Interpreting Canada's Past: A Post-Confederation Reader is a supplemental book and the second of two volumes. It includes both primary and secondary documents. This volume is designed to accompany J.M. Bumsted's two-volume textbook The Peoples of Canada or his single-volume text A History of the Canadian Peoples.

This edition contains two primary documents and two historical interpretations in each chapter, except in Chapter 7, which contains six examples of visual primary documents and two historical interpretations, making the book much shorter than the third edition. Thus it will be easier for instructors to incorporate these readings into coursework. Each chapter also includes an introduction to help contextualize the documents, a list of questions for consideration, and a list of suggested further
readings.