Great Moments in Canadian History

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Canadian history has seldom been regarded as a source of light-hearted fun, but this collection of cartoons by Whalley, with text by the indefatigable John Robert Colombo, should go far to change all that. Now at last you have Laura Secord offering a chocolate to allay the suspicions of the sentry she means to circumvent; Alexander Mackenzie, who crossed the northwestern half of the continent in 1793, leaving as his graffito “Getting Here Was Half The Fun”; the observance of the United Church’s first services in Toronto in 1925 as a sort of clerical three-legged race, and many more. It’s all in fun; the historical information included is accurate; and readers may even find some hitherto unknown on forgotten snippets of Canadian history left sticking in their minds, firmly fixed by the pin of satire.