Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s.

Toronto’s Upper Canada College is without question Canada’s
pre-eminent boys’ private school, the nursery of the rich and powerful
of Ontario for almost 170 years. What old boy James Fitzgerald has done,
very cleverly, is to let 71 representative graduates talk about what the
College did to and meant to them. These are transcribed interviews,
polished but not corrected, and readers should beware of the sort of
factual howlers (Governor General Beaverbrook, for example) that
inevitably creep into the memories of old men.

The book is nonetheless important. Many of those interviewed
predictably loved the structure UCC provided, the training in British
values it offered, and the contacts they made that let them move ahead.
Others hated the place. They despised the canings by sadistic, sometimes
homosexual masters; they were repelled by the classist air that
permeated the school; and they resented the way UCC graduates, in their
view, sold Canada out to the Americans. Despite the ersatz British
values, despite the traditions of loyalty and Loyalism, UCC grads led
the way in turning Canada into a satrap of the United States. This view,
which comes through in a number of interviews, is expressed most clearly
in the one with University of Toronto political scientist Stephen
Clarkson. Probably that places too much blame where it cannot easily
rest: the rich serve their interests by maximizing their returns, and
money knows no borders. Still, this volume is more than an oral history
of a private school, and for that reason alone it has genuine value.