Children are being taught to respect Indigenous cultures, but not the lessons that would balance out this new appreciation

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I wasn’t expecting a school class trip to invoke despair about the state of Canadian history. But it happened anyway.

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It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Canada has a long history of national forgetting and cultural erasure. We know about some parts of this — about the assimilation efforts of residential schools, most notably.

But less often noticed is the weird Canadian tradition of deliberately misrepresenting and then forgetting large chunks of our national story in the interest of reaching out to cultural minorities.

We did it from the 1960s to the 1980s in a push to make French Canadians and Quebecers feel like they were part of Canada. It was well-intentioned. But it meant eradicating old symbols of Britishness from Canadian iconography — Royal Mail became Canada Post and Dominion Day became Canada Day — this last one was done almost in secret on a Friday afternoon in the summer in Parliament without telling anyone it was going to happen.

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