CBC failed to renew the broadcast rights for Canada: A People’s History.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Joe Martin is the president emeritus of Canada’s History Society. Kealy Wilkinson is executive director of the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation. Susan Reisler is a former CBC Radio and TV correspondent and host.
As Canada Day approaches, we find ourselves emerging from isolation and into a season of anger and grief. Discovered unmarked graves with the remains of 215 children – with probably thousands more to be found across Canada – are now speaking. Statues have fallen; celebrations have been cancelled; schools are being renamed. National pride in being one of the most civil societies on Earth now mixes uncomfortably with historical bewilderment. But the resulting alloy – reflection – should be embraced.
This land has an epic history. Before the pyramids, before the founding of Rome, people walked here. There were more nations in North America a thousand years ago than there are in the European Union today – nations with their own cosmologies, gods, languages and customs. Their descendants are with us.
And in the past 400 years, a vast human migration brought waves of people displaced from France, the Scottish Highlands, the famine in Ireland, the Ukrainian steppes, China’s Pearl River Delta, the concentration camps of the Second World War, and from decades of social and political turbulence around the world. Those four centuries contain stories of saints and pirates, orphans and scoundrels, peacemakers and plunderers – although the vast majority, comprising millions of people, were just honest people seeking only a future for their families. Still, displacement begat displacement, and Indigenous peoples suffered from the waves of settlement.
A country that does not know its history cannot understand who its people were, who they now are and where they are going. We ignore history at our peril.
And yet we are ignoring it.
From October, 2000, to November, 2001, CBC/Radio-Canada aired Canada: A People’s History/le Canada: une histoire populaire as its millennial project. It was produced in both French and English on a widescreen cinematic scale, attracting the largest audience for a documentary series ever broadcast on any subject in Canada. It was a collaboration between the country’s leading historians, researchers and historical re-enactors, drawn from all of our founding nations – Indigenous, English, French and immigrant cultures.
The series told our story through the eyes of the people who lived it, rooted entirely in their words. It did not shy away from the dark pages of our history. It was so successful that it was translated into seven of Canada’s most used “unofficial” languages, and the two accompanying books and DVDs became number-one bestsellers. No history is perfect and each is a product of its time, but Canada: A People’s History was a landmark in recognizing our Indigenous heritage, the role of women, immigrants and workers, and the underlying stresses in our society.
But 20 years later, this celebrated visual legacy has been consigned to broadcast oblivion. Last year, the CBC failed to renew the broadcast rights, reportedly for reasons of budgetary priority – even though spending $30-million in taxpayers’ dollars to produce an evergreen television series, only to cut off public access to it, is itself an irresponsible use of funds. By refusing to update routine music and archival license rights, the CBC is effectively holding hostage the most significant hours of television ever produced in this country, preventing it or any other company from running a program wholly paid for by Canadians.
While stuck at home during the pandemic, we have at least had access to storehouses of television programs from around the world on streaming services. But you could not find the complete Canada: A People’s History – despite the fact that in the two decades since it was first aired, our Canadian family has grown by 11 million, more than half of them immigrants keen to learn about their new country.
CBC/Radio-Canada was created in the 1930s as a public electronic railway to carry Canadian voices across the country: One that would tell our stories, both the good and the bad. Over the years, it has done this. But few today recognize this achievement because so much of what CBC/Radio-Canada has produced is dead to the world, locked up in its huge black-hole archives. Yet it is there we will find the voices and faces that can give life to the history Canadians need to know.
When we wrestle with difficult questions about our national identity and future this Canada Day, Canada’s public broadcaster should be at the forefront of the discussion. To do so, it would only be responsible for the CBC to announce the rerelease of Canada: A People’s History.
It’s our history, after all. We have the right to see it.
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