Choosing Canada - 2

In my previous post I said a little about arriving in Canada as a landed immigrant on November 9, 1969. There’s more to say about the context of the decisions that led to our family move from the culturally and historically rich city of Edinburgh, where we were very happy and I worked in one of the greatest universities in the world, to a small city (albeit a national capital) with a nonentity of a medical school in a nonentity of a university.

In the late 1960s I had established a scholarly reputation. I began to get enticing invitations to move. None came from Australia, where we really wanted to be, and I was passed over twice when I applied for Australian positions for which I was well qualified. I was interviewed for both, but both went to candidates who were well connected and inside the ‘establishment’ in Australia.

In the early summer of 1969 I was invited to a workshop on Hospital Discharge Abstract Systems at Airlie House, an elite think-tank in the rural country outside Washington DC. It was an arcane topic about which I knew very little, and I hesitated about accepting.  My friend and mentor Kerr White persuaded me in a phone call from Baltimore to Edinburgh. The invitation, he said, was a subterfuge, intended to provide an opportunity for several people to meet me, to find out whether I was the candidate they sought for a challenging role as a cross-appointed professor of primary care in the Harvard Medical School and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.   

I was awestruck to be considered for a position at Harvard. I shuffled my teaching schedule and other commitments in order to get across the pond in time for the workshop and to visit Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d already met one of the two Harvard bigshots and knew the other by repute; they proved to be easy-going, as did the deans of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.  Despite my misgivings about the political minefields I’d have to contend with while straddling Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health, and misgivings about returning to the USA where neither Wendy nor I had any desire to settle permanently, I provisionally accepted the position. But my greatest misgiving remained.  One reason for our happy lives in Edinburgh was a delightful balance between work and home life.  If we moved to Boston/Cambridge we would have to live far away, perhaps as far as New Hampshire. I’d face a long commute, perhaps 2 hours each way. When there were evening meetings I’d seldom get home before midnight.

Almost as an afterthought when I’d already provisionally accepted the position at Harvard, I flew on to Ottawa, because I’d had a hand-written invitation from the head of the small department of preventive medicine in the new medical school in Ottawa. The department was expanding to embrace family medicine as an academic discipline. It had changed its name to Epidemiology and Community Medicine, one family practice teaching unit was already getting off the ground, and a second one was in advanced planning stages. As an experienced family doctor with training and experience in epidemiology I was well qualified to head the expanding department.

I arrived in Ottawa late on a summer afternoon with several hours’ daylight to come. I checked in at the Bytown Inn on the corner of Albert and O’Connor, an old colonial but rather down-at-heel pub. I walked up to Parliament Hill admiring the Peace Tower, across to the new National Arts Centre, and beside the Rideau Canal, a leisurely stroll on a lovely summer evening. Across the Canal was the campus of the University of Ottawa. Heading south I came to the Glebe, and somewhere there, on First, or Second or Third Avenue, I headed away from the Canal. Mums and Dads sat out on their front steps chatting and sipping cool drinks while their kids played street hockey. 

I had an epiphany: This would be a better place than Harvard for our family! We could live close to the campus, perhaps within walking distance as we did (in theory) in Edinburgh, so there would be no time consuming commutes. The University and its medical school, nonentities in the late 1960s, had nowhere else to go but up. I could help them make this laborious climb.

From my room on a high floor of a hotel in Boston, I’d phoned Wendy in Edinburgh to tell her we’d be moving back to the USA – news, that she later told me, had filled her with dismay. There wasn’t time to phone her again from Ottawa but I told her when she collected me at Prestwick airport, that we wouldn’t after all be moving back to the USA, but to Ottawa, where her brother John had learnt to fly spitfires before going on to Britain early in 1941.  She was greatly relieved. Like me, she felt confident that our move would prove to be a stepping stone on our journey home to Australia, or to New Zealand, we didn’t care which. But it would be in the British Commonwealth rather than the USA where we had never really adapted to a culture and values we found alien.

When that seemingly irresistible invitation to come home to Sydney arrived in the early 1980s, carried personally by an eminent Australian academic, it was too late. Wendy and I and our three kids had all put roots down too deep to face the prospect of yet another major intercontinental move. We were all Canadian citizens by then. Thanks to the vagaries of international diplomacy, our kids were also New Zealanders as well as Canadians, but I was no longer Australian: I’d had to surrender my birthright when I became a Canadian citizen in 1976.

Now there is no room for doubt. Our move to Ottawa was the best thing our family ever did. It proved to be a resounding success in every way possible.