The year 2017 is the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation. It is also the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during the First World War. Celebrations and commemorations of both are rife this year, and it is difficult to say which is more important in the popular imagination. The two events are in curious competition as founding myths, and also often conflated in a narrative that presents the country’s political founding in 1867, but situates its founding in a real emotional sense as happening at Vimy Ridge.
Why have we decided this? The oddity of a battle on another continent, one that took place 50 years after Confederation, being the actual birth of the nation is accepted among Canadians with strangely little question. It is difficult to explain to an outsider. The battle was not in defence of the country against a foreign invader; nor was it won in a fight for...
Amy Shaw teaches history at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Crisis of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in Canada during the First World War (UBC Press, 2009) and co-editor of A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls in Canada and Newfoundland during the First World War (UBC Press, 2012).
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