It is not that we do not have such a history. It is simply that we have chosen not to remember it.— J. L. Granatstein
As the Cold War ended, with liberal democracy seeming to prevail, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously argued that “the end of history” had arrived. A few years later, the Canadian historian J. L. Granatstein was more bloody-minded: history had not ended, it had been killed. Vigorously written and published by HarperCollins, his Who Killed Canadian History? was praised and panned. For well over a decade, any conversation among historians was likely to invoke it. But the book was mostly ignored by decision makers.
Granatstein’s 156-page J’accuse alluded to many guilty parties. The first pistols were the “provincial ministries of education.” I use the quotation marks deliberately, because the normally punctilious and precise Granatstein was...
Patrice Dutil is a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. He founded the Literary Review of Canada in 1991 and wrote Sir John A. Macdonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885.
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