Michael Bliss, CM, Ph.D., F.R.S.C.
University of Toronto
Address at "Giving the Future a Past" Conference,
Association for Canadian Studies, Winnipeg, October 20, 2001
My argument is simple. Anyone who gives any kind of a history course has to make choices about the content of that course, judging that some content is more important than other content. If we call our courses Canadian history, honesty compels us to make choices about Canadian content. In courses that purport to give an overview of Canadian history there is a certain content relating to the history of the Canadian nation or Canadian people or Canadian peoples that ought to be taught.
It's surely hard to disagree with these elementary propositions. Perhaps you can attack them by saying that it's all wrong to think about any specific content in history courses — that the job is not to teach what happened in history, but rather the job is to teach how to think historically, how to analyze problems the way historians do, how to use sources and so on.
There may be some truth in that if you happen to be teaching people how to be historians, just as if you're teaching people how to be computer programmers you would teach them how to program computers. But if the purpose of your teaching is to impart to your students knowledge of Canadian history, then the job is like teaching them the fundamentals of making a computer work — how to use the keyboard, the desktop, the software, and so on. The main purpose of history teaching at practically every level below graduate instruction is to teach content.
So what content are we to teach in Canadian history courses? The operative word is the adjective "Canadian". What makes a course a course in Canadian history? By definition it's about Canada, which means that it's about the experiences the people who call themselves Canadian recognize as Canadian, which is to say it's about experiences they have had more or less in common, which means that it's about the public history of the country.
What is that public history? I suggest that it is the anatomy and physiology of the evolution of Canada through time. When we discuss that anatomy and physiology most of us would reach a rough agreement on what we have to talk about, just as if we were giving a course on human anatomy and physiology we would largely agree on the organs and processes that we have to cover. We would certainly agree that it would be wrong to give a course on human anatomy and physiology that only included two or three organs, let us say the genitals and the parathyroid glands, or looked at only a couple of processes, such as skin pigmentation and the operations of the sweat glands, ignoring everything else. No doubt our medical friends will tell us that there are many different ways of approaching the study of anatomy and physiology, with differing emphases, but you still have to study the major organs — the brain, the heart, the lungs, and so on — and you have to study the basic physiological processes, respiration, nutrition, the circulation of the blood, and so on.
If we're studying Canadian history honestly, we have not done a very good job if we don't talk about certain key historical episodes or turning points. Have we talked about Canadian history adequately, for example, if we have not talked about the first interactions of aboriginals with Europeans? Have we talked about Canadian history adequately if we haven't considered the history of New France, if we haven't considered the Conquest, if we haven't considered the effect of the American Revolution, if we haven't considered the evolution of the Canadian economy within the shifting contexts of British trade policy, if we don't talk about the rebellions of 1837, if we don't talk about the coming of responsible government, if we don't talk about Confederation, if we don't talk about Western expansion, if we don't build the CPR, if we don't talk about Canadian contributions to the two Great Wars, if we don't talk about the depression, if we don't talk about Sir John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Mackenzie King, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, if we don't talk about the crises caused by Quebec nationalism from the 1960s? Have we talked about Canadian history adequately if we don't talk about bilingualism, multiculturalism, constitutional reform and the coming of the Charter of Rights? Have we talked about Canadian history adequately if we haven't talked about the realignment and integration of the Canadian economy with the American economy before and after and including the decision to enter into a free trade agreement? Most sensible people would say that these are the events integral to the anatomy and physiology of Canadian history and they have to be taught if we're going to give students a proper overview of that subject.
Putting this another way, but retaining my analogy to the body, if we make a distinction between political and social history, it might be like the distinction between the bones and the tissues of a body. You can't teach a proper course of anatomy without discussing both bones and tissues. Similarly a Canadian history course that is all political history is like presenting a skeleton without flesh — only the bare bones of history. A course that is all social history is like a serving of tissue without bones or structure — a lot of soft mush.
Putting this yet another way, I do not have a problem with the notion that Canadian students ought to be able to answer those factual questions asked in the Dominion Institute's surveys. Knowing some basic facts and yes, even dates, in history is like having a vocabulary or like having basic typing skills. It is where you start, it is the foundation, and then you go on to build on it.
In his polemic, Who Killed Canadian History? J.L. Granatstein makes two simple points. His main point is that we are distorting history and failing to do the teacher's obvious job of preparing students to be literate citizens if we don't teach a balanced overview of Canadian history. Granatstein is saying that it's unprofessional in the fullest sense to give students Canadian history courses that do not include content relating to, for example, Confederation, Canada's military history, and Canada's national political traditions, among other subjects.
Granatstein's second point is that certain teachers of Canadian history, mostly in the universities, are failing to do their job as communicators when they talk only to themselves and a few senior students in esoteric, jargon-laden language. When they do this they cut themselves off from the main body of students, they cut universities off from the rest of society, and they cut their discipline off from contact with the rest of the intellectual world (much the way that many academic economists have, to take a less contentious example). Some of you will know that in a scholarly article published in 1991 ("Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada", Journal of Canadian Studies, 26, 4 (Hiver 1991-92 Winter), pp. 5-17) I anticipated some of Granatstein's points, stressing that from the 1970s on Canadian history had turned inward, becoming personalized, privatized, and solipsistic, and that in succumbing to these trends we were failing in our basic duty as teachers to the point where the capacity for Canadian citizenship was being imperilled.
