Today is
the 157th anniversary of the day when the British North America Act came into
effect establishing a new realm in North America that under the reign of Her
Majesty Queen Victoria and governed by her own Parliament in Ottawa would bear
the title of Dominion and the name of Canada.
Originally a confederation of four provinces she would grow to include
six others along with the territories which were originally a single territory,
which was divided twice, just before the twentieth century and at that century’s
end bringing the current number to three. Although I was only six when the Liberals,
lacking the necessary quorum in Parliament, sneakily and illegally passed a
bill changing the name of our country’s holiday I still refer to it as Dominion
Day which the great Robertson Davies, writing to the Globe and Mail, once described as a “splendid title” while
referring to the new one as “wet” due to its being one letter off Canada
Dry, and the folly of the Liberal parliamentarians as “one of the inexplicable
lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed.”
Normally for Dominion Day I write an essay, sometimes about a notable Canada, sometimes a more political piece blasting the
Liberals, big and small l, and all the changes for the worse that they have
wrought. Last year’s essay was a call
for religious revival in Canada. This
year I decided to do something a bit different and have put together a Dominion
Day recommended reading list. This list
is not intended to be exhaustive either in whole or in any of the sections into which it
is divided so non-inclusion in this list should not be taken as a recommendation
against a book on my part.
Canada: Political
Philosophy
The two books that top my list of recommendations for
Canadian political reading are ones to which long-time readers will have seen me
make multiple mentions. These are
John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown
(Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s
Those Things We Treasure: A Selection of
Speeches on Freedom and Defence of Our Parliamentary Heritage (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1972). The first of these,
which was published posthumously having been edited by journalist Judith
Robinson who herself passed away not that long after, makes the case for our
constitutional parliamentary monarchy against the alternatives of American
capitalist republicanism or Soviet socialist totalitarianism which at the time were striving to remake the entire world, each in her own
image, in the conflict we remember as the Cold War. Farthing also discusses the first stage of
the Liberal Party’s subversion of our constitution in the King-Byng affair. A more thorough examination and defense of
the constitutional principles represented by the right side of that almost
century old controversy, that of Lord Byng (the King in the name of the affair was not King George V, whom Byng represented as Governor-General, but the
Liberal Prime Minister whose last name was King) can be found in Eugene Forsey’s
doctoral dissertation which was published as The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British
Commonwealth (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943). I mention this third book, which in its
dissertation form can be found online if you have any difficulty locating a
hard copy, before commenting on Diefenbaker’s because of its topical connection
with Farthing’s. Diefenbaker’s book collects speeches that he gave during and
in response to the second wave of Liberal subversion. It is mostly changes wrought early in the
premiership of Pierre Trudeau that are decried although the second wave
of Liberal subversion can be dated to the moment that Lester Pearson, with the
aid of both the Social Credit and the New Democrats, ousted Diefenbaker in
1963. For the classic account of this
act of Liberal subversion see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal:
McGill University Press, 1965) which is the most political of Grant’s books,
although it incorporates the philosophical and moral insights more typical of
his other writings.
The fifth book that deserves mention under this heading is The Social
Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other
Essays (Toronto: The University of
Toronto Press, 1973) which was edited by Alan Bowker and which incorporates the
whole of Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, originally
published in 1920 and which is a critique rather than an endorsement of
socialism, as well as “Greater Canada: An Appeal” and several of the essays
from Leacock’s Essays and Literary Studies (1916), including his “The
Woman Question” which is the best single piece ever written by a Canadian on
the subject of feminism. Leacock was the chair of the Department of Economics
and Political Science at McGill where he was a mentor to both Farthing and
Forsey. Noting this connection brings me
to the sixth book, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada
(Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982).
