The brilliant John A. biopic
By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 26, 2011 - 19 Comments
Who said Canadian history was devoid of excitement?
Steve Wilkie/CBC
Chances are you missed it, but something quite significant happened on the CBC Monday night. Indeed, I may say it was an event of some importance in the life of the nation: the historical drama John A: Birth of a Country. It is rare enough to see any Canadian history on Canadian television, and rarer still something of this quality. There have been subtler dramas, there have been more exact histories, but this is the finest historical drama to appear on the CBC since The National Dream almost 40 years ago.
Explaining the road to Confederation through the personal and political battle between Sir John A. Macdonald and George Brown, it should dispel forever a pernicious myth: that Canada’s founding, like much of its history, was a dry bit of horse-trading, devoid of interest or excitement. On the contrary, as any viewer of John A will be convinced, it was the creation of men of extraordinary passion and conviction, driven by personal ambition but guided by their own greatness toward an end much larger than themselves. The last half-hour, in particular, is simply riveting: the scene where Macdonald seeks to persuade Brown to join his cabinet—on his terms—is a study in psychological and political acuity.
That the show brings Macdonald so vividly to life (Shawn Doyle is marvellous in the part, wobbly accent notwithstanding) is an achievement, though not entirely surprising: he remains one of the richest, most colourful subjects in all of political history, a brawling, drunken, cheerfully unscrupulous rebuke to the whole “Peace, Order and Good Government” theory of Canada’s development, which has bored two generations of Canadian schoolchildren.
But we know Macdonald was great. Of much more significance is the treatment of Brown, at last restored to his true position in the historical firmament, second only to Macdonald among the Fathers of Confederation, and perhaps not even second. It is to Brown that we owe much of the design of the country: not only his famous insistence on “rep by pop,” or representation by population (apparently still a controversial idea), but the very principle of federalism, against the unitary state that was Macdonald’s dream. And it was his momentous decision to cross the floor, joining Macdonald in the grand coalition that would pursue federation with the other scattered colonies of British North America, that made the whole enterprise possible. All that we are, everything this country has become, can be traced to that supreme act of statesmanship.
Yet in popular terms at least, he remains very much the forgotten man of Canadian history. There are no highways or airports named for him, as there are for Macdonald and his Quebec lieutenant, George-Étienne Cartier. The last major biography him was J. M. Careless’s—52 years ago. He simply does not fit into the dominant, Macdonald-centred view of Canadian history as an orderly series of public works projects. He was a Victorian liberal: reform-minded, pro free trade, skeptical of government, with unfortunate (though by no means unusual for his time) views of Catholics and the French. As such he was an inconvenience, and so was made largely to disappear. With any luck, John A, and Peter Outerbridge’s doughty performance as George Brown, will begin to change that.
Good as it is, I do not see John A as an argument for public broadcasting (the question is not whether I like a particular show, but whether I can justify forcing others to pay for my pleasures; the subscription model, à la HBO, has more to recommend it, both on artistic and philosophical grounds). But if we are going to have public broadcasting, surely this is exactly the sort of thing it should be doing. Which makes it a mystery why the CBC should seem so intent on burying it. It’s bad enough that it has taken the corporation decades to produce a show on this, the single most important event in our history, but it has thus far committed only to this first instalment in what I gather was planned to be a four-part series on Macdonald’s life (drawing on Richard J. Gwyn’s shrewd biography, John A: The Man Who Made Us). For goodness sake, we’re only up to 1864: the adventure has barely begun.
What’s truly unforgiveable, however, is the lack of promotion. At a time when the network is blanketing the airwaves with ads for Battle of the Blades and other bilge, you’d think it could spare some of its PR budget for a project as important as this. Yet people working at the CBC were unaware it existed until a week ago. If the corporation were in any doubt of what it had on its hands (it shouldn’t: the producer, Bernard Zukerman, has a proven track record, as does director Jerry Ciccoritti and writer Bruce Smith) it cannot be now.
It is just too much like the CBC to turn what ought to have been a moment of triumph into a fiasco. Fortunately, there is a remedy. We’ve seen the pilot. Now green-light the rest of the series. Give it a decent time slot. And maybe tell the odd person it’s on.
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Ignoring history
By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 8 Comments
Why are Canadian schools teaching so little about the pre-Confederation era?
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Recent history grads may be forgiven for not knowing the significance of the 1st Baron of Dorchester, or that his 1744 Quebec Act was once known as Canada’s Magna Carta. They don’t teach much pre-Confederation history in school. “In high school, we had to take one history course and all I learned about was World War One, World War Two—maybe we touched on the Depression,” says Amy Legate-Wolfe, the 22-year-old co-president of the University of Toronto’s History Students’ Association. She didn’t choose any Canadian history courses in university either, preferring to learn about British monarchs and the origins of Hong Kong.
But considering that the Quebec Act was the first piece of legislation to enshrine minority rights for French Catholics in the British Empire, more Canadians should have studied it, says Chris Champion, one of the five editors of a new journal, the Dorchester Review. The Review’s first issue is modest in circulation (500 copies), but it has attracted some big-name contributors, including Conrad Black. They’re united by the belief that Canadian history teachers are overlooking many key moments. “[Professors] emphasize the notion that the really important things happened after John A. MacDonald, that World War One was Canada’s war of independence, that we didn’t really become a country until we had our own flag and that our rights and freedoms began in 1982 with the Charter,” says Champion. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”
The kind of things one might have learned if studying in the 1960s. The University of Toronto’s 1960-61 course calendar shows 27 of 33 history classes focused on Canada, Britain or America. Queen’s University only offered two courses on anything outside of North America or Western Europe that year.
