Press Release
November 2, 2004
Cross-country tour celebrates Canada's boreal forest
VANCOUVER - Six-time Juno Award winner Colin James and beloved performer Fred Penner will join James Raffan on Nov. 10 at the Ridge Theatre in Vancouver as part of a national 10-city tour organized by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) that will bring stories, songs and big screen images of Canada's spectacular boreal forests to urbanites across Canada.
The "True North Wild and Free" tour will recapture the magnificence of "Boreal Rendezvous 2003" - a summer-long series of canoe trips down 10 of Canada's most spectacular boreal rivers that involved Cathy Jones, Justin Trudeau, David Suzuki, Ken Dryden, Sarah Harmer and many other celebrities.
The November tour will visit Toronto, Edmonton, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Montreal and Ottawa. A rotating cast of well-known Canadians including Trudeau, Thomas King, Colin James and Connie Kaldor, will join MC James Raffan at various locations.
The content for the evenings is based on Rendezvous with the Wild: Canada's Boreal Forest; a magnificent book based on the 2003 canoe trips, edited by Raffan and published this fall by Boston Mills Press. Raffan is the author of 10 previous books, a former governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a popular wilderness raconteur.
"We're extremely excited by the opportunity to share with Canadians the tremendous beauty and ecological value of our boreal forests. We as Canadians have an incredible opportunity as global citizens to protect this forest and we are excited by this opportunity to bring it home to them," says CPAWS national boreal program director Tim Gray.
Canada's boreal forest region covers the country like a wide green ribbon, stretching from coast to coast, beginning just north of our temperate forests and prairies, and ending where the arctic tundra starts. It holds about one third of the world's last great remaining stretches of intact forests and wetlands.
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For further information, contact:
Karen Blinkhorn
Tel: 604 685 7445 or 778 772 5402
Email: kblinkhorn@cpawsbc.org
View event details at: http://www.cpaws.org/boreal
True North Wild and Free is an initiative of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). CPAWS thanks its partners and sponsors the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Queens University Alumni Association, Expedia Canada Corp, the George Cedric Metcalf Foundation, Domtar and Via Rail.
CPAWS - British Columbia Chapter