Danny Williams, parliamentary democrat?

I've never been a admirer of Danny Williams. He is the latest and most extreme of the egomaniacal, authoritarian, demagogic leaders whose existence parliamentary democracy is designed to prevent -- yet who flourishes in our Canadian perversion of the system. But suddenly I wonder if the Newfoundland premier might, all unintentionally, start to drive our disfunctional parliaments in the right direction.

Williams does not like what the federal budget does (or does not do) for his province. So he is ordering "his" MPs -- all the Newfoundland members in the House of Commons -- to oppose it, even though six of the seven are Liberals, and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has said the Liberal party will support the budget.

Okay, it's a typical bullying, confrontational, conflict-maximizing Williams move. But you know, Newfoundland's MPs are not obliged to support the budget just because Mr. Ignatieff is inclined to. MPs are not cattle, they are the elected representatives of the people. Mr Ignatieff should answer to them and not vice versa If Danny Williams's demands can encourage MPs to engage their brains and votes in the service of the country, he could be doing the country a real service.

There's just one proviso. If Mr Williams wants members of the federal caucuses to think and vote as they think best, he can hardly expect his own Newfoundland Conservative caucus to do differently. We should take seriously his campaign for independent thought in the federal caucuses when we see some evidence of it in his own. C'mon Newfoundland MNAs: what do you really think of Danny's work?

Meanwhile the Globe & Mail reports that "at Wednesday's caucus meeting, Mr. Ignatieff reportedly cautioned his MPs that their party must speak with one voice – namely his." Maybe the MPs need to remind them he is leader by their choice and at their sufferance.

Universities, museums, money, tenure

University of Pennsylvania lays off research staff at its Museum of Anthropology. Money quote:

Told that some of those whose jobs are being eliminated have said he is trying to run the museum like the Wharton School, with the assumption that anyone good can find money, he doesn’t balk at the comparison with Penn’s acclaimed business school. “Why not?” Hodges said.

Archaeology mag slams irresponsible history television

The program in question is Discovery Channel's, not from a History channel per se, but Archaeology Magazine's point in this article is how irresponsibly television often covers history -- in this case celebrating the looters who plunder underwater archaeology.

Late Update: Great. The same team of unscientific goldseekers claim to have found another goldmine, uh, priceless underwater archaeology site.

She vote

Historica reports that on this day in 1916 women in Manitoba became the first Canadian women to win the right to vote.

It was a Manitoba law, but it covered both Manitoba and federal elections. In those days, provincial legislation determined not only the provincial franchise, but also who could vote in federal elections. It was set that way at Confederation: the provincial franchise would apply federally. Macdonald established federal control of the federal franchise in 1885. Laurier, preaching provincial rights, reversed that soon after he came to power. Provincial control of the federal franchise was not completely removed until 1920.

Beaver in flight

New -- February-March 2009 -- issue of The Beaver is reaching subscribers now. My column this month is a profile of Dorothy Harley Eber of Montreal and her decades of interviewing Inuit elders about the Inuit past.

In the rest of the issue: a handsome survey of a century of flight in Canada, riffing on the first flight of the Silver Dart near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in 1909. Beaver Online here, including my accidently timely article from the previous issue, all about the governor general's role in minority parliaments.

Love on the Plains of Abraham

That's Rod Love, once the brains behind Ralph Klein (you say you never knew there were any?), expressing the 'ewww' factor in the idea of recreating the battle of the Plains of Abraham for the 250th anniversary next fall.

Léon Robichaud made much the same point in his comment on my previous posting

What was it again? Hungry Bear Coming? Here Before Christ? Hosted by Cree?

It has occurred to the company that has recently been calling itself HBC that there is actually brand value in its historic name and identity. They are going back to being called Hudson's Bay Company.

Some years ago, however, they laid off the company archivist and the other staff who maintained that historic image for them. No word on whether the firm will rebuild that capacity. Far as I have heard, they are still destributing the history of the Hudson's Bay Company that I wrote for them to all who request copies. Teachers, take note.

Wise men (some women, too) on the prorogation

A blue ribbon collection of political scientists, lawyers and scholars wants you to know "the rules concerning the appointment of government." They pronounce their views in a de haut en bas voice that seems calculated to offend everyone who reads it...