The author of this book was Charles Taylor, not the philosopher but the
journalist and race horse breeder. Eugene Forsey and George Grant both get a
chapter in this book, the chapters being based on Taylor’s personal interviews with these men, which is the same format used for
the chapters on the historians Donald Creighton and William Morton and a few
others. Leacock and Farthing obviously
could not be similarly interviewed although Taylor discussed Leacock and
mentioned Farthing earlier in the book.
Canada: Topical
Politics
The
distinction between the books under the previous heading and the books under
this one is that the previous books addressed Canadian politics in terms of
general political philosophy whereas these address specific issues. The Stephen Leacock book could have gone in
either section.
On the
subject of immigration, which is a very hot button topic today, Doug Collins’ Immigration: the Destruction of English
Canada (Richmond Hill: BMG, 1979) is arguably still the best Canadian book
ever written. It was the eighth and last
book published by BMG, a small publishing house set up by Winnett Boyd, Kenneth
McDonald and Orville Gaines to warn against the path down which Pierre Trudeau was
leading Canada. This was very early in the era of liberal immigration and
Collins accurately predicted that the end result would
be the importation of a lot of unnecessary and unwanted racial strife. For warning against importing racial strife Collins was branded a racist. Since that
warning went unheeded, he was a Cassandra and his enemies did their worst to
make him a pariah by the time he passed away in 2001. More of his commentary on immigration and a
host of other issues can be found in The
Best and Worst of Doug Collins (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1987). When this book was first published you could
walk into an ordinary bookstore and buy it off the shelf. When he died in 2001, the only obituaries I
remember seeing were by Kevin Michael Grace in the Report and by Allan Fotheringham in MacLeans (I was never a fan of Foth but he
showed a lot of class on this occasion).
The next book on my list on this topic is Ricardo Duchesne’s Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity
and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (London: Black House Publishing, 2017). Of all recent books on Canadian immigration
this is the closest to Collins’ in terms of what it is for and what it is
against although it tackles the subject from an academic rather than a
journalistic angle – Duchesne is a historical sociologist who until he was
driven out by leftist colleagues a few years back was a professor in the social
science department of the University of New Brunswick - and has the advantage
of almost four more decades of history on which to comment. Other books deserving mention are Charles M.
Campbell’s Betrayal & Deceit: The
Politics of Canadian Immigration (West Vancouver: Jasmine Books, 2000) and
Mike Taylor’s The Truth About
Immigration: Exposing the Economic and Humanitarian Myths (Coquitlam: KARMA
Publishing, 1998). These could be
described as having been written from an insider’s perspective. Campbell, an engineer in the mining industry
by profession, served ten years on the old Immigration Appeal Board that
existed before it was reorganized into the Immigration and Refugee Appeal Board
in 1989 following the Supreme Court’s bad ruling in the Singh case in 1985. Taylor
had worked as an immigration investigator for the federal government before
writing his book.
The current
Liberal government that has taken rather the opposite view of immigration to
that expressed in the books just mentioned has promoted a lot of hatred against
Canada or at least the historical Canada.
They have also promoted a lot of ethno-masochism among Canadians of
European ancestry. I am not saying that
these problems began with the present government, far from it, but they have
been more aggressively promoted by this government than any prior and the means
employed has been a narrative in which the history of the church-administered
boarding schools that Canada used to fulfil her education obligations under the
Indian treaties has been heavily distorted.
In response I will recommend two books both of which are edited
collections by multiple authors. The
first is Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf ed. From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and
Reconciliation Report (Winnipeg: The Frontier Centre for Public Policy,
2021) and the second is C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan ed. Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And
the Truth About Residential Schools) (Dorchester Books and True North
Media, 2023).
Since my
recommendations in the previous two paragraphs will have already driven any overly
sensitive progressive into a fuming frenzy I will stoke the fire of their rage
further by adding Down The Drain? A
Critical Re-Examination of Canadian Foreign Aid, written by Citizens for
Foreign Aid Reform co-founders Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published in
Toronto by Griffin House in 1981. This
is the best Canadian book that I have read on the subject of tax money being
taken from working and middle class Canadians and either dumped into the bank
accounts of Third World dictators or thrown away on wasteful projects in the
Third World. While the book is obviously
in need of either an update or a sequel the issue, which had largely been dormant for a decade or more, has been brought back to life with a vengeance by the present Trudeau Liberals.
