Steve Paikin: An American founding father whose name you well know wanted Canada even before there was a United States. It was not to be, but it offers lessons for today. Hi everybody, I'm Steve Paikin and welcome to Campbell House in downtown Toronto. This place might have been familiar to early settlers of a contested colonial town in the 17 or 1800s. We're here for a close-up edition of TVO Today Live with author Madlin Droen. This series is possible thanks to the very generous support from the Wilson Foundation and its benefactor Red Wilson. Madlin Drowan is a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and author of He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin's Forgotten Failure to Annex Canada. I'm holding it in my hand as we speak with the man on the $100 bill looking very pensively back at us. First of all, welcome. It's so nice to meet you, my fellow Hamiltonian. Okay. Ben Franklin had his sight set on this place a long time ago.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah.

Steve Paikin: And how come people don't know this?

Madelaine Drohan: Uh there's a long answer to that and maybe a short answer.

Steve Paikin: Start with the short answer and then we'll build.

Madelaine Drohan: We don't talk about it. I mean when you think about it um history is what we choose to remember and enough of us have chosen not to remember this that it doesn't sort of form part of our uh collective memory and that that's why people are shocked about it right now.

Steve Paikin: We're here in Campbell House which is one of the oldest buildings in this capital city of Ontario. It's more than 200 years old and even though it is very old, your story actually predates this place. When we say Canada of the 1700s, what are we actually referring to?

Madelaine Drohan: We're mostly referring to what we consider now the province of Quebec, the southern pro part of the province of Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. At the time, like in the early 1700s, it was uh called New France or Canada. was under the French regime and basically peopleled by French Canadians. uh when we get on a bit later uh after 1760 it became a British colony but still it was mostly populated by French Canadians and at the time which I know we'll get to around the American Revolution um most of the population in Canada or the province of Quebec as it was then called again it was it was concentrated between Montreal and Quebec City in Toronto to there was no Toronto at that point. There was a Fort Toronto uh which was a French fort uh that it was where the exhibition grounds are now and of course the first nations had you know settlements here long much longer than that but there was no other presence here at the time.

Steve Paikin: So let's go to 1776. Then you've described what Canada essentially was at the time, right? 13 American colonies at that time. They're not yet. Let's go, you know, pre-signing of the Declaration of Independence. They're not yet a country, right? What kind of a place is it? Who are the people? What's their religion? What's their makeup? How many are there? Etc.

Madelaine Drohan: Those are a lot of questions. Okay, we're talking about the 13 colonies. Okay. Well, they were all British colonies. They were predominantly but not exclusively English-speaking Protestants. I mean who had come over the the original ones had come over from the British Isles and then the population just bmed in the 13 colonies. So when we get to 1776, I think there's probably about 2.5 million around that as population estimates aren't great, but 2.5 million British American colonists. There might have been about 100,000 French Canadians in Canada or the province of Quebec. Uh there might have been about 2,000 English speakers in the province of Quebec. And then there'd be tens of thousands First Nations um in that general area where the the two sort of intersect. And I should mention as well there were separate colonies for Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and what they called the aisle of St. John, which is now Prince Edward Island.

Steve Paikin: Isle of St. John.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah.

Steve Paikin: Okay. The European settlement of this part of the world. I guess we trace back to what about the 17th century roughly.

Madelaine Drohan: Uh they ca started coming over in the 1500s.

Steve Paikin: In the 1500s, but like Jonestown 1600s, right? That kind of thing. Indigenous people of course long long before. Yeah. Let's talk about some of that.

Madelaine Drohan: The indigenous uh population. Okay. I don't have figures for that but of course there would have been rather large um I don't nations we'll call them first nations both throughout uh what was the 13 colonies and Canada there was a difference between how the British settlers interacted with them and the the French settlers uh in that uh the British settlers were basically here to settle as in the name you know so they were taking over territory and pushing the first nations out. Whereas the French settlers were coming over, there was not as many of them and they were here to trade and so they need to have sort of a mutually beneficial arrangement with the First Nations. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it was their sort of economic circumstances that controlled how they interacted with the First Nations. And both the English and the French settlers tried to have the First Nations as their allies.

