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Ask Trent University history professor John Milloy, and he will tell you Canadians have been “much too polite” about their history.

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While the FLQ was blowing up mailboxes in Quebec in the 1960s, Canada became so bent on selling an uncontroversial national narrative that it neglected all the meaty details: The hard-drinking Prime Minister who lied and cheated his way towards a cross-continental railway; anti-government rebels shot dead on Yonge Street in Toronto; voyageurs who slept their way across the frontier; and the hundreds of 1940s Vancouverites who looked the other way when authorities came for the Nakumura family next door.

“Blood, sex, greed,” he said. “That’s the good stuff, that’s what brings people into the movie theatres.”

[np-related]

Similar sentiments may have been on the mind of heritage minister James Moore this week when he mustered a crowd at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., to announce that it was not the Museum of Civilization anymore, but the Canadian Museum of History. It was also going to have a lot more cool artifacts, like Rocket Richard’s jersey and the Last Spike of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.