On 4 May, 1944, the Honorable Athanase David, Liberal Senator from
Sorel, and former Quebec Provincial Secretary (in effect the Minister
of Education) in the government of Quebec from 1919 to 1936, introduced
a motion on the floor of the Senate asking the provinces to appoint
"a committee of the most impartial and competent historians,
as such recognized in each province, with the mission of preparing
a text-book of Canadian history that could be accepted and adopted
by all provincial Governments in all schools under their direct or
indirect jurisdiction or control" (Senate Debates, 4 May,
1944: 147). Only with such a textbook, he argued, could history create
the national patriotism which he saw as the primary justification
for teaching history in the schools at all. David and the other Senators
who took part in the debate on his motion were concerned by what they
saw as the dangerous lack of understanding between English-speaking
and French-speaking Canadians, a state of affairs for which they held
history teachers partly responsible, and which they saw a suitably
reconstructed teaching of history as correcting. The history that
was taught in Canada's schools, David insisted, was "sometimes
bad and sometimes false" and created "too many quarrels,
too much friction and chauvinism" (ibid.: 148).
David charged the English-speaking provinces with ignoring the history
of New France and Quebec and, more generally, the French dimension
of Canadian society as a whole. Similarly, he charged Quebec schools
with teaching too little about English-speaking Canada, while what
they did teach was too often biassed and inaccurate. The predictable
result was not one Canada, united by a shared Canadian sentiment,
but two, divided by ignorance and antipathy. What was needed to correct
this state of affairs, argued David, was not national unity, in the
sense of one homogenized national outlook, but something "quite
different from unity ...namely, a beautiful and comprehensive fraternity"
(ibid.: 148). And this could be achieved only if history was
taught differently, so as to create "a Canadian mentality common
to descendants both of the English and French races" (ibid.:
149). This mentality, however, needed as its base a shared historical
understanding.
David saw history as consisting of an accurate and definitive record
of the events of the past. As he put it: "History is history;
it is a search for truth - a narration of facts and events arranged
in chronological order, and a statement of their causes and effects"
(ibid.: 148). He saw little difficulty in establishing a common
story of the Canadian past, scientifically vouched for by professional
historians, and impossible to challenge because it would be true.
Just as no-one in his or her right mind would challenge the axioms
of mathematics, so no one could legitimately challenge history, at
least on the level of established facts. Interpretation and judgment
entered in only when "the endeavour is to deduce laws co-ordinating
the march of events, then it becomes the philosophy of history"
(ibid.: 148).
This distinction between fact and interpretation, between history
and the philosophy of history, was elaborated upon by another participant
in the Senate debate, Arthur Marcotte from Saskatchewan. History,
he insisted, was "a science" that was "true, impartial"
and the historian was by extension an objective scientist (Senate
Debates, 18 July, 1944: 296). The philosophy of history, by contrast,
was more complex: "To relate facts, events, lives of men, their
deeds, to find the causes and to fix the results - that is the philosophy
of history" (ibid.). Marcotte brought the point closer
to home by referring to the debates that had recently taken place
between the Quebec historians, Arthur Maheux and Lionel Groulx, particularly
over the nature and effects of the British conquest of Quebec, and
showing how even such "honest historians" could differ,
since "the greatest difficulty lies in commenting on a given
historical fact" (ibid.). Despite these reflections, Marcotte
nonetheless came down in favour of a uniform, national textbook, containing
only "true and impartial history." In his words, "The
trouble is not about the facts, but about the interpretation of these
facts, their causes and their results." Canada needed a national
textbook that stated the facts of Canadian history, he concluded,
but "there will always remain what is yet more important; the
interpretation of the facts, the events, the lives of men, their thoughts,
their deeds, their projects" (Senate Debates, 18 July,
1944: 298).
Both Marcotte and David, like almost other participants in the Senate
debate, seemed unaware of the difficulties involved in their attempted
separation of history from the philosophy of history. The distinction
was not uncommon in the early years of the twentieth century, but
it had been largely abandoned by historians well before the 1940s.