Steve Paikin: Let me pick up on that. How did their influence in the colonial wars affect Benjamin Franklin's view of Canada?

Madelaine Drohan: Well, certainly at the beginning um when when and we're talking this is prior to the revolution when Franklin was growing up. Let's let's put it then because then it was a French regime in Canada and versus the BritishAmerican colonies and uh both sides with their indigenous allies would raid the other side. And so when Franklin was growing up in Boston, the papers would be full of stories about raids of French uh raids with their indigenous allies coming down, burning settlements, taking hostages. I mean, this was a fairly common thing. It was well covered in sort of the newspapers of the day. And so, not just Franklin as he was growing up, but you know, the colonists there saw Canada as a threat, a threat to their security.

Steve Paikin: And Franklin would have noticed that and presumably be influenced by that.

Madelaine Drohan: Absorbed it. It was part of his thinking. Yeah.

Steve Paikin: Okay. Ben Franklin today, to the extent that I suspect Canadians think of him, they know he's the guy on the $100 bill. They know he's the guy who flew the kite and had some relationship with electricity, um, lightning rods, bifocals, all of that. you've zeroed in on one of the ironically less successful projects of his life, which is his repeated attempts, not once, but repeated attempts to make Canada part of the United Colonies of America.

Steve Paikin: All right, let's dive into this a little further. Now, I'd like to think I know a bit about this time of history. I knew nothing about that aspect of the story. How did you find out about it?

Madelaine Drohan: Uh while I was in Montreal, this was when I was still writing for The Economist. I was on assignment. I had some time to kill. So I went around the block and there's a museum there called the Chateau Ramse, which is a lovely museum. Uh and it's in a building that was built in the early 1700s. Uh it's a museum of Quebec history. So, you know, I'm wandering around through the displays and they have lots of religious artifacts and stuff beavers and canoes and that everything you'd expect. And then in a room at the back they have this huge portrait of Benjamin Franklin. And I was just taken aback. I thought

Steve Paikin: thinking what's that doing here?

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. Like okay. So I I went and looked at it and and they do have a little plaque on the wall there that said Benjamin Franklin was in this very building in 1776 when he invited the French Canadians to join the American Revolution and I was stunned.

Steve Paikin: You hadn't heard that before? I

Madelaine Drohan: I had absolutely no idea. And I mean I thought I was a relatively well-informed person and this I had I had no idea about it and that sparked my interest in you know researching it and finding out exactly what had he been doing in Montreal and the second part of it was why don't I know about it?

Steve Paikin: Well pick up on that because if you didn't know about it and I didn't know about it I'm going to assume a lot of people out there didn't know about it either. And the question is why not?

Madelaine Drohan: Okay. And it's because nobody talks about it. Okay. And you go through the list of players that were around at the time because I should backtrack a little bit and say one of the attempts was Franklin actually did come to Canada when the Americans invaded and occupied Montreal and Tu Rivier. What

Steve Paikin: what year are we talking now?

Madelaine Drohan: We're talking uh 250 years ago right now. and he arrived April 29th, 1776 and he left May 11th, 1776. Okay. So, um anyhow, so that was one of his attempts and that whole uh invasion fell apart. It was a complete failure. Um but it was followed right afterwards by the Declaration of Independence. Okay. So the Americans even at the time didn't want to talk about it much because it was at a such a sensitive point in the American Revolution. Bad for morale. They tried to conquer Canada and uh they failed. Okay. Franklin hardly ever referred to it again in his writing. I could find like maybe three references over the next 20 years about it. So he wasn't interested in talking about it. And it doesn't fit with the American founding myth, you know, which is

Steve Paikin: success.

Madelaine Drohan: Well, success, but also we're victims of British tyranny. We're just defending ourselves. Britain was the aggressor. Well, it doesn't really look good if you, you know, started out by trying to conquer the the colony next door. So for for a number of reasons and also they've got something to celebrate with the Declaration of Independence which sort of pushes everything else that came before that into the shade.

