Terry Fox and the idea of Canada

Terry Fox didn't just try to raise money for cancer, he gave Canadians a way of understanding themselves as a people not despite, but through, their vast geography.

In late June of 1981, I went on a weekend car-camping trip ahead of the Canada Day holiday with my friend Rick, his brother and his parents, and another kid, a pal of Rick’s who I didn’t much like. We spent the trip goofing around the campground, swimming and playing catch and generally just enjoying being Canadian kids on the cusp of adolescence with a whole summer vacation stretching ahead of us.

On the drive home, Rick’s parents were up front listening to the radio while us four boys sat in the back, sunburnt and bickering. At one point, his dad shushed us all as he turned up the volume during a news break. We caught the end of the announcement: Terry Fox had died.

The car went quiet; after a few moments I realised that Rick’s mom was crying. I remember sitting there, knowing that something terrible and important had happened, but not really knowing what to say, what it meant, or even really how to process it.

We all knew who Terry Fox was, of course. He had been all over the news the year before as his Marathon of Hope increasingly gathered national, and then international, attention. After overcoming initial indifference in the Atlantic provinces, and then faced with open hostility from drivers in Quebec, it was a big deal when he came through Ottawa. The Citizen ran an iconic photo of Terry taking the ceremonial kickoff at a Rough Riders game at Lansdowne Park, which was a short walk from our house. A week later, he did an interview with the American network show Real People, where host Sarah Purcell interviewed Terry while running along with him. In Toronto, he met Darryl Sittler, who gave him his 1980 NHL All-Star Team sweater. The Marathon of Hope was turning into a big deal, and Terry’s dream of running across Canada and raising a dollar for cancer research from every Canadian seemed well on its way to coming true.

Until September 1, when Terry had to suspend the Marathon of Hope outside Thunder Bay after he learned that the cancer that had taken his right leg had returned, this time to his lungs. The following June, after months of chemotherapy, he fell into a coma and died, a month shy of his 23rd birthday. The news footage of Terry being interviewed on the last day of the Marathon of Hope, as he chokes up at the end, is almost unbearable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Terry lately, for a variety of reasons. Partly it is because my daughter has an oversized shirt that she got for being the captain of our family’s Terry Fox Run team last year, the first one Ryan Reynolds helped design, which she has a habit of wearing to bed as pyjamas. But there was also the announcement by the Bank of Canada in December that the federal government had decided Terry Fox would be replacing Laurier on the $5 bank note. This decision is obviously damage control by the Liberals; in 2023 an image of Terry Fox was removed from the new Canadian passport, replaced by generic images of random animals and children jumping in a lake, a decision that upset a large number of Canadians.

But apparently it didn’t upset everyone. After the announcement by the Bank of Canada, the Ottawa Citizen ran a thoroughly bizarre oped by a local amateur historian named Desmond Mills which argued that Terry Fox had no business being on our money (and, one presumes, being in our passport for that matter). Mills’ argument is that pride of place on our money “should be reserved for those who built up our nation and contributed to the development of its identity and culture,” which he says means “stately political figures and, only in exceptional cases, non-political figures of renown who helped define the Canadian national consciousness or contributed or helped raise awareness for Canada on the international stage.” According to Mills, Terry Fox doesn’t make the cut, being, in the “grand scheme of history” a “relatively minor figure.”

I’ve written and edited more than my share of clickbait contrarian op eds, with varying degrees of success, and I understand the appeal from a journalistic perspective. Sometimes it’s fun getting people riled up just for the sake of it, especially when the stakes seem low. And you can imagine running a version of this argument that ends up as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of public idol worship. But going after Terry Fox? It is like asking what Anne Frank ever did to deserve her fame.

Mills makes a crucial mistake when he decides to hang Fox’s achievements and legacy on what he did for cancer research, which he praises, but with the qualification that “it was not instrumental in developing the Canadian national character or its institutions.”

This is hilariously, preposterously wrong-headed. In fact, I would make the opposite argument: Despite the fact that the Terry Fox Foundation has, to date, raised something like $900 million for cancer research, this accomplishment is relatively minor when compared with what Terry Fox did for Canada.

Consider this: Terry Fox was born in Manitoba, and his family moved to British Columbia when he was 8. There is little evidence to suggest he ever spent much, if any time, in central or eastern Canada. Yet the Marathon of Hope began on April 12 1980 with Fox dipping his right leg into the Atlantic Ocean near St. John’s, and filling two bottles with seawater that he planned to pour into the Pacific at the end of his run.

Why start there? Why run across Canada at all? Why not just run around B.C., or to Alberta and back, or up to the Yukon or down the Pacific coast to California? The answer is that Terry Fox saw himself as a Canadian, addressing himself and his mission to a Canadian audience.

In choosing to run from coast to coast, he was essentially using the geography of the country as a narrative instrument. The greatness of the land matched the greatness of his ambition, and it enabled him to speak to an imagined community that was tied together in part through that geographical expression. I’m going to run through your town, your city, your province, hop step by hop step, mile after agonizing mile, because in some sense you are mine and I am yours, and I have an idea for something I want us to do together.

It’s weird to have to point this out, but there was a reason Terry Fox was made the youngest ever Companion of the Order of Canada in a special investiture ceremony. And there is a reason why there are Terry Fox statues, roads, memorials, parks, and schools and even a mountain, from one end of this country to the other. And it has little to do with the fact that before he died, he had raised $24 million for cancer research, and a lot to do with how he made Canadians think about themselves and their country, and what they could accomplish when they weren’t bickering.

Statesmanship can take many forms, and sure, occasionally it looks and sounds like a politician with big ideas and grandiose schemes. Sometimes, though, it’s just an intensely competitive kid with a prosthetic leg and a bone to pick with the world, asking his country to join him.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope. You can donate to the Terry Fox Foundation online here.

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From the X-Files:

• The novelist Andrew Pyper died shortly after New Year’s Day. I didn’t know him, but he was part of a scene in Toronto that I circled around the periphery of for a while in the late nineties. I’ll write about it at some point, but for now this piece by Craig Davidson in the Globe is lovely.

• After 120 years, the Cherry Blossom candy is headed for the chocolate graveyard in the sky. I never liked the treat, but as a kid I adored the insane, very seventies, psychedelic commercial that was basically an ad for drugs, or sex, or sex on drugs: