Full Comment - Canadians don’t deserve a passport of shame

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00:02:03.480 Are Canadians suddenly interested in our history?

00:02:06.740 Are we actually outraged that the passport has been changed?

00:02:10.140 Hello, I'm Brian Lilly, your host.

00:02:11.660 This is the Full Comment Podcast here on the Post Media Network.

00:02:14.420 Eric, it's something that grabbed people more than I thought it would when it happened.

00:02:20.600 A week or so ago, the Trudeau government decided that they were going to update our passport for security reasons, which is fine.

00:02:27.580 But they also took out all the historic images from our passport, be it Terry Fox, Nellie McClellan of the Famous Five,

00:02:35.720 the last spike, Fathers of Confederation, images of Quebec City, the prairies, all of these things gone.

00:02:43.060 And in exchange, images that I compared to a cheap IKEA coloring book.

00:02:49.240 In a piece at the National Post recently, former Harper Cabinet Minister Peter McKay said,

00:02:55.280 It's not that a bland generic passport on its own damages the Canadian psyche.

00:02:59.980 It's the intentional act of obliterating our history in sense of pride that causes harm.

00:03:05.700 Callously discarding the words, symbols, traditions, and beliefs that are woven into the fabric of our nation is wrong-headed.

00:03:12.460 Purging, erasing, like the book-burning and whitewashing of a bygone era,

00:03:16.580 are often signs of an insidious effort to hide truth and human triumph and are doomed to failure.

00:03:22.800 End quote.

00:03:24.120 Joining me to discuss this issue and Canadian history in general is David Berkison.

00:03:29.380 He is a history professor at the University of Calgary and director emeritus at the Institute for Military and Strategic Studies.

00:03:36.560 He joins me now from Calgary.

00:03:38.360 David, thanks for the time.

00:03:40.580 Okay, you're welcome.

00:03:41.320 What was your sense when you saw the new passport and saw that we had decided we're going to dump Terry Fox

00:03:51.480 and Nellie McClung in Vimy Ridge, but in exchange you're going to get a nice little cute photo of a drawing of a squirrel

00:04:00.540 and a guy raking leaves into a wheelbarrow?

00:04:04.000 Right.

00:04:04.640 There's no question that this represents thinking within the government,

00:04:11.900 although if things in preparation as passport went as they normally do,

00:04:19.520 probably started down at some bureaucratic level and worked its way up to the top,

00:04:23.880 and then people nodded and said, sure, yeah, that's all right, let's go ahead.

00:04:27.980 So I think it does reflect a view of Canadian history, which is that there's a lot of bad things in Canadian history,

00:04:37.720 and if we put this image or that image or another image, there's always going to be somebody who's going to complain

00:04:45.820 that we're colonialist or we're racist or we're homophobic or whatever the case may be,

00:04:52.660 and so let's avoid all of that controversy and put in stuff that nobody could possibly complain about, like raking leaves.

00:05:02.200 Except as I've pointed out to people, raking leaves, the images that are there, that's a very central Canadian image.

00:05:08.640 All the images are very central Canadian, and there's large parts of the country where this doesn't look like where you live.

00:05:15.940 I agree completely. I've only seen the new passport on the Internet, and of course my passport is the old one.

00:05:28.960 Raking leaves, I don't know, I don't rake any leaves.

00:05:32.420 I just let them sit there all winter, and then we'll deal with them in the spring.

00:05:37.100 But I think the point is that who can argue about raking leaves being a prime function of Canadians? 0.80

00:05:48.140 We know we get winter. It's the worst thing that happens to us in this country.

00:05:54.020 Apparently we're the second coldest country on the face of the earth, so the leaves fall down, and we have to rake them.

00:06:00.840 No controversy there. Don't have to worry about immigrant ships coming into the harbor in Halifax.

00:06:08.640 People complain about, we have too many immigrants, we don't have enough immigrants.

00:06:13.580 No complaining about Vimy Ridge, oh, that was a bad war, and we shouldn't have taken part in it, and so on.

00:06:20.160 And it also feeds a theme that I'm very, very concerned about, which is that what most Canadians, I think, learn about the history of their country today is highly negative.

00:06:35.180 This is a great country, in my opinion.

00:06:40.480 We, and I say we, I'm speaking for Canadians going all the way back several hundred years.

00:06:46.600 We have done great things in this country.

00:06:48.480 Have we done rotten things in this country?

00:06:51.420 You bet we have.

00:06:52.960 Show me a country that hasn't.

00:06:55.380 In the United States, for example, we know that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.

00:07:01.760 The Americans seem to think, well, a lot of people owned slaves back then, and our values today are very different than they were then,

00:07:09.740 but these guys still did something very important for the history of the United States.

00:07:14.300 And here we have people who go around, and they take the heads off statues of John A. Macdonald.

00:07:21.060 Or they take the statue down completely.

00:07:23.640 Or they take the statue down completely, or they paint it all red.

00:07:27.480 And Queen Victoria, my God, what did she ever have anything to say about the government of Canada?

00:07:32.300 But this is the image that we are getting today, and I think we are losing our sense of perspective in that we are a great country.

00:07:42.240 We have done great things together in all fields, sciences, engineering, arts, the military,

00:07:50.600 putting a country together against tremendous odds across thousands of kilometers of very inhospitable territory.

00:08:01.020 And I could go on and on and on, and if you gave me an hour, I could read out probably two, three hundred names of Canadians who did famous things.

00:08:10.700 Nobody hears about them.

00:08:12.040 Well, look, you said that some of the images that were in there could have been controversial.

00:08:18.000 We've got a government that claims to be a feminist government. 1.00

00:08:21.500 They took out Nellie McClellan, one of the famous five that went to court to prove that women were persons, 1.00

00:08:27.220 to make sure that they could have the right to vote, that they could sit for elected office once elected.

00:08:34.220 She's too controversial. 1.00

00:08:35.800 Terry Fox, the mayor of Port Coquitlam, Brad West, said,

00:08:39.900 whoever made the decision to remove Terry Fox from Canadian passports needs to give their head a shake.

00:08:45.940 Our country needs more Terry Fox, not less.

00:08:49.580 He's too controversial.

00:08:50.660 I know that when the Harper government brought in these images, their critics said,

00:08:56.000 well, it's too militaristic because there were a couple of pages with military images.

00:09:01.800 But those were not even close to the majority.

00:09:05.820 Are we so ashamed of our history that Terry Fox is now controversial?

00:09:13.620 I don't think we are ashamed of our history.

00:09:16.300 I think this government and possibly the past government or maybe several governments going back,

00:09:22.800 I don't know when all of this started.

00:09:24.280 It started at least 20 years ago that we beat ourselves with chains on the back

00:09:32.240 for being this country of colonialists and slaveholders and bias and prejudice

00:09:40.040 and look what we did to the Japanese in the Second World War, etc., etc., etc.

00:09:46.200 And those are all things worth talking about and acknowledging.

00:09:50.500 Yes, of course they are.

00:09:51.400 Absolutely they are.

00:09:53.300 What we did to the Japanese in the Second World War is a perfect example of a bunch of people, 1.00

00:10:01.880 particularly on the West Coast, with some federal politicians at the time.

00:10:06.600 This is in the months after Pearl Harbor, saying,

00:10:08.640 Oh my God, these people are all going to conduct espionage against the rest of the country

00:10:14.960 and they're going to side with the Japanese Empire and on and on and on and on.

00:10:19.500 And what was done was a horrible mistake.

00:10:23.060 But any country makes mistakes in their development.

00:10:27.960 No country that I can think of can say,

00:10:30.800 I've got a completely clean past.

00:10:32.720 I was always politically correct.

00:10:35.020 I was always woke.

00:10:36.200 Nothing that we did harmed anybody.

00:10:39.440 That's just not real.

00:10:41.000 That's just not real.

00:10:42.160 So yes, we should talk about the negatives in our history,

00:10:46.620 but there are so many positives that we don't ever talk about.

00:10:51.020 And I think this passport is a perfect example of that problem.

00:10:56.660 You take Vimy Ridge, for example.

00:10:59.520 We fought in the First World War.

00:11:02.780 We fought at the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

00:11:04.920 It was a singular Canadian victory.

00:11:07.740 It was an important victory for Canada at the time.

00:11:12.380 Today, people might look back at the First World War and say,

00:11:15.120 Well, it was a war of empires against empires and this and that and the other thing.

00:11:20.880 And yeah, that's all true.

00:11:22.620 So you add that into your explanation for why we went to war in 1914 and why our soldiers were at Vimy Ridge in 1917.

00:11:31.500 But you don't wipe it out.

00:11:34.260 That's my whole point.

