Hilroy Made Newfoundland Disappear

It’s that time of year again. The stores are packed with backpacks, pencils, rulers, erasers and enough notebooks to keep a classroom busy until Christmas. Somewhere in the middle of it all is the familiar Hilroy exercise book, one of those Canadian school supplies most of us never gave much thought to because they have simply always been there.

You bought them. Your kids bought them. They have been sitting in Canadian desks and backpacks for generations, looking pretty much like the exercise books we remember from school. Then you look a little closer at the cover and realize something is wrong: Newfoundland is missing.

Once you notice it, you have to wonder how somebody managed to make an entire island disappear from a map of Canada. This isn’t some tiny island hiding in the corner of a complicated map. Newfoundland is a very large piece of land sitting right off Canada’s east coast, yet the Hilroy cover map leaves it out, along with Cape Breton and Haida Gwaii.

At that point, you start asking questions. Was the map cropped? Was an island layer left out of the artwork? Did somebody start with a simplified map that was already wrong, or did nobody actually look at the finished cover before thousands of notebooks went into production?

We don’t know. ACCO Brands, Hilroy’s parent company, has called it a production error and apologized, saying the affected books have been pulled from distribution, the artwork is being corrected and customers will be offered replacement or refund options. The notebooks had already been on store shelves since last year before the mistake attracted widespread attention, which makes you wonder how many people looked at that map and thought, “Yep, looks like Canada.”

Newfoundland eventually noticed, and the reaction was predictable. Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham took to Facebook with a message for Hilroy: “You can leave Newfoundland off an exercise book, but you can’t erase us.” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston wasn’t about to let Cape Breton disappear quietly either, calling the omission unacceptable and joking that the education minister could send Hilroy a proper map.

I’m guessing that wasn’t a package anyone in the education department expected to mail this year. Somewhere, there is probably a very confused person wondering why a provincial government is sending a stationery company a geography lesson.

There is some history behind the Newfoundland reaction, too. Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949, and the province has always had a strong sense of its own identity. Memorial University historian Sean Cadigan described the Hilroy mistake as embarrassing but said he did not see evidence that it was intentional.

And that’s probably the important distinction. Hilroy didn’t decide Newfoundland didn’t belong on the map. Somebody simply got the map wrong, and once you start looking at everything that is missing, it becomes a spectacularly bad map mistake.

That’s what makes the whole thing so wonderfully ridiculous. Once you put Canada on the cover of a Canadian school notebook, you have one very simple job: make sure the map is Canada.

Hilroy is such a familiar part of Canadian school life that the mistake feels even stranger. These are the notebooks many of us remember from classrooms long before school supplies became a seasonal fashion statement, when you bought one, wrote your name inside the cover and filled the pages with whatever the teacher wanted.

Nobody expected the notebook to become a geography lesson, but here we are. Apparently, this year’s back-to-school shopping comes with a little bonus test: find the missing parts of Canada.

The good news is that Newfoundland hasn’t actually gone anywhere. Cape Breton is still where it belongs and Haida Gwaii is still off British Columbia, even if the Hilroy designer temporarily misplaced them.

The notebook just managed to forget them. If you happen to have one of the defective versions, I’d keep it because years from now it might make a pretty good conversation piece, even if it turns out to be worth absolutely nothing.

After all, how often do you get to own a Canadian exercise book that accidentally comes with its own missing-persons list? I just hope we don’t find Newfoundland missing from a milk carton. Then again, we’re in Canada. We like our milk in bags.

And that’s about as Canadian as this story gets. A familiar school notebook, a slightly confused map, a few missing islands and a bag of milk somehow all come together in one back-to-school story.

This will put Canada on the map. Well, not quite all of it.

Recommended Reading

• Global News: Hilroy notebooks and the Canadian map error
• NTV: Hilroy apologizes for leaving Newfoundland and Cape Breton off the map

Tony M.

If this article made you think, brought back a memory, or made you see something differently, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email at sandboxworld@gmail.com. I read every message personally and, with your permission, may feature your thoughts in a future article because the best stories are the ones we share.