The Gazette Board of Contributors Desmond Morton Is director of the McGill Centre for the Study of Canada. The views of contributors are not necessarily those of The Gazette.
|
Last spring, I had a pretty good answer when friends asked me what I would be doing with my summer holidays. While their plans ranged from kayaking off Labrador to taking the kids to the beach, I was going to rewrite the history of Canada.
And it was more or less true. Back in 1982, I had produced a book called A Short History of Canada. Since then, the book has expanded to include four more prime ministers, the Free Trade Agreement, Meech Lake and the 1995 referendum but the earlier chapters had never really been revised. At last, if I could find the time, the publisher was willing to accept a new version - provided I made it short.
So what's the point? Surely history stays the same. What's so new about the past? Apart from fixing a few mistakes of my own making, pointed out by kindly reviewers over the years, what would I want to change? Surely I had just found an excuse for staying out of this summer's unusually rotten weather.
The truth is that history changes every time it is told. Scores of books and hundreds of articles on Canadian history appear annually, and most add something worth considering. Since 1982, about 3,000 university theses have added details, explored little-known subjects and occasionally even forced a new interpretation of familiar topics. Even authors and publishers change.
The Short History was born in an encounter with an Edmonton publisher and passionate nationalist named Mel Hurtig. He demanded that I produce a book that you could buy in the Edmonton airport and by the time you landed at Toronto or Montreal, you'd know all you needed to know about Canada's past. As usual with enthusiasts, I was an easy convert. After all, I taught that kind of history mainly to the children of newer Canadians who settled in Mississauga. Why couldn't I write it?
And I did, punctuated by "Hurtigrams" from Mel, commanding me to include more about business - "and labour, too." Women needed a bigger role. Make sure Prince Edward Island gets mentioned in the index. (It does, 11 times). For the sake of brevity, we had planned to start in 1867. In hope of high-school sales, I got 80 pages for 20,000 years of pre-confederation history. Brief - but not short.
That was then, this is now, a split second in geological time - but think what's changed. Free trade and NAFTA; no more Cold War but not much peace, either; the rich richer but never enough, the poor poorer and our once-vaunted social programs in tatters. Or, alternatively, Canada surviving the odds, one of the best places in the world to live, and finally moving to correct appalling, old injustices to our first peoples and to some of our newest. And the book itself has switched publishers to McClelland and Stewart after Hurtig's amazing encyclopedias brought him to financial ruin.
How would one write a Short History for people in 2001? One idea that intrigues me has been given shape by a historian I had never met back then, Gerard Bouchard. Why is it, he asks, that most Latin American countries base their history on their American roots while Canadians root our history in French and English colonialism? What if we saw Indians as ancestors who made it possible for us to live here?
And what would happen if Canadians de-emphasized some of those colonial wars of conquest that fill the old history books and recognized how our geography and our own experience has made us different, yet connected in a shared community. We have the third-oldest federal system in the world. Only the Swiss and the Americans are senior, and both have survived brutal civil wars.
The new Short History is not quite as different as I had expected. It covers a few more years, but it will have fewer pages. It is not as full of celebration as Mel Hurtig had wanted, but he isn't quite the cheerleader he used to be, either. Instead, it is still a "user's manual" for Canadians whOWN to understand how Canada works. My historian colleagues will find too much about politics and not enough about their own interests, but watching the news and voting in elections is one of the few things almost all of us do together.
And, as I looked up from my computer and across the lake to the Abbaye Saint-Benoit and the cloud-patched hills beyond, I realized what a wonderful summer I had had.
- Desmond Morton is director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
by Dr. Desmond Morton
was Director of
The McGill Institute for the study of Canada