Canada and Quebec: One Country, Two Histories

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

An offshoot of a series of educational radio programs, University of
Toronto historian Robert Bothwell’s book is a smooth run through 250
years of history. The 1995 referendum has strained relations between
Canada and Quebec most seriously, but as the scholars, politicians,
bureaucrats, and participants interviewed here demonstrate clearly, the
marriage between French- and English-speakers in Canada was never an
easy one.

The book is a collection of excerpts from interviews (including one
with this reviewer), linked together by Bothwell’s connecting notes.
One might expect such an effort to fail, but it does not. While there
are places where more information might help, they are few, and
astonishingly the sense of both a connected narrative and a dispute
between perspectives (often more than two) is carried off. As one might
expect, the bulk of the material is devoted to the years since the Quiet
Revolution, and the author is not at all reluctant to offer his choices
for the villains of the piece. Who brought us to our present pass? Not
Trudeau, not the opponents of the Meech and Charlottetown accords, but
Mulroney and Bourassa, the duo that restarted the constitutional follies
in the mid-1980s, setting in motion once again the long string of
“humiliations” that have become political currency in Quebec. This
is ultimately a sad and depressing story, but there is no doubt that it
is well told here.