There was Amy thinking she knew Canada until selecting a book from Dad’s bookshelf to read during one wet afternoon. She became interested after seeing the glowing testaments from the back cover.

She was gripped. Then having seen her home and native land from an altogether different angle, Amy desired a different role for herself and future in relation to this re-conceptualized Canada, because she couldn’t just plug back in to all that was behind the veil.

I’ve lived a lie.

Too many revelations like Amy’s bubbling to the surface would be hazardous to the status quo. To mitigate the risk, power imposes a fantastic Canada on Canadians, building up its vision of what to believe in our heads while bullying others out of the way. The real-time collage is sculpted by more than seven thousand registered lobbyists federally,[1] artists in a sense, advising on behalf of clients or employers by injecting appropriateness, a standard model, into popular media creations and their advertising.

From 1960 another team of reality makers undertook a similar responsibility of explaining Canada to most Generation X and baby boomer students, the ninety percent or more attending public, Catholic or residential schools for the required decade and a half, rather than private academies. This bureau of conjurers usually called the Curriculum Branch and existing within Ontario’s Ministry of Education,[2] became necessary when the Province opened itself up to publishers’ unrequested submissions for the sake of democracy. Among the Curriculum Branch’s responsibilities was recommending the textbooks listed in the official, annual and nationally distributed Circular 14.

A BONA FIDE TEXTBOOK
As with other submissions, the Branch chose subject specialists from its rosters to evaluate Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson’s The FOUNDING of CANADA: Beginnings to 1815. Unlike the previous two evaluations discussed here, those of Adolescents in Society and WAR, publisher Progress Books had submitted a genuine textbook, rather than a resource or activity book. This is a single monograph featuring a long chronological list of thirty three chapters about early Canada, from before human occupation “between twenty and forty thousand years ago”[3] to the early 19th century conflicts between American republicans and British imperialists. Among the eighty-seven suppressed books tabled in Canadian Mockingbird, The FOUNDING of CANADA and its sequel UNEQUAL UNION: Confederation and the Roots of Conflict in the Canadas, 1815-1873 are two of the most important.

The human journey east and south across the continent from Asia is central. We know what Ryerson means by “Canada” by his association of the term with geography, in thematic maps for example. He made an effort to refer to the continent’s original peoples how they refer to themselves, even back in 1960. “Like the ‘Indians,’ the Arctic people have had a name foisted on them that is none of their choosing.”[4] Eskimo meant “an eater of raw flesh” in the Abenaki language. The much later discovery of North America by Europeans is printed in quotation marks.

If you lost interest in Canadian history, when was it? For me it followed first year university, after once again having pre-Columbian time flattened into a week or two. The disproportionate time devoted to European exploration, which results in such a warped rendering, was explained by the directive that “history is the written past.” This was the professional answer. The conversation remains memorable for having withdrawn my curiosity in Canadian history departments. Anthropology was better for me. The FOUNDING of CANADA in fact has much to offer the student of anthropology.

In The FOUNDING of CANADA early civilizations are wedded to a more substantial timeline than in typical elementary or high school textbooks. The choice to represent those thousands of years of experience and innovation prior to European arrival makes the period come alive.

Because the weight of this point is difficult to convey with only words, here is a diagram from Canadian Mockingbird‘s chapter seven portraying history from the era of the Heiltsuk Nation, a complex society living on Triquet Island in the Pacific Ocean an estimated 14,000 years ago. Pre-contact white boxes of five hundred years each are contrasted with the two black boxes of European (et al) exploration and settlement, from the Norse.

Ryerson’s historiography continues the Indigenous and minority contributions along with French and English settler communities, post-contact. Class activities, such as by “working people” and “feudal landowners”, and original peoples (like the Ojibway from my own hometown) are described. Alongside of churches and corporations are indigenous ways and mythologies. The wars, placenames and edicts you’d expect to find are also available.

THE ANSWER IS NO 
The FOUNDING of CANADA had popular success, just not as a government-funded textbook. My 1975 copy was from the fourth printing. Progress Books submitted the publication to Ontario at least twice. First in 1968 the Curriculum Branch chose not to undertake an evaluation but still replied that the book didn’t “meet our course requirements at the present time.” In 1971 the book was resubmitted and distributed by the history and social studies manager to seven panelists. The bias reviewer who approved considered it to be “generally free of bias.” A majority of four panelists approved, encouraging the manager to suggest its listing for Grade 13 to his supervisor.[5]

However the same manager wanted the branch superintendent to know that the book was Marxist, maybe providing some shielding from potential criticism. Deliberation over Ryerson’s text ended at an “Associates’ Meeting” a week later where it was decided The FOUNDING of CANADA would be refused because consideration of “Schedule E” books, those book not supporting an entire course, was also ending. But as mentioned this was a undisputable textbook. One rejecting reviewer called it “good history. It is well-written and interesting. Certainly we have other histories in Circular 14 that are inferior to it.”[6]

Whether or not Canada is a communist state really isn’t the question, even if shopping across the border and seeing the immensity of what is available impresses the traveler with a richer variety of consumer products and agreeable climates. If there was anything dangerously Marxist about The FOUNDING of CANADA, it was that it explained too much of Canadian socioeconomics. The same rejecting reviewer provided his rationale.

Mr. Ryerson goes beyond the usual political and territorial tensions that are the stock-in-trade of most text-book writers. Inevitably he measures each tension in terms of its impact on every-day people in their every-day lives … he points out that friendship with Europeans, regardless of their nationality, was fatal to the Indians. … The question is, should a book with such strong Marxist flavour be included? I’m inclined to think not.[7]

Neither Stanley B. Ryerson’s pedigree as a Sorbonne graduate, nor as a descendent of Egerton Ryerson, that agent of British monarchy and founder of the public school system, who Canada now distances itself from because of his concurrent role in the creation of residential schools, could prevent the text’s censorship.

Notes
[1] Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada, March 14, 2025.
[2] Evaluation of textbooks was outsourced in entirety in 2002, but planning began in 1994 with the Bob Rae administration’s creation of the Ontario Curriculum Clearinghouse (OCC) and issuing of evaluation contracts from 1998.
[3] S.B. Ryerson, The FOUNDING of CANADA: Beginnings to 1815 (Toronto: Progress Books, 1975, orig. 1960), 10.
[4] Ibid, 19.
[5] Oct. 5, 1971, file B145049.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.

Formatting updates March 19 and 21, 2025

Jeremy Tompkins’Canadian Mockingbird: Exposing Censorship and Textbook-Mediated Social Engineering, the nonfiction book describing covert public, Catholic and residential school textbook censorship during Baby Boomer and Generation X eras is now available. The program regularly dismissed panel consensus of paid subject specialists by ignoring domestic and international protections.