If there is a thin thread that connects these two books it is the railroad. And that’s what tied Canada together soon after Confederation; Maritime entry was induced by the promise of the Inter-Colonial Railway, British Columbia’s by the CPR. A speeding modern CN train adorns the cover of Harry Bruce’s book, The Pig That Flew. A historic CPR photo was going to decorate Daniel Francis’s National Dreams, but the company was so upset by what it read about itself between the covers it refused permission to print it. Both books are accessible, easy reads.

Beyond these flimsy parallels, however, commonalities are few. Bruce is a veteran journalist whose subject, the CNR, was born after the First World War when Ottawa took more than 200 largely faltering companies and melded them into Canada’s foremost Crown corporation. His story, however, is a relatively recent business one: how and why CN, once the country’s largest employer, was privatized in 1995 in the biggest initial public stock offering in Canadian history.

The glossy snapshots of the players in Bruce’s book are boring. In contrast, the 50 selected visuals in Daniel Francis’s National Dreams offer a variety of archival and fine art images. Despite their small size and poor reproduction they are delightfully engaging and illuminating.

Where Bruce is a fan and booster for the story and personalities he presents, Francis is a critic full of antidotes to sugar-coated historical fairy tales. A historian with 13 other titles to his credit, Francis’s dreams are the myths that have appeared in our history books. Bruce’s sources are magazine and newspaper stories, broadcast transcripts, a few books, some research reports, and a slew of interviews with CN executives, directors, and three cabinet ministers. Francis’s bibliography includes some manuscript collections and government records at the National Archives, and he is particularly focused on revisiting and eviscerating his and others’ high school history textbooks.

Bruce’s yarn is chock full of quotes, something of a play-by-play account of who is doing what to whom. Francis’s story – stories, to be more precise – reveal more breadth and depth. His is a more substantive, challenging, and satisfying read for it retells, revises, and thus revamps the historic tales and received wisdom Canadians have taken for granted. The myths he confronts, in addition to the CPR, are the RCMP, those of the West, the North, and Quebec, our heroes, and the canoe. There is also an assault on the now long-dead notion of British Canadians being a master race atop an ethnic pecking order in which native people are at the bottom. Francis’s style is direct and unconvoluted, his construction coherent and compact. It is a counterpoint to the other book this season that wrestles with our myths, John Ralston Saul’s Reflections of a Siamese Twin. Francis’s Dreams are much shorter, less wordy, less flighty. His idea of Canadian history is solidly rooted in Canada, whereas Ralston Saul’s Canada emerges more from the swirling world of ideas.

One idea that neither Bruce nor Francis explore – one pertinent to both books – is that Canada once had a public enterprise culture in contrast to the behemoth to our south. To be sure, the CPR was a case of private enterprise at public expense, but it did help build the nation state. The CNR, the provincially owned hydro and telephone utilities, the CBC, Air Canada, and Petro-Canada were all once testimony to the pivotal role of government in the economy. As recently as the 1980s, a quarter of Canada’s net fixed assets were publicly owned. As privatization proceeds, our governments retreat from the centre to the periphery of economic life. Or is that just a newfangled postmodern post-national myth?