Risky Business

I worked at a car dealership in the summer of 1968 after my first year of university. The job was not dangerous: I washed and dusted the used cars on the lot and ran errands for the salesmen. One of my co-workers was a young man with an engaging smile — a high school dropout, as I recall, who did more than wash cars. One day, he was operating the floor-mounted bead blaster, used for changing tires, when something went wrong. He lost the tip of a finger, which was a big deal, of course. But he returned to the lot the next morning almost as if nothing had happened — as if he had schooled himself to expect injury because he was working with his hands. Shit happens, and then you get on with life.

The contributors to An Accidental History of Canada do not share this resigned view. “Human life is unpredictable and ‘accidents happen,’ but that does not mean that accidents have no social, cultural, or political meaning,” several of them write in their introduction. “Risk is almost always mediated by wealth, power, and social position or, conversely, exacerbated by poverty, poor housing, and unsafe working conditions.”

Historically, the reality for the tens of thousands of men, women, and children who worked for employers who did not exercise benign care over them was the expectation of injury or death. This was particularly true for those who paved highways, hauled in fish, or laid down track — in other words, the people who built Canada. As the authors write, “Canada as a concept invites certain risks; this country has more road, river, and rail than most on which to falter and die.”

Each of the twelve essays in this book features dozens of footnotes and an extensive bibliography, a depth of documentation that underscores how the history of accidents has been chewed over for some time. These authors don’t just say “Shit happens” and move on (since most of them are academics, the occupational risks they face are often of the paper-cut variety). Nor do they focus on large-scale disasters, such as the 1917 Halifax Explosion. The charm of the book is its focus on lesser-known individuals and small groups. Appropriately, the introduction quotes the American journalist Jessie Singer: “When we die by accident, we die in ones and twos.”

Here, the ones and twos cover the waterfront. The emphasis on events away from urban centres is fitting for a country that was carved out of the wilderness and where clearing land and building bridges and railways were fraught with uncertainty. The essays are grouped into three categories: where wealth and the lack of it contributed to workplace injury and death; the ways in which public and private charities attempted to mitigate risk; and how stories about accidents help society remember.

Thus we read about mining injuries and death in twentieth-century Ontario, about the development of workers’ compensation in Alberta, and about kitchen-table surgeries throughout rural Canada. All of it is presented with the terminology — intersectionality, settlers, and the like — that saturates contemporary academic discourse. That’s all benign enough. What’s not is the occasional sneering.

It’s appropriate to differentiate between the fates of loggers and of canoeists on Ontario’s turbulent Petawawa River, as does Cameron Baldassarra, who focused on Algonquin Park during his graduate studies at McMaster University. But to single out the 1968 drowning of the parliamentary journalist Blair Fraser — to make the point that recreational canoeists might be, in the words of another scholar quoted here, “middle-class men recreating in the wilderness as a way to reinforce their masculinity”— is cheap. Baldassarra seems particularly resentful that there’s a memorial plaque above the rapids where Fraser met his demise and that his death has been “mourned and memorialized” over the decades. He draws a contrast with the makeshift wooden cross that commemorates the 1905 death of the logger Emile Huard (who is, in turn, more recognized than countless anonymous workers who perished without any recognition at all). What does this prove except that the Petawawa became the preserve of recreational canoe trippers who put a premium on safety in ways that old timber companies didn’t? Death on the river became much less common over the twentieth century, so naturally it drew more attention in the late ’60s. It comes across as mean-spirited to single out Fraser’s “privileged position in society.”

Just as troubling is the dismissiveness shown toward Othoa Scott by Megan J. Davies and Tamara Gene Myers, historians from York University and the University of British Columbia respectively. Scott was a B.C. girl who was left with a badly injured back after falling on rocks while playing with friends in 1920. Her fate aroused public feeling and led to the development of pediatric rehabilitation facilities, which, Davies and Myers suggest, put the girl’s “cuteness, diminutive size, and white settler background” to “maximum fundraising effect.” Such a line of argument undercuts both a heartening story and a remarkable achievement in what was still a young province.