Daniel Francis
Daniel Francis, a North Vancouver-based writer, is the editor of the print
and online editions of the Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has written more than twenty books of history, including The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, and National Dreams: Myth, Memory and
Canadian History. His biography of Vancouver mayor Louis D. Taylor won the
2004 City of Vancouver Book Award and in 2008, Operation Orca, a book about killer whales on the West Coast which he co-authored with biologist Gil
Hewlett, was named Foreword Magazine's Nature Book of the Year. He is a regular columnist with Geist magazine and blogs regularly on things British Columbian at www.knowbc.blogspot.com
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Most biographies are written about people who are well known – artists, politicians, porn stars, whatever – but I chose to write a biography of Louis D. Taylor for the opposite reason, because I’d never heard of him. Taylor was Vancouver’s longest-serving mayor. He first ran for election in 1902 and finally retired, or more accurately, was retired by the voters, in 1938. In between, he served ...
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Many British Columbians could be found Wednesday morning crying great tears of disappointment into their coffee cups. No, it wasn’t the defeat of our beloved Canucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs on Monday night (though that still hurts). Rather it was the defeat of a radical new voting system in Tuesday’s provincial election that has many electoral reformers crying the blues. In a surprising (to ...
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Making History in British Columbia
When British Columbians go to the polls in a provincial election on May 12, they will be doing more than choosing a new government. For the second straight election, they will also be voting in a referendum asking them whether they are in favour of transforming the province’s electoral system. If the vote is 60 percent in favour, a new voting system will be in place for the next provincial ...
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BRITISH COLUMBIA’S EMBARRASSING SLOGAN
british columbia, slogan
Reading Gaston Deschênes’ recent post about the Quebec motto, “je me souviens”, I felt envious. Envious because instead of a modestly evocative provincial motto, rooted in history, we here in British Columbia must endure an inane slogan invented by political hucksters. “British Columbia: The Best Place on Earth” was dreamed up in the bowels of Premier Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government and ...
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Reading Brian McKillop’s new biography of Pierre Berton, I was reminded of the day I met John A. Macdonald. In 1974 the CBC televised an eight-part adaptation of Berton’s railway books. Berton, no stranger to television, narrated the series himself, but the scene stealer was William Hutt who played John A. Macdonald in the dramatized sequences. Not long afterwards, I was lucky enough to meet ...
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Wasn’t it gratifying, during the recent hijinks on Parliament Hill, to notice how often the past was invoked to explain, speculate and clarify? It was as if the whole country was attending an introductory history seminar, learning the difference between prorogation and dissolution, how to parse the governor general’s every option and, most importantly, how to compare today’s events with similar ...
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The holiday season seems to bring out the list-maker in people, and I’m not talking about everyone’s wish list for Santa. It is the time of year when critics of all persuasions draw up lists of the ten best this and the twenty worst that. In the spirit of Christmas, then, I am getting in on the fun. At the beginning of December, The Globe’s book review published its annual list of the top 100 ...
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Do Canada’s academic historians have a collective case of writers’ block? I’ve been getting the impression lately that Canadian academics are not producing much in the way of readable history books for the general public. Deciding to test this impression, I conducted a small, completely unscientific survey. I tracked down the results of the last five years worth of major national non-fiction ...
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In her Remembrance Day column in The Globe and Mail , Margaret Wente repeats the familiar lament that Canadians do not know their own history, particularly their own military history. “The immense saga of Canada at war is disappearing down the memory hole,” writes Ms. Wente, who predictably blames the schools for their “collective failure to teach the next generation about how we fought, and ...
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There's No Conflict in Conflict
Leafing through the autumn book announcements in a recent Quill and Quire, I was struck by the preponderance of upcoming non-fiction titles devoted to military history. Books about Canada at war – by both academic and popular writers -- dominated the list.
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