Steve Paikin: It becomes the story.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. Yes. You're a journalist. You know you you know what the story is. The Declaration of Independence is the story, not some failed battle that didn't work out for them. Yeah. Yeah. No. So you can understand it. But so the Americans, you know, tend not to talk about it in their history books, in their popular media. And we consume so much American culture here that, you know, we're influenced by that view that it wasn't important. But why wouldn't we trumpet that more? Particularly since with all of the Trump annexation talk, I it's so strange like nobody that I recall hearing about I don't recall anybody saying, you know, you guys tried this 250 years ago and failed. Now you're trying again. We're going to kick your butts back to Washington again.

Steve Paikin: Yeah.

Madelaine Drohan: Nobody said that.

Steve Paikin: Why not?

Madelaine Drohan: Well, again, because we don't talk about it for reasons of our own. Okay. If you look at the the players, we'll take the French Canadians first. Okay. So, if they had risen up and and and supported the American invaders, it would have been all over. There were 100,000 of them, right? And some certainly did support them, but a lot of them were neutral and some of them supported the British. Right. Okay. At first they did there were were some attempts to sort of trumpet that whole thing, but then that fell by the wayside. And if you think about it now politically, it doesn't it's not really a good look for a French Canadian to say, "Yes, I supported the British." You know, and more to the point for them, the big event in their lives was the conquest when Britain pushed France out of North America. I mean, that's what turned their lives upside down. So,

Steve Paikin: Plains of Abraham.

Madelaine Drohan: Yes. Exactly. 1759.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. So, you know, for them, you know, collective memory is is a funny thing. If you're looking at one thing, you're not seeing something else. And so, for them, they look at the conquest. So again, this is not as important to them. Even though it was hugely important to Canada, it's not necessarily important to the French Canadians, you know, as a group. And the English Canadians just weren't around at the time.

Steve Paikin: So there's all sorts of kind of reasonable reasons why members of both of our countries don't particularly want to remember this time in our collective history.

Madelaine Drohan: No, it it's true. And there and there's probably another one that we should mention which is you know at the political level does the prime minister of Canada really want to go around poking the president saying you know you lost you especially this prime minister and this president you know so it's another reason to not put too much emphasis on it

Steve Paikin: although there there is there there comes a time in every prime minister's tenure when they jokingly say to some American president you know if you don't give us this, we're going to come down and burn down the White House again like we did 200 years ago.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah, but but this is not the time for that kind of comment.

Steve Paikin: Probably not. Okay, I get you. Why would Franklin have been so interested in, you know, given what was going on in the 13 colonies at that time, why would he have been so interested in trying to acquire what was then preconfederation Canada, right, for the United States?

Madelaine Drohan: Right. Well, a big part of it was security all the way along. I mean, Franklin didn't sort of start out by coming to Canada and try to turn around the invasion. He started out intellectually, you know, painting out the reasons why Canada should be part of the United States. And the big one of those reasons was, of course, security when the French were in Canada, because get rid of them and then the 13 colonies don't have to worry so much about being attacked from the north. But he also had these other ideas about how it was the destiny of the British American colonist to occupy the whole continent, you know, manifest destiny.

Steve Paikin: manifest destiny.

Madelaine Drohan: Exactly. I mean, the term wasn't invented for another hundred years, but that that was the idea. And uh he also there was a a financial interest as well um that you know you acquire more of the lands to the north the land speculators can come in. He was a land speculator like many of the founding fathers. But I think you know overall I'd have to say security is the big one that you know they just thought it'd be better if they owned the whole top of the continent and didn't have to worry anymore. Is it always a real estate play with these folks?

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. Well, that was another surprise to me how many of them were involved in land speculation uh companies at the time, which covered as well. We don't think about this as part of Canada, but at the time at the time of the American Revolution, that land below the Great Lakes in a sort of a triangle that was considered part of Canada or the province of Quebec by both Britain and France. It's just the uh British American colonists who thought it really should be part of their uh territory.

Steve Paikin: Historians love to think about the whatifs. So I presume at some point during the course of writing the book and now out promoting it, you have asked yourself the question, what if Franklin had been successful? What if he had managed on behalf of those colonies, eventually the United States of America, to capture whatever Canada was back then? How would the last 250 years have been different?

