How the Scots Invented Canada

Canadians of Scottish descent, who today total over 4.7 million, have never made up more than 16 per cent of Canada’s population. Yet they have supplied thirteen of twenty-two Canadian prime ministers, and have made proportionate contributions in exploration, education, banking, military service, railroading, invention, literature, you name it.

Award-winning author Ken McGoogan has written a vivid, sweeping narrative showcasing more than sixty Scots who have shaped Canada. They include fur traders Alexander Mackenzie and the “Scotch West-Indian” James Douglas, who established national boundaries; politicians John A. Macdonald and Nellie McClung, who created a system of government; and visionaries Tommy Douglas, James Houston, Doris Anderson and Marshall McLuhan, who turned Canada into a complex nation that celebrates diversity. McGoogan toasts Robbie Burns, recalls the first settlers to wade ashore at Pictou, Nova Scotia, and celebrates such hybrid figures as the Cherokee Scot John Norton and Cuthbert Grant, father of the Métis nation. In How the Scots Invented Canada, Ken McGoogan uncovers the Scottish history of a nation-building miracle.

KEN MCGOOGAN has published more than a dozen books, among them Fatal Passage, How the Scots Invented Canada, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, Celtic Lightning and Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. He has won the Pierre Berton Award for History, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and the Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan has worked as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. He sails with Adventure Canada, teaches creative non-fiction in the MFA program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and lives in Toronto with his artist-photographer wife, Sheena Fraser McGoogan.