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Building Canada: People and Projects that Shaped the Nation
By Jonathan F. Vance
Penguin Canada, 318 pages, $26

In a country that is disintegrating faster than a pair of $10 shoes — in which the once-great forest industry has been reduced to sawdust, the family farm is boot-deep in debt and the national airline dishes up pretzels and spiced Shreddies for dinner (this to say nothing of a House of Commons in which 51 MPs are committed to spoiling Confederation) — there is a touch of poignancy about a book that heralds a dozen historic construction projects, each of which contributed both physically and psychologically to this grand and troubled country we call Canada.

In the most primitive physical sense, the country was of course built 3.6 billion years ago, of Precambrian granite, and was decorated when the last glacier retreated and grasses and forest crept north across the rock.

However, it wasn't until the Europeans arrived and ransacked the cultures that had been here for millennia that the newer and more civilized notion of "building" was introduced to these lands and waters. Which is to say building with money, ambition and blueprints (often big money, ruthless ambition and wildly pretentious blueprints) — and of course with wood, stone, bricks, steel and glass.

Building Canada is historian Jonathan Vance's account of the construction of, among other things, our telephone and electrical lines; our highways, bridges and air strips; our railway hotels and beaux-art and neoclassical legislative buildings. It is the story of the people who did the planning, of those who did the painting and plastering, and of how the resulting structures and installations affected the lives and perspectives of Canadians.

Or were expected to affect those lives and perspectives. In 1942, according to Vance, The Huron Expositor wrote that the arrival of electricity in rural Ontario would allow a farmer to "wake his chickens with bedside buzzers while he grabbed an extra hour's sleep," to "enjoy a leisurely breakfast, prepared by his relaxed and good-spirited wife on the latest appliances" (presumably while he slept), and to "be sure his food and utensils were safe, thanks to electrical sterilization lamps." (It is but a speculative jot to imagine that electrification might also have helped him read the foreclosure or divorce papers when they were served.)

Vance — Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture at the University of Western Ontario — seems to have an almost Freudian fixation with towers and poles as they pertain to the development of the nation. No less than six of his 12 chapters are devoted to vertical erections in the form of telephone poles, hydro poles, grain elevators, corporate towers, memorial towers (Brock's column at Queenston Heights), the great decorative towers and domes that grace our provincial legislative buildings.

The underlying theme of the book is that the construction of all of the above (plus air strips, highways, bridges and performing-arts centres) served to unite the country and enhance its evolving self-awareness. The theme is obvious where bridges, highways and phone lines are concerned, somewhat less so in the realm of, say, war memorials. Vance explains that many of the country's war monuments are of an identical design sculpted by German-born Emanuel Hahn after the First World War and sold to dozens of municipalities that would never have been able to afford an original sculpture (it is indicative of the design's popularity that the city where I grew up, Cornwall, and the city where I live today, Thunder Bay, both have the standard Emanuel Hahn war memorial). The author's thinking seems to be that the sculptures somehow connected people in their sense of loss — and perhaps equally in their patriotism.

Given that Vance is a respected historian and essayist, I might have expected him to go further than he does in examining the "connectedness" that is patriotism — a force as often as not fed by distortion, deception and manipulation, as seen recently in the United States at, say, the beginning of the Iraq War.

While the book is exhaustively researched, solidly written and frequently entertaining (Vance shows a memorable sense of the absurd in his recounting of, say, the catastrophic farce that was the building of the Brock monument), not all of its chapters are of equal appeal. While the chapter on, say, the building of the great architectural towers is observant, fresh and amusing, those on the grain elevators and performing-arts centres seem to have been written by the guy who wrote my Grade 9 geography text which, like an antihistamine, tended to cause drowsiness and impaired judgment.

One of the many things I like well about this book is that in its idiosyncratic choices and leavings (Vance rejects writing about our railways and power dams, includes our highways and bridges), it provoked for me a private deliberation on other major infrastructural developments that might have been included for their significant effect on the minds and well-being of Canadians. Our public libraries come immediately to mind, as does early CBC radio, with its vastly popular presentations of Jake and the Kid and Kate Aitken and the unifying magnet that was Foster Hewitt's Hockey Night in Canada.

As for my original thoughts on the disintegration of the country, it is perhaps telling that fully half of the projects depicted in Building Canada have fallen on shadowy, if not evil, days. Our grain elevators are but a memory; our arts facilities are begging; our biggest electricity company is swamped by debt. Our war memorials say as much about skepticism as heroism.

On the positive side, not all of our legislative buildings are madhouses, and a couple of our great railway hotels have managed to remain solvent.

Meanwhile, it is instructive to try to imagine what a sequel to Building Canada might look like, featuring nation-building projects from the past 20 or 30 years. Is there even a remote equivalency between the building of the information highway, or at least Canada's piece of it, and the building of the literal highway that stretches across the Prairies and through the mountains? Or between the bridges of cyberspace and those that span the St. Lawrence River or Burrard Inlet?

We could call the sequel Rebuilding Canada.

We could hope that it's not too thin.

Charles Wilkins's personal building projects include two sets of bookshelves, the installation of a screen in his cabin door and the replacement of a busted headboard in his bed. He is the author most recently of the travel memoir Walk to New York.