Sharp wit / sharp pencil
The Canada Handbook
by Adrian Raeside
Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$22.95 / 9781550179538
Reviewed by John Belshaw
*
Adrian Raeside’s The Canada Handbook provides light, amusing touches on the country’s history and people, leavened with a few bitter insights. Hints on how to fit in, how to insult other Canadians, how to survive. Many stereotypes are on display. For a kiwi living on the Canadian Mediterranean (Vancouver Island), where ice is mainly found in a G&T, Raeside has a lot to say about hockey. And international affairs.
Does the handbook take itself seriously? Just a bit. Raeside is sufficiently obsessed with his adopted country to have drawn/written several collections on the topic. This one, however, was forged in the fires of our current elbows-up moment. The US president appears as a buffoon, a blowhard, and a Cthululian monster (so, yes, pretty accurate). In addition to having fun, the message is clear: Canadians need to appreciate what they’ve got, enough to defend it.
On receiving my review copy I had a sharp pang of déja vu. The cover colours and layout are strikingly like those of the Ferguson brothers’ How to Be a Canadian (Douglas & McIntyre, 2007). Some of the shticks are too. Very different approaches, of course, but that similarity raised the question of genre.
Is there a Canadian identity humour niche? I did a quick Google search and found comparable How To Be books on America, Britain, and France and a slew of How to be Australian titles, but nothing like that for Nigeria, Korea, or Brazil. There’s a separate genre of How To Be books written by outsiders, including a How To Be Chinese. I will bet good money that there are several How To Be French equivalents written by haughty English authors. Once we move to the Handbook category, however, things turn very serious indeed. The French and the Brazilians in particular offer sober and unfunny advice on how to pass for a local. American and British titles of this kind lean hard into legal obligations and imperial might. It’s hardly a big sample but it reinforces my long-held belief that Canada’s distinguished record of producing and fashioning humourists is one of our great national achievements.
In BC, cartoonists like Len Norris, Roy Peterson, Bob Krieger, Dan Murphy, Raeside, and (more lately) Pia Guerra have demonstrated what a sharp wit can do with a sharp pencil. Nurtured for decades by daily spots on the local newspaper’s editorial/opinion page, these giants of jest created lasting and recognizable characters, styles, voices, values, and understandings of who we are. Norris, Murphy, Raeside, and Guerra were born abroad, and that may have something to do with their interest in and their take on Canadian affairs. Peterson and Krieger, along with Montréal’s Aislin and the Ferguson lads hail from the Great White North, but it is difficult to sense a distinction between the two camps. There is a pedigree here that runs from Peterson and Stanley Burke’s Frog Fables and Beaver Tales through How to Be a Canadian to Raeside’s Canada Handbook and it is not easily explained by immigrant insights or local-born attachment. But it is undeniably present, a need to express a needling affection for the country and its people, no doubt activated in part by a Canadian audience that wants to see its foibles drawn and quartered. It is worth noting in that latter regard that this domain is white and overwhelmingly male and I suspect the audience reflects that.
You probably want to know if The Canada Handbook is amusing. At the end of the day that’s between you and your funny bone. I can say for certain that Raeside effectively puts into pictures a taste of our existential angst. In years to come, when historians look for how we processed the collapse of the old alliance with America, they will find this collection to be a helpful resource.
*
John Douglas Belshaw, Ph.D., FRHistS, is a history professor at Thompson Rivers University – Open Learning. Among other accomplishments, he is the author of Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (UBC Press 2010), the co-author, with his colleague and spouse Diane Purvey, of Vancouver Noir: 1930-1960 (Anvil, 2011), the editor of Vancouver Confidential (Anvil, 2014), and the author or co-author of three open textbooks on Canadian and Indigenous histories. Lately he has turned his attention to the history of cycling in Vancouver and how it illuminates aspects of the city’s past, including community safety, elite formation, and gender. John Belshaw makes his home in Vancouver’s East End. [Editor’s note: John Belshaw has also reviewed books by William Gibson, Rolf Knight, Cecil Foster, Jack Little, and Charles Demers for The Ormsby Review and The British Columbia Review.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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