00:11:35.680 That it was an event of great importance to Canadian history.

00:11:41.180 And so were events in the Second World War and in the Korean War and so on.

00:11:45.500 But it's not just war.

00:11:46.880 We've done wonderful things.

00:11:48.720 You know, I'm a diabetic.

00:11:50.700 I take insulin every single day.

00:11:52.640 And I remind myself that it was two guys from Toronto who discovered insulin and the important impact.

00:11:58.360 I walk by their statue on a regular basis.

00:12:01.260 I'm not far from where they worked, where they did that seminal work.

00:12:05.920 And one of the things I've said since finding out Terry Fox was taken out was I could understand if it was to say,

00:12:16.120 OK, well, we honored Terry Fox the last time, but we've got a long list of great Canadians and we're going to put in Frederick Banting.

00:12:23.280 But they didn't do that.

00:12:26.000 We've got the cheap IKEA coloring book.

00:12:27.820 There was a lady who worked for Canadian Car and Foundry at Fort William who was the chief aeronautical engineer of the first hurricane fighters that we built in the Second World War.

00:12:45.640 And she got her position through tremendous struggle.

00:12:49.140 And then everyone acknowledged that she had played a huge role in the design and construction of these fighter planes, which were vital to us and vital to the UK and the Battle of Britain and so on.

00:13:02.900 Why not put her on the dollar bill or on the passport? 0.68

00:13:07.020 Why not put her on the passport? 0.60

00:13:08.820 I mean, you don't have to look far to see who these people are and what they did and the events that they were taking part in.

00:13:17.480 Don't have to look far.

00:13:18.480 All you need to do is get some first-year university history student and they'll fill you with hundreds and hundreds of pages of Canadians who did great things.

00:13:29.040 We did great things together.

00:13:31.340 We still are today.

00:13:33.400 But if you emphasize the negative, if you apologize every Tuesday and Thursday for something else that you've done in your history,

00:13:43.200 well, then you're destroying people's sense of self-identity as belonging to a country that they can and should be proud of.

00:13:53.800 I've long had a sense, and maybe you can speak about this, is that maybe you've noticed it, maybe you think I'm off base, but

00:14:05.300 people that back the Liberal Party of Canada tend to look at history as starting when Lester Pearson was prime minister.

00:14:18.980 Anything before Expo 67.

00:14:21.340 Now, maybe that's a generational thing for boomers.

00:14:23.780 I don't know.

00:14:24.700 But they seem to think that all the great things in Canada happened since 67.

00:14:29.900 That was a year of celebrating our 100th anniversary as an independent country.

00:14:35.580 I don't know.

00:14:36.320 It seems to be lost on them.

00:14:37.280 But it's like there's a certain mindset within certain parts of our society that say, let's forget about everything before.

00:14:45.420 Let's just deal with the now.

00:14:49.100 This is a phenomenon one finds amongst youth in the United States and in Europe, and yes, in Canada, which is like you said, history began yesterday or history begins today.

00:15:00.480 One of the reasons is because we hardly teach history in the school systems across the country.

00:15:08.720 Now, the curriculum are, of course, provincial matters, but if curriculum allow schools to get away with teaching good old basic solid Canadian history, how did we get here?

00:15:22.280 What did we do once we got here?

00:15:24.580 How did we shape this country?

00:15:26.360 And so on, then they're not going to know anything.

00:15:28.620 I teach in a university.

00:15:31.080 The students I teach are largely second and third year and graduate students, and it's amazing how many of them don't know the basic facts about Canadian history because they're not being taught in high school.

00:15:43.820 Back about where the dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in high school, I learned all of that stuff, and it didn't hurt me.

00:15:53.960 You know, at least it gave me a sense of where we came from and why we're here and what we've been able to accomplish.

00:16:01.980 That's really all history can do anyway, but it's important because if you wipe away history, you have collective amnesia.

00:16:09.100 Why am I standing here in the middle of downtown Toronto, and why are these cars here, and why are those buildings there, and why is there a harbor down there?

00:16:17.560 It's impossible to think about it, but in fact, that's what it is, and we're just not teaching it anymore.

00:16:24.240 We're the social scientists or social studies experts have gained control of the curriculum.

00:16:31.740 The governments, for the most part, leave it alone because it's very controversial, and so that's what we're raising generations and generations of people who know very little about this country, the good or the bad.

