Canada 150 begins
Ibegan the New Year on the West Coast thinking about the East Coast. On Vancouver Island, which is about the size of the state of Israel, my thoughts were with the people on the island of Ramea, a tiny speck off the southern coast of Newfoundland. A massive storm before Christmas had brought ocean water into their reservoir, threatening the supply of drinking water. A state of emergency was declared, and it caught my eye on the CBC because I visited there l ast year. It provoked this thought: What is it that unites people nearly 5,000 kilometres apart as the crow flies? Why is Ramea national news? What is that nation? My Christmas reading, in anticipation of the Canada’s sesquicentennial year, had made me inclined to think of such questions.
Charlotte Gray’s The Promise of Canada is one of the first of the Canada 150 books to hit the market, released in the fall. A gifted biographer in her adopted country, she has produced a marvellous r ead t hat will make Canadians more proud of our distinctive history. And she certainly has a distinctive way of telling it. I was not surprised that she chose to present the history of Canada as a series of biographical sketches. She chose not to choose the obvious figures — the prime ministers — and instead chose major events and presented them biographically. So we have Confederation and the railway ( George-Étienne Cartier), the Mounties ( Sam Steele), the vastness of the west ( Emily Carr), the fur trade ( Harold Innis), medicare ( Tommy Douglas) , the charter ( Bertha Wilson), aboriginal issues ( Elijah Harper) and CanLit ( Margaret Atwood). It is an excruciatingly curated — as the word is now employed — world view from Ottawa. She even quotes newsman Craig Oliver, who has never in his long decades whispered a word dissenting from the official Ottawa consensus.
If you think that Canada is the story of the subsidized railway, the national police force, single- payer health insurance and judicial social policy, Gray’s book will provide plenty of confirmation. The voyageurs and explorers, the missionaries and homesteaders, the miners and manufacturers and auto plants and oilsands and immigrants who own Tim Hortons franchises do not appear. Gray’s story is the biography of a government, not a country.
A telling detail from the chapter on Elijah Harper describes how the then-29year- old chief of the remote Red Sucker Lake First Nation in f ar northeastern Manitoba managed to bring satellite television to the reserve in the late 1970s. The Department of Indian Affairs was dismayed because it violated broadcasting regulations by capturing American channels. Who cares what 700 people more than a day’s drive from Winnipeg, accessible only by an ice road in winter, are watching when they do not have indoor plumbing? A bureaucrat does.
Is that what Canada is? A government whose remit runs from sea to sea? Gray quotes no less than Marshall McLuhan that “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” The current prime minister made the same point shortly after his election, characterizing Canada as “the first postnational state,” where “there is no core identity, no mainstream.”
So if there is no identity, no people, no nation, is there only a government? Gray’s book presents a benign view of its protagonist, the modern state. Gray acknowledges that the state gets up to mischief, but really only insofar as it offends against current attitudes on tolerance and diversity.
Yet I would recommend Gray’s account of Canadian history because, after we get past Cartier and the Fathers of Confederation, it provides a greater degree of diversity than much of standard Canadian history. It’s not set in Ottawa and Montreal and Toronto. As a transplanted Albertan reading it on the West Coast, I was pleased to see the prominence given to Westerners — Steele, Carr, Douglas, Harper — and especially Preston Manning, whose i nfluence on t he current shape and solidity of the federation is often overlooked. Gray also pays welcome attention to the impact of religion on such figures as the Prairie preachers — Douglas and Manning — as well as the preacher’s wife — Bertha Wilson — who sat on the board of the Toronto School of Theology and policy committees of the United Church before ascending to the supreme court.
Gray’s Canada is well, a grey Canada, given that most of the principal players drew a government paycheque. But if government is what Canada is, then it is heartening to know that on Her Majesty’s payroll were some colourful characters. With Gray’s contribution, Canada 150 begins with a good story of our government. The rest of the year can be devoted to telling the story of our country.