Canadians Don't Know Jack about War of 1812

Young Canadians are particularly in the dark over one of the country's most important chapters as its bicentennial approaches.

Whoever said Canadians have no sense of history has been ... well, proven right once again, as a study on citizens' knowledge of the War of 1812 finds it to be seriously lacking. Next year, the federal government will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the start of the war, which pitted the Americans against the British, with much of the fighting taking place on Upper Canadian soil (that's Ontario). Canadian forces, a combination of British regulars, farmers, and aboriginals, successfully repelled an American invasion after they burned down the Parliament buildings in York (now Toronto). We politely returned the favour by burning the hell out of the White House. The war's end led to a new sense of Canadian unity and pride owing to the military's successes, and resulted in the creation of the Rideau Canal and military installations across Upper and Lower Canada. It also led political leaders to consider banding the provinces of British North America to prevent further invasion from those dastardly Yanks. The rest, as they say, is history.

But a survey performed for the government found that just about no one in the country knows anything about one of the most important chapters in Canada's history. Among the findings were that only 14 per cent of respondents could correctly identify Canada, the U.S., and Britain as the three participants of the war and 40 per cent of people between the ages of 25 and 34 had never even heard of the war. Among those who knew of the war, 40 per cent couldn't name a single person linked to the war. Those who knew the most about the war were from Ontario and older, while the further respondents were from Ontario, the less knowledge they were likely to have about the conflict that essentially set the foundations for the nation of Canada.