*Danielle Robinson get the credit for coming up with this title! She’s hilarious. đ
So, in case youâve been living under a rock for the past six months, you know that this year Canada is celebrating itâs 150th birthday. While July 1st is technically the day that Canada was âborn,â governments at all levels as well as a range of institutions have events planned for the entire year. Iâve mentioned a couple of these on various roundups, like the Canada150 series that many newspapers are running, featuring locals who made significant contributions to Canadian history.
All this sounds great, right?
So why is it that so many historians (and others) are endlessly grumbling about Canada150? Are we all killjoys? Do we hate Canada? Are we secretly lizard-people planning to take over the world? While I canât comment on the last question đ I can tell you that no, most historians arenât killjoys, nor do we hate Canada. But there are very important reasons why Canada150 is a very problematic campaign. So in todayâs blog post, Iâm going to talk about a few of the reasons why many Canadian historians start gnashing their teeth whenever someone brings up Canada150.