Perhaps both of us were wrong, however, to worry so much about the universities, to worry about how certain professors were distorting and deadening our subject. Even as we were writing our laments, other historians, mostly outside the universities were hard at work generating what has welled up into a quite tremendous flow of popular writing about Canada and Canadian history, a volume of writing that means that Canadian history shelves in bookstores are groaning with books on all manner of subjects.
Magazines too. Here in Winnipeg we should pay special tribute to the national history magazine published in this city, The Beaver, which in the 1980s thanks to a few real visionaries (especially Rolph Huband of the Hudson's Bay Company), was transformed from a company house organ into a slick glossy and comprehensive popular magazine of Canadian history with what for this country is an enormous circulation, now standing well over 45,000. The Beaver may never be quite so fat with ads and circulation as the magazine it's always trying to catch up to, the Canadian Geographic Journal, but that just underlines what we all know about Canada having more geography than history.
And of course we also now have videos — stacks and stacks of videos — most notably the whole 32 hour course in Canadian history put together by the CBC, "Canada: A People's History". Many of you know much more than I do about how or whether videos can work as a fundamental teaching tool, but what interests me about the CBC's approach to Canadian history is that it exactly proves the point of my comments. When Mark Starowicz and his staff set out to produce the most intellectually up-to-date course they could in Canadian history, when they bent over backward to consult historians of all stripes, when they bought into the idea of telling history from a "people's" point of view, and when they put it all together - the result looked remarkably traditional. Much is going on in the episodes of "A People's History" — a lot of attention to aboriginals, a lot of attention to workers and women and the immigrant experience — but there is also an enormous amount of military history and political history. Most of the check-points I listed earlier in these remarks are covered, because to their credit the CBC people touch all the bases as they circle the field. Good for them.
But my final argument is that to achieve a balanced content in Canadian history courses -ie. to have a truce in one version of the history wars - is only a beginning. It does not solve the crucial double problem of (a) how to make the instruction in these important subjects interesting to our students and (b) how to show the students that history is not just a set of agreed upon facts. These problems are often linked, but as a professional historian I'm most interested in the objectivity/interpretive issue.
Our crying need in Canadian history is not so much for new approaches to new content, but rather for new approaches to and serious discussion of the issues swirling around the old content. Here is where our texts, where many of the courses we teach, where "A People's History" and where our current generation of university historians all tend to let us down. You can't do Canadian history without talking about the rebellions of 1837, for example, but should you really assume that you understand these rebellions and their consequences? Were they crucial in bringing about political change in the provinces of Canada or did they retard political change? Similarly would the Métis people have been better off with or without the Northwest rebellion of 1885? Was it really important to Canada that Macdonald rushed through the building of the CPR when he did, or could it have been built a decade later with less risk, less conflict, and more profitability?
I can go on raising these interpretive issues — hard interpretive ones, mostly involving the problem of counter-factual reasoning and assumptions — almost endlessly. I can suggest to you, for example, that the Winnipeg General Strike is hugely over-emphasized in our history books — that it was both an abject failure and little more than a product of the hyperinflation of prices and expectations between 1915 and 1919. It's very important, many of us feel, and it's a very easy argument to make after September 11, 2001, that Canada's experience during Hitler's war be studied, and particularly that our military traditions not be neglected. But I tend to part company with my friend Granatstein and many of our military historians in believing that it's not enough to just list Canada's contributions. We have to evaluate our military engagements with cold critical intelligence. We have to raise all the hard issues that for the most part are skimmed over in our military histories and in textbooks and in "A People's History", but were raised for example, in the hugely controversial and immensely interesting series "The Valour and the Horror"-such issues as the failure of Canadian troops in Normandy to take their objectives, the morality of the terror bombing of Germany, and the very serious problems the Canadian navy had in the battle of the Atlantic.
Even within a balanced presentation in terms of basic content, then, history is not cut-and-dried. It's always contentious, always resting on interesting and intricate arguments about might-have-beens and contingencies, always subject to reinterpretation. If we are to have a country, Canada, if we are to teach something that's called Canadian history, our content has to be the public events of our common history, as well as some of the varieties of the private events. It is not being super-nationalistic or excessively patriotic to suggest that our sense of our selves, especially our sense of where we have come from, is fundamental to our civic sense. If our civic sense, which has never been all that strong, is allowed to erode and wither in ignorance and subjectivism and misplaced pluralism and narcissistic solipsism, then our democracy is going to function even less well than it does now.
We need to build a platform of a sense of a common history. And then we need to realize that every plank in that platform is contingent — from the moment we nail it in place we should start examining it critically. Is it really good wood? Is it properly fixed? Can we replace it with something better?
A healthy foundation is always being poked and prodded, tested, repaired, rebuilt. If you have no foundation at all, which describes too many people's understanding of Canadian history, then the buildings that you try to put up on that no foundation are all going to fall down.