Worst new title

This ain't to kick Conrad Black while he's down. I've said elsewhere he's a better writer than businessman, and his Roosevelt is a good book. I won't be surprised if the new Nixon book is too. But calling it "The Invincible Quest"? What would an invincible quest be?

Great Dominion Dust Up

Still a lot of fun.

Charest's right to be premier

The moment it was clear the Quebec Liberals would have a couple more seats than either of the other parties, all the newsreaders and all the commentators declared Jean Charest would lead a minority government. Paul Wells, the best political blogger in Canada, has a contest to see how few shifted votes it would have needed in order to give the ADQ more seats than the Liberals -- and make Mario Dumont premier.

It's as if we already had list-PR in this country and that there were not 125 MNAs elected but really only three -- the three party bosses. Or that all that mattered was which leader was given the most tally sticks.

Strictly speaking, there was no certainty that Jean Charest would remain premier if his party got the most seats, or that he would cease to be premier if another party got a few more.

Sure, Premier Charest had the right to remain in office until defeated in the National Assembly. And leaving the Liberals in government seemed to be the preference of both Action Democratique and the PQ. But those are calculations and should have been reported as such. Should the two other parties choose to cooperate, Charest's tenure as premier would be over.

In a parliamentary democracy, simply having a couple more seats than either of the rival parties does not confer the keys to the premier's office. Sad that so few of our politicologues know it, in Quebec or here in RoC.

Quebec Election FPTP

Just to note that first-past-the-post served Quebec quite well last night. The seat split mirrors the vote split about as closely as any system could have provided.

ADQ 31% of vote = 32.8% of seats, PQ 28% of vote = 28.8% of seats, Liberals 33% of vote = 38.4% of seats. Fringe parties 8% of vote = 0 seats.

Notable anniversaries of March 2007

These weeks are full of historical events, some actively commemorated, all worth note.

200 years ago: Britain voted to end its trade in slaves, March 1807. (Should see: the new film Amazing Grace, on William Wilberforce and the Parliamentary campaign. Best corrective, should it seems too cheer-leady: any of Seymour Drescher's fine books on the complicated history of how slavery ended.)

140 years ago: Queen Victoria gave royal assent to the British North America Act, March 1867. (Should see: since I'm probably the only one who is noticing this one, my book 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal.)

90 years ago: the Battle of Vimy Ridge, April 1917. Retain a bit of scepticism about that overworked cliche of how "Canada became a nation." Still, a big deal. (Should see: History Television's Vimy film tonight on three guys who went to Vimy from one of my favourite towns, Goderich, Ontario)

60 years ago: establishment of Canadian citizenship, January 1947. (Should see: the lines at the passport office.) Also the abolition of wartime orders-in-council abrogating the rights of Japanese-Canadians.

50 years ago: the introduction of RSPs into the Canadian tax system, March 1957. (Should see: your accountant. Filing deadline's just over a month away.)

30 years ago: the big one among some in my household, the opening of the first Star Wars film, April 1977. Saw it as an adult, but I still remember leaving the theatre wanting to drive our little VW Rabbit as if it were an X-wing spacefighter. (Should see: the Firefly TV series on DVD, a better fulfilment of George Lucas's original dream than most of its recent sequels.)

Comuzzi firing - another blow to parliamentary democracy

Joe Comuzzi, MP, old time old style liberal down to his fingertips, gets fired from the Liberal caucus.

Comuzzi's going to vote for the budget. He's from Thunder Bay. He's struggled to bring work to his riding all his career. The budget provides 400 new jobs, in the time-honoured old Liberal way. Comuzzi feels he has to go with his lifetime commitment. Bam, Stephane Dion says, Joe, you are not a Liberal.

Memo to caucus (all the caucuses): this is nuts. What do you and your party gain by driving away one more voice and vote? Okay, it makes the leader look like a mad-dog authoritarian, and Canadians all profess to love that look in a party leader.

Seriously, caucus members have to grasp the principles of parliamentary democracy. Caucus membership is determined by the caucus. If the leader is seriously troubled by some insufficiently pliant yes-man on the backbench, let him put it to a secret vote of caucus.

