Charlotte Gray and The Promise of Canada
Among the flood of books, articles and television programs now before us about Canada’s impending sesquicentennial, Charlotte Gray’s The Promise of Canada stands out for several reasons. Asked by her publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, to prepare a book for the big anniversary she thought long and hard about who to include, and she consulted widely with friends and colleagues. The book she set out to write features short biographies of a number of important but surprising Canadians. There are no Prime Ministers, hockey players or entrepreneurs.
Many of these figures fall somewhat below the highest level of recognition in the country. They might well be called “Canada’s B Team.” However, these B players are so interesting and substantial in themselves as to suggest the need for some revision-alist thinking among our leading academic and cultural historians. The Promise of Canada wisely questions who matters and why. And Charlotte Gray is deeply enthusiastic about the country we have to celebrate! She quotes historian Desmond Morton who praises “the great, quiet continuity of life in a vast and generous land.” Gray explores that life with pride and self-identification.
The Promise of Canada is a book that stimulates serious thinking about those who have most influenced the Canada as we know them today. Canada is, after all, a country always in ‘the making’ and that process of evolution has been the work of many. As Gray observes, “no single narrative makes up our history and every vision, every story is a part of the promise of Canada.” In that spirit she offers a handful of individuals who have helped to shape the way we think about ourselves.” They include certain extraordinary, but often overlooked, figures in our history and their particular contributions. George-Etienne Cartier as politician, Harold Innis as historian, Bertha Wilson as judge, Sam Steele as mountie, and Elijah Harper as native spokesman are among those that caught my attention, but Gray’s biographies of Emily Carr, Margaret Atwood, Tommy Douglas and Preston Manning are also evocative and powerful. Her portraits are sympathetically drawn but never sycophantic; in short order they take the reader deep into lives of great interest and make one feel a part of their stories. Gray knows her way around history, national and international. She is a brilliant biographer, the best popular biographer in Canada today.
Charlotte Gray came to Canada in 1979 and, while mostly living in Ottawa, has carefully set down deep roots over four decades. Her biographies of Mrs. King, the Strickland sisters, Pauline Johnson, Alexander Graham Bell (and his beloved wife), and Nellie McClung have earned her high critical praise and a large supportive readership. In The Promise of Canada she extends her biographical range and opens up the territory of additional Canadian lives in thoughtful, probing ways. Each figure she chooses has contributed significantly either to Canada’s development as a nation or its cultural or social achievements. The very detail of these lives, so clearly presented and articulated, deepens the theme of the book— the promise of our country; it offers some of the major reasons we have evolved as we have.
Gray is warmly personal explaining her choices; as well, she is attentive to the discipline of biography. In each essay, without losing narrative steam, she segues into a brief commentary on such crucial matters as the use of archives, the wayward tendencies of some biographers, and the ways in which historians understand or misunderstand history. Her interest in the people behind the scenes and behind the larger political movements deepens the larger story she is telling.
I was particularly attracted to the biographies of George Etienne Cartier, Harold Innis and Bertha Wilson, all of whom I wanted to know more about. Cartier was John A. Macdonald’s crucial partner in making the confederation of the four founding provinces possible in 1867. We in English-Canada often accept a pro-British point of view as a given, neglecting what Quebec (aka Lower Canada and Canada East) was thinking. The story of Cartier is an eye-opener in that regard. We might not have had a Canada at all without the dandyish and influential Montreal lawyer whose familial roots were in the Richelieu River Valley. He was a keen promoter of railways and one of the leaders who put an end to the seigneurial system in Quebec (1854).
Regarding Confederation, he brought Canada East on board and he kept it there. While John A. had the vision, “it was,” in Gray’s words, “the brains and quiet persistence of George Etienne Cartier that turned the vision into reality.” His own vision was “a template for federalism,” both at home and abroad. In a speech in November 1866, Thomas D’Arcy McGee praised him as the leading engineer of Confederation while John A. wept quietly in agreement, unable to add a word. Cartier’s pivotal role in Confederation certainly needs to be better understood in English-Canada.
Harold Innis, for whom one of the colleges at University of Toronto is named, also receives attention as a war veteran whose ideas helped to shape “his generation’s image of Canada.” He later became a workaholic historian, an original thinker who developed the idea of “staple theory,” and thereafter was recognized as “a towering figure in Canadian academic life.”
A southwestern Ontario farm boy who enlisted in 1917, he came out of the First World War both wounded in body and appalled by the British arrogance he encountered as a Canadian soldier. Back in Canada he made himself into a historian and a lover of the land. Once he became an historian at the University of Toronto, he spent his summers canoeing in the west and the (mostly) uncharted north, trying to understand the economic realities of Canada’s early life. The Fur Trade in Canada” (1930) became one of the most durable books in Canadian history, not because of his writing, which was notably opaque and laborious, but because his study redefined how Canadians needed to think about their northern geography and the economics generated by that land. His later work on communication theory influenced not only his young colleagues in history but fellow faculty member Marshall McLuhan. Innis was a man of his own time and a man ahead of his time.
Finally I was drawn to Gray’s inclusion of Supreme Court Justice Bertha Wilson. Perhaps the most surprising member of Gray’s B Team, Wilson was a Scot with a university degree who came to Canada as ‘an accompanying spouse’ in 1949. From a minister’s wife to a dental receptionist, she finally enrolled in law school in Halifax and began a late-flowering career that led to her become the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. She attributed her steep and steady ascent in the Canadian judicial community to “good work habits.” Never a feminist by self-definition, she nevertheless began to read the law in terms of women’s rights and needs, along with other Charter freedoms. Pierre Trudeau didn’t want her on the Court, but later he wisely relented. Charlotte Gray’s account of Wilson’s influence on the bench and her relentlessly hard work makes for stirring reading.
Such examples will help, I hope, to make evident Charlotte Gary’s achievement in The Promise of Canada. Her approach to the country is not all positive by any means (we have many warts that cannot be dismissed), but it taps some of our sturdiest maple trees sympathetically and well. The book also provides handsome sections on ‘Artistic Visions of Canada’ and Canadian advertising posters, both of which are worthwhile additions in themselves.