Bastards and Boneheads

Geoff Hayes is the director of International Studies Option at the
University of Waterloo.

This lively overview of Canadian history is intended to be partly parlor
game, partly a “crash course in cultural literacy.” As the former,
the book works fairly well. After an irreverent introduction to his
“methodology,” Will Ferguson surveys Canada’s early years, taking
us from Champlain’s first disastrous landings, through the Acadian
Diaspora, to more war and rebellion, on to Sir John A. and the
Confederation agreement. Was Louis Riel a hero or a madman? Neither. In
this book, he’s both a bastard and a bonehead, whatever those
categories mean.

The parlor game wears thin when Ferguson turns to the 20th century. He
draws heavily on standard university texts to highlight Canada’s
“most important” events: the vote for women, conscription, Native
peoples, the wartime treatment of Jews and Japanese-Canadians, the Quiet
Revolution, the October Crisis, and Oka. Despite the irreverence,
Ferguson’s choice of issues is pretty standard.

Ranking the prime ministers is an industry unto itself these days, and
Ferguson fills out the book with brief verdicts on each first minister.
Although his criteria are not as thoughtful as most, his rankings are
just as predictable. In his view, Macdonald and Trudeau were the greats,
Bennett, Diefenbaker, and Mulroney the disasters.

Should we take this book seriously? Not really. Ferguson concludes with
the remark that “History is a verdict, and we are all on the jury.”
If so, Ferguson missed the trial. Simplicities and extraordinary
omissions abound. “World War I was an ugly, dirty, pointless war.”
Possibly, but what does that say of the 66,000 Canadians who died
fighting it? Arthur Currie, the one Canadian military leader who
actually knew how to fight, is a mere “bastard.” So too are the few
anti-Semitic bureaucrats who barred European Jews from coming to Canada
in the late 1930s. They were bastards, but shouldn’t we also learn
something about the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who fought
against the evils Hitler embodied?

On one level, this book takes a lively poke (too often deservedly) at
our history and its historians; on another, it simply repeats glib
historical judgments without ever working through the complexities of
the issues. To understand the web of Canadian history is no parlor game.
That work, however, is the stuff of cultural literacy.