Canadians delude themselves if they believe we are the peaceable kingdom

KAMOURASKA, QUE.—My old house here has a lot of antique furniture, thanks to friends who contributed when my parents requested old pieces after a fire in 1980. One of them is a sleigh bed, once owned by the leader of the 1837 rebellion in Quebec, Louis-Joseph Papineau. Sleeping in that bed may have prompted a breakfast conversation with a guest, a francophone former journalist who said, “I have always wondered why English Canadians are not more aware of the rebellions in Quebec and Ontario.” I fumbled for an answer and suggested a number of reasons: poor teaching of Canadian history; a provincial approach to education; and finally, the fact history is no longer a mandatory subject in most schools. I acknowledged to him how we dropped the ball on the teaching of history in English schools. While in Quebec, history courses have always shown a serious nationalist bias (and the new curriculum in Quebec schools bears this out), at least history really matters here. When my older siblings went to school in Montreal in the 1950s, many of their textbooks were American. When Canadian textbooks appeared in my cohort, they failed to provide more than a superficial understanding of Canada’s colonial past, relations with Indigenous people, and the emergence from the war of 1812 to the demand for true democracy in 1837 to Confederation a generation later. How Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine picked up where Papineau’s rebellion had failed, and how a former Patriote, George-Étienne Cartier, aligned with John A. Macdonald to create a new country. All of these things are part of the genesis of Canada, and they were by no means peaceful. And this is where I was able to respond to my friend: the rebellions are not a focal point in our history because they don’t fit the narrative of Canada’s peaceful evolution, compared to the United States. Indeed, the Revolutionary war left 30,000 dead and tens of thousands exiled, and the Civil War cost 620,000 lives. Compared to that, the 500 in the rebellions seem paltry. But, without a doubt, they had a huge impact on the later history of the country, and especially the history of Quebec. The burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal in 1849 and the violence that followed are rarely mentioned in our history books. And yet, in 2004 then-Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin told an American audience: “To put it another way, the United States emerged from its colonial period abruptly and bloodily, with a determination to protect the individual citizen against the tyranny of the state. … Canada emerged from its colonial period later and more peacefully and gradually. … Canadians are more willing than Americans to trust the state, and more willing to blame the state if poverty abounds or medical needs are not met.” Of course, this is unfortunate nonsense. The Conscription Riots, the Winnipeg General Strike, and the October Crisis were violent moments in our history. And our treatment of Indigenous peoples was far from peaceful. Our failure to grasp this side of our history contributes to a collective incomprehension of the present. The latest example is the current furor in Quebec over the release of 2021 census data. Most English Canadians didn’t bat an eye when they heard French speakers were declining as a share of the Quebec population, but it was big news here. And while there are many flaws with the data (francophones only include mother-tongue speakers, not anglophones or allophones who speak it fluently) the interpretation in Quebec has been apocalyptic. Combined with the news that federal public servants may no longer require fluency in French if they speak an Indigenous language, the Journal de Montréal’s Emmanuelle Latraverse wrote in a column titled “The Folklorisation of French”: “It is only a matter of time before knowledge of French as the existential foundation of Canadian bilingualism is seen as a source of systemic discrimination. Therefore, the latest census data portends an explosive identity debate for all of Canada.” Canadians may be sleepwalking into a confrontation without even knowing it, convincing themselves Canada is “the peaceable kingdom” compared to their fractious neighbours to the south. Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal governments. He is a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a town councillor in Kamouraska, Que. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com. The Hill Times

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Canadians delude themselves if they believe we are the peaceable kingdom

Our failure to grasp the messy and violent side of our history contributes to a collective incomprehension of the present.

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