Environment and Citizenship in Canadian History

In 2009, many historians criticized the federal government for its publication of a new citizenship guide titled, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship. The new guide represented a significant shift in the portrayal of Canadian history when compared to the previous guide, published in 1997. Ian McKay’s 2011 lecture at the 15th Annual New Frontiers in Graduate History conference at York University in Toronto offered one of the sharpest rebukes of the new citizenship guide in which he argued that the guide attempts to re-conceptualize Canada as a conservative, militant nation.