Madelaine Drohan: Well, the there were two times that they ca that he came close. Okay. And so one of what them would have been that invasion in 1776 when he came up to Montreal. He was supposed to be setting up a government. The Americans came very close to actually having all the major population centers in Canada. So the what if there is we don't know if Britain would have mounted a counteratt attack after that and taken it back. We just don't know that.

Steve Paikin: So we could have become Americans.

Madelaine Drohan: we we could very easily be become the 14th colony as they were talking then. But the second time the other attempt of his was when he was negotiating the peace deal in Paris when he tried to get Britain to give them the United States Canada

Steve Paikin: 82.

Madelaine Drohan: 82. Okay. Yeah. And that one would have been different because if Britain actually signed a treaty and said yes, you know, Canada belongs to the new United States of America, then it's unlikely they would have mounted any sort of attack to uh to take it back. So that would have been more sort of conclusive and we really would have been uh Americans at that point.

Steve Paikin: So the odds were actually against what ended up happening. two more likely scenarios would have been us to become Americans for two different reasons.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah, it's kind of uh maybe it was our manifest destiny not to be Americans. You ever think of that?

Madelaine Drohan: I hadn't thought of that actually. I I think you know at any time during the last 250 years the Americans have certainly had the military power and the population and economic weight to take Canada over. But I think what saved us a lot of times is they wanted something else more at the time. You know in the peace treaty in 1782 when they were doing the negotiation, what they really wanted at the time was um or what the the negotiators wanted more was access to the fisheries off the east coast and that land below the Great Lakes. They wanted it sort of set in stone that that belonged to them. You know, had they had if they hadn't been preoccupied by that, I don't know. They would have gone for Canada.

Steve Paikin: So, Quebec was back burner at that point then.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. They've always wanted Canada. They just always wanted something else more.

Steve Paikin: How much, this is a bit of an uncomfortable question to ask, but you know, Franklin may have been typical of his time in as much as he didn't love Catholics and we were very Catholic back then. Yeah. How much of his desire to take over Quebec was based on his dislike of Catholics or distrust maybe?

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah, I think for him it would be distrust. Although you have to remember he got over that when he went over to France and dealt with the very Catholic king of of France. he was less um a sort of uh anti-popery as they called it at the time than some of his uh colleagues like John Adams for example. Um so yeah, I'm not sure that uh his dislike of Catholics came into it as much as just fear that because it was a different religion, different type of government that it posed the security threat. Well, and you do make the good point that he was negotiating with the French to try to come on side and help them beat the British to become an independent country. Yeah. So, his dislike of Catholics didn't hold him back from doing that.

Steve Paikin: No. No. Right. Um, would it be too cheeky to put forward the proposal that to some extent the way Britain kept Canada helped the cause of the American Revolution in 1760? Now, is that what you're saying?

Madelaine Drohan: Well, no, absolutely. I I don't think it's cheeky at all because you know, you think about it, Britain has then removed an external threat from the colonies uh when they drove the French out of north that part of North America. And so then the colonies could start concentrating on their grievances with the motherland. It it gave them the freedom to start looking at that relationship and what they didn't like about it. As long as they needed Britain to come, you know, with their military forces and fight against the French, then they pretty much had to, you know, get along with them.

Steve Paikin: I don't hear Trump thanking us for that.

Madelaine Drohan: I I'm not sure he thanks us for anything to tell you the truth.

Steve Paikin: Tell us more about Franklin's time in Montreal.

Madelaine Drohan: Well, he had been sent up to Montreal by the Continental Congress to turn the invasion around and to set up a new government. And uh they got there they they left New York on April 2nd. It took them till April 29th to actually get to Montreal. And it they were only there a couple of days when they realized they could not salvage what was going on. The AR American army was in uh Continental Army was in disarray, deeply in debt.

Steve Paikin: Who was leading it at the time?

