Now, in a contagiously laidback fashion, he runs Naturally Superior Adventures and Rock Island Lodge, so that others can paddle and overnight here too. It’s a sort of cut-off jean-shorts, endless water-n-trees, super-nice place to be. Over the communal dinner, a fellow guest, from Toronto, sums it up: “You’ve basically come to peak Canada.”

I don’t sleep in the lodge itself, but rather a geodesic dome on the beach – any closer to the lake and I would be on it. Indeed, soon I am: guide Tate takes me kayaking on Superior. The world’s largest freshwater lake, it’s more like a sea, with its own weather and whims. Thankfully it is calm as we paddle north. We indulge in property porn – there are some jaw-dropping houses on the shore. Then we nose into a cave and pull up on a long, sandy beach. 

“If there are five people here we think it’s busy,” Tate grins. Today, there is no one at all, just some driftwood and another Group of Seven info easel: AY Jackson painted the view I am now taking in. Jackson had a strong desire to paint the Canadian landscape, and travelled widely, up to the Arctic and from coast to coast. However, it was right here that he chose to buy a summer cabin, which he owned until his death in 1974. Well, if north Ontario was good enough for a founding father of Canada’s artistic identity, it is certainly good enough for me. 

Essentials

Air Canada (00800 669 92222; aircanada.com) flies to Sault Ste Marie, via Toronto, from around £550 return. Canadian Sky (01342 395583; canadiansky.co.uk) can organise tailor-made holidays to Northern Ontario. 

Walk Among the Trees offers walks from C$40pp (walkamongthetrees.com). Forest the Canoe (forestthecanoe.ca) offers two-night backcountry trips from C$675pp including guides, kit, permits and food. Naturally Superior Adventures (naturallysuperior.com) offers many paddling options, including half-day canoeing (from C$105) and multi-day expeditions; rooms at Rock Island Lodge (rockislandlodge.ca) cost from C$185pn B&B, GlamDome from C$110pn.

Entrance to the Canadian Bushplane Museum costs C$15.50 (bushplane.com). For info on the Group of Seven trail, see momentsofalgoma.ca. For more info, visit destinationnorthernontario.ca