The very concept of a historical fact had been subjected to severe
criticism by such historians as Charles Beard and Carl Becker in the
1930s but the Senators, the oldest of whom was born in 1867 and the
youngest in 1892, drew their understanding of history from the teachings
of an earlier, more positivist, and generation. They were unaware
of the interpenetration of past and present in the thinking of historians
to which James Harvey Robinson and others had drawn attention more
than a generation earlier. More fundamentally, they totally ignored
the difficulty that even if agreement could be reached on facts, this
was very different from establishing their significance, determining
their causes, assessing their subsequent impact, and deciding which
to include in a curriculum. It was perhaps this failure of the Senators
to show any awareness of the debates of historians over the nature
of history that, in part, led Canadian historians to turn a deaf ear
to their appeal to define a common history to be learned by all Canadians.
Having launched his appeal for a common national history textbook,
David found himself supported by almost all those Senators who spoke
to his motion. They too were disturbed by what they saw as the mutual
incomprehension and antagonism that existed between francophone Quebec
and the rest of Canada. They too saw common history, taught in the
schools, as a way of building spirit of national solidarity and a
shared patriotism. They too believed, in the words of one of their
number, that "many of our youth from the Atlantic to the Pacific
coast are not at all as familiar with the history of their country
as they should be" (Senate Debates, 4 May, 1944: 150).
They too saw history in unproblematic terms as the scientific establishment
of an accurate description of the events of the past. As a francophone
Ontario Senator, Gustave Lacasse, put it: "After all, what is
history, if it is not an honest record of past events for the information
of the generation of tomorrow, irrespective of the whims and fancies
of the historian himself, and unaffectedly the transitory passions
which might influence readers as well as authors" (ibid.:
162)?
Some Senators brought copies of textbooks into the Senate chamber
and regaled their audience with what they saw as especially egregious
misrepresentations of the past. Some counted and compared the number
of pages devoted to different topics to demonstrate what they saw
as the lack of attention paid to New France and French Canada in English
language texts, or the anti-English biasses of Quebec texts. In doing
so, they took the opportunity to voice their particular personal enthusiasms,
thus unconsciously demonstrating the difficulties inherent in trying
to establish a common view of the past and what was significant in
it.
Senator Davies of Kingston canvassed a number of people across Canada,
both in and out of schools, and reported that his respondents were
divided on the question of the desirability of a national textbook.
The principal of what Davies described as the largest private boys'
school in Ontario, while acknowledging that "Canada cannot be
a nation, nor even two friendly nations, until the idea of Senator
David's motion is put into execution, and both parts have surrendered
a bit of pride," observed that no good book had ever been written
by a committee and that it mattered "very little what a textbook
contains (provided it is not deliberately false) since the atmosphere
and interpretation is derived from the class-room" (Senate
Debates, 30 May, 1944: 168).
This last point, as obvious as it seems, was ignored by almost all
the Senators who participated in the debate, who seem to have taken
the view that the teacher's job was simply to walk students through
the textbook without note or comment. In this regard, Davies quoted
from a letter sent to him by a Manitoba history teacher who raised
this very point, arguing that "it would be most unfortunate to
prescribe one text for the whole of Canada." It was pedagogically
undesirable since "modern teachers are trying to get away from
the old idea of one text as a bible in any subject." It was philosophically
undesirable since one officially endorsed national textbook would-be
regarded as "a complete and final authority," especially
if it was declared to be objective and truthful and the work of competent
historians ("if such beings exist" noted the Manitoba teacher).
As a result, "First thing we know, we would find that to question
it would be treason, or at least subversive propaganda" (Senate
Debates, 30 May, 1944: 168-9). This Manitoba teacher proposed
an alternative: let historians examine existing textbooks, point out
where they were at fault, leave it to publishers to make the necessary
changes, and then commission selected teachers to offer advice about
style and presentation. The result would be a list of worthwhile textbooks
from which teachers could choose: "Variations in emphasis would
still persist; variation in style, one hopes, would also continue;
but all the texts would have been pronounced accurate as far as they
go" (ibid.: 170).
