At his Substack, the Canadian/American writer Dan Gardner lauds Mark Bourrie on his way to offering cold thoughts about the state of Canadian nonfiction and history. I'm quoting some longish excerpts from a much longer post, but reading the whole thing might be worth your while.
The Canadians among you will know that Bourrie is a Canadian author with eclectic interests. His latest is entitled Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre. So, yes, it’s political. I swore off commenting on domestic partisan politics many years ago, so I haven’t read it and won’t say another word about it. But I do want to say something about Mark and other Canadian writers like him. (I’m in a different category as I am — despite being so Canadian I recently injured myself playing hockey — essentially a rootless cosmopolitan who writes for an international audience.)
Mark and others don’t do it for money. There’s no money in writing Canadian books for Canadians. For researched non-fiction of the sort Mark writes, there isn’t even the intravenous drip of government grants to keep an impecunious writer barely fed.[.... ]
It wasn’t always this way. Pierre Berton and Peter Newman made a damned good living selling popular histories of Canada. But Canadian publishing is now mostly branch plants of foreign giants that have no time for such eccentric little subjects. And the whole ecosystem that supported Canadian popular history has either shrivelled (newspapers and magazines) or vanished altogether (book reviews sections in newspapers and magazines).
And Canada’s political class hasn’t even noticed.
Many Canadian institutions reward and promote Canadian fiction and memoir. Close to none lift a finger for popular history.
[....]
And yet, miraculously, some popular Canadian history continues to be published. Charlotte Gray. Tim Cook. Thomas King.
I was pleased to see someone in the comments section had added my name to the list, But mostly I like how Gardner identifies an institutional problem -- the selloff of cultural institutions, for one -- rather than ranting about "saving" Canadian history by putting up more John A statues, ramming history down the throats of children, and resisting reconciliation and diversity. (I'm looking at you, Canadian Institute for Historical Education.)
