Question Time

Toward the end of Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada, the historian Peter Price notes that “every generation has a tendency to designate its position at the culmination of a dramatic narrative of human development.” Put another way, each generation sees itself at the end point of history and almost always has a difficult time overcoming its blind spots. It’s a telling observation.

With his book, Price targets what he sees as one of our blind spots today: our understanding of the nation itself. Canada was not “created in a single moment in 1867,” he writes in his introduction. “It was shaped instead by a gradual process in which many sought to explain the meaning of the new political jurisdiction and how those living within its expanding boundaries could or should identify with it.” Confederation was really a “mutable moment” with contested meanings; the idea that we share a “distinct nationality based on a constitutional...