Once upon a time, more than twenty years ago, I set out from Harvard with my newly minted doctorate to teach Canadian history to students at UBC in Vancouver. In my innocence, I had supposed that there was a genuinely national history to teach. It was the story of Cartier and Champlain, the Plains of Abraham, Upper and Lower Canada, the struggle for responsible government and the achievement of Confederation. Try teaching that to students on Canada's West Coast. To them, it was just an interesting fable about a distant land two thousand miles to the east. They didn't begin to believe it was their story until the railway made it to Vancouver. It took a semester for this particular Torontonian to realize that the national history I took for granted was essentially regional—the story of the settlement of what Donald Creighton called 'the empire of the St. Lawrence.'

The other reason the history I was teaching wasn't a genuinely national history was that it left out almost all of the people. It was a history of the politics, diplomacy and warfare which led to the creation of British North America and the Canadian political system. While this has to be the core of any national history, it leaves out a lot . Where were the sod-busters, the Prairie settlers ? Where were the Ukrainians ? Where were their own ancestors, my students wanted to know ? Where were the Chinese labourers who built the railway ? The people from the sub-continent of India who came out to cut timber ? The Japanese who worked in the market gardens of BC's lower mainland ? The history I was teaching them left out what mattered to my students. They couldn't make sense of the photographs in their family albums or the tales told by their grandmothers and grandfathers. And as for the aboriginal peoples, whose civilization had marked the history of the Pacific Northwest, if my students wanted to study them, they had to head over to the anthropology department. Their achievements—and their tragedy-- didn't belong in the Canadian story.

Of course things have changed radically since I taught out at UBC. I don't know whether we have a genuinely national history—one which incorporates the five regions of the country—but I do know that the story is more inclusive of all Canadians. Thanks to the young social historians who came out of graduate school in the Sixties and Seventies, ordinary people—the immigrants, workers, orphaned children, religious groups and aboriginal peoples—have come back to the center of the story where they belong. Of course, this makes it more difficult to tell Canada's story: we have to keep asking who the 'we' is . Jack Granatstein seems to lament this, and to feel that our history genuflects too much to political correctness, to a pious wish to be inclusive and uplifting about all of our national communities. It's not political correctness so much as long overdue recognition that the national story has been defined by a constant struggle over who belongs, who is included, who gets the right to use the word 'we' and who gets labeled 'they.'

Jack Granatstein also seems to lament the fragmentation of our common historical understanding, the waning of a sense of a 'shared' history. Again, what history ? Whose history ? Our national experience has been recurrently bedeviled (as well as enriched) by the fact that English and French Canada do not share the same history of 1759. For the English, it is a victory; for the Quebecois, a bitter defeat. For over two hundred years, our politics has been defined by the quarrel over the meaning of that moment. It is a sentimental illusion to suppose that the two communities will ever agree on what it means. At best, we will agree to disagree; we will continue the argument, and the argument—provided it remains civil—will not prevent us from living together and sharing political institutions. It would be nice if, one day Quebecois people would admit that the Conquest didn't turn out too badly for them; that the British conquerors actually safeguarded their religion and laws, and that as a result we share a common matrix of British institutions. Just as it would be nice if the English admitted that the French are not some inconvenient historical anomaly, a troublesome people who have always threatened our unity, but instead that their presence, and the unending argument that goes with it, has defined us both and made us different and actually helps guarantee our joint survival as a distinct people . But we shouldn't count on this kind of shared understanding. History matters to both of us, but we shouldn't suppose it will ever be the same story.

History for Jack Granatstein is a civics lesson. History for me is the story of our arguments: French versus English, native-born versus new arrivals, region versus region, rich versus poor, race versus race, religion versus religion. It's also a story of how we managed to resolve them, how we created a way of agreeing to disagree. Jack Granatstein worries that too much emphasis on our disagreements will turn our history into a victimology. Too much emphasis on the negative till turn us into a nation of victims instead of the proud patriots we should be.

I don't think history is a lesson in patriotism. It should be a lesson in truth. And the truth is both painful and many-sided. What kind of history of Canada is it that would exclude the execution of Riel, the War Measures Act, the bitterly divisive debates about conscription, the residential schools for aboriginal children ? What kind of history would it be that only talked of these darker and more difficult sides of our past ? Just as one-sided as a history that omits them . We would all like to love our country, because we would all like to be reconciled to its past. But first, we need to tell the truth.

Jack Granatstein wants to 'force feed' Canadian history to our immigrants. He seems anxious about whether the center can hold as Canada becomes a fully multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society. I think the center will hold provided it knows how to change. These anxieties about immigration, as he well knows, are old hat in Canada. Doubtless, there were Anglican worthies a century ago who worried about the dreadful things their descendants and mine were going to do to their cherished idea of Canada. But here it is Granatstein, not me, who seems to be losing faith with the history . In Laurier's day we took in millions of southern and eastern Europeans. They didn't speak our language; they didn't have the slightest conception of the history of British North America. Four generations later, their descendants are helping to run the country. The same thing will happen to the Caribbeans, the Asians and the Latin Americans who are now joining the Canadian experiment. Yes, they should learn the history of this country; they should know who Laurier was; they particularly need to understand that we are a nation strengthened, rather than weakened, by competing and contradictory visions of the national experience, and that their vision of who we are and should be matters just as much as those who were born here.

Having disagreed so sharply, let me, in true Canadian fashion, conclude on a note of agreement. Like Jack Granatstein, I'm not a relativist. I don't believe history is just the stories we happen to tell about it. History is both a set of facts about the past and a set of conflicting interpretations about their meaning. The facts matter and all Canadians need to know them. I don't like the idea of a Canada where no one knows who Laurier was , where everyone has forgotten what Pierre Trudeau stood for. We can argue about the facts—and I say the more argument the better—but we are truly done for if we pretend that they do not exist. They do and they set the limits of any arguments we can hope to have . Jack Granatstein is to be warmly congratulated for fighting to make sure that our schools and universities teach us enough good history so that we can disagree about what it means.