In order to clarify this debate , I can see three distinct questions: Do Canadians possess "common cultural capital ? Should we be trying to strengthen it ? Is the country jeopardized if we don't ?

What do we mean by "common cultural capital" ? It's Jack Granatstein's phrase, and I presume he means a set of understandings, widely shared by Canadians about how the country came to be, what its basic rules are, and what it stands for. From these understandings flow certain ways of behaving towards each other: because we understand each other, we are more tolerant, more civil, more knowledgeable about our country and the choices it faces. So common cultural capital helps the country hold together, because it makes us better citizens. So there seems to be a lot at stake here.

Let me concede what I can to this view. It's hard to imagine Canada functioning without some shared understandings: the rules of democracy, the rule of law, shared knowledge of the geography, how the political system works, or is supposed to work; and certain habits of mind which go with these understandings: a willingness to argue out our differences instead of reaching for a gun; a belief that everybody should try to stand on their own two feet, coupled with a view that those who genuinely can't are entitled to some help.

The trouble is that there isn't anything very Canadian about these understandings: most Western liberal democracies would have much the same common ground. Our history would make this common ground distinctive , but the question is does common cultural capital need to be distinctive in order to work ? Most of the time, it doesn't. Shared historical consciousness might actually be a marginal addition to the 'common cultural capital' that makes Canada hold together. What actually holds us together is something altogether more prosaic: people doing their jobs. This is a disagreeable thought to any historian. Certainly it is to me. But it is a thought which must be entertained, lest we proclaim how essential our discipline—and way of seeing are—to a country which may share our view that history matters, only not as much as we like to think it does.

So we do have common cultural capital—but we share it with other countries, and it is not as distinctive, not as Canadian, and not as historical as we like to think. It is a product of our history, but it might still work to keep us civil even if we had mostly forgotten where it came from. Again, a disagreeable thought, but one which sociologists and anthropologists have less difficulty embracing than historians.

Yet the same disagreeable thought can be turned around and made a good deal more agreeable, when seen from another vantage-point. Jack Granatstein believes in some deep way that a common history is essential to Canada's survival. He doesn't say this, but why else would he want to be 'force-feeding' (his word) a core curriculum of Canadian political and institutional history to immigrants and adolescent Canadians ? You only 'force-feed' ideas which you think are going to make an essential difference .

I share his concern about the fact that history is not taught in Canadian schools the way it was or the way it should be. Like him, I don't want history reduced to victimology. I don't want it to bow to every current fashion of political correctness. I don't want to see it elbowed out of the schools because other things—computers, business studies whatever—seem more relevant. All this is common ground between us.

What I refuse to believe is that widely diffused knowledge of Canadian history is essential to Canadian unity and some kind of necessary pre-requisite for adequate citizenship. There are many kinds of good citizen, and not all of the forms of good citizenship require knowledge of the Prime Ministers of Canada going back to Confederation. Neighbourliness, civic courage, willingness to serve in political office, community pride: all of these can be enhanced by historical consciousness, but they do not require it.