00:16:45.280 And so the government comes along and says, well, we need a new passport.

00:16:50.600 We'll put a raking leaves in there instead of a Terry Fox.

00:16:54.520 People can look at that, and they can say, well, who is Terry Fox, and who is this guy with one leg, and why have we got him on our passport?

00:17:01.000 Well, if you don't know the history of Terry Fox, then he doesn't mean it any to you.

00:17:05.780 And you should know the history of Terry Fox because he was a real Canadian hero.

00:17:11.000 Yeah, I'll admit, David, I'm a history buff.

00:17:14.280 I would love to take your classes if I were out in Calgary.

00:17:17.840 I'd just sit at the back and enjoy myself listening.

00:17:22.300 But I'm the weirdo.

00:17:23.920 I'm the guy that stops to read every plaque.

00:17:26.300 You know, like, here's the spot that we did the last hanging in Toronto.

00:17:30.560 It's like, oh, okay, that's interesting.

00:17:32.800 Things like that are around.

00:17:34.360 But, you know, I've taken lots of friends on visits around different battle sites, and you say, well, this is where Tecumseh helped the British take Detroit.

00:17:44.480 Wait, Tecumseh?

00:17:45.320 Isn't he American?

00:17:46.280 Yeah, he fought with us in the War of 1812.

00:17:48.100 I mean, shouldn't they be looking at things like that?

00:17:50.660 You know, we've got a government that says reconciliation is our most important thing.

00:17:54.100 And how often do you hear about issues like that, where First Nations and settlers like the British were working together for common purpose in the War of 1812?

00:18:07.460 Because Tecumseh said, I'm on your side.

00:18:11.280 You know, I can't work with these guys.

00:18:13.740 And it wasn't just Tecumseh.

00:18:15.780 I mean, I teach Canadian military history.

00:18:19.160 And when we talk about the War of 1812, my emphasis is the militia that grew out of society, the First Nations, and some British soldiers.

00:18:33.980 We beat back the Americans, and we made Canada possible.

00:18:39.320 And the role of the First Nations in the War of 1812 just cannot, cannot be underestimated.

00:18:44.760 So, I completely agree with that.

00:18:48.140 And that is an example of people working together to accomplish something.

00:18:55.920 Now, does that mean that the residential schools were a terrible thing and it marked the only real point of contact between the government or between Euro-Canadians and the Aboriginal nations?

00:19:13.000 No, it does not.

00:19:14.760 And let's look at the school, the residential schools.

00:19:18.340 How did they get there?

00:19:19.360 Why did they get there?

00:19:20.720 Who supported them?

00:19:22.540 We'll find in many cases it was Aboriginal communities themselves that wanted their kids to learn whatever science, engineering, agriculture that these schools taught.

00:19:34.720 But we don't teach that either, that the schools were only for bad purposes.

00:19:39.760 The Parliament of Canada called it a genocide, which to me is a complete destruction of the meaning of the word genocide.

00:19:49.060 And there we move on from there.

00:19:50.660 Well, we've passed judgment.

00:19:51.740 It was genocide. 0.73

00:19:52.280 Now, let's move on to imposing a new tax on shoelaces. 1.00

00:19:56.700 It's just, I get very angry about it.

00:20:02.600 We've got a prime minister that did say that we are the first post-national state, that we are a country that doesn't look at our history.

00:20:14.960 Does it come from the top?

00:20:16.540 I mean, I agree with you that this passport change is one example, likely started with bureaucrats.

00:20:23.900 But if it started with bureaucrats and they said, well, let's change it this way, it's up to the government to step in and say, no, that's not how we're going to do it.

00:20:33.280 I mean, the Americans, the Brits, the French, the Australians, all these other countries use their passports as a way to celebrate their country, not put in generic clip art.

00:20:44.020 And so if the bureaucrats come up with generic clip art, if the government believes in its own rhetoric about Canada, then they should have said at some point, no, this isn't where we're going.

00:20:56.500 We're not doing that.

00:20:57.800 Well, if we're a post-national country, why is it that whenever Canada and the United States play off in the world hockey tournaments every year that everyone is out there watching TV and wanting to make sure that Canada defeats the United States, we want to support Canada and play in the United States.

00:21:18.440 You know, I'm a great lover of certain important aspects of the United States, but if it comes to who do I want to see win the Olympic medals, it's Canada.