When it
comes to the topic of the ongoing moral and social decay of our country and
Western Civilization in general in the post-World War II era the best and
certainly most exhaustive book by a Canadian that comes to my mind is The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks
Out On the Political, Economic, and Social Policies That Threaten Us All. The author was the late William D. Gairdner
who competed for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympics before going to university
and earning his Ph.D. and becoming a well-known small-c conservative speaker
and writer. This, his second book, was
originally published in hardback in1992 by Stoddart of Toronto who released a
paperback edition the following year. After Stoddart folded, BPS Books of Toronto
re-released the paperback edition in 2007 with a new cover which as far as I
can tell is the only revision made. In
connection with this book I would also recommend by the same author The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of
Relativism and a Defence of Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 2008). Where the first book looks
at such matters as “Compulsory Miseducation”, “Moral Values and Sex Ed”, “The
Feminist Mistake: Women Against the Family”, “Women at War: On the Military,
Day Care and Home Fronts”, “Radical Homosexuals vs. The Family”, “The Invisible
Holocaust: Abortion vs. the Family” to give a few chapter titles in whole or in
part from the perspective of the official policies behind the various changes
involved the second book digs deeper and addresses the basic ideas of which the
official policies are practical applications.
The War Against the Family included a chapter on euthanasia as
well as a chapter on abortion and this has become a far more timely topic due
to the present government’s having introduced the world’s most aggressive and
extreme euthanasia policy in M.A.I.D.
Another book that addressed both abortion and euthanasia from the
perspective of showing how the Modern technological way of thinking and doing
has conditioned people to reject the older way of thinking about justice that
rejected and condemned these things and to embrace a newer way of thinking that
accepts them was George Grant’s final book Technology
and Justice (Toronto: House of Ananasi Press, 1986). The chapters on abortion and euthanasia are
the last two in the book and these Grant co-wrote with his wife Sheila.
Bill
Whatcott’s Born In a Graveyard: One
man's transformation from a violent, drug-addicted criminal into Canada's most
outspoken family values activist (Langley: Good Character Books, 2014) is the autobiography, or perhaps
testimony would be a better word, of a man who has paid the price for
translating his Christian views on these matters, especially abortion and
homosexuality, into practice in the form of activism. Whatcott was charged by the Saskatchewan
Human Rights Commission for distributing pamphlets that colourfully expressed
his opinion about the alphabet soup gang’s public schools agenda. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruled against
Whatcott who appealed to what was then the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench
(now King’s Bench) which upheld the Tribunal’s ruling, then to the Saskatchewan
Court of Appeal which ruled in favour of Whatcott causing the Saskatchewan
Human Rights Commission to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada which held
hearings in 2011 and unanimously ruled in 2013 that while Whatcott’s rights
under section 2 of the Charter had indeed been violated those who so violated
them were allowed to get away with it because of the loop-hole in section 1.
Needless to say this asinine ruling in which the expression of “detestation”
and “vilification” was declared to be outside the protection of free expression
(I suspect that the “detestation” and “vilification” of white people, men, and
Christians is treated as an exception) was not exactly a step in the direction
of freeing Canadians from the unjust shackles of censorship and self-censorship
that the first Trudeau introduced early in his premiership. Today it is part of the legal precedent that
the second Trudeau and his cronies look to in order to justify and explain
their attempts to pass draconian laws telling us what we can and cannot say on
the internet. Since Whatcott is up before the Supreme Court again this time on charges
pertaining to his creative evangelistic efforts at a Hubris parade in Toronto a
sequel may be on the horizon.