Madelaine Drohan: Uh well there were a couple of generals. There was Benedict Arnold was still a general and he was in control of Montreal when Franklin arrived, but there was also a general Worooster who I think was had taken over the siege of Quebec City because that hadn't hadn't fallen. But the the Continental Congress had sent their army up without enough provisions or money and the French Canadians initially uh were happy to sell them things. But when they had hard currency, gold and silver, but as soon as they ran out of that and tried to pass off their new paper, continental currency, uh the French Canadians started to say no. And then the army started to seize things. So they had basically they basically succeeded in turning the French Canadians against them at this point. And I think Franklin and his colleagues saw that. Um and they realized that without more money they were going to they they desperately needed more money, more men, more equipment, more provisions. And they kept writing these begging letters to the Continental Congress uh about this, you know, send money, send pork, send powder, you know. Uh and they were in the midst of all of this when on May 6, British warships appeared in the St. Lawrence outside Quebec City.

Steve Paikin: Uhoh.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. Carrying reinforcements. So they had won the race to get reinforcements there. um the American troops that were besieging Quebec just fled. They started running down, you know, towards Montreal and home and uh Franklin and his colleagues found out on May 11th uh that the British had arrived and uh he left Montreal that same day.

Steve Paikin: Do we know whether he was happy to leave Montreal or was it his preference to get more reinforcements up there and continue the fight?

Madelaine Drohan: I think he wanted the reinforcements, but personally I think he wanted out of Montreal. Keep in mind, he was 70 years old. His health wasn't great. It it looked like a a problem that would require a great deal of time and energy to solve. And at this point, he just wanted to head home.

Steve Paikin: Did he speak French?

Madelaine Drohan: I think he he spoke some French. He certainly wasn't as bilingual as some people uh thought he was. I imagine that once he got to France he improved quite a bit but during the time in Montreal. No.

Steve Paikin: All right let's go to 1783. The Treaty of Paris is being negotiated. America is now of course a country has been for a few years. They decide on various borders of various countries at the time. What did Franklin think about what was achieved at the Treaty of Paris?

Madelaine Drohan: I think he wasn't totally content, but he thought that that was all that they were going to get at that time. During the negotiations, which was uh he was he was involved in the 1782 negotiations. I mean, that's when he was repeatedly asking um that Britain give Canada to the United States, but then he fell ill. And so the the end of the negotiations was left to John J and John Adams and and they were the ones who wanted fish off the east coast and uh and the land underneath uh the great lakes. So he basically had to content himself with that. And actually there is one letter that he exchanged with John Adams after the the treaty was signed where he suggested maybe opening it up again and getting Canada the secession of Canada in there. So he hadn't totally given up but you know by this point he he really is an old man.

Steve Paikin: We should chat for a moment here about his a word we would not use today but I guess they did back then is illegitimate son. Oh, can you talk to us about the guy who eventually became the governor of New Jersey, William Franklin?

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. No, nobody knows who the mother was actually, but uh Franklin had a common law wife, Deborah, uh who they moved into together when he was still in Philadelphia. And uh she agreed to take in this son, il illegitimate son, William. So they raised him as their own and uh Franklin then when he was sent to London to be an agent for the colonies brought William along and William you know was introduced into all the right circles and uh seemed to have a taste for the British aristocracy and worked his way up and then he was appointed governor of New Jersey. Uh but when the revolution started, Franklin assumed that his son would sort of side with him against the British and that didn't happen. And so they were basically estranged after that. He did apparently in his will leave his son. I think he had 20,000 acres of property in Nova Scotia. Huh.

Steve Paikin: Ben Franklin owned property in Nova Scotia.

Madelaine Drohan: Yes.

Steve Paikin: That he left to his illegitimate son.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah.

Steve Paikin: Who sided with the British.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah.

Steve Paikin: That's awfully generous for a guy you have no relationship with because he didn't join daddy in the revolution.

Madelaine Drohan: Well, maybe he thought that's now in a British territory beyond his reach and so was basically worthless to anybody who was an American.

Steve Paikin: Do we know whether Franklin had uh considered the revolution somewhat personally tarnished for him because his son opposed him in it. His son stayed loyal to the British.

Madelaine Drohan: No, I think Franklin was very convinced that he was right and and that his son was deluded. you know, Franklin in his personal family relationships. It doesn't it's it's another side of the man that uh I needs to be explored because he has this common law wife who he basically spends what is it three or four decades separated from her. I mean this is not a close relationship. And so I I I don't know about his personal relationships with his family itself that they were very close.

