What are you reading? Commanding Canadians

I've been browsing in Commanding Canadians: The Second World War Diaries of AFC Layard, edited by Michael Whitby and published by UBC Press last year.

The title reflects how Commander Layard, a Brit and a career Royal Navy officer seconded to the Canadian Navy in 1943, discovered that commanding Canadians was, well, a bit more of a challenge than he had expected.

But what struck me more in Layard's war-at-sea diary (he wrote a short entry every day for about thirty years, contrary to all naval regulations) is his testimony to the sheer hellishness of command. Layard apparently struck his subordinates and superiors as reasonably capable and always calm. In his diary he's permanently fearful, insecure, and self-hating. The situation keeps changing; no one can know the appropriate decision; mistakes are inevitable. Ships sink, men die, U-Boats get clean away, and Layard in his heart knows it is all his responsibility. Whenever he gets a chance he drinks himself into a stupor, praying for the war to be over.

Michael Chong, backbencher

I'm always in favour of cabinet ministers resigning on principle. At the least, it suggests to politicians they are supposed to have principles.

Today it was Michael Chong, who was Intergovernmental Affairs minister (who knew?) and cannot accept the prime minister's new views on the nationhood of Quebeckers.

But this resignation-on-principle thing creates new problems in today's context. The historical sense in resigning from cabinet was that by resigning, a minister gave up the privileges of power in order to escape the discipline of cabinet solidarity. Cabinets work collectively, and they must; if you can't agree, you must go.

But it used to be that a cabinet minister who resigned got in exchange the freedom of the backbench. The point about being in the back benches, not part of the government, was that you got to hold the government accountable.

Now, discipline weighs equally upon cabinet ministers and back benchers. Back benchers face ejection from the party for the most trivial deviations from the Line of the Boss.

I salute Michael Chong, who's doing what he must.

But what will he do as an ordinary member? In what passes for parliamentary practice in Canada, ordinary members don't seem to get to have principles at all.

RIP George Blackburn

Quill and Quire reports the death in Ottawa of military memoirist George Blackburn, age 90, and adds a nice tribute by his publisher, Doug Gibson. In the 1990s, in his seventies, Blackburn wrote three volumes of memoirs of the Second World War, most notably the disturbingly, movingly intense The Guns of Normandy (1996).

Speaking of moving and disturbing, Farley Mowat's war memoir of the Italian campaign And No Birds Sang has just been republished by Key Porter. My father, who also served in Italy, was both moved and infuriated when he first read that book years ago. For giving a sense of what that war was like, he thought Mowat had it dead on. But it drove him crazy that Mowat seemed to have all the details wrong. When your life had depended on the fighting effectiveness of the 33rd Armoured Brigade, say, it was maddening to see them called the 44th and then the 22nd. Well, Mowat's always said the truth is more important than the facts. But facts can be talismens; not good to fool with them.

The Trinity Beaver

In August I mentioned Trinity, Newfoundland, and its attractions. My column on the subject is just out in the December-January issue of The Beaver. If you subscribe like you should, you should have it by now.

Some of my past columns from The Beaver can be viewed at the main website here.

Hot Canadian History and the Blogs

Just come across the blogs of two graduate students interested in museology, public history, and the audience for Canadian history. Nice blog titles too: Kelly Lewis runs "Curiouser and Curiouser" and Kevin Marshall got a laugh out of me with "Turtles All the Way Down: History for the 21st Century". They've been having an exchange about whether Canadian history can ever be "hot." Track it from here.

GG: Ross King's art history

Ross King's The Judgment of Paris has won the 2006 Governor General's Award in non-fiction today. It's a study of the battle between impressionists and traditionalists in the art world of the late 19th century. I haven't read it, but it's been saluted for the narrative drive King creates around the figures of Edouard Manet the impressionist and Ernest Meissonier the traditionalist. King's earlier work Brunelleschi's Dome was also highly regarded.

King's a Saskatchewan boy, but has long lived, worked, and studied in Britain, and his primary publishers are American and British. I always feel a little pang to see awards go to books and writers that are not here and can't much engage with the reading and writing community in Canada. But a jury's job is to pick the best eligible book every time. This year King wrote that book, so he's entitled. Recall that the Yanks gave Carol Shields a Pulitzer when she had long gone Canadian on them.

The most "historical" work on the GG shortlist this year was Afua Cooper's The Hanging of Angelique. Other nominees were Suzanne Reber and Robert Renard for Starlight Tour, Christine Weisenthal for The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther, and Michael Strangelove for Empire of Mind. Salute them all, and also the hardworking jurors (been there!) Winnipeg writer Allan Levine, Montreal translator Fred Reed (himself a nominee in translation), and First Nations writer Lee Maracle.

52nd Regiment

Results in about 2 hours! Alastair Sweeny of Ottawa's Northern Blue Publishing provided this link for the unidentified regimental badge I noted in yesterday's blog. It's the First World War's 52nd New Ontario Regiment:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~ww1can/division.htm

The Mail

My new buddy Scott from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., emailed. He's writing an essay on my Louisbourg Portraits (buy it here or at your local bookseller), and he needs to know: why no footnotes?

