A part of our heritage

The Ottawa Citizen considers the anti-semitism of some Canada’s more honoured public servants, including a prime minister, a cabinet minister and a governor general.

All these figures, including Whitton, were “very prominent and important in their day,” said Robert Bothwell, an eminent Canadian historian at the University of Toronto. If their recognition is meant to represent what Canada was, Bothwell said in an e-mail to the Citizen, “then all these people should be commemorated.

“As the war museum controversy some years back should have demonstrated, history is not a series of pleasant bedtime stories, pre-sanitized so that only the worthy appear in order to make our hearts thump with a patriotic pit-a-pat.”