There is a phrase that I love to hear: Canadians should learn more of their history. It is often a phrase used by Canadian Historians including Jack Granatstein and Margaret MacMillan. 

The problem is that that phrase is a double-bladed sword. It is true that Canadians do need to learn more about their history. Due to our immigrant nature, most Canadians’ stories don’t start in Canada; and most Canadians don’t know the story of this land. The 2021 Census tells us that more than 8.3 million Canadians (or about 23% of our population) were landed immigrants or permanent residents that were born outside of Canada. If you include non-permanent residents, total foreign-born residents, including newcomers, in 2024, that number could have been as high as 12 million people. 

If you widen the lens a bit more and just include first and second generation Canadians, according to the 2021 Census, 44% of the country or almost 1 – in  -2 Canadians would be included. Thus, Canada is an unusual country, we are a country of mostly immigrants; a country that doesn’t often know what happened three or four decades before we or our parents got here. Thus, much of Canadian history is unfamiliar to those who are Canadian.

However, the wrongs of our history are never really forgotten by the few who have spent generations here. By their telling, Indigenous Canadians have been here since time immemorial; they were created by the land and live on the land because this is their home. However, a Scientist would look for a very different number: they would say the oldest strain of Indigenous Canadians – Inuit and First Nations –  have inhabited Canada for at least the last 14,000 years, while the Métis are much younger. 

After the First Peoples (Inuit, First Nations and Métis), many French Canadian Communities come next. L’Acadie and les Québécois date back to Jacques Cartier’s arrival in the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1534. This is something that much of Canada forgets or may not know. Many Canadians may not have appreciated that during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), the British deported thousands of Acadians in the Grand Dérangement. British Troops rounded up families and moved them to their colonies in America or to French Louisiana. This is why to this day, in Louisiana, there are a people who are called “Cajuns”. Or put in other words, the word “Cajuns” is an anglicized corruption, a phonetic evolution, of one word: Acadians.

Having said that, let me get back to the second side of that double-edged sword: an attempt at permanency. Many historians say that same phrase – “Canadians should learn more about their history” – also as a way to freeze the meaning of that past; as a way of not looking at the past with  critical eyes. I would argue that Jack Granatstein in his book” Who Killed Canadian History”, actually argued for a permanency of the interpretation of Canadian history; keeping the narrative, or focus, of those stories in values that feel comfortable with their first mentions in 1920s academia.

Acknowledging that dichotomy, I have to say one thing: Premier Danielle Smith should learn more about Canadian history. For, a lack of historical understanding, is the only way she could defend  Bruce McAllister’s dreadful words, words which argued that Canada’s  “Judeo-Christian heritage” is why we have an open and diverse Country. In arguing that Canada’s “Judeo-Christian heritage” had anything to do with Canada’s present openness, she has obviously not taken a course in Canadian History.

After all, “Christian Canada” was not a generous or safe place. Just by way of an example, that “Canada”, that Christian Canada, had slaves and slavery. While, on July 9th, 1793, Upper Canada was the first colony in the British Empire to pass legislation against Slavery (the “Act Against Slavery”); slavery did exist in British North America. It might not have been as abundant or as harsh as the slavery practiced in the Caribbean, the United States or elsewhere; but, it did exist. In fact, Slavery only fully disappeared from British North America with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. An act that was passed by the British Parliament in 1833 and that came into force on August 1, 1834.

Now, if this had been a one-off exception, the Premier could be forgiven. Canada, in its early years, could be seen to be a bastion of inclusion and tolerance. However, this is not the case. Before we touch on the treatment of Indigenous Canadians, let us just look at the Canadian Constitution for evidence. For in our own Constitution, we can see the problems. Originally, the Constitution Act, provided for Catholic Education in Ontario and Protestant Education in Quebec. That might seem odd today, but back in 1867, Canada was a Dominion which was full of religious, sectarian and class strife. 