In light of the recent events, it has become clear that many Canadians are unfamiliar with some of the basic rules of our constitutional democracy. In a recent Ipsos Reid poll, 51% of participants mistakenly thought that Canadians directly elect their Prime Minister. We feel that it is our duty, as constitutional scholars, to clarify for the public the rules governing the appointment of government.

...but it is still worth reading.

Late Update: Sorry, some incompetent minion on the technical staff forgot to include the link. It's now there. (Thanx, Mark Reynolds) Stephen MacLean points out the same crew has an op-ed in The Star. And reader Chrystal Ocean recommends Kady O'Malley's conversation with some of the authors on her Maclean's blog.

...slippin' into the future

Rick Salutin has a little pensée in his Globe column today . He notes how everyone going to the Obama inauguration was going to be "a part of history." What are the rest of us, he wonders, ahistorical chopped liver?

I felt something similar when CNN, two days before the big day, announced: Two Days to History. Isn't two days ahead still the future?

Shovel-ready? We've been shovel-ready for 200 years!

The two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 rushes towards us. A network of Ontario citizens' groups and heritage agencies is asking the federal government to allocate $64 million dollars as part of a $189 million initiative to upgrade, develop, and preserve historic sites and related institutions as part of the commemoration.

They are citing the Conservative Party platform commitment to "instill pride in Canadian history and identity" and "ensure that important historic milestones such as the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 will achieve the national recognition they deserve."

Full details of the proposal are available here. The heritage network urges you to contact your political representatives in support.

Public Policy Wiki

Idea factory The Dominion Institute and The Globe and Mail are jointly launching a public policy wiki.

We'd like to try and open that process up a little, and this is our attempt to do that. One of the benefits to the Internet is that it lowers the barriers that can prevent people from discussing these kinds of important topics, and allow them to provide their thoughts about the direction the government should take. Some would argue that it lowers the barriers a little too far, but that's a subject for another day, and another wiki :-)

Above all, this is an experiment, and one that we hope will provide a useful forum for concerned citizens of all kinds to contribute their thoughts and ideas on some of the issues mentioned above. We're starting with one issue (The Federal Budget), but we hope to make this a home for similar discussions on a range of other important topics. How — or even whether — we do that will depend on your response to this initial "beta test."

History Today? Not today

Paul Lay, the new editor of Britain's History Today magazine launched a blog, a "daily digest of historical comment", on January 12. Blogged Jan 12, 13, 14, 15, ... since then, nada. Hey, I know the feeling. Who said it was easy? Still, there is lots of stuff in the History Today online archives, accessible from the blog site.

Late update: They also have a history news service -- active and interesting.

Torture and Terror: History of the Bush Regime

It seemed painfully foolish and unnecessary, the Canadian border service's decision on Monday to prevent William Ayers of Chicago from entering Canada when he arrived at Toronto airport to attend an education seminar at a university here.

Ayers is no threat; he's long since defanged. But he is hardly an admirable figure either. The studied certainty with which he refuses to take any responsibility for his violent acts in 1968-70, the way he continues to argue it was a reasonable response to American foreign policy: all that suggests a spoiled self-absorbed manchild who has still not learned and reflected on his experiences. He beat the rap on a technicality, but he seems to have no sense of the wrongs he was part of. He still conveys an unlimited sense of entitlement: "Why can't I bomb people I disagree with?"

He reminds me of George W. Bush. We also had news in the last couple of days of how Omar Khadr was tortured into giving bogus testimony about Meher Arar and how the drumhead court-martials at Guantanamo are now trumpeting those frauds to the world. Amazing, how uncritically the news media repeated all this! It reminds us that everyone involved with American torture will need to face justice before all this is put away.

I don't imaging George Bush ever will face charges for authorizing the regime oftorture -- though he may need to be careful about his foreign travel. But torture is one reason why Bush's "historic standing" (that mythic thing all leaders are said to hanker for) will never be redeemed. He will always be the torture president, the president who made the United States of America into a torture state.

It's a safe guess that Bush, like Bill Ayers, will never recognize his wrongs.