00:21:33.140 And I don't believe that amongst the almost 40 million of us that there are very many people who think differently.

00:21:40.400 Absolutely. So to say we're a post-national state is, you know, it's to throw another cliche at what's going on, because we're not a post-national state.

00:21:51.400 There is pride in Canada. I've got, I live in a neighborhood here where, I don't know, about half the houses here have got Canadian flags flying in their backyards.

00:21:59.180 And this is supposed to be separatist Alberta, which it is not.

00:22:05.740 And I would say the same thing probably goes across the country from Newfoundland to British Columbia.

00:22:12.640 We like what we are, but we don't get enough of the real story of who we are.

00:22:18.180 And so you might say, well, I feel proud to be a Canadian.

00:22:20.980 Okay, why?

00:22:22.620 I don't know. I just feel proud to be a Canadian.

00:22:24.620 Well, if you can say, I'm proud to be a Canadian because we did this and this and this and this and this.

00:22:30.520 And yes, we committed offenses.

00:22:34.680 All countries do.

00:22:36.200 We should acknowledge them.

00:22:37.980 Our kids need to learn about the bad things that we did as well as the good things and move on from there.

00:22:44.980 But we don't do it.

00:22:47.520 Now, you say that you're talking about the government in Ottawa.

00:22:50.720 And I say, yeah, that's a big part of the problem.

00:22:53.300 But, you know, all of the provinces, they all control the curriculum and educations in their provinces.

00:23:01.880 They're not in Ottawa.

00:23:04.300 Why are they allowing this to happen?

00:23:06.360 Because they're giving in to the educational, quote, specialists, unquote, who say, well, we know what we should be teaching these kids.

00:23:15.380 And we need to show them, we need to teach them how shameful they should feel about what we did to the Japanese and to the indigenous peoples, to the Jews, and so on and so forth.

00:23:30.120 Sorry, yeah, teach that.

00:23:31.880 But teach the other stuff.

00:23:33.660 Teach the important stuff.

00:23:35.520 There was a lot of stuff that was very, very important that we contributed to the world and to ourselves.

00:23:42.860 But nobody hears about it.

00:23:45.120 I wonder how much of that is due to the academic world that you live in.

00:23:49.360 And I want to ask you about that when we come back from this quick break.

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00:24:38.140 Is the academic world part of the problem?

00:24:41.580 I think it's worthwhile considering that, especially as we speak with you, David.

00:24:46.300 You're an academic.

00:24:48.100 You're a history professor.

00:24:49.460 It's people like you.

00:24:51.480 Not you, in all cases.

00:24:53.540 But who writes the history books or the curriculum that the schools will follow?

00:25:00.340 Is there a sense in Canadian academia that we are the problem?

00:25:09.840 That our history is just one big reason to sit in sack and ash cloth?

00:25:16.260 Oh, yeah.

00:25:18.340 I think you're absolutely right.

00:25:21.540 You know, a good friend of mine and I think a famous Canadian historian named Jack Ranisteen wrote a book about 25 years ago called Who Killed Canadian History?

00:25:30.540 And the book was really about the different trends amongst academic historians at the time.

00:25:37.200 And what he was trying to say, and I completely agree with him, was that when we began really in the 1960s to break away from the old history of politics and males and politics and males and what they did to the country and Johnny McDonald and George Brown and so on,

00:25:55.420 began to broaden the field of the field of Canadian history, which was a good thing.

00:26:01.660 And we began to teach labor history and women's history and so on and so forth, that the central themes of the history of this country became forgotten or were hidden by some academics,

00:26:15.780 who thought it was far more important to teach some of this social science stuff than it was to actually teach history.

00:26:24.660 And a lot of them, I have to say, not my contemporaries, but maybe a generation after me who had political views that were, let's say, quite liberal.

00:26:38.100 And they brought those views into the classroom.

00:26:41.140 They brought those views into the writing of Canadian history books and so on.

00:26:46.360 And that's part of what happened.

00:26:48.220 There's no question about it.

00:26:49.640 That is part of what happened.

00:26:52.360 So are we able to teach all those different aspects of history, but also the central story at the same time?

00:27:03.320 Sure we can.

00:27:03.960 An average university semester in this country is about four months long.

00:27:13.880 You put in, as an academic, I have academic freedom.

00:27:17.540 I put in what I feel is important in my courses.

00:27:20.360 I have to downplay those things that I think are not so important because I don't have the time to cover them all.

