FEATURED FELLOW: CHARLOTTE GRAY

Gray’s 10th book, a look at the people and ideas that shaped Canada, comes out in October.

How do you capture 150 years of Canadian history in a single book? What do you include? More important, perhaps, what do you exclude? Such was the challenge facing celebrated author and historian Charlotte Gray as she set out to write her 10th book, The Promise of Canada: 150 Years — People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country, available in October. “So often we’ve only seen a top-down approach: how Canada was run by politicians or generals,” says Gray. “I just felt there were so many layers in this complicated layer cake of a country that were never even touched by that kind of approach.” The book instead focuses on the personal journeys of notable Canadian writers, thinkers, artists and activists — people such as Emily Carr, Harold Innis, Elijah Harper and Margaret Atwood — as well as a new generation of public figures such as Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi and rapper-turned-broadcaster Shad, who are reshaping our concept of what it means to be Canadian. Gray is quick to note that the book is not definitive — “These are my choices; readers will probably have different ones” — but that the common thread woven throughout is that each of the featured individuals has contributed a key idea to the national psyche, whether it be Tommy Douglas and universal healthcare or Innis’s thesis of geography as destiny. They also understood that Canada, by virtue of its size, is a country built on compromise, and that any policy or project that aims to be national in scope has to account for an enormous amount of regional and individual diversity. “All of these people have the sense that when Canada works, it works better than any country in the world, but that we still need to work on it,” Gray says. “This is a country with so much potential and the full promise of it hasn’t yet been realized.”