In the 1920s and 1930s members of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) debated how best to represent the past's ethnic and linguistic diversity. Some board members espoused a "bicultural" view of Canadian history that aimed to subsume francophone and anglophone experience in a unified civic history, posited as a corrective to the linguistic strife then vexing Canada. The HSMBC's commemorative projects at Grand Pre, Nova Scotia, forced members to confront entrenched ethnic and linguistic rivalries - conflict that challenged and finally undermined their commitment to this incipient biculturalism.