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By Castor Date: Monday, June 29, 2026 Reading time: 13 minutes
Towns Castor mentioned this week
The watercolour illustrations in Castor’s Letters are made with a mix of original photography, editorial design, and AI illustration tools, curated by our team. Words and editorial decisions are entirely human.
The flag is younger than the country.
The maple leaf we will raise on Wednesday morning was adopted in 1965, when Canada was ninety-eight years old.
The name Canada Day replaced Dominion Day in 1982 — when the country was a hundred and fifteen.
O Canada became the official anthem only in 1980, a hundred years after Calixa Lavallée first wrote the music for it on a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day.
The flag, the name, the anthem — all younger than the country.
A country willing to change its flag, rename its holiday, and adopt an anthem inside a single lifetime is a country not afraid to reinvent itself. It is still doing it.
This Canada Day, Castor is home in Castor, Alberta — for the first time in years.
If there is a town you have been wondering about, write to Castor. He will ask his cousin there.
Happy discoveries. — The 1000towns team
Castor’s kitchen, Castor, Alberta — Sunday, June 28, 2026.
I am home.
After two months on the road, I am back at the kitchen window in Castor, Alberta. The room is exactly the way I left it. The strange thing about being home is that nothing has changed.
Henri’s notebook is on the windowsill where it has always been.
Beside it, my mother’s old green hardcover of Winnie the Pooh — the one she read to me when I was a kit, with the Ernest Shepard drawings of a bear who is fond of honey.
After the road, I am beginning to suspect that small towns are doing the same thing: keeping something alive.
Through the window, the streams east of Red Deer are running clear this year. The community hall is putting up bunting.
Wednesday is Canada Day. I have not been home for Canada Day in years. What I am thinking about, looking through this same window, is the thirteen Canada Days I spent somewhere else.
Wednesday will be a new one. But here are the others.
One Canada Day morning, I was in Ferryland. In Newfoundland, July 1 is two days at once.
In the morning, the flag is at half-mast. It is Memorial Day — the day Newfoundland remembers the soldiers of the Newfoundland Regiment who advanced at Beaumont-Hamel, in France, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Of about eight hundred men, sixty-eight answered roll call the next morning. That was July 1, 1916.
At noon, the flag rises to full mast. The afternoon is Canada Day.
One Canada Day, I was in Louisbourg. The French built this fortress town on Cape Breton Island in 1713 — more than a century and a half before Canada became a country in 1867.
The walls of the fortress had been warm since morning. Children in red shirts ran through streets where French soldiers once marched.
A place older than its country was celebrating its country.
One Canada Day, I was in North Lake, on the eastern tip of Prince Edward Island.
A fisherman pointed toward a photograph on the wall of the wharf building. The tuna hanging beside the boat looked impossible. Bluefin tuna can weigh more than a thousand pounds. Bigger than a piano. Bigger than some small cars.
The fisherman looked at the picture and shrugged. It wasn’t even the biggest one, he said.
The harbour calls itself the Tuna Capital of the World.
One Canada Day morning in Saint Andrews, the fog had not lifted. I sat on a bench by the water and waited.
When the fog lifted, Maine was right there across the bay — close enough that I could see the houses in Eastport, the American town on the other side. Two countries shared the same shoreline.
The trees were the same. The gulls were the same. The flag on my side was red and white. The flag on theirs was red, white, and blue.
One Canada Day, I was on the Île d’Orléans — the long farm island in the St. Lawrence just downstream from Quebec City.
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day — Quebec’s national holiday, named for its patron saint — had been a week earlier, on June 24.
The strawberry fields had been red for Saint-Jean. They were still red for Canada Day. The best berries had ripened in between.
Two celebrations a week apart. Two identities. One island in the river.
One Canada Day, I stopped in Perth. They keep a replica of a cheese.
In 1893, twelve cheese-makers using the milk of ten thousand cows made a single wheel of cheddar that weighed twenty-two thousand pounds.
They shipped it to Chicago for the World’s Fair. It fell through the bottom of the railcar. Canadian Pacific built a metal-reinforced flatcar — possibly the first one — to carry it the rest of the way. It won a bronze medal.
A tea magnate named Thomas Lipton bought it for four thousand dollars and shipped it to London.
The replica is in Perth. I stood beside it that afternoon.
One Canada Day, I was in Churchill, the Polar Bear Capital of the World.
The bears were not there. The sea ice was gone. The town was waiting.
There is no road to Churchill – train or plane only. Churchill spends part of every year waiting for things to return: the ice, the bears, the belugas, the trains.
Some towns are built around arrival. Churchill is built around patience.
One Canada Day morning, I drove through Biggar. At the edge of town there is a sign with the town’s famous slogan: NEW YORK IS BIG, BUT THIS IS BIGGAR.
A railway surveying crew painted it on a signpost in 1914 — the story says they had been drinking.
The town kept the joke. In 1954, the town council made it the official motto.