The Premier has obviously forgotten that the problems created by the Château Clique and the Family Compact were so bad that the military was called out in Upper Canada and Lower Canada; and that the eventual solution was the creation of the Province of Canada in 1840. The Premier obviously didn’t know that depending on where you were there were problems with those who spoke English and French, Catholic and Protestant; Protestant and Protestant, and between English, Scot, French and/or Irish. 

Or we could talk about the Manitoba Act and its French Language Guarantees. In 1870, when Manitoba came into Confederation, through the Manitoba Act, French Language communities were guaranteed the right to use the French language in the legislature and in the courts. However, in 1890, the Manitoba Legislature violated the Canadian Constitution and forced Manitoba to be an English only province. Or might I ask, where was the tolerance there? There was no understanding there, in a time when Canada was more religious and where – according to Statistics Canada – more than 90% of the country were practicing Christians. It took a different set of values to rectify the situation. It took a series of landmark Supreme Court of Canada cases, including Forest (1979) and Reference re Manitoba Language Rights (1985), and the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to ensure that the courts could enforce equality because for about a hundred years politicians would not act to reverse a statute passed in 1890.  

Yet, the disregarding of the Manitoba Act was not the beginning or the end of this notion. There were laws that tried to keep those people of “asiatic” descent out of Canada. Or put differently, at the time, Canada was afraid of including anyone that was not Caucasian, “White” or not of “acceptable European Stock”. To put it in their words, they were scared of the “Yellow Peril”. In modern words, they didn’t want to live and work with people from exotic places like China, Japan or other parts of Asia.

In British Columbia, organizations were formed to press the case including the Asiatic Exclusion League. “Christian Canadians” passed laws to limit “asiatic” people. Laws that defined “asiatic” so broadly that simply to look “asiatic” was enough to be barred from Canada. This definition was so broad that people from Lebanon were banned as being too “asiatic”; and, Armenians were largely excluded from Canada when they were looking to escape persecution in Turkey.

But this was not the only tool Christian Canada used. In 1908, the Canadian Parliament passed an amendment to the Immigration Act, prohibiting the landing of any immigrant that did not come to Canada by continuous journey from the country of which they were natives or citizens: the “continuous journey regulation”. On May 23, 1914, the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver carrying 376 passengers – mostly Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus from British India. However, only 22 of the 376 South Asian passengers were allowed to disembark before the ship was turned away. 

If these regulations were not enough, “Christian Canada” would be explicit. These “Christian Canadians” would pass a law. After the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Chinese community was the target. There was the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 which imposed a $50 “head tax” on Chinese immigrants. Then there was the passage of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Often called the Chinese Exclusion Act, this Canadian law almost entirely banned Chinese immigrants from entering Canada for 24 years, from July 1, 1923, until its repeal in 1947. The aim was simple: to force Chinese Canadians out of Canada. How christian it was of those Christian Canadians, Canadians that Premier says our values came from.

The intolerance in our past is clear and it occurs during the most “Christian” times in Canadian History. During World War I, it was the internment of Ukrainian Canadians. By World War II, this escalated into the mass internment of Japanese, Italian, and German Canadians. The Japanese-Canadian community, in particular, saw their homes and lives liquidated by a government that viewed them as “enemy aliens” regardless of their birthright. This domestic cruelty was mirrored at the borders. In 1939, when the MS St. Louis carried over 900 Jewish refugees to Canada’s doorstep, the government’s refusal to dock—under the infamous “None is too many” sentiment—directly resulted in the deaths of over 250 people in the Holocaust.

If I wanted to, I could go on. In fact, Justice Thomas Berger did so. He wrote a whole book in 1981 called “Fragile Freedoms”. It is a historical explanation of the treatment of a significant number of minorities in Canada. However, there is something remarkable about his approach. He noted that Canada’s historical record as it comes to minorities is unspectacular. In dealing with your history, Justice Berger argues that we should neither have a “reason to flagellate ourselves”, nor have any “justification for being smug”. Justice Berger does say that he hopes that his examination will allow Canadians to “understand better what kind of world must be created to foster human rights and fundamental freedoms”. 