00:27:27.160 But maybe somebody takes a course in pre-Confederation Canada from me or one of my colleagues, and then somebody else teaches Canada from 1867 to 1914.

00:27:41.840 It's absolutely possible.

00:27:43.720 And the problem is that people who are in charge of curricula at the provincial levels largely determine what our students are learning.

00:27:55.080 And when they go into university, some of them will take history courses.

00:28:00.260 And hopefully when they do take history courses, they'll get a much fuller understanding of who we are as a nation and as a people.

00:28:07.660 But if they don't, if they're not forced to take history, if history is not there on the curriculum for them, they'll never learn.

00:28:18.520 They haven't learned it in high school where you can control the curriculum.

00:28:22.520 And if they don't want to learn it in university, they don't have to learn it.

00:28:26.780 So that's, again, a part of this problem.

00:28:29.580 We don't know enough about the things that our country has done, good or bad.

00:28:35.820 And so when it comes to putting a passport together, and you say to yourself, well, whoever looks at the pictures on a passport, and the answer is probably, you do?

00:28:45.520 Okay.

00:28:45.840 Well, I mean, I looked at the pictures of my passport when I got it.

00:28:49.900 And it says, and I thought at the time, well, yeah, it strikes me as about right.

00:28:54.360 You know, you've got, I can't remember how many pages there were, about eight or nine.

00:28:59.460 How do you distill Canadian history into eight or nine pages?

00:29:02.840 Well, you know, yeah, Terry Fox should be there.

00:29:06.060 Fimmy Ridge should be there.

00:29:08.320 Nellie McClung should be there.

00:29:09.860 Or some other people who represent the early feminist movement in this country.

00:29:14.760 Yeah.

00:29:15.360 I mean, I think, yeah, that was fine.

00:29:17.160 Thank you.

00:29:17.620 I've got my passport.

00:29:18.820 Now I'll use it wherever I go anywhere.

00:29:20.780 But today, what we've got is just a bunch of soaked cornflakes.

00:29:26.440 It's too soaked to be solid, too soaked to have an edge to them.

00:29:33.980 It's just a lot of historical mush.

00:29:37.420 You know, we love to tell stories of ourselves that aren't fully true.

00:29:43.280 And I wonder if that tendency has led to some of what we're dealing with now.

00:29:48.740 You know, well, Canadians help with the Underground Railroad.

00:29:51.460 Absolutely true.

00:29:52.960 But now some Canadians are shocked to find out that, well, some of our civic leaders had slaves.

00:30:01.740 You know, and you can look at James McGill.

00:30:04.080 People are saying they want to get rid of the name of McGill University in Montreal, famous institution.

00:30:08.880 The streets here in Toronto, it's less of a problem in Western Canada.

00:30:13.580 But, you know, get rid of Jarvis Street because Jarvis had slaves. 0.50

00:30:16.480 Well, so did Joseph Brandt, who was a famous Mohawk leader, brought them from New York State to Southern Ontario.

00:30:25.220 I think that speaks to my contention that if we learn the fullness of our history, the good and the bad, that we have a better understanding of ourselves.

00:30:36.020 And I think the smugness that we've had surrounding how good we are, how pure Canadians have always been, leaves us shocked.

00:30:44.960 Because, as you say, people aren't being taught history.

00:30:48.420 And then, oh, wait, somebody had slaves? 0.98

00:30:51.000 Burn them down. 0.98

00:30:52.220 Eradicate them from the past. 0.97

00:30:54.320 Yeah.

00:30:55.480 Well, that's absolutely true.

00:30:57.620 And it's a good thing that you raised the issue of slavery, because the British Empire abolished slavery in 1832.

00:31:05.780 So there was no slavery in Canada after 1832.

00:31:09.700 And although there was slavery under the French colonial regime, and then even under the British colonial regime, until that point in time,

00:31:17.040 although the British abolished the slave trade just after the turn of the 19th century, slavery has not become, in my opinion, is not the central issue in our country that it is in the United States.

00:31:35.880 There's no slavery in the United States today, but they continue to wrestle with the problem of blacks and whites in American society and the inequalities that exist between blacks and whites in American society.

00:31:49.960 It's central to American history.

00:31:52.640 It's not central to our history.

00:31:54.920 And the reason is simply because we didn't have that many slaves in this country, and slavery was abolished 30 years before the American Civil War broke out.

