Canada’s Candide

My instructions are to write about western Canada, British Columbia in particular. I contemplate the task on a July afternoon, while looking out the open cottage door and across Tribune Bay. A butterfly comes into view—a fluttering yellow dot moving randomly against the brown and green of hills on the bay’s far side, the silvery blue of sunlit ocean and the purple lavender in the foreground, which turns out to be its destination. Languidly, it takes pollen from one stem, then another.

Like the butterfly, I prefer reaching my destination via digressions. First, a little history.

The Last Best West

Much as wheat summed up western Canada a century ago, oil does today.

At the peak of the wheat boom, in the first decade of the last century, Wilfrid Laurier famously promised that the 20th century belonged to Canada. At the time, European immigrants, from Kiev to Glasgow, were turning the sod of their homestead claims in...