Be interesting to see how Comuzzi would do in that kind of test.

Canada's National Trust? Is Bev Oda dead?

Here's an ethical dilemma.

You're a heritage-minded type, been active in preservation activities and the outreach work that grows from that. Say you have some expertise, some organizational skills, some community standing. Now the government asks you to join the board of the new National Trust, announced in the budget yesterday to conserve Canadian heritage sites and natural places.

Accept? Reject?

See, the National Trust has a budget of $5 million over a couple of years. That'll cover startup costs, lease on some offices, board expenses, a few staffers. Then what? The Trust has not been given any power to designate property, stop demolition, require conservation. It's to be a private sector operation beyond its startup: it can solicit donations and partnerships.

But uh... Don't we already have the Heritage Canada Foundation and the Nature Conservancy and other organizations doing precisely that? As the Heritage Canada Foundation says today, it's surprised at the National Trust announcement. The federal government already created Canada's National Trust, back in 1973: it's the Heritage Canada Foundation. And it's still there.

I guess this wouldn't have happened if Bev Oda, Minister for Canadian Heritage, were alive.

You join this new org. You are not a Tory patronage hack. You are not crazy. So what are you?

Greatest Politician Ever (ignore the oxymoron alert)

Great Dominion Dust-up. A web contest to vote on the great Canadian politicians. March madness style -- all votes by one-on-one eliminations. With John A. vs Ed Boadbent, where's your vote?

What are you reading? the Vimy book, actually

There's a new thingy called Booknet, a book industry sales-tracking system that for the first time makes accurate bestseller lists possible.

Recent list is dominated as always by Oprah and Binchy and Grisham and so on. But number 4 on the list was Ted Barris's latest military history, Victory at Vimy (a Thomas Allen Publishers book) -- a title I wasn't even aware of. Hey, book readers are collectively smarter than me, no contest there.

I know they keep telling you Canadians don't know their history, don't read it, don't support it. It's always been nonsense. Nice to see Booknet proving it. Nice for Ted, too -- well done.

Census destroyed

Small news item (here's the Toronto Star version) reveals the full extent of the vandalism Statistics Canada has achieved with its 2006 census.

For the first time ever, Canadians were asked if they wanted census data to be available to researchers a century from now. Only 56% ticked yes. So Statistics Canada will now be free to destroy 44% of the personal data on the 2006 census, making the census perfectly useless to future Canadians. Given their pigheaded stupidity on this matter for most of a decade now, the StatsCan censors surely do the purge the moment they can.

The bloody bureaucrats even have the audacity to uptalk it: hey, more than half of Canadians want to make their data available, is how they released the news.

St Patrick's Day: IRA strikes Toronto Public Library

I've been reading Postwar, Tony Judt's enormous history of Europe since 1945, in a copy I borrowed from Toronto's terrific public library system. TPL branches are close and welcoming, and from their online catalogue you know what's in stock -- or have ordered what you want before you go in. Postwar being enormous, I've already done an online renewal of my copy.

The copy I borrowed is in good condition, except in one small section. At pages 464-69, where Judt discusses IRA violence in Northern Ireland since the 1960s, he uses the word "Ulster" as often as "Northern Ireland." And at every place he does, some fool has crossed out "Ulster" and printed in "Northern Ireland."

There's the IRA spirit in a nutshell: stupidity, intolerance, and violence . Even in Toronto, this unreconstructed sympathizer would rather vandalize library books than allow an author free use of the language.

Semi-literate too, evidently. Pages 706-7, where Judt notes what seems to have been the defeat and surrender of Irish terrorism in recent years, as most Irish have came to see its practitioners as "bizarre antiquarian relics of another age," are left unmarked. Our pen-wielding thug didn't read that far, probably.

Meanwhile, Ken Loach's new movie, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," is opening here: apparently it's another take on the old story of the sweet, saintly IRA men of the 1920s, compelled to put bullets into their own kith and kin because the malevolent British had perfidiously accepted Irish control of Irish affairs.

