Canada Made Me

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This is not a “nice” book. First released in 1958, it was promoted
as a portrait of Canada by a native son who speaks unflinchingly of his

country’s underbelly. Through Levine’s eyes, Canadians were
confronted with a portrait of themselves as pimps, prostitutes,
abortionists, and derelicts. Even respectable Canadians seem little more
than stiff-necked bigots or third-rate intellectuals. It is easy to
understand, then, why this book has not been warmly embraced by Canadian
readers for the past three decades.

The slant of the book might be attributed to the author’s budget.
Levine was chronically broke throughout his trip. A coast-to-coast tour
of any nation’s flophouses and beer parlors might have produced a
similar portrait. Or maybe not. Three times the author warns readers
that he is “attracted to failure.” This determines what he chooses
to write about—and not write about. For example, early in the book
Levine sees three young German males in neo-Nazi uniforms strutting
about his emigrant ship. Although both a Jew and an ex-serviceman,
Levine makes no comment. Yet, 100 pages later, a visit to a Canadian
suburb compels him to devote an entire paragraph to ridiculing his
host’s ostentatious choice of bathroom accessories.

In his introduction, Levine pre-empts a great deal of the reader’s
interpretation by saying that he deliberately left all errors in the
text. But he does not tell us what these errors are. Thus, when he twice
describes the same incident in two different cheap restaurants, the
reader has no idea whether he is trying to make a statement about the
sameness of Canadian culture or whether he just botched the writing job.


This is a fascinating book for both its writing (when it is good) and
its portrait of late-1950s Canada (when it was bad).