Canada: History
The first
book on Canadian history that I recommend is W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada: A General History from
Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963). The author, who was born in Gladstone, was
the head of the Department of History at the University of Manitoba from 1950
to 1964. Among his other books, all of which are worth
reading, are histories of the university and of the province. Taking its name from the
original full designation of the country proposed by the Fathers of
Confederation this one-volume history of Canada ends on the eve of the second
wave of seditious, Liberal, revolution-within-the-form under Pearson-Trudeau.
The second on my list would be the complete works of Donald G. Creighton. Alright, you can omit Take-Over (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1978) because that is a
novel, but The Young Politician (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1952) and The Old Chieftain
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), the two volumes of his biography of Sir John A.
Macdonald must remain on the list for the story of the life of the foremost
Father of Confederation is an absolutely essential part of Canadian history and
no one tells it better than Creighton.
Read both volumes in the original editions if you can, but if you must
read the current one-volume edition from the University of Toronto Press
consider skipping over the introduction by Creighton’s own biographer, Donald
Wright of the University of New Brunswick.
His apologizing for Creighton’s not holding to the stomach-churning,
woke, entirely-wrong, perspectives of the present day are bad enough in his
biography of Creighton without marring Creighton’s masterful account of Sir
John’s life. My recommendation again is
for the entire corpus of Creighton’s writings.
I will not list them all but a few deserve special mention. The book that earned him his reputation is
one of these, The Commercial Empire of
the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850 (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1937), in which
Creighton tells the history of the use of the St. Lawrence River as a means of
trade and transportation in the century leading up to Confederation. Goldwyn Smith had written a book that was
published in the year of Sir John A. Macdonald’s death in which he argued that
Confederation was a mistake because it was a project undertaken against the
natural north-south flow of trade in North America. That year, the Canadian public gave their answer
to Smith’s thesis by awarding Macdonald, who was running against Sir Wilfred
Laurier’s Liberals who were campaigning on a platform of free trade, a
landslide victory. Creighton’s book was
the scholarly answer. Editions of it
published from 1956 on have omitted the “Commercial” from the title. His The
Forked Road: Canada 1939-1957 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976) was
published as Volume XVIII, the penultimate of the Canadian Centenary Series
that he and W. L. Morton had started and edited. It can also be regarded as the last in a series
of books that he authored bringing the history of Canada down from the
pre-Confederation period that he covered in The
Commercial Empire and The Road to
Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863-1867 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1964) down to the end of the St. Laurent premiership. While I don’t think anybody would claim that
this was the best book he ever wrote it is too often criticized for taking the
opinion that the Liberals under King and St. Laurent were leading the country
down into the sewer if not lower.
Creighton died three years after it was published. Imagine what he would have said if he had
lived to write the history of the two Trudeau eras.
The penultimate
entry in this section is David Orchard’s The
Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism (Toronto:
Stoddart Publishing, 1993, revised and expanded edition Montreal: Robert Davies
Multimedia Publishing: 1998). This book
is a history of Canadian resistance to continentalism and particularly to
American economic conquest via free trade.
The first edition came out during the talks on expanding the US-Canada
Free Trade Agreement that Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, both men betraying
the protectionist traditions of their own parties, had signed in 1988 into the
North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which came into effect on the first
day of 1994. The expanded edition came
out during Orchard’s campaign for the Progressive Conservative leadership in
1998. This was also the occasion for the
writing/compilation of Ron Dart’s The Red
Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes (Dewdney BC: Synaxis Press, 1999)
which is why I am adding it here rather than in the general political
philosophy section.
