Peter C. Newman, the iconic author of a trilogy on the Hudson’s Bay Company, once told me an anecdote about meeting a new quartermaster general of the HBC. The man was Jewish and Newman asked him if he had ever been the subject of discrimination. “Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” he replied. “I’m the first Englishman ever to be quartermaster general of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
The rest, of course, were Scots.
The story came to me as I read Ken McGoogan’s fine new book, How the Scots Invented Canada. The title is deliberately provocative, to the point of being preposterous, in the same vein as its inspiration—Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It. It sounds as if it were conceived after...
John Ivison is a political columnist for the National Post and a native of Dumfries, Scotland, final home and resting place of the poet Robert Burns.
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