The most provocative — and certainly the most reported —
contribution to the debate came from the newly appointed Senator from
St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Telesphore-Damien Bouchard, a long-time Liberal
Party activist in Quebec, who took the opportunity to settle some
old scores by attacking an assortment of Quebec nationalists whom
he accused of distorting history in a deliberate attempt to separate
Quebec from the rest of Canada. A member of the Quebec legislature
from 1912 to 1944, and the holder of an assortment of Quebec government
portfolios over the years, Bouchard painted a lurid picture of a Quebec
riddled with secret societies and conspiratorial associations who
were "prompted by a racial hatred insidiously instilled into
the souls of the French-Canadians by a wrong teaching of Canadian
history" with the aim of "undermining our governmental institutions"
(Senate Debates, 21 June, 1944: 214). He suggested that it
was the recognition of this state of affairs that had prompted David
to make his motion on the first place.
In a narrow sense, Bouchard was right. David had explicitly set his
motion in the context of a lack of understanding between English-speaking
and French-speaking Canadians. In a more important sense, however,
Bouchard was very wrong, since David attributed this state of affairs,
not to the workings of subversive revolutionaries who had permeated
all aspects of Quebec society, but, much less spectacularly, to mutual
ignorance and indifference in both language groups. Nonetheless, Bouchard,
an anti-clerical liberal in the classic Rouge tradition, went on to
connect his alarmist depiction of Québec society to the teaching
of history in Quebec schools and thus to the urgency of producing
a properly objective and truly national textbook. He pointed to the
dangers of "the false history that the past and present generation
have been taught" and emphasized "how urgent it is to make
a radical change in this teaching" so that history would no longer
serve as "a tool of subversive propaganda in the hands of those
who are aiming to disrupt Confederation and overthrow our form of
democratic government" (ibid.: 211-12).
Bouchard's alarmist exaggerations produced rebukes from other Senators,
ranging from the undesirability of washing dirty linen in public to
the danger of mistaking the antics of an untypical few for the conduct
of the typical majority. Another Quebec Senator wondered whether a
secret society might not be behind Bouchard's speech, so disruptive
was its effect. His Quebec critics suggested that he had used the
safety of his Senate seat, and its lifetime tenure, to unburden himself
of things he dare not say in Québec itself. Briefly lionized
by those sections of English-speaking Canada that thought that Quebec
was not pulling its weight in the War, Bouchard found himself vilified
in Quebec. He resigned the mayoralty of his home-town, St-Hyacinthe,
which he had held uninterruptedly since 1917, and found himself condemned
by the Church hierarchy, by most of the press, and disowned by his
former colleagues in the provincial government, which removed him
from his post as President of the newly created Quebec Hydro, the
creation of which had been one of his long cherished goals. Bouchard,
however, remained unrepentant. He rejected the charge that he was
washing Québec's dirty laundry in public by insisting that
by speaking in the Senate he was speaking "in his home."
The homeland of French-Canadians, he insisted, was not only Québec
but Canada as a whole: "The country of French-Canadians, as of
all other Canadians, extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and
from the 44th parallel of latitude to the extreme north. My national
family is the Canadian family, composed of Canadians of French origin
and of every other racial origin" (ibid.: 219).
Unlike Bouchard, other Senators took a more specifically pedagogical
line. Pamphile du Tremblay of Montreal, for example, argued that too
much was being expected of a national textbook and that a truly national
textbook that was acceptable to all provinces would have to include
so much that it would be unmanageable since no province would adopt
a textbook that did not pay appropriate attention to its particular
history. His solution was to produce a textbook that would in essence
be no more than a primer, confined to a summary of truly national
events, leaving the provinces to supplement it as they saw fit. For
example, Manitoba would want more emphasis placed on the Selkirk Settlement
than would other provinces; Ontario would emphasize the Loyalists;
Quebec would do the same with New France; and so on. In effect, du
Tremblay was arguing for a national minimum of significant facts,
supplemented by provincial or regional facts selected according to
provincial tastes. He saw this as true to the combination of unity
with diversity that was the hallmark of Canada. As he put it: "It
is often said that the country is rich because of the varied contributions
made to our national welfare by our different nationalities and groups.