Piece of Folk History: Seeger and Springsteen for Obama

This blog has been mostly an Obama-free zone -- lots of others doing that good work -- but Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing "This Land is Your Land" at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday: that's worth watching. God bless Pete Seeger. I hope he lives forever.

MacSkimming on Macdonald in Ottawa

News from the Ottawa Historical Association:

The Ottawa Historical Association is pleased to announce a public talk by Roy MacSkimming, author of the recent novel Macdonald (Thomas Allen, 2007). Mr. MacSkimming will discuss his literary process in transforming Sir John A. Macdonald and his times into fiction and will speculate about how Sir John would handle the great issues now facing Canada if he were prime minister today.

The talk, one of a series of public historical lectures, will take place at the Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, on January 22, 2009 at 8 pm.

Robert Sutherland, early black lawyer, makes The Globe

Globe & Mail has a good lively story today about efforts to see Robert Sutherland, early Ontario lawyer, early Queen's graduate, early immigrant from Jamaica, and a black man, fully recognized at Queen's University for his important contributions to his alma mater.

I feel slightly proprietorial about this story, having written about it a decade or more ago (not that I was the first) in my Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers. Good to see it made (more) public, neverthelessl

Can you re-enact the Plains of Abraham?

Can you re-enact the Battle of the Plains of Abraham without, you know, giving offence?

Visiting Gettysburg Battlefield's impressive new visitor centre last summer, I was impressed by the historiographic section in its display, in which it was argued that after the American Civil War, the theme of "reconciliation" became very powerful, so that fifty years after the battle, old confederates and old unionists could meet on the understanding that they were all Americans who had been fighting over some important constitutional principle -- as if it had had nothing to do with still-painful subjects like slavery and racism and Jim Crow. It took some white-painting of history, that is, but relatively soon after the Civil War, it would have been possible to re-enact its battles without giving great offences. These days they do it all the time.

That has not quite happened regarding the battles of The Conquest. There remains a strong "Nous sommes opprimés, nous sommes humiliés" constituency in Quebec public life, for whom poking the wound of 1759 remains a vital stock-in-trade. I suspect for most Quebeckers as for most Canadians what happened back then is a very long time ago, and that lots of people could be quite entertained watching a battle re-creation without drawing political lessons. But I see the problem.

The Young City; James Bow's book launch

Did not get down to Nicolas Hoare Books in Toronto yesterday for James Bow's book launch, but I promised to mention his young adult historical novel The Young City, about a couple of twenty-first century kids who find themselves in the Toronto of 1884. It's the third in his series "The Unwritten Books." JB is becoming a prolific book writer -- to match his already well-developed blogging persona.

David Irving: The Mind Boggles

David Irving interviewed by The Independent of London. It's horrifying and instructive, and important in its way. David Irving has been a very capable professional historian, very skilled in the technical side of the profession. And at the same time he's always been... this. Anyone who ever wonders about, what do they call it, deformation professionale might take a look, and ponder.

Nortel: My Part in its Downfall

In the summer of 2000 there was a proposal about to produce a history of the legal aid system in Ontario. It would not have been a bestseller in the making, for sure, but legal aid a subject of some consequence. Publicly-funded legal aid emerged in Canada in the 1960s, part of the same process that brought medicare, expanded old-age security, unemployment insurance, and other elements of that "social safety net" that now seem part of the eternal Canadian bargain. Legal aid, because it was mostly run by law societies rather than governments, proved one of the most vulnerable of the safety-net programs; compared to pensions and medicare, say, it has been cut back much more substantially in recent years and with much less outcry.

Anyway, Andrew Lawson, a well-to-do retired lawyer who had once been a legal aid administrator at the start of the publicly funded system in Ontario, had spoken of donating his papers and a sum of money from his family's foundation to support a history of the program. Peter Oliver, the indefatigable director of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, took up the opportunity. He asked me to go with him to lunch with Lawson at Lawson's home in Cobourg.

