PR at the cottage

Driifting around Ontario this summer, visiting friends and relations on the beach, at the cottage, we found this proportional representation referendum coming up in the chat a few times. In my experience, people said they were not very engaged with it, and then they said two things about it quite firmly:

• We need more politicians in the legislature? That's nuts. What the hell?
• There's a lot wrong with any plan that lets the parties appoint members of the legislature.

Maybe it's going down. It seems to be a thing for party politicos and poli-sci beancounters.

War Museum: Morton MacMillan v Bercuson Bernier

The turning point that led to a commitment to rewrite a Canadian War Museum plaque to appease certain veterans -- the Wikipedification of the War Museum, it's being called -- seems to have been a Senate subcommittee report in June. The Senators were actually reluctant to meddle with the museum's text, but they did suggest the museum should consider alternatives. That seems to have spurred a reshuffling at the Museum's board, with advocates of surrender taking charge. Frederik Eaton became chair. Joe Guerts promptly resigned as executive director of the War Museum (see my earlier blog on Guerts below).

Part of the process that influenced the Senate subcommittee's recommendation was a commission to four historians to assess and report on the disputed text. The Senate report says the historians split two-two, all agreeing it was accurate but two feeling it should be changed due to "tone."

I'm always concerned by historians who profer expert advice and expect to remain secret. Every time a CBC historical program comes under attack and the CBC brass decide to fold up like a cheap suitcase, they declare they have consulted an expert historian, never named, to justify their surrender to pressure. The filmmakers never get a change to see or debate the opinion. (See my labels "Prairie Giant.")

If historical advice is expert, the expert should be prepared to stand on his or her expertise. Secret opinions, untestable, are not credible historical judgments.

So it's worth noting that the Senate report here identifies the four historians who examined the War Museum text: Serge Bernier (Department of National Defence), Desmond Morton (McGill), Margaret MacMillan (Oxford University) and David Bercuson (University of Calgary). Indeed, that is four experienced and credentialled historians, one actually working in a public museum.

Margaret MacMillan has been very public in condemning the change to the museum's text. I understand Desmond Morton has also publicly defended the integrity of the text as it stands. That would suggest the two experts who endorsed making the change were David Bercuson and Serge Bernier.

Strong Charles Taylor Jury

Last January 18, I was reflecting on the predominance over the years of fiction writers and fiction critics on the juries of the Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Non-fiction and what seemed to follow from that: the predominance of novelists among the winners.

The jury makeup was changing then, and the 2007 jury, recently announced, has solid non-fiction cred. It's past winner J.B. Mackinnon, Charlotte Gray, and former politician John Manley. Manley reflects the trend among high-end prizes to leaven their juries with non-writer celebrity jurors -- not a bad thing if they are literate readers, I'd say.

Can Historians Share?

Can history professors "share authority" with people who... well, people who are not history professors?

It's a live question for Steven High. He's a Canada Research Chair in Public History (who knew?) at Concordia University in Montreal. Apparently "shared authority" has buzz in academic study of public history, but the consensus seems to be that there has been "enthusiasm but few concrete results."

Prof High wants to see what the possibilities are. He's organizing a conference about sharing authority in oral history, digital storytelling and collaboration in February 2008. Details from shigh@alcor.concordia.ca Concordia's Centre for Oral History, a sponsor, is on the web here.

Joe Guerts, War Hero

Under political pressure, the Canadian War Museum, so much admired since the opening of its sober and majestic new building two years ago, will bowdlerize its exhibit on the Second World War, according to Paul Gessell in the National Post.

Alleged spokesmen for veterans have waged war against the museum for its account of the bombing campaign against Germany.

The controversial text read, "The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command's aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations. Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions of German war production until late in the war."

No one has disputed the truth of this statement, but some old men who think they own the war found it unflattering to aircrew. In June, Gessell reports, a Senate committee too much beholden to those men did not quarrel with the accuracy of the statement, but still declared it should nevertheless be changed to suit the taste of the critics.

