By
Sheila Potter
Saanich News
Mar 16 2005
For five years, the family of Bruce Hutchison offered to sell his
home and surrounding land to Saanich municipality for a below-market
price provided the property be preserved.
Saanich didn't bite to buy the famous writer's home.
Now the North Quadra Community Association and some councillors
are eager for Saanich to buy the land before it is too late.
The family approached the municipality to subdivide the land in
the late 1990s. It held off the subdivision for five years, giving
the municipality the option to buy the property.
The five-year option expired in November.
The North Quadra Land Use Protection Association approached Saanich
council and Saanich South MLA Susan Brice to see what could be done.
Next they will approach Gary Lunn, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands.
Council is currently discussing the issue in camera and cannot
speak about the details. But Mayor Frank Leonard said the family
had extended the option to buy the property long enough for council
to discuss what is in the public good.
"It was quite an honourable gesture on their part," Leonard
said.
Councillors Vic Derman and David Cubberley are both fans of Hutchison
and want to make his home a heritage site.
Cubberley remembers reading Hutchison's The Unknown Country in
his youth.
"I grew up in southern Ontario and I didn't have a sense of
the rest of the country at all until I read that," Cubberley
said. "Ironically I ended up living in the very municipality
where he wrote the book."
Hutchison wrote it when an American suggested he write a book to
explain Canada to Americans.
His writing career began at 16 with the Victoria Times in 1917.
He became the editor of that paper, the Winnipeg Free Press and
the Vancouver Sun. Throughout his jobs, he worked from his Rogers
Avenue home, long before telecommuting was considered a reasonable
option.
Among his many books, The Unknown Country and the Mackenzie King
biography, The Incredible Canadian, both won Governor General's
Award.
"He was respected, the valued confidant of about 10 prime
ministers starting with Mackenzie King. He was not just another
reporter," said Derman.
That isn't to say Hutchison was always chummy with politicians.
According to Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer's book on Hutchison,
he once wrote an editorial that so outraged provincial politicians,
they summoned his publisher before the bar of the House to apologize.
"Hutchison responded by reprinting the offending editorial
on the front page, just in case anyone missed it the first time,"
Palmer wrote in To Canada with Love and Some Misgivings.
Not everyone is a fan. His books idolize nature and Canada in a
way one Globe and Mail columnist called "Nationalist baroque."
Andrew Coyne offered this Hutchison sample as purple prose: "Something
strange, nameless and profound moves in Canada today. It cannot
be seen or labeled, but it can be heard and felt - a kind of whisper
from far away, a rustle as of wind in prairie poplars."
But for historians, Hutchison's books provide an invaluable resource,
Derman said. Hutchison chronicles the beginnings of Saanich, leaving
a detailed record of the life and character of the country around
Christmas Hill, now hemmed in by suburbia.
In A life in the Country, he describes how he built his home and
farmed his land, the very land in question now.
Derman argues that Hutchison's standing as a Canadian figure is
large enough to make Hutchison house a national historic site and
possible tourist draw.
The house is already designated historical; so no matter who owns
the land, the exterior will remain intact. But Derman and Cubberley
worry about the surrounding Garry oak woods that Hutchison wrote
so eloquently about.
Saanich has already preserved a section to the east of the home.
The municipality bought the section of land a few years ago and
it is now a park.
The priority according to Derman and Cubberley is to save four
lots: the house and three wooded properties to the west.
These lots were the ones offered at a below-market value for five
years.
The North Quadra Land Use Protection Association is putting pressure
on Saanich to buy six lots, including two lots forming a grassy
meadow further west.
Some councillors will not be keen to buy land, association executive
member Haji Charania predicts.
"To us it is not an expense, it is a community investment
in our heritage and our environment," Charania said.
He said the response from Brice was "encouraging."