It was a beautiful, lush, high summer southern-Ontario afternoon. Cobourg was looking its best, and Lawson lived in a beautiful and spacious heritage home near the lakeshore. He had recently suffered an injury, so he was attended by someone who was at once medical aide, chef, and all-round personal assistant. This aide had prepared a lavish luncheon, and he served us as we sat discussing the project in an elegant dining room, with cooling breezes coming in from the airy porch facing the lake.

Lawson's aide had a small television in the kitchen, tuned to a business-news channel. I have a vivid memory of how, throughout our lunchtime conversation and later as we continued to talk on the porch, he would come out periodically, with the next course or a refill of coffee, and announce the latest news of Nortel share prices. "Nortel is at 118," he would say, and a little later, "Nortel is at 120." This, I began to realize (then? later?), was not irrelevant to our discussions. The funds that Lawson proposed to give in order to kick-start the legal-aid history would be a transfer of shares; the production of this history was going to be just another wonderful spinoff of the fabulous wealth that Nortel was showering upon Canadians who had made it part of their investment portfolios.

That afternoon we were bathed in sunshine and in that warm, humid, tangible air that I think of as the hallmark of rural and smalltown southern Ontario in the summertime. And we were also bathed in money. Perhaps I have never so strongly felt the presence of money. Old money compounding itself with new money. Money taken for granted. Money floating down like pollen on the breeze, growing and increasing effortlessly, easily, like a blessing, making all things possible.

Of course it all went away. That must have been near the very peak of the Nortel boom, just before the start of the crash that took it back from $120 to $1 and less. The legal-aid history went no further, as far as I ever heard, though indeed there were many obstacles that would have remained quite apart from donations. But as far as I heard, it went no further. I never went back to the Lawson house.

I never had any of my own money in Nortel, either going up or going down. But I never hear anything about Nortel without recalling that afternoon, bathed in sunshine and bathed in money.

Smackdown: Ajzenstat on Flanagan

Janet Ajzenstat takes down Tory apparatchik/political scientist Tom Flanagan's "the constitution is what the government wants it to be" Globe op-ed on her blog here. Actually Janet A. is on fire these days -- lots of posts worth reading on her "Idea File" blog lately.

There has been a lot of blog and media response to the Harper government's attempt to say, in response to the coalition challenge in December, that the government is not accountable to Parliament. There was Don Newman's demolition of John ("the government will go over the heads of Parliament, over the heads of the governor general") Baird, now a YouTube sensation . A thoughtful piece by James Marsh at HistoryWire. Even Rick Mercer's Rant on the CBC last night (online yet? -- I think not), took up the theme, with a nice little nod to the Dominion Institute.

But there's a thread running through these pieces: a declaration that the government and its apologists are just wrong, and that more education, more explanation of our parliamentary system, is what's really needed. I think that misses part of the problem. Canadians don't need lectures, we need a discussion.

There really is an alternate theory of government out there, and it was not invented by John Baird last month. You might say parliamentary democracy in Canada is challenged by a claim for something like plebiscitory democracy: the government faces an election once in a while, and thereafter the winner can Do What It Wants. Now, that's a bad theory, and a dangerous theory, and ultimately a tyrannical theory. But it's not confined to the Harperians, and it's stronger than we imagine. It's been around in Canada since the heyday of Mackenzie King. In fact, it's how Canadian government operates most of the time. And if we don't like how the government acted recently, we need to confront the systemic abuse.

This is the blogpost version of a much larger dissertation I don't seem to have time for. But it matters.

John A Macdonald's Birthday Party

I haven't got a photo of the cake yet, but the history students of Pitt Meadows Secondary School in British Columbia rocked their school on Monday with a party for John A. Macdonald's 194th birthday party. It turned into a national event. There was media coverage. (News story here) The Heritage Minister came. A prominent Canadian history blogger spoke.

I wouldn't have missed it. Thanks: to the Dominion Institute (their coverage here) who made my participation possible, but mostly to teacher Heather Brown, one terrific school, and the gang of students who made it happen.

There was a moment when we were google-mapping ourselves through the fog and the new construction in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, my lap encumbered with a large cake bearing the face of our first prime minister, when I wondered about the strange things the practice of history gets one into. But hey, the event was a triumph.