Canada: Christianity
The first
book in this section will be the Right Rev. Philip Carrington’s The Anglican Church of Canada: A History
(Toronto: Collins, 1963). This book was
first published the same year as W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada in which year the second wave of the Liberal subversion of the country began under the
premiership of Lester Pearson. A
small-l, theological liberal subversion of the Church was already underway. A small indication of that can be seen in the
1962 Canadian edition of the Book of
Common Prayer, in which the Psalter is bowdlerized to omit the imprecatory
portions of the Psalms, including the 58th in its entirety. This was unfortunate in that it marred what
is otherwise an excellent adaptation of the Restoration BCP of 1662. It was a mild display
of liberalism, however, compared to that which would soon sweep the Church
leading to the present day in which I dare say most of the prelates wish that
this history, written by the seventh Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec
who went on to become the eleventh Metropolitan Archbishop of the
Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, would be swept under the rug and forgotten.
With
regards to the liberal sweep of the Church I recommend two books both written
in the late 1990s. Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada?
(Cambridge Publishing House, 1999) was written by Dr. Marney Patterson who was
sometimes described as the “Anglican Billy Graham.” He wrote six other books with more uplifting topics and by the time he passed away two years ago had transferred to the
Anglican Network in Canada. A year prior
to this Rev. George R. Eves had released Two
Religions One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada (Saint
John: V.O.I.C.E., 1998) which he has recently updated and
made available as an e-book.
While the increasing willingness of the Church to depart from both
Scripture and Tradition on the matter of moral theology as it pertains to those
attracted to their own sex was the occasion for the writing of both of these
books, Dr. Patterson and Rev. Eves both address the larger problem of
liberalism. Dr. Patterson dealt well
with the matter of how the unwillingness to stand for unpopular Scriptural
truth compromises the Church’s ability to evangelize. Rev. Eves discussed how the introduction of
the Book of Alternative Services,
which in many parishes is not so much an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer but its
replacement, was a victory for liberalism since on the lex orandi, lex credenda principle if you change the liturgy you
change the belief. These books both came
out within five years of the conference sponsored by the Prayer Book Society,
Anglican Renewal Ministries, and Barnabas Ministries for the purpose of
addressing these concerns that produced the Montreal Declaration of Anglican
Essentials. The papers at the conference
were edited by George Egerton and published as Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith Within the Anglican Church of
Canada (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1995).
One of the
speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference was the Rev. Dr. Robert D.
Crouse, a priest and academic from Nova Scotia, where his home town was
Crousetown, in which the house where he grew up was on Crouse Road (his family
had lived there for centuries). His
address to the conference was entitled “Hope Which Does Not Disappoint” in
which he warned against “that most dangerous of all sins” despair, to which
souls, left weary and lethargic from the “widespread destruction of theological
and liturgical tradition” resulting from the false persuasion that the ancient,
ecumenical, and Anglican heritage is “somehow outmoded and inappropriate in the
present time” are tempted and gave the timely reminder that our “spiritual
health depends crucially on a revival of hope”, the virtue that is the opposite
of the vice of despair, and which rests upon faith in the promises of God. I cannot recommend a book that Dr. Crouse
wrote because while he contributed to books and wrote plenty of reviews and
articles, he never wrote a book qua book. His doctoral dissertation was a translation. Last year, however, Darton, Longman &
Todd in London released three books compiled from his sermons. These are Images
of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Witness in Christian Spirituality, The Souls Pilgrimage – Volume
1: From Advent to Pentecost: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of
Robert Crouse and The Soul's Pilgrimage - Volume 2: The
Descent of the Dove and the Spiritual Life: The Theology of the Christian Year:
The Sermons of Robert Crouse. He had
talked to Essentials about the need for renewing the Christian spiritual life,
these books describe what that very thing looks like.
Two other speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference
were Ron Dart and J. I. Packer. In
response to a book by Michael Ingham, who occupied the See of New Westminster
at the time and basically stood for the opposite of what Essentials stood for,
they wrote In a Pluralist World
(Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1998) which returned to print in 2019
under the new title Christianity and
Pluralism and published by Lexham Press in Bellingham. While the origins of this book place it in
the context of the same ecclesiastical turmoil that produced the books
mentioned in the previous paragraphs Dart and Packer concentrate here on the
question of the competing ways that have been proposed for Christians to deal
with the competing truth claims of multiculturalism. Since I mentioned another book by Dart in the previous section I would
add another book by Packer except that my favourites of his books were all written
before he moved to Canada. So read the revised editions.
