Mark Bourrie Transcript

My name is Mark Bourrie. I'm an Ottawa-based author, historian, and lawyer. I write a lot about history. I've been writing about history since I was a kid. And my latest books are biographies, mainly of Jean de Brébeuf, Pierre Radisson, and George McCullagh, who founded The Globe and Mail in the 1930s. I like really interesting people, and that's why I've been drawn to biographies. Though the project I'm working on now isn't really a biography; it's more of a big story.

But I like things that don't fit into boxes, where I can look at a person's life and say: this person was multifaceted. This is the kind of person that I would probably have really enjoyed spending some time with, so that when my readers read about them, they spend time with them. I like things to be interesting. People have done enough homework in their lives in high school and university. They don't like to do it. And I like to give them things to think about, but also make it entertaining at the same time. I'm drawn to these stories because often the answers to the questions we have now are somewhat in the past. I don't think the past always fits with the present, but just for example, two of my books deal with contact between early European arrivals in North America and functioning Indigenous societies.

And one, the Pierre Radisson book, which is called Bush Runner, is an example of contact where there's respect and things work out for both sides. And the other, Crosses in the Sky, which is a biography of the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf, is about contact where Europeans try to immediately change the society of the people that they meet. And now as we talk about Indigenous rights and Indigenous issues in our society, we really need to know how we got to where we are. How does media shape where we are today and how we see things of the past? I think people who have a good sense of how media works understand that almost all media comes at issues from a point of view. And that's really useful to historians because we can go back into the record and say, well, you know, conservatives sort of saw things this way and more liberal people saw things that way because we know which publications are liberal and conservative.

We're very quick to criticize media bias, but it can actually be valuable to the historian. Our problem now is that our media overall is dying. And the idea of a professional media where people strive to get truth is being shunted aside for just basically partisan messaging. That is something that concerns me quite a bit and it's something I write about outside of my historical writing. I hope the impact of my work is that people feel connected and grounded to a separate Canada, a Canada that's different from the rest of the world, that should take pride in its geography, in its history, a Canada that has a past that is worth embracing, and that being Canadian is something that's worth embracing. That we're not just sort of Americans without the right to vote or Americans who are dodging some of the issues in the United States, but benefiting from sort of the wealth of the United States.

I would love it if people could go across the country and see areas of Canada and know that interesting people, brave people, sometimes absurd people, built a nation on that for them. I think it's important for the public to engage with history because we're losing our country. We are under an existential threat that we have not been under in all my life. Even as a kid in the ‘60s and '70s when we talked about Canadian independence, when we talked about Canadian economic nationalism, a new constitution, we were never told by a superpower that they would break us economically and take us over as a 51st state. So, if we're going to keep this country, we better know it. We better be attached to it. It better be our country. When people talk about, you know, in my country, blah, blah, blah — that country is Canada. And if people don't know what Canada means because they don't know its history and its geography, then we've already lost.