Let us, then, maintain our different characteristics" (ibid.:
231). Such an approach, he suggested, was not only philosophically
more acceptable than a single national textbook, it was also more
achievable, since it would be more acceptable to the provinces. This
argument prompted an intervention from Senator David who, in an effort
to preserve his original motion, made a distinction between a textbook
and "a complete history of Canada" and insisted that nothing
in his motion prevented teachers from making their own comments on
historical facts. David did not seem to notice the apparent contradiction
in his argument, since giving teachers this kind of freedom would
presumably nullify, or at least seriously weaken, the very purpose
of a national textbook, which was to produce a more intensely Canadian
patriotism through teaching a common history. It is difficult to avoid
the impression that David and his colleagues, while shutting the front
door firmly against the "philosophy of history," were unwittingly
let it come in through the back.
The most substantial contribution to the debate came from Sir Thomas
Chapais, the Senator from Grandville. Chapais was an established and
highly regarded historian who had taught at Laval from 1907to 1930,
and had served as President of both the Canadian Historical Association
and the Royal Society of Canada. He was the author of an eight-volume
history of Canada from 1760 to 1867, a biographer of Talon and Montcalm,
and a prolific essayist. He, alone among the Senators, approached
the debate as a historian conversant with the demands of his discipline.
It was as a historian that Chapais dissented from David's motion.
Having described the practical difficulties of producing a national
textbook that would be acceptable in all parts of Canada, he went
on to dismiss the whole idea. He endorsed David's goal of creating
"a deeper feeling of national solidarity, of common aspiration,
and of truly Canadian patriotism," but denied that national textbook
could ever achieve it. Saying that he was "not a believer in
one sole mould for human minds," he argued that a variety of
books could be "equally but diversely good and really commendable
for various qualities." (Senate Debates, 19 July, 1944:
311) Moreover, this was especially the case in history: "We should
never forget that in the field of history, perhaps more than in any
other, uniformity is not to be expected. It has never been reached
in any country ... and, as a matter of fact, it is not to be found
in the historical text-books" (ibid.: 313). Thus, Chapais
concluded, "a uniform text-book of Canadian history would be
detrimental to further improvement in that branch of learning"
(ibid.: 311).
In Chapais' view, Canadian history was simply too diverse and of
such "extraordinary complexity" for any such project to
succeed. Taking a strictly Eurocentric view of Canadian history as
beginning with the arrival of Cartier in1534, Chapais suggested that,
on a strictly quantitative count of years, New France should take
up about half of any national textbook, and that this would be unacceptable
to English-speaking Canada since all the provinces had their own history,
as distinguished and as worthy of record as that of New France. As
Chapais put it, "As a matter of fact, each province-the Maritimes,
the western provinces-has a claim to a fair historical record of her
deeds, and only a text-book framed in that spirit-a text-book where
the general survey on the origin, the growth, the trials and achievements
of Canada as a whole would be buttressed with special attention to
facts having a peculiar importance for the people of the intended
province-could be satisfactory. And such a book could not easily be
accepted as a standard book for all the provinces of Canada" (ibid.:
313). Instead, Chapais suggested, each province should have at its
disposal a variety of textbooks "which would join accuracy in
narration of general facts, with peculiar attention to facts more
specially connected with the history of the said province" (ibid.).
In any textbook, the guiding principles should be, not uniformity,
but "truth, impartiality and a happy blending of provincial and
Canadian patriotism." By contrast a uniform national textbook
could only be "stereotyped, lifeless, colourless and dull"
(ibid.).
If strengthening Canadian unity was the objective, Chapais continued,
it had to be properly understood. For Chapais, unity in the sense
of homogeneity or uniformity was neither desirable nor possible. He
distinguished between unity and union: "If it is Canadian "unity"
which is our patriotic goal, I am sorry to assert it will never be
reached... We speak two main languages. We bow to different altars.
We have neither unity of race, nor unity of creed, nor unity of language....
We cannot have unity which is the sameness of the component parts.
