Belinda Stronach on leadership

Okay, so I had long assumed Belinda Stronach was just the latest whacko with high self-esteem, a big bank account, and zero qualifications who thought she could buy the leadership of a political party.

But Stronach seems to be accepting her place as just another opposition backbencher rather better than most of her colleagues and rivals. First came her decision to skip this boring, semi-corrupt, and seemingly endless "race" to become the next leader of the opposition.

Now she has a position paper on how to run a political party in the 21st century, and, you know, it's not without interest. You can download it from her site, belindastronach.ca.

Not all her ideas are good ones. Taking her party toward those one-member, one-vote mass telephone/internet extravaganzas for picking leaders is just more travelling in the same wrong direction as everyone else. She proposes to let more people participate by reducing party membership fees to just a dollar. But given the vote-buying that defines most leadership contests, surely this can only make the corruption even more widespread. In today's political parties, a "membership" is a euphemism for "a vote." Vote-buying is vote-buying, even when it is cheap.

But then Ms Stronach launches a curiously subversive idea. She would empower the backbench by letting it, not the leader, nominate which caucus members will become cabinet ministers (or when in opposition, critics). This strikes me as brilliant -- restoring the accountability link between elected members and the executive that parliamentary democracy thrives on.

She supports the proposal by noting how well that system works in the Northwest Territories and in Australia and New Zealand. And she is right. Except: she does not mention that in all those jurisdictions, the caucus also selects (and when necessary, removes) the party leader.

Stronach is not able to be that clear-thinking about parliamentary democracy yet. She still feels compelled to advocate yoking the democratically elected and representative parliamentary caucus to an extra-parliamentary leader chosen mostly by vote-buying.

But at least she floats the idea that the problem is in caucus, the solution is in Parliament. Belinda Stronach would at least have the Liberal Party groping in that direction. And that's a good thing (as another talented women never hobbled by lack of self-esteem liked to say).

New Beaver column: Barricades

If you subscribe to The Beaver as you should, you have already received the July/August 2006 issue with my column entitled “A Short History of Barricades.” It reflects on why we so regularly find barricades, defended by armed men and women, arising around First Nations communities across this country.

An excerpt:

“Are the barricades justified, therefore? Clearly violence has best rewarded those who are good at violence. It damages normal political life within First Nations communities, and often erodes the prospect of settlements based on trust. But Canadians have to admit that for First Nations non-violence has also been a spectacular failure for 150 years. The Crown that declares itself responsible for native Canadians has been their worst enemy, and the Canadian courts have consistently played for the home team against the native one.

“Are there actions Canadians and their governments could take to turn First Nations communities away from barricades and resistance? It has to begin with an acknowledgement that Canada’s treaty obligations are serious. We cannot simply accept the parts that work for us (essentially, we got Canada) and ignore the commitments we made in exchange, whether in land, in rights, or in self-governance.”

The Beaver -- at www.TheBeaver.ca

100 Years 100 Books

I've been recommending McClelland & Stewart's webvoting site on the hundred best books of its one hundred year publishing history. I've been encouraging people to vote, not to vote for me. But maybe virtue is rewarded once in a while. For what it's worth, Louisbourg Portraits has been hitting the top ten in the list. Check it out at www.mcclelland.com/100years.

Louisbourg Portraits is still widely available in bookstores or from the online booksellers.

John English at DCB?

I hear John English, one-time federal MP, history prof at Waterloo, and biographer of Lester Pearson, will succeed Ramsay Cook as General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Sounds like a good idea. DCB biographies are at www.biographi.ca -- always worth a visit.

Review of the week: McGhee on The Island of 7 Cities

Picked up the July/August edition of Canadian Geographic. Lots of good stuff in Canadian Geographic, as always, but I was entranced by Robert McGhee's eloquent review of Paul Chiasson's The Island of Seven Cities, a charming and loony book about Chiasson's notion that 14th century Chinese explorers settled on Cape Breton Island. Particularly if you read in the Globe & Mail or elsewhere about Chiasson's "discovery," you should read McGhee for a reality check. On the CanGeo site, you can follow the links to the review text.

Book of the Week: Bar U Ranch

I managed to sit down recently with a book that intrigued me when it was first published in 2004. It's even better than I anticipated.

It's The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History by Simon M. Evans, published by University of Calgary Press.

The Bar U ranch, west of High River, Alberta, was one of the first of the great foothills cattle ranches launched by eastern Canadian entrepreneurs and pioneer cowboys in the early 1880s. Today it is run by Parks Canada, a unique and imaginative historic site.

Evans's book is a good history not just of that one ranch but of an extraordinary moment in Canadian social and economic history, when cattle ranches newly founded on the far reaches of Canada's frontier were soon producing Canada's third largest export product -- cattle shipped from the Alberta foothills to London meat markets, ten days on the CPR to Levis, Quebec, ten days on the boat to Liverpool.

The Bar U is also a beautiful piece of publishing, lavishly and intelligently illustrated, building on the resources Parks Canada has been assembling as part of its Bar U research project. A nice example, in fact, of the kind of history only Parks Canada does, and which it occasionally does superbly.

PS (July 27): I see the publisher is announcing a paperback edition for this fall. It's a smaller format, convenient but may not have the wealth of illustration.

New mission for history profs

One response to the storyswirl about the young men photographed peeing on the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Canada Day: A letter to the Globe & Mail declared this kind of thing only happens because our young people have too little appreciation for the past. We need more history taught in our schools, etc.

I'm all for history teaching, but I laughed out loud to think of it being the new mandate of teachers and professors all across the country: to prevent peeing on our national monuments.

Come to think of it, peeing on the national monuments might be a metaphor for the ambitions of some historians.

Book of the Week: Thinking Fan's

Spent some of the long weekend browsing in The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (Harper Perennial Books), and I find myself thinking it's the best history I've read in a while. The idea was to get 32 good writers to write something about each of the 32 countries that qualified for the World Cup, and if the essay includes something about soccer, so much the better.

And they are frequently brilliant. Suddenly I know all about Tunisian politics and society from Wendell Steavenson's essay. I have a new angle on Dutch society. Tim Parks on Italy is brillant and hilarious. Paraguay, South Korea, Togo -- lots of wonderful bits.

Now I regret Canada didn't qualify for the Cup mostly because I would have loved to read the essay they'd have commissioned from Douglas Coupland or Hal Niedzviecki or someone. Jeez, I would have volunteered.

Caledonia, Rule of Law, Ontario Courts

Ontario Court Justice David Marshall declares that the Ontario government's seemingly rather successful efforts to defuse the tensions at Douglas Creek Estates constitute a contempt of court. He wants his injunction against Six Nations protesters enforced -- at bayonet point, presumably -- and anything else constitutes contempt for the rule of law.

Surely it's the courts who are bringing the rule of law into contempt. They will issue these inflammatory injunctions on twenty-four hours notice, apparently. But it may be decades, if not centuries, before the courts take notice of the treaty violations and appropriations of First Nations lands that produced the barricades in the first place.

A little more rule of law would be nice. A little less bloodthirstiness from our judiciary is urgently necessary.