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Review
by Orland French
Originally published in The Globe and Mail
Pity
the poor historians whose work goes unappreciated
by their nation. They slave away in the history factory
all day, burnishing the past and reassembling the
facts into chains of cause and effect, yet their efforts
go largely unnoticed by the masses.
In an earlier book, Who Killed Canadian History?,
popular historian Jack Granatstein claims it is possible
to be educated from crayons to sheepskin in Canada,
hold a doctorate in history granted by a Canadian
university, and never once study Canadian history.
It’s enough to make a grown historian cry. Or
write another book.
So Mr. Granatstein teamed up with Robert Bothwell,
another prominent historian, and wrote a book for
all those people who were sick the day their class
took Canadian history.
Even if those students were awake and alert during
history lessons, say the authors, they were probably
shown a slanted sliver of the entire picture. Where
history is taught, they claim, “the past is filtered
through the very fine mesh created by the education
ministries of 10 provinces. The result, when combined
with the prevailing political correctness that stifles
debates, is schools that teach victimology, regionalism,
and provincialism; unfortunately, they almost never
teach the nation’s history.”
I have seen the effects of regionalism first-hand
at the University of Regina, where I taught journalism
for a year as a visiting professor. Students complained
that my weekly news quizzes had too many “eastern”
questions, even though many of those “eastern”
questions related to issues in the Canadian parliament.
In response, I prepared a quiz based entirely on headline
Prairie news. You guessed it. Students left a lot
of blanks on their test papers.
Our Century is a non-provincial, non-regional, almost
ism-free story of Canada’s 20th Century, presented
with only a little bit of bias. (While most prime
ministers are spared jarring personal assessments,
Brian Mulroney is described as oleaginous and unctious.)
It’s called Our Century because Sir Wilfrid Laurier
said it would be. (Note to students: Sir Wilfrid Laurier
was prime minister 1896-1911, and there is no e in
Wilfrid.) The authors contend that Mr. Laurier was
right. Canada is a damn fine place to live and has
its head screwed on right when it comes to determining
its values, except maybe teaching history.
We’re free, we’re united, we’re prosperous.
Measured against the examples of disintegrating, warring
nations around the world, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Unfortunately, we Canadians usually measure our achievements
only against the performance of the United States
and complain that our taxes are too high.
There are not many new revelations in Our Century
for anyone familiar with Canada’s story. But
the telling of the story decade by decade, each neatly
fitting into successive chapters, reveals the cause-and-effect
nature of creating history.
For instance, victimology teachers condemn the harsh
treatment of Japanese Canadians during the Second
World War. How could people stand by while their government
confiscated property of Canadian citizens and locked
them away in internment camps? Why would they tolerate
this racial injustice?
Why? Because they learned it at their parents’
knee. During the First World War, the Conservatives
of Sir Robert Borden won re-election by taking away
the right to vote of anyone from an enemy country
who had immigrated to Canada since 1900. While these
people may have had little love for their native country,
they also tended to vote Liberal. Though Sir Wilfrid
condemned this confiscation of rights as “a blot
upon every instinct of justice, honesty and fair play,”
Canadians sided with Borden in 1917. And where might
they have gotten the idea this sort of treatment of
immigrants was fair? Well, hadn’t their parents
supported a discriminatory head tax on Chinese immigrants?
But there’s much more than politics examined
in this book. This is also the kind of book that your
great-great-granddaughter will pick off the shelf
someday (assuming there are still books and shelves
in the great-great future) and say, Oh, is that what
they did?
You can find out about bush pilots and the fact that
hundreds of thousands of Canadian homes still didn’t
have electricity or plumbing only 50 years ago, how
women faked nylon stockings, how Elvis justified his
hip-swinging to a shocked Toronto and how the authors
sneaked fellatio and cunnilingus into a discussion
of Canadian history. If you missed that history lesson,
you can always look it up.
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