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Mel Hurtig’s new compendium is what I call “bathroom reading” in the noblest sense of the word. It is more serious than “beach reading,” which seldom rises above the level of potboiler detective fiction and moist romance. At the same time, it requires less than full intellectual concentration. Encyclopedias of amusing subjects, books of lists or records and anthologies of very short stories are iconic in this genre.
In The Truth about Canada, Mel Hurtig has assembled forty chapters of about eight pages each (plus a preface, a conclusion, a glossary, two appendices and twenty-two pages of endnotes). The results are largely derivative and somewhat disorganized. There is little in terms of any coherent narrative or explanatory principles. History and theory are absent. Perhaps, however, the book’s apparent weaknesses are its strengths, for it is are great fun—especially for those with an unwholesomely gloomy sense of humour—and a great challenge to anyone who continues to wish that Canada might one day be “about” something, rather than a ragtag appendage to a declining American Empire with the singular oddity of having more French-speakers than Louisiana.
Mel Hurtig’s great forte is his distinction as one of the last of the liberal, bourgeois Canadian nationalists. He follows neatly in the splendidly idealistic tradition of Walter Gordon, who saw nationalism as an essentially positive and progressive force, but refrained from associating it with domestic issues of social class and international issues of imperialism. He is certainly no political radical; yet, at a time when all realistic and selfish impulses dismiss national loyalty (except in the language familiar from the likes of General Rick Hillier, pursuing patriotism in lock-step with US foreign policy), he plainly loves his country. Moreover, his emerging concerns with poverty and other matters of social justice reveal some development in his understanding of the limits of liberalism in terms of the pursuit of economic, as well as formal democratic, rights.
To many, “bourgeois nationalism” has long been a discredited ideology—most explicitly because it has been disowned by the bourgeoisie.” Most Canadian nationalists in living memory have been either “tories” (mainly of the distinctively “red” hue) or profoundly “democratic” socialists. This is as it should be. Canadian business interests have aggressively pursued American markets. Canadian consumers have been eager to acquire American goods and services cheaply. Accordingly, free market economics have dominated continentalist opinion for the whole of Canadian history, and have been held at bay mainly because of what George Grant famously called the “ridiculous project” of seeking to build a genuinely conservative society on the same continent as the greatest technological empire that the world has seen to date.
