Let’s face it: Canada, most of the time, leaves us indifferent. The average Quebecer is more interested in the election of an American politician than in that of the premier of Saskatchewan — do you know him? — or Nova Scotia. Canadians themselves, moreover, seem to be more interested in what is happening in their southern neighbor than in current events in their own country.
What is today’s Canada, really, if not an English-speaking multiculturalist hostel offering more generous social programs than the United States? In December 2015, in an interview with New York TimesJustin Trudeau was saying nothing else when he maintained that Canada had no fundamental identity and embodied “the first post-national state in the world”.
On a cultural level, the country’s Prime Minister basically argued that Canada is an empty shell with great values. It’s not very exciting. If Durham returned, he would have to mend his ways: it is not French-speaking Quebec which is a people without history and without literature, it is English Canada which is a gathering of individuals without a common culture, according to its own first minister.
However, it would be unfair to reduce Canada to this portrait. The country has had and still has great writers — Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro — talented songwriters — Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn — and exceptional painters. Moreover, whether he likes it or not, he has a story in which we are, by force of circumstances, a part and which is far from boring when we deign to delve into it.
This is the mission that Quebec historian Harold Bérubé gives himself in Canada. Meeting placet of conflicts (Septentrion, 2023, 162 pages): convince us “that Canadian history is worth taking an interest in.”
Bérubé is well aware of the difficulty of the enterprise. He nevertheless sets out with the concern of “maintaining a happy medium” between the traditional Quebec criticism of the Canadian federation and the candor of the Heritage Minutes. He achieves this successfully.
We know that Quebec did not enter the Canadian “Confederation” with enthusiasm in 1867. Do we know, however, that another of the four founding provinces was also lured into joining the project? ? Bérubé recounts the deep reluctance of Nova Scotia in this matter. There, as here, it took a lot of maneuvering to defeat “Nova Scotian separatism”.
The province feared, in fact, losing management of its fisheries and its economy in general to the central government. The opposition, led by former Prime Minister Joseph Howe, even went to London twice to convince the British Parliament to reject the project, but without success.
Howe would eventually abdicate to the central government by being appointed minister in Ottawa. The episode confirms that the founding of Canada in 1867 was not based on popular will in many parts of the country.
Bérubé illustrates in several ways the “constitutive tensions of the Canadian political project”. It thus tells the story of Pier 21, in Nova Scotia, which was for a long time the gateway for immigrants to Canada, but it also recalls the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in several Canadian regions, notably in Saskatchewan, in the years 1920-1930. Defender of the “Britishness of Canada”, the racist movement of American origin attacks Canadians of African and Chinese origin, in addition to targeting Jews, Catholics and French-speakers. The flagships, as we see, are not always glorious.
After having energetically recounted the general strike which paralyzed Winnipeg in 1919 and which gave an admirable reformist impetus to Canadian trade unionism by shaking the country’s economic and political elites, Bérubé delivers his most surprising chapter by exposing the history of British Home Children.
The episode, which I had never heard of, is astonishing. From 1869 to 1939, Canada welcomed more than 100,000 boys and girls aged 9 to 14 “recruited” from the poor neighborhoods of British cities. They were said to be orphans, but two thirds of them were not.
For the promoters of the project, it was a question of lifting these children out of poverty and providing labor to the colonies. Delivered to families, these young people were often “mistreated and exploited”. According to some historians, “10% of Canadians are descended from children from the program.” Gilles Duceppe, the former leader of the Bloc Québécois, is one of them.
Canadian history is therefore indeed partly ours. However, there is nothing admirable enough to justify continuing to participate in it in the future.