One thing that Anglican bishops and fundamentalist Baptists
have in common is that they tend to be great subjects for biographies and to write excellent autobiographies. The Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing, father
of the John Farthing mentioned in the first section (whose middle name was
Colborne so this is not a case of Sr. and Jr. which requires all the names to
match) and the Bishop of Montreal in the early twentieth century wrote an excellent memoir entitled Recollections of the Right
Rev. John Cragg Farthing, Bishop of Montreal (1909-1939). It was printed without any publication
information but was likely published either by Farthing himself or by what
would then have been called the Church of England in Canada at some point in
the early 1940s. The Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto and an important figure in pre-Confederation Canada did not write his own biography but his successor the Right Reverend A. N.
Bethune wrote a very readable Memoir of
the Right Reverend John Strachan, D.D., D. C. L., First Bishop of Toronto
(Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870). If the title confuses you note that while “memoirs” and “autobiography”
are often used interchangeably they are not the same thing. An autobiography is when someone tells the
story of his own life. A memoir is
recorded memory of something, an event, a person, whatever. There is a lot of overlap but basically in an
autobiography one’s self is always the subject whereas one’s memoir can be focused
on the people and places and events one knew rather than on one’s self. An
account of someone else’s life can be called a memoir if the writer knew the
person well which is the case here.
Either type can be called a memoir. If there is an s on the end it is referring
either to more than one book or, less properly but more commonly, to the kind
that overlaps with autobiography. The Most
Reverend Robert Machray, the second Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land to
which my own parish belongs, became the first primate of what would become the
Anglican Church of Canada. His
biography, written by a nephew of the same name, came out the year he
died. That is Robert Machray, Life of Robert Machray, Archbishop of
Rupert’s Land (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909).
As for the fundamentalist Baptists, since we are listing
Canadian books here the obvious biography to mention is Leslie K. Tarr’s Shields of Canada (Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1967). Like his subject,
Leslie K. Tarr was a Baptist minister, as well as the first editor of the
Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s publication Faith Today. His subject, T.
T. Shields was the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and of the
Baptist preachers who fought for orthodoxy against encroaching liberalism in
their denomination was by far the most prominent Canadian. He joined the short-lived Baptist Bible Union
and in consequence is usually remembered alongside that group’s co-founders, W.
B. Riley of Minneapolis and J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth as a sort of
triumvirate of the Baptist fundamentalism of the era. Honourable mention goes to Lois Neely’s Fire In His Bones: The Official Biography of Oswald J. Smith (Carol Stream: Tyndale House,
1982). Oswald J. Smith was not a
Baptist. He was first ordained a
Presbyterian minister, then switched to Christian and Missionary Alliance (the
founder of which, A. B. Simpson, was originally a Presbyterian from Prince
Edward Island), before founding the non-denominational megachurch the People’s
Church of Toronto. As pastor of People’s
Church before handing the reins over to his son Paul B. Smith he was probably
the best known evangelical preacher in Canada in the twentieth century. I’ll also throw in Perry F. Rockwood’s Triumph in God: The Life Story of Radio
Pastor Perry F. Rockwood (Halifax: The People’s Gospel Hour, 1974). At fifty-seven pages and staple bound it is a
booklet rather than a book and the only one to make it into this list. Rockwood was ordained in the Presbyterian
Church of Canada in 1943 which at that point consisted of the parishes that had
opted to remain Presbyterian after most, about seventy percent, had joined with
the Methodists to become the United Church in 1925. While one might think that those who opted
out of the merger would be very conservative and orthodox it was only a few
years after his ordination that Rockwood was hauled before an ecclesiastical
court over four sermons he gave on the subject of “The Church Sick unto Death”
and while a case could made that he was indeed guilty of the charge of “divisiveness”
a stronger case can be made that those who put him on trial were guilty of
exactly what he charged them with in the sermons i.e., the greater crime of defecting,
not only from the Presbyterian Westminster Confession but from the basic Christian
faith as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The four sermons are
reproduced in full in his autobiography.
