Faultlines: Struggling for a Canadian Vision

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and co-author
of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Shadows of War, Faces
of Peace: Canada’s Peacekeepers.

Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe and Mail’s senior political columnist, is
one of Canada’s most acute journalists. But he is also one of the few
journalists who can write something more than an 800-word column,
something he has demonstrated with a succession of fine books.
Faultlines is yet another, an examination of eight very different
Canadians whose lives illuminate the strains under which Canada now
suffers. Here is Lucien Bouchard, separatist leader, a man whose
naiveté about American benevolence is so staggering as to call into
question his judgment—if his separatist sentiments had not already
done so. Here too are Georges Erasmus, a Native leader, and Mary Eberts,
a feminist lawyer. Preston Manning, the leader of the Reform Party, is
taken apart in 35 pages, and so too is Newfoundland’s Clyde Wells, in
the only one of Simpson’s portraits that is mean-spirited. The net
effect of this book is a portrait of Canada’s “limited
identities,” an examination of the faultlines that have sundered race
and region, gender and class. Now, as Quebec moves toward a critical
vote that will determine its—and Canada’s—future, Simpson’s book
forces one to ask if there is enough will, enough goodwill, to keep the
nation together.