Joe Geurts, director of the war museum, resigned right after the Senate report was released. At the time there was no explanation. It looks like Guerts fell on his sword rather than collaborate in gutting the integrity of a great Canadian museum. Heroes in the civil service -- good to see even amid the ruins. Courage among those to whom he reported?... scarcer.

Update: Val Ross of the Globe & Mail is on the story. Looks like the surrender started when Frederik Eaton took over as Chair of the museum's board. Kudos to Margaret MacMillan for taking a stand. Will other academic historians, particularly military historians, join in?

Royal Alex at 100

Toronto noted the centenary of the Royal Alexandra Theatre this past weekend.

One of the many great things about the Royal Alex is that it is still the Royal Alex.

We went to a show this summer at another magnificent old Toronto theatre, its vast spaces and exuberent decorations all meticulously restored a couple of decades ago. The only jarring thing about that theatrical palace is its name: the Canon Theatre. That's a corporate logo recently imposed by a deal worked out by the owners, Clear Channel (who last year brought the union-busting Blue Man Group to their other theatre, the "Panasonic.")

Before Clear Channel, the "Canon" had been the Pantages, which was the name it had when it was new in the 1920s. The Pantages family's theatrical business started in the Yukon, so the name preserved a history not only of the building, but of Canadian theatrical history too.

True the Pantages spent many years chopped up into screening rooms under the name of the Imperial Six movie theatre, but as a live theatre venue, Torontonians knew it as the Pantages.

These days, cultural institutions, universities, and public builings sell the naming rights to almost everything. Today the largest movie theatre in downtown Toronto is actually called Scotiabank. It's another credit to the Mirvishes that the Alex is still the Royal Alex. The Mirvish organization puts on shows in the Canon, but they don't own the building or the naming rights.

Night in the Archives

One of my favourite rooms in Canada is the reading room that fills the rear of the third floor of the Library and Archives Building in Ottawa. (The library reading room right below it is beautiful too, but one has one's loyalties). It's vast, quiet, plain, high-ceilinging, and its enormous windows give a wonderfully soothing vista over the Ottawa River. Having spent days and weeks there has always seemed to me like the essential credential for historical practice in Canada.

Used to be, when I was spending those days and weeks, you could sign out the documents and series during working hours, and then you could work all night and all day in the reading room if you chose. The archives never closed. The work of history never stopped.

I never did pull an all-nighter in the archives, but I always liked the idea that you could, that you could work in the sources forever if you had the stamina and the pre-planning.

Long gone, alas. The LAC is announcing even more strict limitations on service and use of the consulting rooms at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/whats-new/013-298-e.html. The Canadian Historical Association is organizing protests.

Was Diefenbaker the worst Canadian?

For its exploration of the "worst Canadians" in its summer 2007 issue, The Beaver asked for a nomination. I wrote:

For his faith in ordinary Canadians, his commitment to a Bill of Rights, and his stirring oratory, John Diefenbaker deserves his place on the list of Great Canadians.

But the damage John Diefenbaker did to our political institutions was enormous. No one did more to fix in place the situation that has plagued Canadian politics ever since: the leader as one-man show. A disgruntled, ineffective loner as an MP, he became the first party leader to seize the leadership against the will of the party’s MPs. Claiming a mystical bond with the Canadian people, he ran his government largely alone, without regard to cabinet or caucus, responsible to no one. In defeat, he shattered his party rather than accept party discipline.

In his long twilight, when he had been repudiated by the voters, his caucus, and his party, he proclaimed himself a House of Commons man. But the essence of parliamentary government is accountability to one’s parliamentary peers. Dief the Chief showed you could go a long way in Canadian politics while accepting accountability to no one. He has had many imitators.

The Beaver has been hiring a lot of new staff, and the published text has some small changes that I would not have endorsed. To see that version and the other nominations, read The Beaver .

Richard III

died this day in 1485 at Bosworth Field. Speaking of power-hungry failures, today is also the fifteenth anniversary of the Canadian first ministers' Charlottetown Accord of 1992.

Michael Redhill's Consolation

Michael Redhill' s novel of Toronto history, Consolation, has made the not-too Long List (13 titles) for this year's Booker Prize.

