Featured Articles
Alberta’s Little History War
JASON KENNEY, SWORN in as Alberta Premier on Apr. 30, should not only cancel the revised social studies curriculum drafted under Rachel Notley since 2016. He should scrap the extant 2005 curriculum too, and do what he can to shift the teaching philosophy behind it. Kenney re-entered the History Wars with finely-calibrated counterattacks in 2016-17, renewed this year on Feb. 16, against “social engineering and pedagogical fads.” He should now bring forward the reserve guns. Mandatory testing to the end of Grade 12 is laudable and should continue. The deeper problem lies in the current thematic approach to history and civics,...
1812 & The Fathers of Confederation
Several Fathers of Confederation had a connection to the War of 1812. Only two generations separated the peace of 1814 from the Charlottetown conference -- the same lapse of time (fifty years) as between 1945 and 1995, when Canadians of all ages celebrated “Victory in Europe."
Mapping Vancouver Island
Phyllis Reeve reviews a splendid account of how explorers, traders, and adventurers followed on the heels of pirates, capricious monarchs and merchants to chart the waters of Vancouver Island, and shows how every map and plan has a human story.
The 'Settler' Nonsense
There is much creepy virtue-signaling in whites abasing themselves as “settlers.” But there is no road forward because, fundamentally, it is a collectivist concept. This approach blames some people not for what they did but for what somebody like them did. It absolves others of all blame based on skin colour and falsifies their ancestors’ history.
1841: The Year of Responsible Government?
Locating Responsible Government in 1848 divorces it from its proper context. And it ignores contemporary 19th century authorities, like Sir John A. Macdonald, who said that the grant of Responsible Government occurred not in 1848 but in 1841.