But we may have union, which is the harmony of those parts.... Let
us have union, strongly founded on a basis of justice, toleration
and liberty — on justice, which protects all citizens, and deals
equal treatment to minorities and majorities; on toleration, which
softens controversies and teaches the mutual respect of national beliefs
and traditions; on liberty, which secures for everyone the free exercise
of all his civil, political and religious rights" (ibid.:
315).
Chapais' cautionary comments were reinforced by another Quebec Senator,
L.M. Gouin, who suggested that the model for Canada was to be found
in Switzerland, whose federalism embodied "not unity in too rigid
a sense, but rather unity in diversity" (ibid.: 315).
Gouin agreed that a "truly Canadian patriotism" was needed
but argued that it was not to be achieved through a common, national
history textbook. Like Chapais, Gouin rejected the distinction made
by David and others between history and philosophy of history, between
fact and interpretation. He insisted that history could never be shorn
of interpretation and argued that any attempt to confine a textbook
to a recital of agreed facts, even if it were possible, would result
in its being "as dry as dust unless its pages revealed the living
patriotism of the authors." Lacking a subjective element, a textbook
would be a "dead record" but in no way a "literary
work, the embodiment of the living work of a gifted writer, a historian
who is also at the same time an artist belonging to his own time and
to his own country" (Senate Debates, 19 July, 1944: 316).
Gouin pursued this theme by posing some of the questions which, in
his view, a textbook writer or committee would have to answer, arguing
that they were in fact incapable of being answered objectively and
thereby demonstrating that the idea of an objectively accurate, universally
acceptable, national textbook was a chimera. As he asked the Senate:
"What principles would animate those writers in trying to instill
in all young Canadians love of their country? Let us be quite frank.
Would the writers chosen to prepare such a textbook give first place
to Canada as a free and sovereign nation? Would they write history
from a purely Canadian point of view — and that would be my wish
— or from a British or French-Canadian or provincial point of
view? How would such authors conceive our relations with the rest
of the Commonwealth, or with the United States? How would they understand
the relative positions of the Dominion Parliament and of our provincial
legislatures? What kind of a future would they foresee for our growing
generations? Each historian would have his personal opinions on all
the different subjects which I have just enumerated. Each one would
try to write his essay honestly and objectively; there is no question
about that. But, after all, when the writer puts all his heart into
his patriotic task he finds his inspiration in his personal feelings.
A subjective element necessarily comes into play" (ibid.:
316).
Gouin was making an obvious enough point, though he did not elaborate
upon it. If history was to contribute to national unity, to bring
English-speaking and French-speaking Canada closer together, then
it would have to be taught in ways that engaged students' emotions
as well as their intellects. It could not be value-free. Thus, the
kind of factual primer that most Senators seemed to favour as a way
out of their difficulties was not only false to the spirit of history,
it was also unlikely to quicken the spirits of those teachers and
students who had to use it. Indeed, it was more likely to kill any
interest that students might have hading the past than it was to stimulate
it.
Gouin went on to suggest that what was needed was not a new textbook,
but a set of criteria that would provide " a common denominator
... to be followed in the teaching of Canadian citizenship."
In this way there would still be a variety of textbooks but there
would also a measure of quality control and a certain commonality
of goals. Gouin offered eight such criteria. One, all students must
have instruction in civics. Two, they must be taught to be proud of
their country and to respect their fellow citizens. Three, they should
acquire "a sense of veneration for our glorious past" and
"confidence in our future." Four, they should learn what
was involved in living in "a free democracy under a constitution
modelled upon that of Great Britain, the home of the Mother of Parliaments."
Five, they should understand the workings of Canadian institutions,
both federal and provincial. Six, they should realize that they enjoyed
"the priceless privilege of living in a land with infinite possibilities"
where Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms were already a reality. Seven,
they should "believe with religious fervour in the fatherhood
of God Almighty and in the true and complete brotherhood of all their
Canadian brothers and sisters." Eight, they should "devote
themselves to the "glory of their native land," being ready,
if necessary, "to die for the survival of their beloved country-this
rich and glorious land, where two great cultures are destined to grow
side by side, where two great races can live in peace and harmony,
giving to the whole world an almost unparalleled example of justice
and mutual understanding, of liberty, true equality and brotherhood"
(ibid.: 316).
