10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada: A Review By Robin L. Harvey

Book review: 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron W. Hughes, University of Alberta Press, 216 pages.

Any book touting it has reviewed 50 years of the history that forged and shaped a nation would be ill-served if formatted as an extended listicle. Yet, essentially, that’s how 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron Hughes is structured. Clickbait may lure eyeballs to read about celebrity faux pas, one’s horoscope traits or top trends in Tik-Tok videos. 

However, shoehorning the stories behind five decades of a nation’s evolving historic, social and cultural events into a listicle of “monumental” dates can only confuse and confound readers. “Not all days are created equal,” Hughes writes in his introduction, noting how some dates will become turning points in history. His plan? To focus on one date per chapter and its subsequent “reverberations” to create “interlocking vignettes” that tell the story of how modern Canada evolved.

“A certain vision of Canada,” Hughes writes, “ . . . shared by a majority of Canadians, connects the chapters. “This vision is largely liberal, progressive, anglophone and centralist.” He mitigates this by adding he’s given “some attention” to voices that differ from this vision. Despite his detailed research and obvious academic knowledge, the book’s structure denies the author a unifying theme. Most chapters elaborate on history students should have learned by the end of high school. 

In ways, the book reads like a course textbook so perhaps the listicle theme was employed to jazz it up. Each of the book’s 10 chapters, parsed into similar word counts, hovers around 20 pages long. Hughes launches the book with the date October 13, 1970, the October Crisis, when the country had its first brush with domestic terrorism after members of the separatist FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec’s Labour Minister Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. 

The authors threads history back to the 1700s to explain the crisis. The chapter’s snappy title, “Just Watch Me,” is based on a frustrated retort from then-prime-minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau to a CBC reporter on the steps of Parliament. Reporter Tim Ralfe persisted in asking the prime minister how far he’d go to end to crisis, which had gripped the nation for more than a week and had already resulted in patrols by armed soldiers, until he got the snarky answer that became the chapter’s title.

Three days later, Trudeau proclaimed The War Measures Act across the country, a peacetime first. People were detained then jailed without due process and news outlets were censored. And for a little over three months, “enemy aliens” made the home of peace, order and goodgovernment seem as if it was  morphing into a banana republic.

Hughes next picks September 28, 1972, for the chapter entitled “Team Canada’s Most Famous Goal,” to subsequently romanticize the drama of the Summit hockey series and exaggerate its role as foreign policy during the existing Cold War. “It is in this larger context of Cold War mistrust . . . that we must situate what would become the most famous game in the history of Canadian hockey,” he writes.

Alan Eagleson, later disgraced, disbarred, and jailed for fraud during his time as a hockey kingpin, was a major player in staging the series. Yet even with this hindsight, Hughes downplays the actions of series officials, organizers and sponsors as well as their meddling, the power politics and grandstanding throughout the games. He also ignores the bad sportsmanship and bickering between the Soviets and Canadians during the series, wrapping up the chapter with the treacle and sentiment that’s mythologized it to this day.

“For that one defining moment on the afternoon of September 28, 1972, Canadians came together in a way they never had before and perhaps never will again.” The next two chapters, “The Patriation of the Constitution,” on April 17, 1982, and “The Multiculturalism Act,” on July 21, 1988, are disjointed and confusing, largely because Hughes must cram hundreds of years of history into just under 42 pages for both. 

Hughes’ next chapter tackles the December 6, 1989, Montreal Massacre in what is arguably the book’s best work. For in 17 pages, Hughes paints a vivid picture of the day Marc Lépine fumbled his way into École Polytechnique to find his targets and brutally murder 14 female engineering students, all detested for being “feminists.” This chapter does focus on the events of one notorious day in Canadian history unlike most of the others. Hughes draws on a wide range of resources and numerous sources, including the coroner’s report and witness statements, to show how the massacre sparked a national outcry for tighter gun control and better treatment for women.

Hughes’s choice of May 25, 1995 as a day most important for gay rights is odd. His focus on a Supreme Court ruling that defeated a same-sex couple’s bid for spousal pension benefits baffles, given the range of significant dates that created more quality for gay Canadians. The legal foundation for the chapter results in jargon and hard-to-follow, obscure legal arguments, far from dramatic reading.

The next two chapters, pegged to October 30, 1995, “The Quebec Referendum,” and June 2, 2015, “The Release of the Executive Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” suffer the same flaws as some earlier chapters. Though Hughes tackles important, long-standing events and treaties, he does not give French Canadians or Indigenous people their due when he crams hundreds of years of historical, social and cultural change into a scant 42 pages.

Hughes’s next date, “The Tragically Hip’s Final Concert,” on August 20, 2016, was hardly historic or epic within the Canadian psyche. Though fans who watched the nationally broadcast performance were justifiable grief stricken over lead singer Gord Downie’s losing battle with brain cancer, the author’s choice fails significantly when stacked up against other events that year. They include: the death of Toronto’s internationally notorious mayor, Rob Ford, multiple charges laid against a former nurse who allegedly used insulin in serial killings, or sex-abuse allegations against one of Quebec and Canada’s most influential film directors.

One of the author’s most questionable choices was made in the book’s final chapter, where he notes March 8, 2018, the day Canada released a new $10 bill depicting a black woman in honour of Viola Desmond as a victory for racial discrimination. Canada granted Desmond its first posthumous pardon for her mistreatment by the judicial system sixty-four years earlier. But Hughes does not call the move for what it was, a cynical bit of two-for-one tokenism aimed to show the government as sensitive to racial and sexual inequality.

Many have since questioned why Canada simply did not choose two separate currency denominations, one honouring a black person to recognize racial discrimination and another honouring a woman to recognize sexism.

Since the book was conceived just before the COVID pandemic began and written during it, the sea changes that ensued created a logistical problem beyond the author’s control, which he briefly acknowledges it in the last few chapters. However, Hughes can be slammed for paying little more than lip service to one of, if not the most important, factors that has shaped Canada’s history, namely being the northern neighbour to an increasingly unstable superpower. 

He barely discusses the subject and its impact on Canada’s development, omitting the NAFTA Free Trade agreement. These flaws rest squarely at his feet.

10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron W. Hughes, University of Alberta Press, 216 pages.