The Black Book of English Canada

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Jack Granatstein, a prominent historian, once denounced specialized
historical monographs in favor of more comprehensive histories of
Canada. Journalist Normand Lester’s searing indictment of
Anglo-Canadian crimes—against French Canadians and others—is not
what he had in mind.

This work was inspired by the author’s investigation of secret
federal government financing of the “Heritage Minutes” series of
historical vignettes. His activities led his employer, Radio-Canada, to
suspend him. By the time the CBC ombudsman vindicated him, his exposé
had evolved into an examination of our history.

Lester for the most part documents his controversial assertions
carefully. Unfortunately, his charge that “Winston Churchill had
visited Il Duce in the 1920s and rhapsodized about him to the British
press” is supported by a quotation without a cited source.

The partisan polemicist attempts to boost controversial Quebec
historian Canon Lionel Groulx by stating that he avoided public
anti-Semitism. So did William Lyon Mackenzie King. Prime ministers and
priests could not emulate fascist agitators; their prejudices were
hidden, but only the anglophone’s dirty secrets are exposed.

Lester’s chief historical contribution is to reveal anglophone
violence against French Canadians, from the 1755 deportation of the
Acadians to the 1917 conscription riots; these accounts give readers a
vivid understanding of Quebec nationalism. The author, unlike some of
his Québécois peers, cares for francophones outside his province. Its
late premier, René Lévesque, may have dismissed them as cultural
“dead ducks,” but Lester chronicles their demise.

British Columbia’s attitudes toward its Japanese minority are
condemned. Lester points out that official provincial racism began with
the 1895 law barring them from receiving Canadian citizenship, but fails
to explore the legislation’s constitutional implications.

This book, and its sequel, may not alter Canada’s destiny, but it has
transformed Normand Lester from a Canadian journalist into a Québécois
crusader.