CTV Interview

"Canada AM" with Valerie Pringle

PRINGLE: Well, there aren't many Canadian history books that have a sentence like "Canada's a country created largely by bastards." Anyway, this is an interesting book, rather broad in its sweep: a look at our history and the people who kind of formed it and then judging them. Written by a bestselling author named Will Ferguson who has written a bunch of guidebooks and a book called Why I Hate Canadians and has taken this on. What do you call it? "A crash course in cultural literacy." I mean you decided to do a broad sweep this time.

FERGUSON: Yes, from Champlain right to Chretien. I wanted to put personality back in history. So I went through history and I took the key players and I evaluated them. I had the highly sophisticated, scientific method of --

PRINGLE: Jerk or not jerk. Dink or not dink. Bastard or Bonehead.

FERGUSON: Bastard or Bonehead. And all kidding aside, I could say there are leaders who are focused and who succeed and who are ruthless and who win. And there are other leaders who are inept, sincere, reactive. Or I could just say "bastard." If I say bastard you understand all the nuance, all the underlying meanings. If I say Pierre Trudeau was a bastard --

PRINGLE: Oh, you say he's a Bastard Maximus Supremo.

FERGUSON: Yes. He was the archetypal Bastard. It's all very scientific. I have a giant computer that does this.

PRINGLE: Yeah, we were thinking of the 80th birthday. They were celebrating up at 24 Sussex. So people have been talking a lot about Trudeau the last little while. We had a documentary on this network recently. I mean he still, as they say, haunts us still. And you think he really was a significant leader.

FERGUSON: Yes. Brian Mulroney also haunts us in the way that a bad meal will haunt you later [with] gas.

PRINGLE: But you put him--a bit of both, eh?

FERGUSON: Yeah, he was a hard guy to classify. Ultimately the way he failed at Meech Lake, failed at the Charlottetown Accord, blundered his way, took us right to the edge of a revived separatism for no apparent reason, the way he brought Lucien Bouchard into the fold . . . I rank him as a Bonehead, ultimately. But yeah, Mulroney was a hard guy to-- My computer had trouble with him.

PRINGLE: To categorize. But you had no trouble with John Diefenbaker, for example.

FERGUSON: No. No, he was the other extreme. He was the other kind of ultimate Bonehead. In style you might think he was a Bastard because he had this great, flowery oratory. But he was really, really an inept leader. And he was very reactionary for all his image.

PRINGLE: And Joe Clark you place there as well.

FERGUSON: Joe Clark, that was a hard one. [laughs]

PRINGLE: Because he's on the cover. . . He's back, he's still serving.

FERGUSON: Poor Joe. Joe went back in. What he reminded me of was if you've ever had a friend that you pulled from a bar room brawl and you dust him off and you say, "Are you okay?" and then he wanders back into the bar room again. And so, "You're on your own, Joe. Go to it, go to it!" Joe is --

PRINGLE: Noble.

FERGUSON: Bonehead/Noble, tomato/tomahtto.

PRINGLE: So a lot of people might think this is simplistic. Or who are you? I mean you're not even a historian.

FERGUSON: Yes, I'm not an academic historian. Isn't that shocking? That's terrible.

PRINGLE: And academics all love Mackenzie King. You put him way down your list.

FERGUSON: Mackenzie King. He's a professor's hero. I defy anybody outside of the academic world to say they're inspired by Mackenzie King. He's a professor's hero. He was a bureaucrat, he was an administrator, he was a very good administrator. He was not a great man, he was not an inspiring man.

PRINGLE: But it's interesting. I think people might be interested in--again, it's your opinion. I mean, Rene Levesque. You know, heart-tugging Rene Levesque.

FERGUSON: The Joe Clark of Quebec Nationalism.

PRINGLE: Bonehead?

FERGUSON: Ultimately. It's the end result that counts. And I was criticized for Rene Levesque--

PRINGLE: But you make Bouchard a Bastard and he hasn't achieved his results.

FERGUSON: Yes, it's tentative. Like, Rene Levesque, if you had talked to me back in 1979 I would have classified him as a Bastard. So it's ongoing.

PRINGLE: Louis Riel? A bit of both.

FERGUSON: Louis Riel of 1870 was a Bastard. He brought Manitoba into Confederation. He outplayed John A. Macdonald--That's no small feat.
The Louis Riel of 1885: the martyr, the delusional prophet of the grasslands was a Bonehead. So your career can arc.

PRINGLE: That's good to know.

FERGUSON: There's many degrees of Bastard-ability and Boneheadness.

PRINGLE: And Elijah Harper. You put him as a Bastard.

FERGUSON: Oh yes. Bastard. He ground the entire constitutional progression just to a halt. The entire machine came to a halt. Actually, I really admire Elijah. He's one of my heroes.

PRINGLE: And the Famous Five. We were celebrating them yesterday. They erected a statue in Calgary.

FERGUSON: Yes. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard. All of them. It's gender-neutral.

PRINGLE: Gender-neutral.

FERGUSON: What they don't tell is the story of why--What sparked [the Persons Case]. It was a young prostitute named Lizzie Cyr who was up on vagrancy charges. Her lawyer was trying to get her off and a female magistrate condemned her to six months hard labour. And her lawyer was trying to get her off. What they don't tell you is in confirming women "as persons" they also upheld [Lizzie Cyr's] conviction and she was sent away for six months hard labour. That's the story you don't hear about the Famous Five.

PRINGLE: You like the heroes though.

FERGUSON: Yes.

PRINGLE: I was thinking as I was reading along. Some of the stories . . . you should get, what, Stompin' Tom to set your book to music?

FERGUSON: [laughs] There you go.

PRINGLE: Sing about the good guys, the Bastards and the Boneheads.

FERGUSON: Yes, because we've just come through this awful era of ideology and policy and sweeping social forces --

PRINGLE: Well, I like how you characterize the traditional demands of Quebec: "Gimme. Gimme. Gimme. More."

FERGUSON: Yes, those are the four traditional demands.

PRINGLE: That's historic?

FERGUSON: Yes, it's a highly refined system I'm dealing with here. It's history for people who don't normally read history or for people who've forgotten a lot of it. It's not history by committee. It doesn't pretend to be objective. But the facts are there, the research is there.

PRINGLE: So, Canada: Bastard or Bonehead?

FERGUSON: Well, at the risk of alienating everybody --

PRINGLE: Well, go right ahead. It won't be new to you.

FERGUSON: We're a good-natured country who tends to favour Bastards. We balance it out.

PRINGLE: Because we need to be led by them, I guess.

FERGUSON: Yes.

PRINGLE: Alright. Thank you.

FERGUSON: Well, thanks for having me.

Canada AM, CTV
October 19, 1999