Canadians and Their Pasts by Margaret Conrad etal. (review)

In the first paragraph of their report on Canadians’ relationship to history and the past, the authors quote with approval William Faulkner’s famous dictum (in Requiem for a Nun): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It reinforces the chief message of their study: many (though not all) Canadians are interested in the past in one way or another, one in three very much so.

Their findings, illustrated and supplemented by tables and figures, are the result of a survey, carried out and processed over nearly ten years, that began shortly after a similar study appeared in Australia in 2003. Some 3,419 Canadians, rather more than half of those contacted, agreed to participate: 400 each from five regions (the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, and British Columbia), 1,000 from the five largest cities, and 100 each from three special groups: Acadians in New Brunswick, immigrants in the Peel region northwest of Toronto, and Aboriginal people living near Saskatoon. Responses were weighted to compensate for the over- and under-representation of various parts of the country.

The report is full of interesting tidbits of information, some expected, others not. As I was reading it, however, I was reminded more than once of a phrase used by Robertson Davies in his Marchbanks stories. When introducing a longish story that he believes deserves to be heard because the information it conveys may be important, perhaps even necessary, to the reader, Samuel Marchbanks often refers to it as “a Boring Account.” The description is, of course, falsely modest: Marchbanks is never boring. Alas, the same cannot be said of Canadians and Their Pasts.

The reasons for the book’s frequent failure to grip the reader have nothing to do with the authors, skilful and accomplished historians and research statisticians that they are, and everything to do with the subject matter. It is probably impossible to present survey results in detail without immersing the reader in numbers and percentages. Individually these may be interesting, but collectively they are increasingly mind-numbing. Evidently conscious of this, the authors use anecdotes and insights gleaned from the many interviews they carried out, but these are only occasionally arresting or amusing.

Readers will, I suspect, be tempted at some point to skip to the concluding chapter. Along with the introduction, it is the most rewarding part of the book. The authors are generally encouraged by what they found. “We came away from the data collection process, which involved no fewer than a quarter-million answers to questions, with evidence that most Canadians were quite ready to explain what was important to them about their past, when they felt most connected to it, and whether things were getting better or worse with the passage of time.” They expected that family history would rank highest for respondents, but they found that many people were able to link this to history in the broader sense. The past is “a crucial component of many groups’ self-identification,” but “conventional generalizations about urban-rural and Maritime/Prairie ‘regional’ cohesion were not sustained.” Respondents east of the Ottawa River were more interested in the history of their provinces than those who lived west of it. “And those who moved from their birth province expressed greater interest in history, their family past, and the past of Canada.”

The authors speculate about the differences between the Canadian responses and those obtained in the United States and Australia. They note that immigrant groups tended to show greater interest in Canadian history than those who were born here. They also note that, in both Canada and the United States, Aboriginal groups had lower levels of trust in official sources than they did in family stories and personal accounts. With reason, one might add. All in all, the authors state, history “plays a significant role for many people in providing meaning in their fast-changing world. … History – as people’s...