Steve Paikin: We're talking about events of obviously 250 years ago, but as you perhaps look at those events through a present- day lens, can we conclude that there are elements of American society that have never completely given up on the idea of having Canada be part of them?

Madelaine Drohan: Yes, I think we can conclude that. I think that's one of the big lessons from this story is that this uh was the attitude of many leading Americans at the time of the creation of the United States that they should own Canada and that has sort of run like a thread through the American psyche uh all the way through. It emerges from time to time. Uh in the 1840s there was this talk of 5440 or fight which was basically to get all the west coast of Canada you know there so

Steve Paikin: 5440 was the latitude and longitude

Madelaine Drohan: 5440 was um the the the southernmost boundary of Alaska and they thought that America should own everything from the border of California all the way up to that.

Steve Paikin: I bet they did.

Madelaine Drohan: Yeah. But no, that's one of the things I think that we need to take away from this is that this has been sort of an ongoing preoccupation, not always at sort of top of mind, but that runs through the uh American attitudes towards Canada. And we shouldn't have been so surprised that all of a sudden it emerged again with Donald Trump. You know, we probably should have been a bit more prepared for that.

Steve Paikin: Do we have any re I mean Donald Trump kind of cherrypicks his history right when he makes a case. So do we have any reason to believe that he knows anything about this and would have used this as inspiration for his own desires on Canada?

Madelaine Drohan: No, I don't think we have any any indication that he knows this story at all. Sadly, you know, be good for publicity for the book if he did. Yeah. People ask me when they see the book, they say, "Did you write this because of Donald Trump?" you know and I have to explain that uh I started the research in 2020. Uh even my supervisor at university thought it was a niche idea

Steve Paikin: even though you I think rightly suspect that Donald Trump knew nothing about this. Do you I mean when he started making advances on Canada and saying we want to make Canada the 51st state and you know make I guess it was Justin Trudeau at the time the governor of uh of Canada. I mean what did you make of all given that you know this you were one of the few Canadians who knew this story. What did you make of all that?

Madelaine Drohan: Well, I just assume that, you know, it's part of sort of the broader character that you sometimes think of Americans, you know, their sort of uh sense of exceptionalism and entitlement and expansionism. You know, that is something that is part of the American spirit. You know, they talk about the frontier. If you look at how the United States grew, you can see that from the very beginning they were uh expansionists. You know, they start with a strip of land across uh the Atlantic and and either by purchase or conquering uh or negotiating. Sometimes they stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean and they started to look north and south. So when I sort of heard him talking about this, yes, it reminded me of let's make Canada the 14th colony, but I also thought it fits in as well with the world view that we hear so often from the states. You know, let's go to the next frontier, which happens to be space at this point.

Steve Paikin: Should it not be a bigger part of our founding myths that we rejected on numerous occasions, including when Benjamin Franklin was undertaking his efforts, we rejected efforts to become part of the American Revolution. We did it over and over and over again, and we're still doing it to this day. Yeah. And yet this this whole part of history that you've written about doesn't really seem to occupy much of a place in our founding myths. Got any thoughts on that?

Madelaine Drohan: Yes. I I I see it, and of course I'm biased, but I see it as a foundational moment for Canada for that very reason that at the time the First Nations, the French Canadians, and the English speakers like the loyalists made a choice. They did not want to be Americans. You know, it wasn't anti-Americanism. They just did not want the system that the Americans were proposing to them. And I think we should make that into something a bit more positive. You know, it was a choice. And because often anti-Americanism here is sort of portrayed as some sort of knee-jerk, envious response, but it it wasn't that. It was at the time, we don't want the system that you're proposing. We're going to stick with ours.

Steve Paikin: We hear that all the time nowadays, right? We like Americans. We just don't want to be you. I mean, this is essentially what the people who were living in these parts were saying 250 years ago.

Madelaine Drohan: Exactly. We've been saying it for 250 years and hoping at some point they're going to hear it.

Steve Paikin: Well, they're not going to hear it, but we should probably chant it louder, don't you think?