In closing the debate, David returned to his original theme: English-speaking
and French-speaking Canada did not know enough about one another so
that Canada was suffering unnecessarily, and a common, national version
of history would help to put things right. Disagreeing with Chapais
and Gouin, and pointing to earlier League of Nations efforts to produce
internationally acceptable textbooks, he insisted that a committee
of historians could indeed work together and that an objective national
history was possible. What he wanted, he pointed out, was a common
factual basis of history to be taught in all Canadian schools and
he repeated his earlier insistence that a school textbook was very
different from a history books properly understood. Moreover, he added,
there was nothing to stop any province adding to the nationally agreed
facts in any way it saw fit, though he seems to have failed to see
that this permissiveness might well cancel out what he saw as the
merits of a uniform version of national history. The fundamental problem,
however, as he defined it, was that "the history of Canada is
badly taught," by which he meant not so much that teachers were
at fault but that curricula and textbooks were partial and fragmented.
As he concluded: "It would befell if all Canadians, wherever
they may be living, were familiar with the glorious pages in Quebec's
history. Would it not also be well for the people of Quebec to know
about the heroes of British Columbia, of the Prairies, of Ontario
and of the Maritimes? Is it fair that certain textbooks should carry
their story no farther than 1910, and that today, during the second
world war, young boys who are using them should find nothing in them
about the first world war? I am satisfied that many young boys using
such text-books do not even know the names of the great Canadian Generals
of the first world war, and have never heard of such Canadian heroes
as Bishop and Brilland, both winners of the V.C. That is why I said,
when moving my resolution, that the history of Canada is badly taught;
and I have no hesitation in repeating that statement" (ibid.:
318).
There the debate ended. The Senate gave assent to David's motion
without a formal vote, though Chapais indicated his dissent, and Gouin
later said that, had there been a recorded vote, he and Chapais would
certainly have voted against it. Only twelve Senators took part in
the debate, eight from Quebec together with Arthur Marquette from
Saskatchewan, Norman Lambert from Ottawa, Gustave Lacasse from Tecumseh,
Ontario, and W.R. Davies from Kingston. And of these four non-Quebecers,
two, Marcotte and Lacasse, had been raised and educated in Quebec,
and had a particular interest in the welfare of French-speaking Canadians
outside that province. Notable by their silence were the Senators
from English-speaking Canada, with the exception of Davies from Kingston
and Lambert from Ottawa. In other words, the question of a uniform
version of history concerned Francophone federalists from Quebec,
but very few others. Once it was raised by Senator David, other Quebec
Senators felt constrained to speak, and Senators from English-speaking
Canada were content to leave the running to them. No doubt, by and
large, they shared the dominant view of English-speaking Canada as
a whole: Quebec was different from the rest of Canada, linguistically
and culturally, it enjoyed certain rights of self-protection, and
should be left to pursue its own affairs provided that it did not
rock the Canadian boat. As the McGill historian and debunker of the
myth of Dollard des Ormeaux, E.R. Adair, put it in 1943:"No doubt
in a large measure unconsciously, the English-speaking Canadian hates
the idea of the existence of a large body of people in Canada who
are quite unassimilated to his standards and this point of view; he
cannot do anything about it, but at least he can preserve the fiction
of his cherished Canadian unity and Canadian nationality by pretending
that they are not really there; as a natural corollary to this, he
is particularly anxious not to do anything to criticize or disagree
with French Canada's view of her own past, for he knows that this
will at once rouse a vigorous controversy and thus make patent to
all the world that there are still two peoples in Canada, not one.
Therefore in most cases the English Canadian has preferred to pass
by on the other side, carefully turning his head away from any critical
contemplation of French-Canadian history; and he has salved his conscience
by Rotarian clichés about the complete understanding that exists
between the two races in Canada." (E.R. Adair. "The Canadian
Contribution to Historical Science" Culture: sciences réligieuses
et sciences profanes au Canada. IV (1), May, 1943: 69).
