Quebec Rewrites Its History

A controversial new textbook is highly selective about the province’s past

- Martin Patriquin

THIS AUGUST, roughly 130,000 grade nine and ten students in Quebec will crack the spine of a new history textbook. Entitled Reflections.qc.ca (Mémoire.qc.ca in French), its two volumes —  adding up to more than 600 pages — cover the story of Quebec and Canada from before European contact to the present. Writing history often involves hard decisions about what to include and what to leave out. But the omissions in Reflections are, at times, astounding and depict Quebec as a society struggling to survive in the face of the indifferent, sometimes malignant country surrounding it.

The First World War, which cost Canada about 60,000 lives, was the site of some of the country’s most heroic battles, such as at Ypres and Vimy Ridge. Yet, in the ten pages devoted to the war, English Canadians — who found themselves divided over conscription after it was introduced in 1917 — are represented almost exclusively as jingoistic warmongers who used French Canadians largely as cannon fodder. There is no mention of Major Talbot Mercer Papineau, arguably one of Quebec’s greatest military figures. There’s also no mention of “In Flanders Fields,” a wartime poem still recited throughout the world — even though its author, Canadian doctor and soldier John McCrae, spent a considerable part of his career in Montreal.