Part of what I told him: "At the time I was writing that book (c1980), I thought I might be the only person in the world ever to take an interest in what I was writing, but at the same time I was determined to make it as accessible as possible to readers.... I probably believed that if, in reading the book, readers came to have trust in my knowledge and authority about the subject, they would hardly need the footnotes. And if they did not, footnotes would not convince them."

Meanwhile, Sarah emailed from western New York. She sorts and identifies donated items for a charity, and she wrote: "I have this odd Canadian item that I just can’t seem to find a thing on. I’m hoping you can help. I’m attaching a photo. The words say “New Ontario Canada” with the number 52 in the middle. Underneath it says “Canada Overseas”. I couldn’t find any reference anywhere to “New Ontario”. Dimensions are about 3” x 2”."



I referred Sarah to the experts at the Canadian War Museum -- but I'm open to suggestions.

Sarah got in touch with me because www.christophermoore.ca is one of the top sites to come up if you Google "Canadian" and "history" and words like that. Scott's query demonstrates how much more easily authors can hear from their readers now. And after I mentioned here that Louisbourg Portraits was among the 100 Great Books of McClelland & Stewart's hundred years 1906-2006, voters at www.mcclelland.com/100years helped push it to #10 on that list's popularity ranking.

We hear websites and blogs are simply for self-expression. But I find they are a great way to be open to commentary I'd never otherwise hear. Thanks to all (I used to say "both of you') who check in.

le quinze novembre

In case you are counting, it's the thirtieth anniversary of the election of the first Parti Quebecois government of Rene Levesque. Remember where you were? (Yes, actually.)

Michel-C. Auger notes the oddity. The PQ has had an enormous impact and terrific success. It has implemented most of its agenda and made tremendous changes in Quebec. The only thing it missed out on was the only one that mattered to most of them. And the more successful they were on all the other things, the less the big one mattered to many Quebeckers.

Remember

Rudyard Griffiths's Dominion Institute has another of those polls out documenting Canadians' ignorance of Canadian history. This time it's the amazing number of Canadians who think of Douglas MacArthur as a Canadian war hero. "Well, he's called Doug, isn't he?" people must have been saying. "Doug sounds kinda Canadian."

I'm a fan of Rudyard and the Dominion Institute's brilliant work, but I have the feeling that if their pollsters asked Canadians what month the October Crisis happened in, half of them would say, "I don't know, we don't get enough Canadian history in our schools." It's programmed, it's what we're supposed to say. I'm always impressed by how many Canadians have a pretty savvy appreciation of what matters to them about history, no matter how they might do on the factcheck test.

Go to Dominion Institute for its Memory Project, a remarkable collection of testimonies to war and those who had to fight them. The Institute is also running an online poll promoting a state funeral for the last World War I veteran when he dies. It's a chancy thing... hold the funeral and beyond a doubt one more surviving vet will be discovered, and then one more. But the idea has merit.

Find the poll and all the Dominion Institute's Remembrance Day material at www.dominion.ca.

And wear the poppy. It ain't to support the war. It ain't to support some veterans' organizations. It's to remember the dead.

Frank Calder 1915-2006

I was glad, moved even, to see substantial obituary coverage on the death of Nisga'a leader Frank Calder, who died in Victoria on November 4 at the age of 91.

The Calder case, the Nisga'a land claims case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973, was his. It looks more and more like histories are going to see in Calder the decisive shift in aboriginal law in Canada. Calder worked for that case for decades. The Nisga'a didn't get a clear victory, but the conclusions of the judges forced the country on the course to a new acceptance of aboriginal title. Lots to be done on that road yet, of course!

Calder, Nisga'a "chief of chiefs" pretty much forever, was the first status Indian to attend university in B.C., the first elected to the B.C. legislature (1949, no less), and he had a long string of similar accomplishments. He was talking about a B.C. Bill of Rights in 1950. He was also a fish plant worker sometimes.

Update: Sandra Martin's fine and nuanced obituary in the Globe and Mail (Nov 9) points out that he was elected to the BC legislature before aboriginals had the right to vote. She also deftly hints at some tensions between Calder and his people, not that they diminish their shared accomplishments.

Bookstore Blues

Paul Wells, columnist, political observer, and jazz fan, has out a new book, Right Side Up, about Paul Martin's fall and Stephen Harper's rise. I haven't seen it, but he's pretty scathing on his Inkless Wells blog about the inability of Chapters stores to actually provide copies of the damn thing in its stores.

From your mouth to Heather's ear, Paul. You aren't the first writer to voice that complaint.

Not to excuse Chapters/Indigo, but it reminds me of Gibson's Laws for New Authors (from publisher Doug Gibson): An author and his/her book cannot be found in a bookstore at the same time. And the corollary: An author's relatives and his/her book can rarely be found in a bookstore at the same time.

Gibson's all-purpose solution was "Blame your publisher." Still useful advice, of course, but that was before Chapters came along.