How Stephen Harper is rewriting history
Starting with a $25-million museum overhaul, the Conservatives want to change the way Canadians perceive their past
Maclean’s Online
John Geddes
Monday, July 29, 2013 5:00am
Mark O’Neill, president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country’s biggest and most-visited museum, is typically an upbeat guy. But as he leads a reporter around Canada Hall, the winding stroll through Canadian history that is one of the museum’s central features, he doesn’t exactly offer a seminar in cheery tour-guide patter. At about the midpoint of the walk, which starts with the Vikings arriving and ends in a 1960s-vintage airport lounge, O’Neill steps into one of his favourite installations—an intact early 20th-century Ukrainian Catholic church, painstakingly relocated to the museum from Smoky Lake, Alta. “Look around,” he says. “You will learn virtually nothing about Ukrainian Canadians. You will learn nothing about the first Canadian internment camps. You will learn nothing about the Ukrainian community today.”
His frustration is not limited to how the charming St. Onuphrius Church seems cut off from any wider historical context. In fact, O’Neill voices similar complaints at just about every turn. He shakes his head at the way the hall’s Acadian section teaches about how early French settlers farmed salt marshes on the Bay of Fundy, but little on their expulsion in 1755. The mock-up of a square in 18th-century New France is lovely, and O’Neill admits it’s popular, but he complains that it conveys next to nothing about actual historical events. There’s a convincing Red River cart, but he bemoans the lack of much, aside from a lonely text panel on the wall, about Louis Riel’s rebellions. A little further along, he slumps into a vinyl kitchen chair in a meticulously reconstructed—O’Neill actually calls it “sort of bizarre”—Chinese laundry. “How does this deal with Chinese-Canadian history?” he asks.
O’Neill gathers all these flaws and failings together in a sweeping critique. “It’s not sufficient,” he sums up, “that you can walk through this hall and learn very little about the history of Canada.” He’s willing to be so blunt because the government has given him $25 million to overhaul Canada Hall as his museum is rebranded the Canadian Museum of History. And the revamping of this major federal institution—in its prime location on the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Que., just across from Parliament Hill—is just one element in the Conservatives’ wider strategy for changing the way Canadians perceive their past. It’s all timed to build to a crescendo for the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017.
A history-heavy advertizing blitz leading up to the sesquicentennial, with a proposed $20-million budget, is in the works at Heritage Canada. Last month, the department announced $12 million for a Canada History Fund. It will pay for, among other things, new awards for outstanding high school history students and teachers. Who could object? Yet the push is prompting angry charges that the Tories are manipulating history for ideological purposes. In the political arena, the New Democrats accuse them of “remaking the Museum of Civilization in their image.” The NDP points to the Harper government’s high-profile, high-cost commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 as evidence of a Conservative bias for celebrating military exploits over, say, exploring social history.
Professional historians are debating the issue too, sometimes hurling accusations that wouldn’t be out of place in the House during question period. The Canadian History Association detects “a pattern of politically charged heritage policy” that includes both the planned revamping of O’Neill’s museum and the War of 1812 publicity campaign. “Canadian history has been conscripted,” declared Queen’s University history professor Ian McKay in a widely noted 2011 lecture, provocatively titled, “The Empire Fights Back: Militarism, Imperial Nostalgia, and the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada.”
McKay charges the Harper government with promoting a narrow, war-obsessed version of Canadian history, a slant he traces largely to the writings of prominent historians like Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson. There’s no doubt that Granatstein, in particular, is an inspiration for the Harper government’s approach to history. James Moore, who as heritage minister from the fall of 2008 until this month’s cabinet shuffle, which saw him become minister of industry, spearheaded the government’s history offensive. Moore often mentions “Jack” in speeches and, in an interview with Maclean’s, the sole historian he refers to by name is Granatstein.
And the book Moore cites is Who Killed Canadian History?, the polemical 1998 bestseller in which Granatstein framed his side of the debate that’s still raging. He complained that political and military history had been all but banished from Canada’s classrooms in favour of social themes, especially trendy topics such as regional and ethnic history. In danger of being lost, Granatstein wrote, was the shared military, political and economic history that undergirds “the larger national and pan-Canadian identity.”
Granatstein’s lament is echoed in Moore’s speeches on the government’s goal of fostering national pride through knowledge of history. “We have an enormous history to be proud of,” he said last month. “But, unfortunately, we live in a country where so many young people aren’t taught and don’t know and don’t have access to those stories that made this country so great and so brilliant.” Harper’s top election strategists, including the late Sen. Doug Finley, have framed patriotism, especially linked to Canada’s military heritage, as a key element in the Conservative brand.
Still, Moore says no Conservative politician will order federal museums to showcase any particular version of the past. ...
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