From Sea to (Shining) Sea?

Obligatory photo of us dipping our bikes into the west coast waters. 

Welcome to our blog documenting our bike trip across Canada! We hope to include regular updates of our journey, musings, and pictures of interesting sights and wildlife (or roadkill) that we see along the way. Karen’s planning to spend a lot of her time on the road listening to audiobooks written by authors from each province we’re biking in, while I plan on listening to musicians from each province we’re in.

While Karen planned the route, the first number of campsites or homes we will stay in, and some interesting landmarks she wants to stop at, I focused on the not-so important task of setting the tone of the trip. For instance, I decided we’d be biking from sea to shining sea! What I didn’t realize how controversial and complicated this would be.

I was shocked to learn that what I thought was Canada’s motto, “from sea to shining sea” is in fact American.[1] Apparently the Canadian version of the phrase that became the national motto, “A mari usque ad mare” doesn’t include the word “shining.” Canada’s motto was used by George Monro Grant and adopted as the official motto in 1906.[2]

“From sea to sea” obviously refers to Canadian land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It also conspicuously ignores the third Arctic Ocean “sea,” which is exactly what Karen and I plan to do as well.

That left us with a very important question. If we start our journey off the waters of the University Endowment Lands just west of Vancouver, does that count as starting from the sea? The water off Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island is unquestionably the Pacific Ocean, but the water off the University Endowment Lands is the Georgia Strait. Is the Georgia Strait part of the Pacific Ocean, or is it adjacent but separate to it? I asked a few people I knew with vaguely related environmental or geology degrees.[3] We unfortunately got a variety of answers that left us just as confused and still unsure if we’re leaving our trip on a false foot/pedal.

In the end, I reached out to the definitive experts, the Georgia Strait Alliance, and emailed them to explain our question. They very kindly and graciously responded to us and confirmed that while the experience of the wild west coast of Vancouver Island is quite different to the inner waters of the Salish Sea, the waters of Georgia Strait are contiguous with the Pacific Ocean and are considered part of the Pacific Ocean. Whew!

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[1] This shock was equal only to the time I learned that Woody Guthrie was American. I thought, ‘How could Guthrie be American when he wrote the quintessential Canadian song, “This Land is Your Land” that includes such lyrics as “from Bonavista to Vancouver Island?”’ How wrong I was, but regardless I still like the Canadianized version better than the original.

[2] Grant is the great grandfather of Michael Ignatieff, who also had his complicated Canadian/American roots questioned as he was “just visiting” in 2011 to lead the Liberal Party to its worst election results in Canadian history.

[3] This included asking Karen’s sister Katie. Katie was potentially a qualified person to ask because she has an Environmental Sciences degree, but she is also debatably one of the worst people to ask an oceanography question to because she lives in Nebraska, the world’s only triple landlocked territory.