The Trudeau government recently updated our passport, and in doing so, they removed all of our historic images from it. Are Canadians suddenly interested in our history? Are we actually outraged that the passport has been changed? Guest: David Berkison.
00:01:00.420The gold standard of online casinos has arrived.
00:01:03.560Golden Nugget Online Casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips.
00:01:10.680Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple.
00:01:15.620And in just a few clicks, you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and top-tier table games.
00:01:21.680Make the most of your downtime with unbeatable promotions and jackpots that can turn any mundane moment into a golden opportunity at Golden Nugget Online Casino.
00:01:31.340Take a spin on the slots, challenge yourself at the tables, or join a live dealer game to feel the thrill of real-time action.
00:01:37.820All from the comfort of your own devices.
00:01:40.040Why settle for less when you can go for the gold at Golden Nugget Online Casino?
00:04:04.640There's no question that this represents thinking within the government,
00:04:11.900although if things in preparation as passport went as they normally do,
00:04:19.520probably started down at some bureaucratic level and worked its way up to the top,
00:04:23.880and then people nodded and said, sure, yeah, that's all right, let's go ahead.
00:04:27.980So I think it does reflect a view of Canadian history, which is that there's a lot of bad things in Canadian history,
00:04:37.720and if we put this image or that image or another image, there's always going to be somebody who's going to complain
00:04:45.820that we're colonialist or we're racist or we're homophobic or whatever the case may be,
00:04:52.660and so let's avoid all of that controversy and put in stuff that nobody could possibly complain about, like raking leaves.
00:05:02.200Except as I've pointed out to people, raking leaves, the images that are there, that's a very central Canadian image.
00:05:08.640All the images are very central Canadian, and there's large parts of the country where this doesn't look like where you live.
00:05:15.940I agree completely. I've only seen the new passport on the Internet, and of course my passport is the old one.
00:05:28.960Raking leaves, I don't know, I don't rake any leaves.
00:05:32.420I just let them sit there all winter, and then we'll deal with them in the spring.
00:05:37.100But I think the point is that who can argue about raking leaves being a prime function of Canadians?
00:05:48.140We know we get winter. It's the worst thing that happens to us in this country.
00:05:54.020Apparently we're the second coldest country on the face of the earth, so the leaves fall down, and we have to rake them.
00:06:00.840No controversy there. Don't have to worry about immigrant ships coming into the harbor in Halifax.
00:06:08.640People complain about, we have too many immigrants, we don't have enough immigrants.
00:06:13.580No complaining about Vimy Ridge, oh, that was a bad war, and we shouldn't have taken part in it, and so on.
00:06:20.160And 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.
00:06:35.180This is a great country, in my opinion.
00:06:40.480We, and I say we, I'm speaking for Canadians going all the way back several hundred years.
00:06:46.600We have done great things in this country.
00:06:48.480Have we done rotten things in this country?
00:06:55.380In the United States, for example, we know that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.
00:07:01.760The Americans seem to think, well, a lot of people owned slaves back then, and our values today are very different than they were then,
00:07:09.740but these guys still did something very important for the history of the United States.
00:07:14.300And here we have people who go around, and they take the heads off statues of John A. Macdonald.
00:07:21.060Or they take the statue down completely.
00:07:23.640Or they take the statue down completely, or they paint it all red.
00:07:27.480And Queen Victoria, my God, what did she ever have anything to say about the government of Canada?
00:07:32.300But 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.
00:07:42.240We have done great things together in all fields, sciences, engineering, arts, the military,
00:07:50.600putting a country together against tremendous odds across thousands of kilometers of very inhospitable territory.
00:08:01.020And 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.
00:12:26.000We've got the cheap IKEA coloring book.
00:12:27.820There 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.
00:12:45.640And she got her position through tremendous struggle.
00:12:49.140And 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.
00:13:02.900Why not put her on the dollar bill or on the passport?
00:13:18.480All 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.
00:14:49.100This 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.
00:15:00.480One of the reasons is because we hardly teach history in the school systems across the country.
00:15:08.720Now, 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?
00:15:31.080The 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.
00:15:43.820Back 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.
00:15:53.960You 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.
00:16:01.980That's really all history can do anyway, but it's important because if you wipe away history, you have collective amnesia.
00:16:09.100Why 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?
00:16:17.560It's impossible to think about it, but in fact, that's what it is, and we're just not teaching it anymore.
