Mel Hurtig wants to beat some sense into Canadians, and he’s using a big hardcover book to do it. Well, figuratively speaking, anyway.

The former politician stops in Edmonton on Thursday, May 22, and while we probably won’t see him running amok in the streets, smacking pedestrians in the face with his latest work The Truth About Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing, And Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country, his lecture will likely have the same pummeling effect.

The heavy hardcover in question is the culmination of three and a half years of research and the result is a shocking testament to how Canada has fallen behind in nearly every international field.

And when Hurtig is testifying, Canadians would do well to listen.The Edmonton-born author, Order of Canada recipient, and Canadian superpatriot’s other weighty projects include the creation of The Canadian Encyclopedia and the establishment of Hurtig Publishers here in Edmonton. In 1992 he took a political turn and helped form the left-wing National Party of Canada, specifically to campaign against the North American Free Trade Agreement.

SEE spoke with Hurtig about damning statistics, Canada’s perpetual identity crisis, and what he sees as our fall from grace at the hands of a lazy media.

SEE Magazine: Why did you write The Truth About Canada?

Mel Hurtig: I was pretty disturbed at how the media wasn’t doing a good job of reporting an awful lot of very important things. There isn’t one Canadian in 100 that knows the information that’s in this book, and the information is pretty shocking. And I think if we keep going in the way we’ve been going, we’re going to end up as a have-not country and a country with poor education and poor productivity.

SEE: What has led you to believe Canada has changed for the worse?

MH: I’ll give you one of the most startling figures in the book—the lowest 94 per cent of Canadian families own a grand total of three per cent of the wealth in this country. And over the last 25 years, the average Canadian family [has] gained income in the ridiculous grand total of $2.12 per year. So we’re not performing [economically] the way we should compared to other countries. We’re not performing the way we used to perform. 

SEE: How do these statistics translate into real life?

MH: Six per cent of Canadians own 97 per cent of the family wealth in this country. How that translates into real life [is] 21 per cent of the jobs in Canada are low-paying jobs compared to the European Union, [where] it’s only eight to 12 per cent. That’s a dramatic difference. It’s true that the Alberta economy is an economy unlike any other in the country, but many Albertans themselves are beginning to ask, “At what cost is this? Should we be destroying the environment the way we have been in the tarsands?”

SEE: How does this shift tie in with our ongoing identity crisis?

MH: Canada isn’t the country we think we are. You go down Jasper Avenue or Whyte Avenue and you ask people, “Are we a peacekeeping country?” And most of them will say, “Yes, Canada has a long reputation as being a peacekeeping country.” [But] we have dropped now to 36th in the world in terms of peacekeeping. We don’t have a single Canadian officer in [the] peacekeeping headquarters at the United Nations. Is Canada dropping in certain aspects? Just ask the great economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has [asked] over and over again in the last little while, “Where’s Canada? Where’s Canada on foreign aid? How come you haven’t kept the promises you made?” 

SEE: Was this self-image ever accurate?

MH: Oh yeah. We were among the world’s leading peacekeepers during Lloyd Axworthy’s time. As Minister of External Affairs, he helped developed a treaty against landmines, and there were many other ways in which we were... the leaders in the world in compassionate activities.