Our Hidden History

The colleague who brings the cups of coffee to our table has been reading John Ralston Saul’s elegant double biography, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, and she is perplexed. She seeks historical guidance. She sees that in his entwined lives of these 19th-century parliamentarians, Saul is asserting large claims about the meaning of Canada. The book is an argument about the foundation of the country and the origins of Canadian political culture. It has flashes of violence, clashes of incompatible political philosophies, threats of ethnocultural war and the spectacle of politicians making subtle choices for the highest of stakes. It is not only a dramatic story, that is, but one that addresses fundamental questions about our political inheritance from the distant 1840s.

My perplexed colleague is a veteran of the Canadian literary-cultural-political scene. She has good reason to consider herself widely read and well informed. (Okay, she is the...