00:32:07.040 So it plays a different role in the history of this country.

00:32:10.580 But there are always people in Canada who look at the latest trend in the United States, and they say, oh, me too.

00:32:16.920 I want us to be like that also.

00:32:19.040 And so if the Americans had this terrible thing called slavery, we had it also, and we should feel just as ashamed about it and feel that it was just as much of a sin as it was in the United States, which it was not. 0.63

00:32:34.980 And I think it's that simple that our history developed differently than their history did, and we have to take that into consideration. 0.53

00:32:42.980 There's stories across the country of different groups, races, ethnicities, not getting on at certain points.

00:32:54.660 But I would say that we've built a fairly harmonious country.

00:32:59.460 And so to focus at this point on what divided us 100 years ago and try and use that to sow division today just seems counterproductive.

00:33:12.980 Well, you know, you're absolutely right.

00:33:16.820 Of course, there were people who didn't agree with other people on major issues, for example.

00:33:21.800 We had riots in Vancouver, in Toronto, in Montreal, in Winnipeg.

00:33:27.220 Yeah.

00:33:28.300 Big general strike in Winnipeg in 1919.

00:33:31.200 But the point is that we have overcome a lot of those divisions.

00:33:36.520 There are new divisions in Canadian society today.

00:33:39.200 There will always be divisions in a country like ours that sweeps from one end of the continent to the other and almost 40 million people.

00:33:47.740 It's inevitable, which is why we are a federation and should remain a federation.

00:33:52.500 But it depends, again, on where you put the emphasis.

00:33:57.340 And if you put the emphasis on those things that divide us, then the things that unite us get lost.

00:34:03.340 Let me ask you as a history professor and someone who's watched now generations of university students go through the classroom, some knowing Canada's stories, some not.

00:34:15.480 What are some of the stories that we should know that aren't being taught the way they should?

00:34:25.540 I think, for example, the efforts on the part of the government in the late 1920s and early 1930s to protect a nascent Canadian culture.

00:34:39.120 How did they do that?

00:34:41.740 Well, they established the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

00:34:46.280 Now, I don't have the same view of the CBC today as I might have had back in the 1930s.

00:34:53.240 But the government of the day looked at the proliferation of private broadcasters in the United States.

00:34:59.340 And they said, if Canadians are going to do nothing but listen to American programming, they're going to lose their sense of who they are as a people.

00:35:09.140 And I think in the 1930s, that was quite true. 0.63

00:35:13.320 I think it's no longer true and hasn't been true for at least the last 10, 20, 30 years, especially with the Internet and all the rest of that that's going on today.

00:35:22.260 But it was true at the time, and I think it was an important decision that the government made.

00:35:29.180 And I think Canadians largely supported it.

00:35:33.180 So there's something that I think government did that was a real positive for the people of this country at that time.

00:35:43.080 Then you have to ask yourself, is it still a real positive for people in this country today?

00:35:47.100 And I think a lot of people would say, I don't listen to the CBC, I don't watch the CBC, I don't care what they have on the CBC, and the CBC is just a lot of pro-government propaganda.

00:35:58.140 I don't know that that's true.

00:35:59.840 I'm just saying that's an opinion a lot of people have.

00:36:02.560 That's part of the debate right now.

00:36:04.020 But I understand what you're saying about the historical view and why R.B. Bennett started it.

00:36:12.140 That's right.

00:36:12.640 It was R.B. Bennett, as a matter of fact.

00:36:14.260 And, you know, he had reasons that appealed to him.

00:36:22.840 He was a conservative.

00:36:24.840 You may find this funny, but it was mostly liberals who helped him write the Broadcasting Act in 1932.

00:36:32.380 Because they thought more or less the same about protecting this very small Canadian culture.

00:36:38.680 We were a nation, I can't even remember how many people we had in the country at the time, maybe 10, 12 million, spread out across 5,000 miles as it was at the time.

00:36:50.020 How do you try to bring Canadians together?

00:36:54.540 Well, you hold up a mirror and you show them that whether you are from Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, well, Newfoundland was not part of Canada, but whether you're from Nova Scotia or British Columbia or Manitoba, there are still certain aspects that we all have in common.

00:37:11.240 I just love the old Foster Hewitt introduction for Hockey Night in Canada, which is hockey fans across Canada, the United States, and in Newfoundland.

00:37:25.380 And in Newfoundland.