From Henri’s notebook, Dominion Day, July 1, 1968:
“Sixty-five years ago today, just after four in the morning on April 29, 1903, the east face of Turtle Mountain broke off. Eighty million tonnes of limestone slid into the valley and buried part of the town of Frank. About seventy people died, give or take. The slide took ninety seconds.
The mountain still leans toward the town. The road around the rubble is narrow. The marker is here.”
I was in Frank one Canada Day. The mountain still leans. The road is still narrow. The marker is still there. The day used to be called Dominion Day.
Some things change. Some things don’t.
One Canada Day, I drove to Bamfield. The town sits at the end of an eighty-kilometre gravel logging road from Port Alberni — winding switchbacks through rainforest, no cell service, no other towns along the way.
Bamfield is not on the way to anywhere else. You don’t pass through Bamfield. You drive to Bamfield because you decided to come. So had everyone else who was there that day.
One Canada Day, I was in Dawson City. The starter was older than everyone in the room.
A sourdough starter carried over the Chilkoot Trail in 1898 is still alive — kept by Yukoners ever since. I had it on a pancake at a kitchen counter on Front Street.
That night the sun did not set.
One Canada Day, I drove to Tuktoyaktuk. Before 2017, you could not. For most of the country’s history, no one could.
The road ends at the Arctic Ocean. The ocean does not.
One Canada Day, I flew into Kinngait — there is no road.
The Co-op studio has been pulling prints since 1959. The work is in galleries in New York and Tokyo and Berlin.
I bought a small print of a bird that day. It is on the wall in the kitchen here in Castor.
Thirteen places. Thirteen answers.
Henri used to say every town keeps one piece of Canada.
I think he was right.
→ Ferryland keeps memory.
→ Biggar keeps a joke.
→ Frank keeps the scar.
→ Churchill keeps patience.
→ Kinngait keeps imagination.
The pieces are different.
The habit is the same.
Henri’s notebook is on the windowsill. The Pooh book is beside it. The print from Kinngait is on the wall. Things gathered from far away, brought home, and kept.
On Wednesday I will raise the flag with my neighbours at the community hall here in Castor — one more Canada Day, in one more piece of the country.
Wherever you are, may yours go up too. Or wait, and rise at noon.
Happy Canada Day, cousins.
— Castor
Castor’s grandfather, on small-town Canada — entries from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s
June 1968, Saint-Jean-de-l’Île-d’Orléans, Quebec.
“The strawberries have come in. The whole road around the island has cardboard signs at the gates of each farm.
I bought a basket from a woman at her gate. She had been picking since five. She told me you should not blink during a strawberry season because they will be gone.
— Henri”
June 21, 2017, Inuvik, Northwest Territories.
“I was in town for the longest day of the year when the announcement came. The Prime Minister had renamed the day.
Until that afternoon it had been National Aboriginal Day. Now it was National Indigenous Peoples Day.
Same day. Same midnight sun. New name.
The National Indian Brotherhood — now the Assembly of First Nations — had asked for the day in 1982. Governor General Roméo LeBlanc made it official in 1996. Justin Trudeau renamed it in 2017.
Wherever you are on June 21st, look up around nine o’clock. The sun will not be quite down yet.
Where I am writing this from, it never quite is.
— C.”
What Castor’s cousins are seeing in their towns this week
→ Cousin Tignish (Prince Edward Island) wrote on Acadian-blue stationery. The Irish Moss Festival is on through Saturday, July 4 — nine days of music and seafood at the Island’s far northern tip.
Irish moss is a red seaweed once gathered along the shore by horse-drawn rake — combed off the sand at low tide. She says her grandfather kept the horse. She says the moss is still there. So is the festival. The horses are not.
→ Cousin Burford (Ontario) called on Sunday evening, voice tired and proud. Wienerfest brought eight thousand people and a thousand dogs to a village of about a thousand, this past weekend. Canada’s largest breed-specific dog festival, officially. The Dachshund Race is the marquee. The costume contest and bobbing-for-wieners draw the crowd in between. He says it is mostly dachshunds, but all dogs are welcome.
→ Cousin Gravelbourg (Saskatchewan) wrote on Sunday. The Museum cut a ribbon at the base of a wooden grain elevator on Saturday afternoon. A live band played. Wooden elevators were once the tallest things for miles in any direction on the prairies — the punctuation of the prairie sky. There are fewer every year. He says Gravelbourg is keeping one of theirs.
→ Cousin Pugwash (Nova Scotia) writes from the Cumberland County coast. The Gathering of the Clans takes over Pugwash on Wednesday — Highland Games, bagpipes, and sword dancing on the lawn beside Northumberland Strait. The PEI Carnival Company brings a full Kids Zone across the water this year. Cousin says she has been hearing the pipes practise all week.
Where to go this weekend, with a tip from Castor’s cousin there
The Ponoka Stampede is in its ninetieth year. Seven days of rodeo on the prairies, ending on Canada Day.
Volunteers run it. They have for ninety years.
This year, the Stampede is dedicated to the cowgirl. From the first pair of boots to the next world champion.