00:16:24.240We're the social scientists or social studies experts have gained control of the curriculum.
00:16:31.740The 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.
00:16:45.280And so the government comes along and says, well, we need a new passport.
00:16:50.600We'll put a raking leaves in there instead of a Terry Fox.
00:16:54.520People 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?
00:17:01.000Well, if you don't know the history of Terry Fox, then he doesn't mean it any to you.
00:17:05.780And you should know the history of Terry Fox because he was a real Canadian hero.
00:17:11.000Yeah, I'll admit, David, I'm a history buff.
00:17:14.280I would love to take your classes if I were out in Calgary.
00:17:17.840I'd just sit at the back and enjoy myself listening.
00:17:34.360But, 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.
00:17:46.280Yeah, he fought with us in the War of 1812.
00:17:48.100I mean, shouldn't they be looking at things like that?
00:17:50.660You know, we've got a government that says reconciliation is our most important thing.
00:17:54.100And 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?
00:18:07.460Because Tecumseh said, I'm on your side.
00:18:11.280You know, I can't work with these guys.
00:18:48.140And that is an example of people working together to accomplish something.
00:18:55.920Now, 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?
00:19:22.540We'll find in many cases it was Aboriginal communities themselves that wanted their kids to learn whatever science, engineering, agriculture that these schools taught.
00:19:34.720But we don't teach that either, that the schools were only for bad purposes.
00:19:39.760The Parliament of Canada called it a genocide, which to me is a complete destruction of the meaning of the word genocide.
00:20:16.540I mean, I agree with you that this passport change is one example, likely started with bureaucrats.
00:20:23.900But 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.
00:20:33.280I 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.
00:20:44.020And 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.
00:20:57.800Well, 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.
00:21:18.440You 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.
00:21:33.140And I don't believe that amongst the almost 40 million of us that there are very many people who think differently.
00:21:40.400Absolutely. 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.
00:21:51.400There 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.
00:21:59.180And this is supposed to be separatist Alberta, which it is not.
00:22:05.740And I would say the same thing probably goes across the country from Newfoundland to British Columbia.
00:22:12.640We like what we are, but we don't get enough of the real story of who we are.
00:22:18.180And so you might say, well, I feel proud to be a Canadian.
00:23:06.360Because they're giving in to the educational, quote, specialists, unquote, who say, well, we know what we should be teaching these kids.
00:23:15.380And 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.
00:25:21.540You 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?
00:25:30.540And the book was really about the different trends amongst academic historians at the time.
00:25:37.200And 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,
00:25:55.420began to broaden the field of the field of Canadian history, which was a good thing.
00:26:01.660And 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,
00:26:15.780who thought it was far more important to teach some of this social science stuff than it was to actually teach history.
00:26:24.660And 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.
00:26:38.100And they brought those views into the classroom.
00:26:41.140They brought those views into the writing of Canadian history books and so on.
00:27:03.960An average university semester in this country is about four months long.
00:27:13.880You put in, as an academic, I have academic freedom.
00:27:17.540I put in what I feel is important in my courses.
00:27:20.360I have to downplay those things that I think are not so important because I don't have the time to cover them all.
00:27:27.160But 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.
00:27:43.720And the problem is that people who are in charge of curricula at the provincial levels largely determine what our students are learning.
00:27:55.080And when they go into university, some of them will take history courses.
00:28:00.260And 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.
00:28:07.660But 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.
00:28:18.520They haven't learned it in high school where you can control the curriculum.
00:28:22.520And if they don't want to learn it in university, they don't have to learn it.
00:28:26.780So that's, again, a part of this problem.
00:28:29.580We don't know enough about the things that our country has done, good or bad.
00:28:35.820And 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?
00:29:52.960But now some Canadians are shocked to find out that, well, some of our civic leaders had slaves.
00:30:01.740You know, and you can look at James McGill.
00:30:04.080People are saying they want to get rid of the name of McGill University in Montreal, famous institution.
00:30:08.880The streets here in Toronto, it's less of a problem in Western Canada.
00:30:13.580But, you know, get rid of Jarvis Street because Jarvis had slaves.
00:30:16.480Well, so did Joseph Brandt, who was a famous Mohawk leader, brought them from New York State to Southern Ontario.
00:30:25.220I 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.
00:30:36.020And I think the smugness that we've had surrounding how good we are, how pure Canadians have always been, leaves us shocked.
00:30:44.960Because, as you say, people aren't being taught history.
