The Unfinished Country: To Canada with Love and Some Misgivings

Kenneth M. Glazier was Chief Librarian Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Alberta.

Bruce Hutchison, over a period of 60 years, has written 13 books on the Canadian scene. Two of those works, The Unknown Country: Canada and Her People and the Incredible Canadians: A Candid Portrait of MacKenzie King, were historic eye-openers on what this nation really was all about and on a man who was Prime Minister longer than anyone before or since. With that background, the reader who picks up this book instinctively asks, can Hutchison tell us anything new about Canada of the past, present, or future?

The best way to enjoy this book is to imagine that you have been invited over to Hutchison’s house and are in his study, its shelves lined with books on Canada, the United States, and the world. These books have been collected over a sixty-year period, and Hutchison knew many of the authors and many of the people the books are about. Hutchison has about him the air that comes to a man of 85 who has travelled a long road; he is now going to open some of the archives of his mind. When he begins to talk, it is like seeing colored slides of the people and places he has known. Few people have Hutchison’s gift of language: a sense of humor, and an ability to analyze character, to portray historic conflicts succinctly, and to appraise frankly the politicians who marched across the stage of Canada. He does not hide his likes and dislikes. He was an admirer of William Lyon MacKenzie King for his political astuteness in holding this country together. At first he didn’t like Trudeau and had some harsh words for him. But as the years went by, he acknowledged Trudeau’s achievement in his stand on the referendum in Quebec, which kept that province in Canada by “his unanswerable logic and stunning oratory.” Again, in the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution, he admits (p.250) “that people will recognize real achievements like the new Constitution…and that brilliance of mind, which Trudeau certainly had.”

It takes a few evenings to hear Hutchison’s memoirs. The slides are not always in the right order, and sometimes you have seen the slide before. But these are minor matters. If you sit down to enjoy the product of a brilliant mind with his incisive comments, you will be enlightened. Hutchison was the respected confidant of more than one Prime Minister and countless cabinet ministers. The reader is privileged to share the insights of a great Canadian.