00:37:26.460 Well, I grew up in Montreal, so my hockey guy was Danny Gallivan, who was, I thought, the best hockey commentator on radio and television.

00:37:37.300 And he commented for the Montreal Canadiens.

00:37:39.880 But, you know, I understand the point that you're making.

00:37:43.700 And, you know, just to say that on the air is to say, well, there is an entity there and I'm addressing that entity.

00:37:51.660 I'm going to show all you people in Winnipeg and in Calgary how you should be supporting the Toronto Maple Leafs.

00:37:58.520 Well, you know, we have a hockey team in Calgary.

00:38:02.920 It's a pretty lousy hockey team, but I don't support the Toronto Maple Leafs.

00:38:08.300 I'll tell you this and I'll ask you about other history bits.

00:38:11.280 Just the difference between where the government's at and regular people.

00:38:14.640 I was at the Leafs game.

00:38:17.440 They may have lost in the playoffs recently.

00:38:19.440 I was at the game.

00:38:20.680 People belt out O Canada.

00:38:23.300 They wave the flag.

00:38:25.220 They cheer at certain parts of the anthem where, you know, song, you know, where it's we're singing about freedom.

00:38:32.700 That is a very different view than you get from the people that run the country.

00:38:36.740 And those, you know, I'm not sure you can call all the people that afford to go to a playoff hockey game common folk, but they're much more common than the folk in Ottawa.

00:38:46.140 What would be some of the other things that, you know, stories that Canadians should know about their history?

00:38:53.400 There are just so many.

00:38:56.820 Canadians who in the early 20th century won medals at the Olympic Games, for example.

00:39:02.560 Canadians, and I mentioned it earlier, who helped solve the problem, a very terrible problem of diabetes.

00:39:12.700 Canadians who invented things that went on to become of great importance to everybody in the world.

00:39:19.840 The Canadian participation, I think the Canadian participation in the Second World War and what we did as a small country to defeat the horrors of Nazi Germany

00:39:28.940 is something that we should be remembering.

00:39:32.240 The veterans are passing away now.

00:39:34.160 There aren't many left, but they did one hell of a job.

00:39:38.340 You know, you can't go to northern France and go to a little town and not see a little plot that says something about the Canadian soldiers who came through here in August of 1944.

00:39:48.920 And whenever I see that, and I haven't been to Europe in a long time with the pandemic and so on,

00:39:54.540 it just gives me pride as a Canadian that we did something that was of immense importance to the world.

00:40:02.800 And then you can talk about all the scientific breakthroughs that we made in this country in the area of aerospace,

00:40:08.280 in the area of computing sciences, and so on and so forth, and are still making today.

00:40:12.300 How many Canadians you can see in Hollywood, how many programs are produced on TV when the writers are actually writing that are made in Canada.

00:40:24.460 And you say, well, there must be a lot of people in this country who understand TV and radio and modern communications.

00:40:31.680 Yeah, Hollywood wouldn't come here to make programs, The Last of Us, for example, made in and around Calgary.

00:40:39.960 Why? Well, because they knew that the expertise was here.

00:40:43.780 There is expertise here.

00:40:45.520 Expertise in producing television programs and expertise in constructing sets and so on and so forth.

00:40:55.780 That's why they were here.

00:40:58.160 Why can't we be proud of that kind of thing?

00:41:00.820 So I say that it goes everywhere in the arts, in literature, in science, in engineering.

00:41:09.960 Certainly in military accomplishments and so on and so forth, we've got a hell of a story to tell, and we don't tell it.

00:41:19.840 Well, hopefully more people will get interested.

00:41:22.700 Hopefully more people will pass on the stories, even around the kitchen table.

00:41:27.280 So, and I agree with you that, you know, the provinces have to do a better job at getting this into the school system.

00:41:36.480 David, thank you so much for your time today.

00:41:38.480 And thank you for your writing over the years that I've enjoyed so much and for taking the time today.

00:41:44.840 You're very welcome.

00:41:46.320 Nice to have a chance.

00:41:48.020 Full comment is a post-media podcast.

00:41:50.260 My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:41:52.280 This episode was produced by Andre Proulx with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:41:55.960 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:41:58.660 Remember, you can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Amazon Music.

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00:42:12.880 Thanks for listening.

00:42:13.660 Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.

00:42:15.220 Thanks for listening.

Full Comment - May 22, 2023

Canadians don’t deserve a passport of shame

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