A Good Day's Work: In Pursuit of a Disappearing Canada

A Good Day's Work is a lyrical journey through a semi-mythological place: the Canada of our imagination. It is the Canada of the day before yesterday. Or perhaps the Canada of 1967 -- the country's "Last Good Year," as Pierre Berton dubbed it. It is a portrait of Canada captured by way of encounters with a blacksmith, a cowgirl, a milkman, a traveling salesman and other custodians of trades from another time. Woven into the always engaging, sometimes strange, sometimes moving and frequently funny interviews are the ruminations and personal reflections of that wonderful writer John DeMont (who as a newspaper reporter and columnist of a certain age is something of a vanishing tradesman himself).

The iconic Canada--the country of close-knit small towns, of common geography and history, of meaningful work and communal values and institutions--is being transformed. John DeMont has gone in search of people who make their living the old way, in an attempt to distill the essence of our shared past.