This
section would not be complete without The
Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years, a twelve-volume history of
Christianity that was produced from 2001 to 2013. The idea for it came from the late Ted
Byfield, most remembered as the founding editor and publisher of the Alberta Report newsmagazine the final
version of which folded in 2003 the year the first volume was published. Byfield served as general editor of the
series. The series was published out of
Edmonton under the imprint of The Christian History Project which after 2006 came
under the aegis of SEARCH, the Society to Explore And Record Christian History.
I exclude volume 10 from the
recommendation because it presents the Enlightenment, the
separation of church and state, and basically the Modern way of doing things or liberalism as the
product, albeit unintended, of Christianity rather than what it actually is,
the embodiment of the Modern Age’s apostasy from and rebellion against
Christianity. Byfield began his Christian walk as an orthodox
Anglican and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the events mentioned
previously in this section and so has no excuse for not knowing better.
Canada - Humour
All of
Stephen Leacock’s fiction can be included here, as can, for that matter, his
non-fiction for even when writing on serious subjects he was funny.
Peter V.
Macdonald, Q. C., a lawyer from Hanover had a column that appeared in the Toronto Star entitled “Court Jesters”
in which he recounted hilarious true anecdotes from courtrooms across Canada. A compilation of these was published as Court Jesters: Canada’s Lawyers and Judges
Take the Stand to Relate Their Funniest Stories (Toronto: Stoddart,
1985). This was followed up by a sequel More Court Jesters: Back to the Bar for More
of the Funniest Stories from Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987) and
then Return of the Court Jesters: By
Popular Demand More of the Funniest Stories From Canada’s Courts (Toronto:
Stoddart, 1990). I received the first
one of these for Christmas one year and annoyed my family for days with loud
laughter. There are also versions of at
least the first two books in which the anecdotes are illustrated with
cartoons. It appears he also wrote a
book with funny police stories. I have
not seen a copy although I have read a similar book by Bruce Day, a retired
police officer here in Winnipeg, that was self-published in 1995 and is
entitled Stop! Police Humour.
Another
collection of hilarious true stories is Ben
Wicks’ Book of Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979). The author whose name is indeed part of the
title was best known as a cartoonist. He followed it up with Ben Wicks’ More Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1982). It should be obvious what these
stories are like but if not here is the definition of a loser provided at the
beginning of the first book “A German tourist, en route to the west coast, who
steps off his plane in Bangor, Maine, and spends four days there thinking he is
in California.” Actually that is quite
mild compared to what happens to most of the people in the book. Wicks’ wrote and illustrated several other
books of humour. The only two that I
have read are his Ben Wicks’ Canada and Ben Wicks’ Women which
were also published by McClelland and Stewart in 1976 and 1978 respectively.
Canada – Fiction
I will not
be listing all the titles and bibliographic details in this section because it
would be very tedious due to the number of lengthy series included. What I
recommend under this heading are all the works of fiction of Lucy Maud
Montgomery, Robertson Davies, and Mazo de la Roche. Remember that this recommended reading
list, neither in whole nor in any section, is intended to be exhaustive, and
that non-mention of an author does not constitute a recommendation against. There are Canadian writers that I would recommend against but I am not going to name them here because that is not the purpose of this list.
