At Daggers Drawn

Canadians don’t like to think about war. As the historian Tim Cook shows in his most recent book, The Fight for History, this country largely forgot about the Second World War for fifty years. It was only in the mid-1990s that Canadians were finally moved by the CBC’s coverage of D‑Day and V‑E Day anniversaries — coverage that showed what our soldiers had done and how they were remembered by those they had liberated. The veterans’ parades in Holland and the crowds of cheering Dutch had a substantial impact. So too did the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa, in 2000, and the watching crowd’s spontaneous placing of thousands of poppies on the granite memorial.

But when Stephen Harper’s government tried to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812, most had a shared reaction of a different kind: people saw it as both an unimportant event and another of the prime minister’s attempts to glorify militarism. The government eased back, and...