Happy St Patrick's Day, Ireland. Gerry Adams may have put down the gun, but I guess Ken Loach still waves it.

Veterans' spokemen threaten Canadian history again.

Val Ross at the Globe & Mail has excellent coverage on museums issues that mostly no one else covers. Here is the latest.

Memory Porn/Victoria Cross/Unknown Soldier

There's debate in the media (you can find it at cbc.ca, or wherever) about an idea to award the Victoria Cross to the Unknown Soldier who lies in the tomb at the national war memorial in Ottawa.

Has anyone coined the term memory porn yet? If not, I'm calling it.

Dan Francis on the Trans-Canada

Couple of years ago, I had a call from Mark Stanton, Vancouver guy about publishing, who had an idea for a book about the Trans-Canada Highway. I liked the idea, but I was completing one book and had another in mind and under contract. I suggested Stanton might talk to a Vancouver writer I knew and admired: Daniel Francis, who among other things had recently edited (and written much of) The Encyclopedia of British Columbia.

Then I forgot about the whole thing. Mostly that sort of suggestion doesn’t work out.

Hey, it worked out. Take a look at the webpage for A Road for Canada by Daniel Francis, published by Stanton, Atkins & Dosil of Vancouver, fall 2006. Nice looking book!

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr

Daniel Gross, American economic journalist, Slate columnist, and blogger at www.danielgross.net, recalls historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died recently. Schlesinger's career reminds Gross why he dropped out of his Harvard University American history PhD a decade or so ago:

“There was another reason I left. Before entering graduate school, I had worked at the New Republic. And I had (naively) assumed that graduate school would be something like a continuation of my year at TNR, that the history department would be stocked with Schlesingers and Schlesingers in the making--historians who were interested in politics past and present, public intellectuals just as willing to talk about the (first)Bush administration as the first Cleveland administration, people interested in writing for and speaking to a broad, high-to-middlebrow audience.

"Well, there were some of those types there. But not that many. And the sort of history that Schlesinger did so brilliantly--synthesizing, broad, political, present-minded--was out of fashion.”

Book of the Week: Home in Glory Land

Karolyn Smardz Frost has a new book out with Thomas Allen Publishers: I've Got a Home in Glory Land. Haven't read it yet, but sounds like one to read. It's a microhistory of John Blackburn, an escaped slave and 19th century Torontonian, apparently in extraordinary detail.

KSF is an archaeologist, ED of the Ontario Historical Society, person-about-Toronto-history for a long time. Apparently she's been working on this some twenty years, and the book grows from a doctoral dissertation. Good on her.

Prince Harry's country

Saw the news the other week about Prince Harry being posted to Iraq with his regiment. I was moved to read he's a troop leader in an armoured reconnaissance unit. Because that's precisely the job my father had, up at the sharp end in the Western Desert in 1942-43.

Harry said he would not accept being left behind while his men went and be denied the chance to serve his country.

Much commentary reflected on how few of the powerful war leaders in Washington DC have children in Iraq or even in the forces.

But I stopped on that "my country." The prince is talking about Britain, and of course he's right. He ain't going for Canada or Auz or Tanzania. Sometimes we all pretend otherwise, but the Royals are as English as the lions in Trafalgar Square, and so they should be.

Victoria Centennials

The Empress Hotel in Vancouver is celebrating its 100th birthday. One of the great works of early BC architect Francis Rattenbury, who also designed the BC Legislative Building (and the courthouse in Nelson BC, an icon of my childhood) and who was murdered by his chauffeur in 1935. Last two times I was in Victoria, I went to the Bengal Room in the Empress Hotel for the curry buffet. "Vaut le voyage," as Michelin says.

But the really exciting Victoria centenary is just up the street: Purdy's Chocolates, founded 1907. Sweet times in Victoria in 1907.

Prize Watch

Rudy Wiebe joins the list of distinguished novelists who have won the Charles Taylor prize in non-fiction for his memoir of childhood in rural Saskatchewan. Max and Monique Nemmi won the Shaughnessy Cohen prize in political writing for Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, their study of young Pierre Trudeau. Wednesday come the slew of Writers' Trust prizes.