Canada Firsts: Ralph Nader's Salute to Canada and Canadian Achievement

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

This book contains original research, no index (there is a scanty
three-page bibliography, consisting mostly of secondary sources such as,
for heaven’s sake, the Grolier Encyclopedia Canadiana), and some
errors. For example, the Canadian Aviation Museum doesn’t have part of
the Avro jetliner (as this book claims), but it does have part of the
Avro Arrow (a fact Nader et al. ignore).

Ralph Nader, the American consumer advocate with a Canadian connection,
is an attractive figure. However, the appeal of his ideology doesn’t
come across in this book, which is filled with meaningless
sentences—like this one on Canadian wheat: “It did not produce
uniform offspring so Saunders carefully selected individual heads from
early plants and emphasized that seed from each plant without mixing
strains.”

This is a very annoying book.