Canada is not 150 years old

11 thoughts on “Canada is not 150 years old”

  1. That last sentence brilliantly sums up my sentiments exactly – well maybe not exactly, but now that I’ve read it, it’s exactly how I now feel. And as a teacher, and a teacher essentially asking my students the same question, a wonderful reminder of the possibilities that exist in quantifying the history of a specific area.

  2. I am enjoying your posts and your project fits in with my own, all be it modest, project of reading Canadian history and starting with The Illustrated History of Canada. It seems to be a first year university text I picked up at the University of Toronto Bookstore. I am relearning some things and finding out other things I either don’t remember or had not learned before.
    Keep the posts coming they are serving a purpose for me.

  3. Love that last line Chris! I might need to borrow it when teaching my grade 5’s about the pre-confederation days of the explorers…….how’s your French these days, any chance you want to translate it for me so I can get your wording perfect 😉

    1. Hi Andrea that sounds great but ma Francais n’est pas tres bon, c’est probablemant meilleur if you translate it for me and let me know what you come up with!

  4. Thanks for this. I am starting to find the whole “Celebrate 150 years of history” annoying and whenever I get a chance, I try to remind people that is only the last 150 years.
    A book commissioned and published in 1941 by Seagrams, and written by Stephen Leacock called “Canada, the Foundations of its Future” contains this statement: “The continent remained, as it had been for uncounted centuries, empty….The Indians were too few to count. Their use of the resources of the continent was scarcely more than that by crows and wolves, their development of it nothing.” That’s the kind of ‘history’ we grew up with and it’s time to put it away and start to learn and teach facts of the Indigenous peoples who lived and thrived here for 1000s of years before Europeans came along.

  5. Have a look at Canada 150 or 409, which I wrote the can be seen on the Queen’s York Rangers blog. I tie in The Peacemaker, even. A Few Acres of Snow translates Voltaire’s comments on Canada as a waste of French livres, and there are two volumes of the excellent collection of essays and news items going back to Martin Frobisher and the Danish experiment at Churchill.

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