Canadian Police Officers

Kathy Corrigan is the journals editor at the OISE Press.

Having just lived through two weeks of my daughter’s anxious waiting
for the arrival at our rural Ontario home of the birthday present in the
mail from her grandmother in urban British Columbia, I marvel at the one
truly light and fanciful moment in Paulette Bourgeois’s otherwise dry
and fact-laden Canadian Postal Workers: The arrival at Grandma’s home
in Victoria, B.C., of a birthday card from little Gordon in
Go-By-Chance, Nfld., a mere three days after it was mailed. What a
chuckle!

Gordon and his Grandma, and the card that passes between them, are the
thin thread of a story line on which Bourgeois hangs her how-to/how-done
manual: that is, how to use the postal system and how operations in the
system are done. Too much of the book is dry detail (and the story too
static) to suit the 5- to 7-year-old set the book‘s format would
suggest is the intended audience (although somewhat older children might
find interesting such facts as which province is designated by the
initial letter in the postal code). From an adult point of view, it is
more than a little ironic that the members of one of Canada’s more
tumultuous unions should be given the antiseptic treatment they are
here.

Bourgeois has created a more exciting story in Canadian Police
Officers. There are bangs in the night and bicycle thieves, a plucky
young heroine who helps catch the robbers, and even a couple of comical
raccoons. Yet the message and tone of this book are disconcerting. All
police officers are always helpful, moral, and right (eh, Rodney King?).
On the one hand, children need always to be on guard against adults, who
are trying to abduct or harm them; on the other hand children need only
produce the slightest bit of evidence (e.g., a “suspicious” van
parked behind an abandoned building) to get trusting adults to bring on
the (helpful, moral, and right) police. The child here is both
omnipotent and victimized. No wonder my daughter shut the book with a
frightened shiver, and went back to waiting for that birthday present.