Who Killed Canadian History?

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

According to English-speaking Canada’s most prolific historian,
provincial education bureaucrats and academic historians killed Canadian
history. Part polemic and part jeremiad, this book laments the declining
emphasis on Canadian history in school curriculums and the way in which
social history has overtaken national (political) history in scholarly
production. Granatstein goes on to criticize the ways in which
multicultural policies further eroded national history as he once knew
it, and to extol the virtues of Canada’s military past—a past
unfettered by the forces of political correctness. A final chapter
discusses how the decline of national history might be arrested.

In fact, Canadian history is not dead but merely different from that
taught when Granatstein was a student and young professor. It was
inevitable that the grand political narratives of Canada’s emergence
from colony to nation—narratives that suckled two generations after
formal independence in 1931—should pass away. The 20th century killed
the optimism that underpinned these narratives. As high schools
attempted to arrest the increasing dropout rate that was viewed as
resulting from a failure to arouse student interest, universities opened
their doors to much greater diversity. Disenchantment with politics, the
core of national history, was reflected in newspapers with so little
conception of what was newsworthy that entertainment and lifestyle items
pushed political coverage from centre stage. But who in the general
population was reading when the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development reported in 1997 that 47 percent of Canadians were
functionally illiterate?

Perhaps the greatest omission in Granatstein’s lament is his
unwillingness to explain the components of Canada’s national history,
even though he insists that history teaching needs to be content-driven
and chronological. Unwilling to recognize that provincial control of
education mitigates against national history in the schools, Granatstein
also pays insufficient attention to competing visions such as those
proposed within Quebec or among Native peoples. He is right, though, to
insist that Canadian history should be taught in the later high-school
years when students are mature enough to think historically.

In provoking more than proposing, Granatstein performs the
intellectual’s classic task. At a time when the Canadian experiment
may end in response to Quebec’s independence movement, many readers
are sure to find much in this little book that will challenge their
assumptions and reinforce their prejudices.