Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government's history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada's past.  If you're an academic who reads this blog, this collection might be of interest to you.


Call for Abstracts – Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With the 150th anniversary of Confederation coming up in 2017, it seems appropriate to reflect on the political, social and cultural forces which have shaped Canada over the course of its history.  National holidays and commemorative events provide an intriguing window into how these processes have affected, and continue to shape nationalism, culture and identity politics.  With this in mind, we invite interested authors to submit proposals for an edited collection that we are developing.  Tentatively entitled "Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics", our objective is to pull together scholarship related to national holidays and major commemorative anniversaries in Canadian history.  While our launching point for this collection is the celebration and observance of Dominion Day / Canada Day, we are taking a broad approach to the book's theme, and would like to include contributions that deal with major anniversary years like the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, the Centennial of 1967, Canada 125 and other related – or competing! - national holidays such as Victoria Day, la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste/Fête Nationale, and Empire Day. We welcome contributions that situate Canadian holidays in a broader international context. 

We have already been in discussions with University of Toronto Press, where there is keen interest in this project. Interested authors are asked to submit proposals to Matthew Hayday [mhayday@uoguelph.ca] by 2 July 2013 (the day after the Canada Day holiday!) including a 250-500 word abstract and the author's institutional affiliation and contact information.  Our planned schedule is to contact authors regarding their proposals by the end of July, and have first completed drafts due in late spring 2014.  We are planning to apply for a SSHRC Connection Grant, with an eye to having participants come together for a workshop in the summer of 2014 to discuss each other's work.  This should provide ample time for revisions and the peer review process to allow the collection to be in print no later than 2017.

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Matthew Hayday
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Guelph
mhayday@uoguelph.ca

Raymond Blake
Professor, Department of History, University of Regina
Raymond.Blake@uregina.ca

Recommend this Post

Canada Day and the War of 1812

In a story in today's Toronto Star and CBC from Canadian Press, the federal government has hired a consultant to inject a War of 1812 theme into the noonday and evening Canada Day shows on Parliament Hill. The article implies that this might represent a major shift in crafting politicized Canada Day celebrations, and that this is part of a larger heritage direction on the part of the federal government. The author is right about the latter, but I'd contest his implied interpretation that this is something dramatically new.

As someone who has dedicated far too many years of my life to researching the history of July 1st celebrations (my most recent article from the Canadian Historical Review can be found here, I could not be less surprised by this development, and I don't see this as anything new. Indeed, there is a long and illustrious history of both Conservative and Liberal governments of the past turning the national Canada Day (or pre-1983, Dominion Day) celebrations to political purposes. If we go back to 1958, Dominion Day ceremonies on Parliament Hill were established by Secretary of State Ellen Fairclough with an eye to promoting aspects of Canada's British and military heritage. In the late-1970s, government mandarin Bernard Ostry was seconded to put together a multi-hour coast-to-coast celebration, organized in part to combat separatism after the 1976 election of the Parti Quebecois. In the early-to-mid-1980s, Secretary of State officials began developing explicit annual themes, some of them linked to historical anniversaries (like the 1984 celebrations, which were tied to the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier's arrival in Canada). This year's decision by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore to incorporate a War of 1812 theme is really nothing new, but simply the exploitation of an existing tradition to reinforce particular government messaging about Canadian identity.

And to answer the question posed by Dean Beeby, the Canadian Press author of the story, the degree of control over the noonday and evening shows has gone back and forth over the past several decades. Some years, the NCC has had a free hand with the evening show. In other years, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, the Secretary of State Department (now Canadian Heritage) played a much more active role in determining the themes and content of the evening broadcast. This was often connected to whether or not the show was to be televised (which also meant that CBC and Radio-Canada were involved in the process).

What I'm still waiting to see is whether an MP introduces a bill to return to the old moniker of Dominion Day.

Recommend this Post

Pope Ratzinger to Quebec City: "Sorry, I have to wash my hair"

Some of my work as a historian deals with commemorations, and so I've been keeping an eye on the plans for Quebec City's 400th anniversary celebrations. The 300th anniversary celebrations were a big to-do in 1908, and were later the subject of H.V. Nelles' award-winning book The Art of Nation-Building. Concordia University historian Ron Rudin has been keeping an eye on the 400th anniversary celebrations as part of a larger project which started with the 2004 celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the founding of settlements in Acadia.

The organizers seem to be having a rough time of it. First the Queen didn't get invited for fear of controversy, and now Pope Benedict XVI - who will be traveling to both the US and Australia in upcoming months - has indicated that he won't be able to come and celebrate mass on the Plains of Abraham, citing health concerns.

On a purely voyeuristic level, I'm rather disappointed that he won't be coming. Lord only knows what deeply offensive statements the pope would have made in a province which has almost completely shucked off its Catholic heritage since the 1960s - a province which was among the first to recognize gay civil unions, was among the first to accept gay marriage, and where even heterosexuals prefer to live in common law arrangements. I'm sure it would have been a barn-burner!

Recommend this Post