On Wednesday — Canada Day — the Tommy Dorchester Dash for Cash is the biggest in the event’s history. Ninety thousand dollars on the line. One run. One winner.
Cousin Ponoka says she has been going since she was small. She says the smell of the grounds — leather, hay, dust, kettle corn — does not change from year to year. She says ninety years of Canada Day rodeo on the prairies is something to see.
Drive to Ponoka for the Dash. Drive for the cowgirls. Drive for the ninetieth year of the Stampede running through the country’s birthday.
Things Castor has picked up on the road
In November 1979, a one-year-old girl landed at Montréal airport wrapped in a red Air Canada blanket. She was one of sixty thousand Vietnamese refugees Canada had agreed to take in after the war. Her family arrived with one bag each. Her father had a hundred dollars in his pocket.
Her name was Vien Huynh-Lee. She was headed to Birtle.
Cousin Birtle remembers them arriving. She says the church sponsors taught Vien’s parents English. She says they found her father a job. She says they traded cookies for her mother’s spring rolls.
When Vien was in Grade Three, a classmate said something to her that he should not have said. The teacher disciplined the boy in front of the class. Loudly.
“That teacher made me feel seen and protected,” Vien would write decades later.
Forty years on, when Canada pledged to take in twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees, Vien drove to the Ottawa airport. She brought welcome signs in Arabic. She brought a box of Timbits. She greeted a Syrian family of six.
“It occurred to me,” she wrote, “that this moment speaks to what Canada is. A group of Chinese people holding Arabic welcome signs, greeting a Syrian family with Timbits.”
The blanket from 1979 is folded in a drawer in Ottawa. The maple leaf has not faded.
Vien published an essay about all of this in CBC First Person. Cousin Birtle says the whole town has read it. She says they are proud.
It is Canada Day on Wednesday.
The man who composed O Canada served in the American Civil War.
Calixa Lavallée was born in Verchères, Quebec in 1842. His father taught him organ. By thirteen he was playing piano concerts in Montréal. At fifteen he moved to the United States and settled in Rhode Island. When the Civil War came, he served as a band musician in the Union Army.
In the 1870s he came home to Montréal. In 1880, the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec asked him to set music to a patriotic poem written by judge Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The poem was for Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day — not Canada Day.
He wrote O Canada.
It premiered in Quebec City on June 24, 1880. Exactly one hundred and forty-six years ago this week.
The song was Quebec’s song first.
It became the official national anthem of Canada by Act of Parliament in 1980 — a hundred years after Lavallée wrote it.
He died in Boston in 1891, at forty-nine. He never heard it sung as the anthem of his country.
A memory from another town
I climbed the Midnight Dome at Dawson City, Yukon one summer solstice. I cannot remember the exact year.
The Dome sits behind the town. People have been climbing it on the longest day of the year – June 21 – since 1899. From the top, on the night of the solstice, the sun dips below the horizon for about twenty minutes and then comes back up.
I went up with strangers — a couple with a thermos, a man with a guitar, three Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in women who had been climbing together since they were teenagers. The light was thin and slanting. The valley below was perfectly still.
I do not remember if the sun came down for fifteen minutes or twenty-five. I remember that nobody spoke when it did.
I have thought of the Dome every June 21st since.
You write Castor. Castor asks the cousin there.
→ Roger Tiessen wrote on the 1000towns Wheatley, Ontario, page on May 21: “When is the big boyz four-day fishing contest this 2026 summer, thanks.”
Roger — I called Cousin Wheatley as soon as I saw your note. Here is what he said.
The official 2026 dates are not posted yet. The Big Boyz Tournament has run on the Civic Holiday long weekend for as long as the Southwest Outdoors Club has organized it, out of Wheatley Harbour.
In 2024 and 2025 it ran August 1–5 — four days centred on the holiday Monday. He says to expect the same shape for 2026: very likely Friday, July 31 through Monday, August 3, give or take a day depending on when the club locks the calendar.
He says the club posts the official dates on their site when they have them. He says we will repost the moment they do.
He says: Wheatley Harbour. First weekend of August. Lines in by sunrise. Bring a cooler. Come hungry. The fish fry is the point.
Thanks for writing, Roger.
— Castor
A puzzle this week. The answer is in next week’s letter
The question was:
Which Canadian village of about 1,500 people claims to feed the world one-third of its fries — and has the receipts?
It is good to be home.
When I was a kit, my mother walked me down the gravel road to the community hall. There was always a pancake breakfast. My friends were already there. The grass was always shorter than I remembered.
I have not been here in years.
On Wednesday, I will walk the gravel road again. The flag will go up at noon. The pancakes will be ready. My friends will be there. Some of them I have not seen since the last one.
I will save a seat in case you are coming.
I’ll write next week from somewhere new.
Got a town in mind? Write to me. I’ll ask the cousin there.
Yours in maple,
P.S. 992 cousins counted. Eight more to a thousand.
Castor’s hometown is Castor, Alberta — population 876, where the streams east of Red Deer kept the family in dam-builders for generations.
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