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A first-rate (mis)adventure writer
By Kate Fillion, Brian Bethune, Anne Kingston, Sheilagh McEvenue, Chris Sorensen - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments
Plus, a novel about Shakespeare’s illegitimate daughter, a case for the oil sands, a shocking confession, war biographies, and a head-spinning tour of central Europe
‘Even Silence Has An End’: Ingrid Betancourt with her sister at a concert for liberty in Paris, July, 20, 2008. Julien Hekimian/WireImage/Getty Images
EVEN SILENCE HAS AN END
Ingrid BetancourtDuring a quixotic campaign for the Colombian presidency in February 2002, Ingrid Betancourt—Green Oxygen party founder, elected senator, bestselling author and anti-corruption whistle-blower—was kidnapped by FARC rebels and spirited off to the jungle. Her account of the 6½ years she spent in captivity is, even at 528 pages, riveting: there are anacondas, piranhas, food shortages, forced marches through the rainforest, sadistic captors, life-threatening illnesses—and the growing certainty that she is both too valuable a pawn for the rebels and too inconvenient an activist for the government ever to be freed.
To evade detection, FARC commanders kept hostages on the move, sometimes cramming them into tiny barracks, and other times forcing them to sleep in the open. Betancourt escaped several times but was always recaptured, and eventually chained by the neck to a tree. But as she makes clear, she was not well-liked by the other hostages, several of whom rushed to press with damning memoirs accusing her of “haughtiness” and “selfishness.”
While Betancourt doesn’t address these charges directly, she writes that many hostages—who included fellow politicians and three American military contractors—were envious of the international attention her plight attracted. Certainly, meanness rather than grace emerged under pressure: cliques formed, captives began snitching on (and filching from) each other, and bitter squabbling and schadenfreude were the norm. Betancourt doesn’t pretend she was above any of this. “I, too, had run up to the stewpot in the hope of having a better piece . . . We were all alike, entangled in our ugly little pettiness.”
It’s easy to believe that in the jungle, Betancourt was a self-important pain in the ass at times. But in this surprisingly a political and tightly circumscribed memoir—there’s no discussion of her post-rescue divorce, or her ex-husband’s nasty kiss-and-tell book—she also proves herself to be a first-rate (mis)adventure writer. This jungle book is an indelible portrait of hell—which, as Sartre suggested, does turn out to be other people.
- KATE FILLION -
Was Louis Riel insane?
By Julia Belluz - Sunday, September 26, 2010 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments
Though the Metis leader didn’t agree, madness seemed the best defence against charges of high treason
O.B. Buell/CP/ National Archives of Canada/CP
When Joseph Boyden read a National Post op-ed in July entitled “Louis Riel Deserves No Pardon,” the author of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, the latest in Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series, fired off a letter (it was never published) to the newspaper about what he says were “untrue and blatantly false” statements in the piece.
One of those falsehoods, says the Giller Prize-winning author of Through Black Spruce, is that Riel—Metis leader and father of Manitoba—tried to take land from the Indians and put it in the hands of his people. “Riel is one who very much believed in inclusion,” says Boyden, a regular contributor to Maclean’s. “He knew that the northwest was big enough for all the races living there.” In fact, the writer feels that Riel’s forward-thinking notions about a cohesive society should define his legacy: “He was one of the first to push for inclusion.”
Boyden is less resolute about another topic of the Post’s op-ed: Riel’s alleged insanity. Boyden thinks he was “somewhere between” sanity and madness. “One day he’d feel in control, the next day he was questioning himself down to his core,” he says. “This fragility mixed with absolute hubris is what’s so interesting about Riel, and part of why many people say he was crazy.”
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT
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Making fun of Canadian history
By Alex Shimo - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 13 Comments
A 25-year-old’s comics feature characters like John Diefenbaker and Margaret Trudeau
Was Lester B. Pearson too nice to be prime minister? Was John Diefenbaker a mad, bug-eyed egotist? And was Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s marital relationship a little like that of father and daughter? These are the sorts of questions 25-year-old Kate Beaton gently probes in her series of comics on Canadian history, which are unusual enough to have sparked the sort of praise most writers spend a lifetime cultivating.Originally from Cape Breton, Beaton is a Toronto-based cartoonist who has fans ranging from award-winning graphic novelists to geeky comic nerds. In the little over a year she’s been doing the comics, her work has been talked about on the website Wonkette and in Bitch magazine; a reviewer for Wired magazine called Beaton’s the “funniest comic that I’ve read in awhile.” Recently Daily Show writer Sam Means approached her to illustrate a children’s book he is writing. About 10 other agents and publishers have asked her to write a book, but so far she’s refused. Still finding her feet, Beaton wants to find out more about the industry so she doesn’t get shortchanged. Also, since she hasn’t yet drawn enough to fill a book, she doesn’t want to become “overwhelmed.”