It was, of course, this isolation of Quebec that so alarmed Quebec
Senators. They believed in a Canada of two founding peoples, in which
both French and English speakers recognized each other as enjoying
equal status and in which all Canadians prized this duality, so that
every Canadian, regardless of language, could feel at home anywhere
in Canada. Hence the insistence of participants in the debate that
unity and diversity were perfectly compatible, and their care to speak
not so much of Canadian unity as of Canadian patriotism and the Canadian
spirit. David and his supporters believed that this vision of Canada
could be encapsulated and promoted within the pages of a uniform national
textbook; Chapais and Gouin believed that it made such a textbook
impossible.
The question of Quebec's place within the Canadian Confederation
is, of course, of long standing, running back in one form or another
to 1763. It comes to the foreground whenever a particular crisis makes
French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians aware of their different
visions of the country: the Confederation debates of the 1860s; the
execution of Riel in 1885; the Manitoba School Question in the 1890s;
the South African War of 1899-1902; Ontario's Regulation 17 in 1912;
Canada's participation in the two world wars; Quebec's Quiet Revolution
in the 1960s;the patriation of the constitution in 1982 and subsequent
attempts at constitutional reform.
One such crisis was, obviously, the Second World War and, more specifically,
the issue of conscription for overseas military service. Mackenzie
King averted a political confrontation in 1942with his famous post-referendum
promise of conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription,
but by 1944 time was running out. The textbook debate took place in
May and June of that year and the Conscription Crisis did not break
until October-November, but the issue never disappeared from the political
agenda. As a result of the conscription referendum of 1942 a group
of Quebec nationalists had created the third party Bloc Populaire
Canadien, pledged to oppose conscription for overseas military service
and, more generally, to protect Quebec's rights within Confederation
in the face of what it saw as the centralizing pressures of the federal
government. The Bloc maintained an active political and media campaign
from its formation in October, 1942, through to and beyond the Quebec
provincial election of August, 1944, thus ensuring not only that the
conscription issue was kept alive but also that the larger question
of Quebec's place within Confederation, and therefore of the nature
of Confederation itself, remained very much alive. For its part, English-speaking
Canada voiced its continuing dissatisfaction over what it saw as Quebec's
lack of patriotism, the non-belligerent role of the home army, the
failure of the Ottawa government to ensure "equality of sacrifice,"
and the like.
Moreover, given Canada's role in the Italian campaign that began in
1943 and especially in the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944, and
the subsequent fighting, this was a time when the War assumed a presence
in Canadian thinking that was even greater than usual. In 1944 a senior
army officer, Brigadier Macklin, explained the failure of military
conscripts to volunteer for overseas service in part on their ignorance
of Canadian and British history which, he said, helped account for
their lack of patriotic willingness "to volunteer and die for
their country" (J.L. Granatstein & J.M. Hitsman, Broken
Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada. Toronto,1977: 206ff).
Macklin's observation, whatever its accuracy, illustrates the particular
importance that the pressures of the War assigned to the proper teaching
of history. In the 1944 Senate debate this linkage of history and
the War provided the subtext underlying much of what was said, and
some Senators made it explicit. Senator Lacasse, for example, described
meeting an army officer from Saskatchewan, ready to die for his country,
who told him that the only thing he knew about Canada, outside of
Saskatchewan, was the name of the Governor-General. Such a state of
affairs, lamented Lacasse, proved the necessity of a national textbook
(Senate Debates, 29 May, 1944: 161). Lacasse further noted
that the Nazis had shown how schooling could be made the servant of
an ideology and argued for a standard national history text on the
grounds that "nothing can do more to direct the future of the
country along ideological and psychological channels than the education
given in our primary schools to the generations of to-morrow"
(ibid.). Which was, of course, precisely what bothered the
opponents of a national history textbook, which they saw as likely
to turn history into patriotic propaganda as officially defined.
In the event, David's motion went nowhere. He had presented it to
the Senate as a private bill. For obvious reasons, the federal government
steered well clear of it. No provincial government gave it any consideration.