Madelaine Drohan: I'm sure.

Steve Paikin: Okay. Tell me this. Canada Post has a stamp with Benjamin Franklin's face on it. Why would they do that when he wanted to take over our country?

Madelaine Drohan: I looked into that. You know, it was sort of like willful blindness in a way. I think at the time that was 17 or 1776, that was marking the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At the time, stamps were a big deal. they were money makers for post office. So, uh, when I was looking at sort of the memos, the internal memos in the what was in the post office department, I mean, part of it was they need to come up with something that we could share with the Americans that they could actually raise some money with these stamps and they lid on Benjamin Franklin. And nobody pushed back hard enough because we don't talk about this part of our history.

Steve Paikin: Well, even Canadians have a kind of a kindly view towards this guy. I mean, we when we go to the States, we tend to get money with his face on it, right? I've been to Philadelphia. There's always just a ton of people around Franklin's final resting place because they want to pay homage to this guy who was a central part of the founding myths of the United States. On the other hand, you tell us in your book, he struggled with humility. He was a bit loose with the facts. He was a bit of a conspiracy theorist when he thought it might benefit him. He was a person who viewed the world through sometimes the lens of real estate speculation. He was a proud British subject until he wasn't. Was Franklin therefore perhaps more of a rogue and less of an admirable hero than history has painted him?

Madelaine Drohan: Well, I I certainly focus in the book about his relations with Canada. And so, of course, he comes off badly from a Canadian point of of view, but I think he was an impressive character and certainly more well-rounded in every sense of the word than than, you know, popular culture would have it. I think we like our icons and certainly in the United States to sort of almost be perfect. So, if there's any little blemishes, uh, like Franklin's love of the ladies or his love of fake news from time to time, those are sort of rubbed off so that you get this perfect icon, uh, to promote. And, uh, so I I don't know on balance whether I'd say, you know, he was all good or all bad. He he had elements of both, but he was certainly an impressive intellectual.

Steve Paikin: you had a view of him before you started doing this book and you have a view of him now. How different are those two views?

Madelaine Drohan: Um my view after the book is a lot more negative because of course in in the course of reading his writings and other people's writings you uncover the human being behind the man and it's not always very admirable.

Steve Paikin: Could you cut him a bit of slack in as much as he did what he did in the interest of creating a larger what turned out to be the biggest you know you could argue the the most important country in the history of the world and he was there at the founding of it. He was just doing his job.

Madelaine Drohan: Well, I I'm not sure I I could I mean, that certainly formed part of it, but sometimes he was doing things that were not necessarily for the greater good, although he painted it that way. You know, sometimes it was just a fit of peak or something like that. So, okay, a tiny bit of slack.

Steve Paikin: Last question. History is written by the winners. History is not normally written by the losers. Given what you've uncovered here, who's written this version of history?

Madelaine Drohan: I think in in the case of Franklin and Canada, the American version of that is the one that's sort of been triumphant. And that's partly as I was saying before because they they're very good myth makers there in in America. We we could learn something from them actually and they've come up with uh this myth and these icons to go with the myth including Benjamin Franklin. and they've got the the heft with their their cultural exports to persuade everybody else that that's what the story is. So, as far as Canada and the United States, um we've allowed them to write the history.

Steve Paikin: So, this is your attempt to push back a little bit at the American mythmaking that has really dominated the last two and a half centuries.

Madelaine Drohan: It is. And it's also a call for us to get our act together and and come up with a a good counter myth, you know, so that we can tell our own story instead of allowing others to tell it for us.

Steve Paikin: Amen. Nice job. Can I just remind people the book is called He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin's failure to enex Canada. Maline Dron, it's so great to have you here and thank you very much for joining us on TVO Today Live.

Madelaine Drohan: It's been a real pleasure.

Steve Paikin: Thanks to to the Red Wilson Foundation. We always love to give them their props uh for this series. It would have been impossible to do this without you. So, thank you very much to the Wilson Foundation. You can see previous conversations in this series at tvo.org/tvotoday or our YouTube channel which is tvO. I'm Steve Pacin. So long from Campbell House in downtown Toronto.