Historical underdosing: Pop demography and the crisis in Canadian history

This paper seeks to problematize the crisis in Canadian history by appeal to three related arguments. The first is that history has largely ceased to inform Canadians' lives, not because of the failure of institutions, but because of the cultural transformation of their understanding of the past occasioned by new media and especially by new ideas about how the past is organized. My second claim is that, along with free markets, and small government, so-called neo-conservative ideologues in Canada have sought, deliberately if not systematically, to appropriated Canadian history and to deploy it in support of their contemporary political agenda. My third argument is that this neo-conservative recasting of Canadians' sense of their own history has been abetted by a powerful new literature I call pop demography, which banishes older notions of the historical past as a coherent, life-informing narrative in favour of a new, market-based interpretation in which the essential component is the generational cohort and the essential historical dynamic is generational competition.