L. M.
Montgomery is, of course, internationally famous as the author of Anne of Green Gables, the first in a
series of eight novels chronicling the life of the title character. Two collections of short stories, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea are also
part of the Anne of Green Gables continuity. If you remember Kevin Sullivan’s television
series Road to Avonlea it was based
in part on these short stories although the main characters of that series were
taken from The Story Girl and The Golden Road neither of which were
connected to the Anne storyline in Montgomery’s original novels. She wrote several other novels, some in series
such as the Emily of New Moon
trilogy, others stand alone.
Robertson
Davies tended to write his fiction in trilogies, including those that he wrote
as “Samuel Marchbanks” the pen-name he used when writing for the Peterborough Examiner in his time as
editor. A selection of his Marchbanks pieces were collected and
published as three volumes, although it is best, in my opinion, to read them in
the later omnibus edition The Papers of Samuel
Marchbanks for while some abridgement takes place you also get a great
introduction in which Davies interviews his alter-ego Marchbanks. There are
three completed trilogies of novels that are usually called the Salterton,
Deptford and Cornish trilogies, the first two after the fictional locations in
which they are set, the third after the character whose death sets off the plot
of the first novel and whose life is told in the second. Davies started a fourth trilogy, set in
Toronto, but only completed two of the novels.
The earliest of these trilogies, the Salterton, is my favourite. Davies also wrote several plays but only one
book of short stories, High Spirits,
a collection of the ghost stories that he composed to tell at Massey College at
the school’s Gaudy Night each year while he was Master (president, headmaster,
principal) there.
Mazo de la
Roche was for much of the twentieth century the single most read Canadian
novelist. An interesting piece of trivia
is that she is buried in St. George’s Anglican cemetery at Sibbald Point in
Sutton West the other most famous resident of which is Stephen Leacock whose
grave is very close to hers. She wrote
short stories and plays as well, but is most remembered for her twenty some novels
of which the most read are the Jalna series,
a family saga, somewhat like a novelized soap opera, spanning one century over
sixteen books. Jalna was the first published in 1927. Its title is the name of the family estate or
more properly the manor on the estate where the novels are set. The family that live there bear the last name
Whiteoak and so the series is also known albeit less commonly as the Whiteoak
saga. The hero of the saga is Renny
Whiteoak, who inherits the estate and the role if not the authority of family
patriarch from his father and grandfather, fights in both World Wars, and
breeds and rides show horses while trying to raise his own younger brothers and
keep the struggling estate afloat. We
had a number of hard cover editions of these books in the family library when I
was a child. The ones I remember usually
featured Renny on a horse on the cover.
The real ruler of the family was Renny’s grandmother Adeline whom the
family called Gran, a sharp-tongued old woman who kept them all in line by not
disclosing the sole beneficiary of her will and who had a parrot that she taught
to make extremely rude remarks in Hindi.
The books were not published in order of internal chronology, although
as with C. S. Lewis’ children’s novels subsequent re-print editions have numbered
them in that order. The last of the series to be published, Morning at Jalna, which came out in 1960
the year before de la Roche died, is second in internal chronology, being set
just prior to Confederation in the period in which the American North and South
were fighting. This book’s not-so-subtle
sympathy with the South was a not-so-subtle expression of de la Roche’s
contemptuous opinion of the “second Reconstruction” then underway in the United
States. That such sentiment prevented
neither the publication of the novel nor the adaptation of the entire series
into the television mini-series The
Whiteoaks of Jalna and by CBC nonetheless about ten years after her death
demonstrates how much healthier and saner our country was in terms of not
having to toe a party line on liberal social values before two generations of
Trudeaus messed everything up. The last
of the novels in terms of internal chronology was Centenary at Jalna and it was set in the year in which it is was
published, 1954. That it is set exactly
one hundred years after the story begins, as the title indicates, would suggest
that this was where de la Roche intended the saga to end, although the ending
of the novel itself very much suggests otherwise
That brings
this list to a close. If you are looking
for something to read this Dominion Day because some Canada-hating woke
jackasses have cancelled the celebrations in your area try one or more of
these.
Happy Dominion
Day!
God Save
the King!