00:30:48.420And then, oh, wait, somebody had slaves?
00:30:57.620And it's a good thing that you raised the issue of slavery, because the British Empire abolished slavery in 1832.
00:31:05.780So there was no slavery in Canada after 1832.
00:31:09.700And although there was slavery under the French colonial regime, and then even under the British colonial regime, until that point in time,
00:31:17.040although 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.
00:31:35.880There'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.
00:31:54.920And 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.
00:32:07.040So it plays a different role in the history of this country.
00:32:10.580But there are always people in Canada who look at the latest trend in the United States, and they say, oh, me too.
00:32:19.040And 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.
00:32:34.980And I think it's that simple that our history developed differently than their history did, and we have to take that into consideration.
00:32:42.980There's stories across the country of different groups, races, ethnicities, not getting on at certain points.
00:32:54.660But I would say that we've built a fairly harmonious country.
00:32:59.460And 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.
00:33:12.980Well, you know, you're absolutely right.
00:33:16.820Of course, there were people who didn't agree with other people on major issues, for example.
00:33:21.800We had riots in Vancouver, in Toronto, in Montreal, in Winnipeg.
00:33:28.300Big general strike in Winnipeg in 1919.
00:33:31.200But the point is that we have overcome a lot of those divisions.
00:33:36.520There are new divisions in Canadian society today.
00:33:39.200There 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.
00:33:47.740It's inevitable, which is why we are a federation and should remain a federation.
00:33:52.500But it depends, again, on where you put the emphasis.
00:33:57.340And if you put the emphasis on those things that divide us, then the things that unite us get lost.
00:34:03.340Let 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.
00:34:15.480What are some of the stories that we should know that aren't being taught the way they should?
00:34:25.540I think, for example, the efforts on the part of the government in the late 1920s and early 1930s to protect a nascent Canadian culture.
00:34:41.740Well, they established the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
00:34:46.280Now, I don't have the same view of the CBC today as I might have had back in the 1930s.
00:34:53.240But the government of the day looked at the proliferation of private broadcasters in the United States.
00:34:59.340And 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.
00:35:09.140And I think in the 1930s, that was quite true.
00:35:13.320I 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.
00:35:22.260But it was true at the time, and I think it was an important decision that the government made.
00:35:29.180And I think Canadians largely supported it.
00:35:33.180So there's something that I think government did that was a real positive for the people of this country at that time.
00:35:43.080Then you have to ask yourself, is it still a real positive for people in this country today?
00:35:47.100And 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.
00:36:24.840You may find this funny, but it was mostly liberals who helped him write the Broadcasting Act in 1932.
00:36:32.380Because they thought more or less the same about protecting this very small Canadian culture.
00:36:38.680We 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.
00:36:50.020How do you try to bring Canadians together?
00:36:54.540Well, 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.
00:37:11.240I just love the old Foster Hewitt introduction for Hockey Night in Canada, which is hockey fans across Canada, the United States, and in Newfoundland.
00:38:25.220They cheer at certain parts of the anthem where, you know, song, you know, where it's we're singing about freedom.
00:38:32.700That is a very different view than you get from the people that run the country.
00:38:36.740And 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.
00:38:46.140What would be some of the other things that, you know, stories that Canadians should know about their history?
00:38:56.820Canadians who in the early 20th century won medals at the Olympic Games, for example.
00:39:02.560Canadians, and I mentioned it earlier, who helped solve the problem, a very terrible problem of diabetes.
00:39:12.700Canadians who invented things that went on to become of great importance to everybody in the world.
00:39:19.840The 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
00:39:28.940is something that we should be remembering.
00:39:34.160There aren't many left, but they did one hell of a job.
00:39:38.340You 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.
00:39:48.920And whenever I see that, and I haven't been to Europe in a long time with the pandemic and so on,
00:39:54.540it just gives me pride as a Canadian that we did something that was of immense importance to the world.
00:40:02.800And then you can talk about all the scientific breakthroughs that we made in this country in the area of aerospace,
00:40:08.280in the area of computing sciences, and so on and so forth, and are still making today.
00:40:12.300How 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.
00:40:24.460And you say, well, there must be a lot of people in this country who understand TV and radio and modern communications.
00:40:31.680Yeah, Hollywood wouldn't come here to make programs, The Last of Us, for example, made in and around Calgary.
00:40:39.960Why? Well, because they knew that the expertise was here.