The Canadian Home: From Cave to Electronic Cocoon

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Denhez starts well, but his first calling—that of civil servant—soon
takes over, so that the imaginative writing evident in the first few
chapters is bulldozed aside by his fascination with political and
bureaucratic trivia.

Canadian Native and indigenous housing (tipis, longhouses, igloos, sod
huts, log cabins) are described with humor. Denhez keeps the reader
amused as he flits over this developmental period in the history of
shelter and arrives with a crash at war-time “jerry built” housing
and government involvement in our struggles to put a roof over our
heads. While the text continues to be rich with interesting facts and
Denhez valiantly strives to keep his style light and amusing, the effort
wears thin as he shifts from writing a history of housing to compiling a
blow-by-blow account of Canada’s housing bureaucracy. Do you care what
CMHC was doing in 1972? Do you want to know what HUDAC’s directors
said in 1975? Interested in a history of MURBs and RHOSPs, or CHIPs and
CHRPs? Undoubtedly hundreds of old government press releases were
analyzed to bring us this painfully detailed information.

This could have been an enjoyable, useful addition to Canada’s social
history. Instead, it is a little fun tacked onto the front of a lot of
pages that do what bureaucrats do best: waste trees.