Canada is hockey.
Canada is baseball.
Canada is basketball.
Canada is sport fishing along rivers or on one of the thousand of lakes.
Canada is the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
Canada is the great open plains of the West and big sky country.
Canada is the majestic peaks, glaciers, mountain streams and thick forests of the Rockies.
Canada is long backroads heading off into the horizon past farms, villages, forests, and lakes. Canada is a beaver dam, a moose wandering amongst trees in the boreal forest, or a muskellunge (Musky) landed in a rowboat on a Muskoka Lake.
OK, so now that we have flipped through the pictures on the wall calendar, Canada is much more than this.
Canada is also a great dinner in a Filipino restaurant in downtown Toronto or a Jewish diner in Montreal serving freshly baked bagels, to name two of the hundreds of nationalities that make up the mosaic of Canada.
Whatever you might imagine about Canada, no one image can capture this vast and diverse nation. Its vast landscapes, its peoples from all over the world, its multitude of languages and the proud heritage of its Indigenous peoples all form part of the fabric of this country.
But Canada has its dark past as well. The recent discoveries of mass graves in the Residential Schools has shown that the Federal Government and mainstream Churches have been complicit is the abuse of Indigenous children who were ripped from their families to be “Christianized” and made into “good Canadians.” In some places in Canada, these prejudices still hold sway. These atrocities cannot be ignored when writing the story of Canada. As we will discover, the roots of these problems existed from the first encounters of the St. Lawrence Iroquois by Jacques Cartier and the Inuit by Martin Frobisher.
That being said, Canada did not become what it is by chance. It did so over hundreds or even thousands of years (in the case of its First Nations peoples) of seemingly small decisions that built upon each other as the years progressed.
My goal for Beyond Brant and Brock is to tell the story of these decisions, both the good and the bad, that resulted in the formation of Canada in 1867, one of the oldest democracies on earth.
I called this Substack Beyond Brant and Brock because of a belief that most Canadians know little about the founding of Canada, or even the history of Canada after Confederation. By offering bite sized segments of this story, I hope to make it digestible. Mostly, I hope to make it fun.
I should start by explaining the odd title.
By the time most Canadian graduated high school, they may have heard about the famous Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, whose real name was Thayendanegea, who has been remembered by the naming of the town of Brantford, Ontario. They may also have heard about General Isaac Brock, the British military commander who was given a monument in Niagara Falls. These two leaders succeeded in preventing an American invasion and assimilation of Upper Canada into a young and inexperienced United States.
By going beyond the stories of Brant and Brock, I hope to encourage you, my dear readers, to appreciate how this country came into being, warts and all. It isn’t the United States for a reason. It isn’t British or France for a reason. It is a unique experiment.
If you are not into wars and dates, this is the story for you. I can’t avoid them altogether as they are often key moments on the journey towards the founding of Can sada.
Beyond Brant and Brock is a people’s history because that is what history is ultimately all about.
Note: These articles are based on original research, secondary sources, and Canadian archives. Where sources are not available, I have made educated guesses.
Click the link below to go to my substack glennjlea.substack.com.