Making History: The Remarkable Story Behind Canada: A People's History

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Executive producer Mark Starowicz went against all the odds when he
undertook the CBC documentary television series called the Canadian
History Project, one that many colleagues feared no one would watch. The
spectacular result was Canada: A People’s History, a series broadcast
in 2000 and 2001 that attracted more than 2.5 million viewers in English
Canada alone. Canadians found it gripping and heartbreaking.

This book stems from the author’s recollections of how the 17
episodes came to be shot, and how he worked behind the scenes to make it
possible. It is set, he notes, in the context of some of the most
turbulent years in CBC history—namely, the late 1990s.

Starowicz writes like a cowboy on the range herding wild cattle, no
holds barred. He calls Television: The Business Behind the Box, by
television reporter Les Brown, the model for his book. Like Brown, he
aims Making History at the general reader and hits his target. The book
reads like an adventure story. Even Starowicz’s handling of his
extensive research in the CBC’s library and archives becomes an
adventure. For example, he opens with five very cold, wet people in a
12-metre boat that is slowly sinking in the icy waters of the Strait of
Belle Isle off the Newfoundland coast. Two of the five are Starowicz and
his 13-year-old daughter. Only 60 pages later do readers learn that all
survived, rescued by a huge commercial scallop trawler.

Viewers found the series “epic but not pompous.” A Toronto Star
reporter called it “breath-taking in its breadth and fascinating in
its details.” Starowicz is currently head of CBC’s Television
Documentary Production Unit, and has received six honorary degrees for
his work. Making History justifies its subtitle as a “remarkable
story.”