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April 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Trois-Rivières Feature: Vikings Feature: Métis population The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

Patrice Halley photographed Inuit villagers creeping under the sea ice at low tide to gather mussels. Dawn Goss interviewed families living on the border of Riding Mountain for a photo essay on how to be a good neighbour to a national park. Bob Kull wrote about living alone for a year on a remote island. Curtis Gillespie laid out five measures that the Alberta government could take to reduce the environmental impact of the oil sands. Jerry Kobalenko delivered a vivid visual chronicle of his walk across the wilds of Labrador in the dead of winter. Mark Abley described the organized chaos of moving day in Montréal. Merilyn Simonds wrote about the history of the gun in Canada.

Since 1995, when I was appointed editor of Canadian Geographic, my colleagues and I have commissioned these stories and many others from our nationwide network of writers, photographers and illustrators. They are an entrepreneurial and intrepid bunch, most of them freelancers who scrape together a living from assignment to assignment. Many live on the margins of poverty. But, my God, do they ever know this country. Because they aren’t burdened with the routine coverage of press conferences and other forms of orchestrated news, they are free to probe the very frontiers of social, economic and environmental change.

The best of their pitches to us often result in more work than we can pay them to undertake. And yet, with assignments in hand, off they go by plane (Lisa Gregoire from Edmonton to Grise Fiord), canoe (Karsten Heuer from Calgary to Hudson Bay), rusted-out beater (David Trattles from Ottawa to Dawson) or foot (J. Kevin Dunn along the rail lines of Saskatchewan). Their reward? A modest fee from us, a bit of glory now and then in the form of a National Magazine Award (worth $1,000 and a certificate) and, occasionally, a book contract. Mostly, though, they do it because they are driven by an overwhelming need to tell our readers a story. My job has been to usher that urgent desire to communicate onto the pages of this magazine. It’s been more fun than a Prairie wedding.

It is a cliché to say that editors invest their titles with a distinctive vision. It’s probably more honest to say that each of us stains the pages we manage with our own obsessions. I grew up in Alberta but studied and worked as a newspaper reporter in Quebec, so if you’ve remarked on how relentless our coverage of those two provinces has been over the past 14 years, I plead guilty. My heart, along with the graves of all four of my grandparents, lies in the parklands of central Alberta. I’ve always believed that imagination is shaped by geography. That’s certainly true in my case; the fragrance of budding poplars in spring or the sight of gently rolling grasslands can bring me to my knees.

Editing this magazine, I’ve been taught that the geography we experience in childhood is deeply imprinted in our bones. Nothing touches you, our readers, more than stories of people forced by poverty to leave their homes or of families emotionally attached to a landscape so forbidding that only a native son or daughter could call it home. That’s why I think this magazine is important to so many Canadians. We don’t dismiss your love of place as mere sentimentality. Our stories are about how we inhabit this country. We’re as interested in the wisdom of the old wives’ tales from Nova Scotia as we are in the neighbourhoods going solar in Toronto and the economic-development strategies of the Woodland Cree in northern Saskatchewan.

It’s time, though, to allow someone else to decide how to fill these pages. I’m stepping down as editor-in-chief. Magazines need renewal, and my successor, former executive editor Eric Harris, will bring to the job fresh energy, deft editing skills and an acute familiarity with this country. I want to thank my forbiddingly talented colleagues and all our contributors, who were responsible for the dozens of National Magazine Awards we won over the years. The high points for me were the Magazine of the Year honour we were awarded in 2001, The Canadian Atlas that we published in partnership with Reader’s Digest in 2004 and the new world map that we delivered to every school in Canada that same year. I want to thank, too, the staff, Governors and Fellows of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, which owns Canadian Geographic, who have given us complete editorial freedom to interpret the Society’s mission: to make Canada better known to Canadians and to the world. I plan to remain active with the Society and to spend more time travelling to the places that I’ve been inspired to visit by the writing and photography published in this magazine.

— Rick Boychuk

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