Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s fake lake has been labelled a shallow PR gesture to win over the international media at this weekend’s G20 conference.
But the $57,000 Muskoka-lite attraction would make more of a splash if it had one vital ingredient, says University of Toronto’s John Kirton, director of the G8 Research Group.
“Bring back the beavers,” he urges. “In 1988 we had a beaver at the summit, and it was a great symbol of Canada.”
What, Kirton, asks, could be more appealing " and more Canadian " than the cuddly creature that is the saw-toothed spirit of the True North?
And unlike some politicians, Amik the summit beaver didn’t hiss or bite.
The much-maligned fake lake is part of a mocked-up Muskoka scene complete with cedar deck, rustic easy chairs and canoes. It’s meant to transport a little bit of lake country to downtown Toronto to tempt foreign visitors who have their noses to the G8/G20 grindstone.
But, says Kirton, the tableau is much less compelling than the one two decades ago, when the furry one-year-old beaver from Sudbury drew crowds by swimming in another synthetic water feature, greeting G7 leaders of the day and visitors alike. It was part of the commercially-sponsored Summit Square on the current site of the downtown CBC building.
“Amik met (president) Ronald Reagan and some of the other G7 leaders,” says his proud former keeper, Franco Mariotti, a biologist at Science North in Sudbury. “He really liked people, and they liked him.”
Orphaned near Sudbury, Amik, which means beaver in Ojibwa, took to his new home with Mariotti and his wife Catherine when he was a baby. Few would have predicted he would be paddling in the world’s richest political pool, and snoozing in a posh Toronto hotel.
“We had him when he was very young,” Mariotti recalled. “He would play in the bathtub and chew on the branches we gave him. He’d stuff them under the door of the bathroom.”
And, he added, raising a beaver wasn’t all fun and games. “I have very fond memories of that cold, wet body bumping against my legs when I was trying to wash.”
Amik was shipped to Toronto as a frisky youngster that had already developed strong people skills. But, Mariotti says, after his brief claim to fame he was released into the wild a year later, something that is no longer recommended for beavers brought up by humans.
That was more than 20 years ago " about twice the lifespan of the average beaver.
So Amik has long since gone to the happy hunting ground.
Science North now has another beaver, named Drifter. But no calls from Ottawa have summoned him to the summit, giving him no chance to become the next Canadian idol.
Still, Amik made his mark in his day, says Mariotti. He was “an ambassador for his species.”