It's good to hear. Redhill has been, so far, a writers' writer, more respected than famous. Attention from a prominent international prize should add a much-deserved fillup to his readership and reputation.

I didn't blog about Consolation when it was new last winter. The review I would have given it was, well, mixed, and I didn't feel like carping about a book getting too little attention. But now it's a star.

Deservedly. It's beautifully written; the sections about a contemporary family dealing with one of its members dying of ALS are powerful and insightful. That story is set against historical sections dealing with a moment of Toronto's past that deeply engages the dying man. The lost, buried history of the city is itself a character in the novel.

A druggist-photographer of the 1850s may have compiled a panorama of Toronto in photographs; the dying man bequeaths to his family his search for where the glass negatives may lie buried. Much of the novel concerns this photographer and the mid-1850s Toronto he lives in.

Except Redhill's mid-1850s Toronto seemed maddeningly and consistently wrong to me. It's really an 1820s Toronto: small, crude, surrounded by looming and threatening woods, buried in snow, and absolutely isolated from the world for most of the year. The isolation and oppression of the place are crucial to the solitude in which Redhill places his lonely, half-mad photographer. They are also crucial to the plot. The photographer 's whole situation changes when he happens to corner the market in photographic supplies during Toronto's long winter isolation.

But mid-1850s Toronto was anything but isolated. It had railroads, it had telegraphs. It was a big busy ambitious place, nothing like the grim, dead village Redhill evokes so powerfully. The photographer would not have been cut off from contact with his family in Britain, and he could never have held a monopoly in silver nitrate for months on end.

Now I don't think historical novels are on oath. Novels have to work as novels, and a novelist's right to play with history is absolute. It's a novel; it's made up. Slaughterhouse-5 is a terrific novel of history; I think A Knight's Tale is a terrific historical movie. Neither gives a damn about narrow footnoted accuracy.Lots of the history in Ondaatje and Urquhart -- to name two very historically sensitive novelists -- can be quibbled with.

But I heard the novelist Fred Stenson, author of the historical novel The Trade, talking of his novelistic practice this summer. He said (I'm paraphrasing what I recall) a reliable historical context is like a matrix in which one sets one tale. And if you stretch and bend the matrix in a historical novel, you sail into trouble. Or, to switch the metaphor, you make the ground unstable underneath you.

I like Stenson's point. And that's where I was uneasy reading Consolation. Michael Redhill is free to shape his setting as he needs. But as I read Consolation, I felt, well, disoriented by its sense of history, and that shaped my response to the novel.

'Course, the Brits on the Booker jury won't have a clue about any of this. Redhill could probably have set his small isolated frontier-outpost Toronto in the 1920s without setting off any concerns from them. Go, Michael Redhill.

(More confirmation for my longtime observation: history is what you have to engage if you want to be a serious Canadian novelist.)

Peopling the Americas

CBC Television tonight reports an archaeological site on the Yukon-Alaska border, where Norm Easton of Yukon College and others are reporting 14,000 year old projectile points and other evidence of human presence -- if proven, perhaps the oldest confirmed site anywhere in the Americas.

Still one of the great unsolved questions of archaeology: how people got into the Americas, and when. Fascinating.

Lessons of Economic History: don't hoard those Aeroplan points

Aeroplan is cutting rewards for some kinds of travel again. Consumer advocates complain.

Well, good luck to 'em, they are doing their best for us.

But be pragmatic too. Go somewhere. Or buy something. Don't wait too long to use what points you have. Burn down the value in your bulging Aeroplan account before the value shrinks even further.

See, there's a gazillion of them out there, way more than the seats available to service them. Too much money chasing too few goods, the value of the currency is likely to fall. The jaded old economic historian sez, spend it before its value falls even further.

(Course I can say this, cause we blew through all ours on a couple of trips in the last few months.)

History of Culture dead in universities?

Have historians abandoned culture -- literature, film, visual arts -- as an element of what they teach in their history classes? American history prof Richard Pells says so here.