Nor were historians any more inclined to step into what they saw as
a political minefield, especially when it entailed defending a view
of history that they had themselves long abandoned. Historians dismissed
the idea of a single Canada-wide textbook as both impossible in practice
and undesirable in theory. In their view the diversity of Canada made
it impossible to write single textbook, and history was, in any case,
more than a compendium of factual information.
There was general agreement that French-speaking and English-speaking
Canadians needed to be better informed about each other, but few people
thought that this could be achieved through a uniform history textbook.
And once it became clear that Canada had successfully weathered the
Conscription Crisis of 1944, and once the War had been won, the concern
for national unity receded into the background as Canadians concentrated
on enjoying the prosperity of peacetime and coming to terms with the
Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of the 1944 Senate debate, any
pressure that might have been felt to act upon Senator David's motion
was dissipated by the knowledge that the Canadian and Newfoundland
Education Association had in fact commissioned a group of historians
to produce, not a national textbook, but a national curriculum, which,
if successful, would no doubt lead to the writing of appropriate textbooks
(their report will be the subject of a future article).
Even so, the idea of a uniform national history textbook did not immediately
disappear. For some years historians felt constrained to address it,
as though trying to exorcize a ghost that wouldn't go away. In 1946
the Manitoba-based historian, W.L. Morton, observed that a national
textbook was as unacceptable to Western Canada as it was to Quebec.
In 1949 even Arthur Maheux, the most forceful exponent of all Canadian
historians of using history to cement national unity, expressed his
opposition to a national textbook. In 1950 a survey of English-Canadian
historians found that they opposed a single textbook (this survey
was the subject of a previous article, see Canadian Social Studies,
36(3), Spring, 2002).
Writing in 1951, the University of Saskatchewan's Hilda Neatby, as
committed and eloquent a champion of history as anyone in Canada,
added her voice to the opposition: "There is a very general demand
at the moment for one textbook for all Canadian schools. That request
is often, though not always, made by those who regard a history textbook
as a collection of vitamin pills requiring only to be administered
at the right time and in the right quantity. At the present stage
of our history and our historiography, a text that would suit the
two cultural groups and the four great geographic and historic sections
of Canada would be a featureless mass of facts" (Royal Commission
Studies. Ottawa, 1951: 210). The argument was taken up by Jean
Bruchési, of the University of Montreal, in his 1952 presidential
address to the Canadian Historical Association. He made no secret
of his opposition to the idea of a uniform national textbook, declaring
that, even it were feasible, it would, by eliminating variety and
competition, produce "a reign of mediocrity." He declared
that "Common sense and the principles of sound pedagogy are against
it." (Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical
Association, Held at Quebec, June 4-6, 1952: 11) However, while
rejecting a uniform textbook, Bruchési resurrected one aspect
of David's 1944 motion by raising the possibility that a committee
of historians might nonetheless compile "a list of those essential
facts and events which every Canadian should know" (ibid.:
12). Immigrants had to pass a history test, and this, he noted, suggested
that someone had been able to decide what history prospective citizens
must know. Why then, he asked, could not a similar standard be created
for native-born Canadians? However, no historians took up his challenge.
The advocates of a national textbook, designed to strengthen national
unity, found themselves facing a dilemma which they never resolved.
On the one hand, they sought to avoid the possibility of interpretative
bias by making sure that their desired textbook would be purely factual
and by insisting that fact and interpretation could be easily and
cleanly separated. On the other hand, they ignored the reality that
facts do not speak for themselves and that thievery selection of facts
involves interpretative judgment, and equally ignored the probability
— their critics said the certainty — that a book that confined
itself to the recital of facts would be dull and uninspiring, restrictive
for teachers and disspiriting for students. But if they said, as some
of them did, that it was the duty of teachers to make the textbook
interesting, they opened up the very possibility of interpretative
subjectivity that a national textbook was intended to foreclose in
the first place.
Perhaps the greatest problem confronting the proponents of a national
history textbook was that they were unable to find a way to put the
cart before the horse. As some of their critics occasionally pointed
out, a truly national textbook could only be the product of national
unity, not its cause. But if national unity existed, there would be
no need for a national textbook.