About 1,700 Canadian volunteers fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, and more than 400 of them died. Many more were wounded and scarred. Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, by Michael Petrou, is only the second scholarly account of who these men were, why they fought, how they lived and died. Victor Hoar’s work in the 1960s, The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, could not get access to key documents and archival material. Petrou's book takes us to a different level than Hoar's, and it is well worth the read.
Earlier accounts, memoirs, even plays, often gave a highly romanticized account of these Canadians, and of what the war was all about. Spain’s descent into civil war has been described with great verve by Hugh Thomas and Anthony Beevor, for example, but Petrou takes us through these years at a level of detail and objectivity we have not seen before, and we are better off for it. His book is less about...
Bob Rae was Ontario’s 21st premier and served as interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Now a lawyer and distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, he wrote the 2005 report on the Air India bombing called “Lessons to Be Learned.”
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