The Canadian census for the common good

Abstract

I was invited to speak at this workshop primarily because, in my role as a microhistorian, my work is rooted in the description and analysis of individuals within a community over time. Like genealogists, therefore, my work relies heavily on manuscript census information pertaining to individuals, and is therefore particularly vulnerable to the recent suppression of historical evidence about individuals through Bill S18, as Eric Sager outlines in his paper for this panel. My comments today do not, however, address the particular difficulties that this legislation will bring to people within my sub-specialty of microhistory, though they are significant. Instead, I will suggest that the government’s decision to destroy or suppress particular kinds of historical evidence has implications that reach far beyond microhistorians’, and indeed beyond historians’ work, out to the common good of society at large.