The Black Book of English Canada

Normand Lester, a journalist with Radio-Canada (the French-language equivalent of the CBC) stirred up a hornet’s nest when he revealed that the federal government had secretly funded television’s Heritage Minutes which, in his view, provided a sanitized version of our shared history. He was subsequently, controversially, let go. The Black Book of Canada is his impassioned defence of his native province and an implicit repudiation of the anglophone media’s unfair, yet all-too-common attacks on Quebec and Quebecers.

While English Canada may think itself a “just society,” in this highly controversial book – which sold 50,000 copies in French – Normand Lester chronicles English-Canadian intolerance: the expulsion of the Acadians; Lord Durham’s anti-French policies; the hanging of Louis Riel; R. B. Bennett’s funding of anti-Semitic publications; and the internment of Japanese Canadians in the Second World War. Lester argues that the myth of two equal, amicable co-founders of the nation, a myth actively promoted by the federal government over recent decades, ignores the fact that there will always be two incompatible national histories.