Canada Through My Eye

Hi! I’m Adam.

And I’m a Canadian.

That alone should be enough reason for me to set up a blog celebrating Canada, especially with our country marking its 150th birthday in 2017. But there’s more to it than that.

I’m passionate about Canada. Always have been. I wrote my first letter to the president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, thanking him for his emphasis on home-grown content, when I was ten years old. I’m now in my eleventh year of providing freelance on-air reports to the CBC’s morning radio show in my native Cape Breton, and I recently completed a 12-year stint of telling the stories of ordinary Canadians via my work for The Reporter, the weekly community newspaper based in my hometown of Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia.

I’m also a musician that spent seven years touring around Canada’s East Coast, writing, recording and performing songs about the things that make us tick. Some are serious. Some are satirical. Jean Chretien has a CD copy of a song I wrote about his testimony to a government inquiry in 2005. (Yes, the briefcase full of golf balls. “That” testimony.)

I don’t consider myself an expert on Canada. I’ll come clean and admit to you that I’ve only spent time in six of its provinces. (I hope to remedy that, at least in part, during this anniversary year.) I’m no learned historian, no great orator, certainly not a coureur du bois or a bucheron, despite the best efforts of my mother’s (Acadian) side of the family.

I just love this country.

And I love it despite having only seen it through one eye. I’ve been blind in my left eye pretty much since birth and nearly lost my right eye at the age of 20. That has also coloured my perception of Canada (and its health-care system) and led to the very title of this Web site.

So I hope you’ll indulge me in a year-by-year breakdown of my life in Canada since my birth in 1972 – my personal observations, highlights and lowlights, gratitude and gripes – along with the occasional commentary on present-day Canada.

Your opinions and comments are most welcome, even if they run counter to mine. If you’re not a Canadian, I hope this exercise will educate you a bit about our nation. If you’re a fellow Canadian, I hope you’ll see something you recognise here, and perhaps share a laugh and even a tear with me from time to time.

Either way – enjoy, eh?