For six years, Matthew Blackett has been thinking about Canada as a city.

Well, not just thinking about it. Blackett, one of the founders of Spacing Magazine, has created a transit map — like the one you see in TTC subway cars — connecting Canadian cities, towns and communities from Dawson City to Cole Harbour.

Blackett was inspired by his belief that Canada is an “urban nation,” noting that the population lives primarily in cities.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your subway art is a very unique way to view Canada. What gave you the idea for this?

We often call ourselves an urban nation with about 80 per cent of us living in an urban setting. I liked that idea and thinking of the city of Canada as opposed to thinking of it as a country. And if you have a city, you have a subway system for the most part. So, this was kind of a jump from that idea.

How long did it take to figure out how to draw it all out?

I knew Canada would be hard to actually tackle. I’ve been starting and stopping since February of 2012. It’s taken me six years to complete. There’s a lot of details that go into it from the spelling of names to the decision of which towns to put in or which towns not to put in. I believe this is called a schematic map. So it’s not to scale, but it gives you an idea of where things are in the network. I started with Ontario and Quebec and kind of built out from there. It became clear that I had built in way too small, way too tight, so I had to go back in and start all over again and expand. I had to use way more logic and problem solving than I anticipated I would ever have to use on a map like this.

Southern Ontario as shown on Blackett's map

What was the most difficult thing about dealing with the scale? To still make sure it was a roughly sketched outline of Canada?

If you look at a subway map of Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, it doesn’t give you a shape of the city. I needed to do that for people to recognize that it was Canada and that in itself is one of the reasons why there is a ferry on Hudson’s Bay to give it that unique shape. It was finding the solution between doing a subway map, which is schematic and not to scale, and trying to give it some shape that it felt to scale, even though I know it’s not the scale.

Did you have to make any strange creative choices to get it to work, like pick a city to highlight that wasn’t your first choice or leave out a city that wouldn’t work that you wanted to have in originally?

With truth and reconciliation on the mind, I made that conscious decision to include all of those small towns — the Northwest Territories and Yukon and up in Labrador. There are many towns and cities that have a population of thousands that didn’t make it onto the map. But there are places in the north that have 300 people, 500 people, 1,500 people, but those are important parts of our country. .

It looks as if a person with one fare could travel all around the entire country. How important is the idea of interconnection in Canada for you?

One of the reasons that our Indigenous communities feel isolated from the rest of the country is because of lack of connectivity. So thinking about connectivity in that kind of way is something I think is important. In the works I have done with Spacing, one of the things that we’ve talked about is we kind of despise the idea of urban rivalries between cities because what’s good for Toronto is actually good for Calgary. I like the idea that we’re all very much connected and the impact that happens in one city will have an impact in other areas. And so this was a nice little metaphor for that.

Canada Day is just around the corner. What does Canada mean to you and does this map help you visualize that in any way?

We really are an urban nation. I’m proudly Canadian. I’m not nationalistic, not a face painter, a big flag waver or anything like that, but I’m certainly very proud of who we are as a country, as a character. And I’m actually very proud of our cities and how they’ve evolved into unique and dynamic spaces.

How has the map become an instrument for you to reach out to more remote areas of Canada that you wish you could be more connected to?

I do remember that when I was younger and I went away, I was really proud to be from Toronto. And then when I was in Toronto, I was very proud to be from North York. And when I was in North York, I was proud to be from Willowdale. I’ve always had that very keen sense of place and pride. I can just imagine someone from Gravenhurst seeing this map for the first time and being excited that they’re on it. Or some small town in Newfoundland is on this map, or a city like Flin Flon in Manitoba is on this map. There are people who will want to identify and see themselves reflected in something like this.

Was there a new place metaphorically that you found yourself moving to while working on this?

You can see I have a couple of closed stations on the map. Those were settlements at some points that were important, but they’re no longer there. I felt like I should include those, because in a subway system as big as the one I created, there’s going to be a few closed stations.There were multiple occasions I was learning stuff about a city or a town or community that I had never, never heard about or knew much about and I was totally enamoured by it.

When people look at this image, where do you want this map to take them?

I think people don’t think about the idea of Canada as a city and what that would be. And then I also think that people will drill down into the map and go, “Oh, what’s that? I never, never heard of that town.” They’ll go look it up and see what it’s all about.

Instructions for Travellers

The following poem was commissioned by the Star to accompany Matthew Blackett's map, which served as the poem's inspiration.

Kate Sutherland Special to the Star

Where do you want to go?

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Enter a starting point, enter

a destination. A map is more

than getting from point A to point B.

Topographical, navigational,

drawn on the ground, in the snow.

Locate your position by noon sun

or north star. Sextant, chronometer,

weather glass, compass, GPS.

Triangulate your position when lost.

How many kilometres of tunnel and track?

What grows at track level? What minerals

lie beneath? What does the sky reveal?

Take notice of every natural occurrence:

heat, cold, fogs, mists, snow, hail, rain,

thunder, lighting, meteors.

What creatures populate the margins?

Bears, cougars, coyotes, porcupines,

magpies, raccoons, skunks, squirrels?

Zoom in for a higher level of detail.

When you can see nothing through the window,

what do you see reflected in the glass?

a strictly factual statement

a symbolic interpretation

figure-ground

underground

overland

land