The Greatest Travesty :: andrewcoyne.com

Usually I find Andrew Coyne annoyingly neo-conservative and condescending, but I think his column today is dead-on - so much so that I can't help but quote from it as he put it better than I could: http://andrewcoyne.com/archives/003948.php

It is a travesty of our past the CBC is offering us: a celebration of ignorance, a salute to mediocrity. Search in vain for our greatest names: for George Brown, the man who, more than any other -- yes, even Macdonald -- was responsible for Confederation; for Champlain and Frontenac and d’Iberville, for Baldwin and La Fontaine, for D’Arcy McGee and George-Étienne Cartier, for Clifford Sifton and C. D. Howe. Apparently there wasn’t room: not if it meant leaving off William Shatner, or “Winnipeg radio personality” Hal Anderson, or Mary Maxwell, wife of the founder of the Bahá’i faith.

I know, I know. We’re trying to make history fresh, get the kids interested. “Forget musty textbooks about the fur trade,” the CBC website burbles, “or droning lectures about the FLQ crisis. The Greatest Canadian makes Canadian history come alive and learning fun.” But what, in fact, are they learning? That Canada, in effect, has no history, that everything happened at the same time, that all achievements are of equal weight and all opinions of equal value.

Canadian history does not need to be made “fun.” The exploration, conquest and development of Canada is one of the greatest stories ever told, a tale of heroism and adventure, full of rude, passionate, and sometimes violent individuals with an extraordinary appetite for life. If, in the service of a particular ideology, it has been reduced to an orderly series of public works projects, that is hardly remedied by turning it into a parody of Canadian Idol.

A final point: How can this be said to represent the nation’s choice of “Greatest Canadian” when it isn’t even being shown in French?