This is the value that emerged. Canada didn’t use its “Judeo-Christrian Heritage” to create the tolerant, multicultural world we live in today; in fact, Canadians after 1945, became Pollyannaish. They wanted a profound change; they wanted to “foster human rights and fundamental freedoms” for all regardless of their religious, historical, economic or other social differences.

The shift toward tolerance was not a natural evolution of religious charity, but a hard-learned response to the horrors of the early 20th century. Shocked by the Boer War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the 12 Million people killed in the Holocaust, and Rights Movements in the American and the British Empire, Canadians began to look at their place in the world. Having defeated Fascism and looking toward the fight with Communism, Canadians said they wanted a better world where we can live with one another with tolerance and understanding. A world that would not devour itself again in hardship. That is what two world wars that end in two nuclear bombs can do.

In 1947, we signed onto the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then did the shocking thing: we tried to implement it. Canadians wanted to walk away from the “Judeo-Christrian” policies which led to the forced sterilisation of women under Premier William Aberhart and continued until 1972;  and facilitated the cultural genocide of Indigenous Canadians through the Residential School system. After World War II, minority communities in Canada asked the Canadian Government if they could bring their families and compatriots over through private sponsorship. Canadians, Institutions and Community Groups background asked the Government if they could take on the cost and provide the effort; and, probably for political and diplomatic reasons, the Canadian Government said yes. One yes, led to another and change started to happen.

Prime Minister Diefenbaker brought forth the Canadian Bill of Rights and started changing the immigration system from one of quotas to one of points – a world first. Prime Minister Pearson continued the ball and added his own fine points: eliminating the crime of sodomy and allowing the LGBTQIA+ community to start their long walk out of the shadows of society. 

When Prime Minister Trudeau sought to pass the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977, he had an unlikely ally: Lincoln Alexander. Mr. Alexander was black and he was a lawyer, a veteran and a Progressive Conservative. Mr. Alexander led some of his colleagues to vote for the Canadians Human Rights Act, a measure championed by the Liberal Prime Minister. When some of his colleagues worried about the possibility that the Canadians Human Rights Act might limit the freedom of some to speak their mind, Mr. Alexander declared that he would support the government to vote in favour of the Act. In fact, he was quite direct when he asked the Progressive Conservative caucus a pointed question: “Are you saying that you can call my son or daughter a nigger and that is free speech?” Eventually, PEI Tory Heath MacQuarrie and Lincoln Alexander convinced 17 other members of their caucus to support the legislation. 

After that things changed. Several provinces including Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia had segregated schools. By 1983, the last segregated school in Canada – a school in Lincolnville, Nova Scotia, just outside Halifax – would close. By 1985, Francophone Communities across the country would be able to use their language, as was their right. By 1996, the last government run Indian Residential School was closed and the final Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was released. While the last Residential School was closed in 1997. So the truth is that Canada’s Judeo-Christian past had nothing to do with our change. In fact, our legally bilingual, culturally  multilingual, multicultural and pluralistic culture is in opposition to what came before it. About the only thing we kept was the Westminster Legislative system and the uniqueness of Canadian Jurisprudence – a jurisprudence which because of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 provides that Quebec can use Civil Code; while the rest of the Provinces and Territories uses Common Law.

Presently, Canada is a multicultural place; because, by 1947, we finally learned the catastrophic cost of our own intolerance; and we were willing to try to do the work required to bring everyone into a better equilibrium, a better stasis. While the political class didn’t understand the magnitude of task that would be required to change from our Judeo-Christian past, Canadians used discussion and accommodation to move forward. We learned that acceptance, tolerance, and debate should be the governing philosophy. Since 1947, we have moved one foot in front of the other; and have come to be a better place, a place where “our better angels” have been allowed to flourish. This is a choice to ignore our Judeo-Christian past, and if Premier Danielle Smith doesn’t understand this and continues to protect and defend Bruce McAllister’s hateful words, Premier Smith doesn’t know Canadian history, doesn’t appreciate our progress and she is a danger to our present inclusion and our future prosperity.