A slick commercial appeared on Canadian television last year, featuring redcoats and period warships, with narrator intoning: “Two hundred years ago, the United States invaded our territory.” It’s 2013 and the invaders are long gone, but our leaders have set to work driving any ambiguity out of our collective memory. As we enter year two of an epic, multimillion-dollar celebration of the...
Reviewed in this essay: What We Talk About When We Talk About War, Noah Richler, Goose Lane Editions, 2012. George Grant wrote Lament for a Nation before official multiculturalism, before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, before the liberalization of Canada had begun in earnest. But he understood that his preferred canon of national stories were no longer told, and that new ones were being...
Reviewed in this essay: King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny by Allan Levine. D&M Publishers Inc., 2011. William Lyon Mackenzie King exists only dimly in our collective consciousness, as a kind of great grey mass hung over a rather substantial chunk of political history. Refreshingly, Allan Levine’s new biography cares little to remedy this...