First Americans ... new DNA hypotheses

Were the Americas populated through an ice-free corridor that opened up east of the Rocky Mountains, or did people come down the Pacific Coast, headland to headland, possibly using boats? Well, both, says a new scientific paper that claims to be even more precise in its DNA analyses.

The ice-free corridor explanation ruled for most of a century. But evidence continued to accumulate that people were south of the ice in the Americas before the glaciation could have retreated enough to provide any kind of corridor. Archaeologist Knut Fladmark of Simon Fraser University pioneered the theory of a coastal migration. Rising sea levels 10,000 years ago put all the archeological sites that might have tested his theory at least 100 metres below the modern low water mark, but Fladmark set out the argument and awaited the development of submarine archaeology -- which has indeed provided some teasing hints of just the evidence he was predicting. And, despite a complete lack of evidence for boats in northern waters so long ago, it makes a kind of sense that a seagoing or shore-going people would have moved south into South America more rapidly than peoples adapted to hunting on the North American interior. So for all the lack of definitive evidence, the coastal migration theory gained a lot of adherents in the last quarter-century or so.

From their press quotations, the Italian DNA scientists who are bringing forth the new data and the new interpretation seem only roughly familiar with all those decades of arguments. But they seem to be up for a compromise: a coastal migration took people with one set of DNA haplotypes right down the west coast and into South America. An inland migration through the gap between the glaciers that did eventually open up brought other people, with a slightly different DNA set, into the interior of North America, where they stayed.

Since both groups came from Asia, and not far apart in time or space, it's not clear how much of a difference there is here. I recall archaeologist Lewis Binford dismissing the whole controversy with a rasping "Who care which river valley they came down? That doesn't implicate any new knowledge." But splitting DNA haplogroups ever more finely is what the DNA science does superbly these days. Look for more of it, maybe even working out dates and sequences.

Frances Russell on Senate history

Okay, one reason I like Frances Russell's Winnipeg Free Press column on the history of the Senate is that she draws most of the history from me. But it's a good, strong Frances Russell piece -- likely to make some people think and make smoke come out of some others' ears.

Late update: Shoulda thought to say: my article that FR draws on is on my site here.

(hat-tip: Stephen Michael MacLean)

What are you doing for John A.'s birthday?

It's next Sunday, January 11th. He'd be 194. Most years, I'd probably be doing just precisely as much as you will be doing, but this year I'm actually going to a party in the west, organized by Heritage Minister James Moore (no relation!), a local school, and The Dominion Institute. More news next week, but there will be cake.

Christopher Hibbert, 1924-2008

Seems I recently saw notice of a new book by Christopher Hibbert, and I thought, "That guy was a best-seller when I was a kid. Do these British historian-gents live forever?"

No, they don't. Here's an obit.

About half the books I write are on subjects I’ve chosen myself, which both my American and English publishers have to want at the same time,” he told The Sunday Times. “The rest of the time I rather feel like a barrister being given a brief. You’re given your instructions and told, ‘This is the subject for you, old chap, and we want 120,000 words.'

Nice work when you can get it (sez I, having done a few). Actually that new book may have been a reprint. I can't find mention of any new books since 2004, when he was only eighty.

Charles Taylor Non-Fiction Prize short list announced

And it is short: three books. And all three are histories this year.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (Penguin Canada)
Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918, Volume Two by Tim Cook (Viking Canada)
Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World by Ana Siljak (St. Martin’s Press/H.B. Fenn)

Quill and Quire has reviews.

What an Academic History Conference is like

I don't go to many. This vivid description is part of the reason why there's a lot I miss not at all. (Potty-mouth alert)

Later update: Here's another perspective, also via Cliopatria, on the job-prep part of it (outlining things you might think would have been standard for a hundred years or so).

History of Wedgwood

2009 marks the 250th anniversary of Wedgwoods, the British pottery firm.

Wedgwoods has always been more than a brand of luxury ceremics. Its foundation marked a vital step in the development of British industry and technology. Josiah Wedgwood's technical innovations meant that Britain had bone china that could compete with the Chinese originals in the home market and for export. The growth of his factories in the Potteries of northern England was a key step in the growth of English industries based on marketing to the newly emerging middle classes. It's the high-end stuff that is famous, but the Potteries made pottery for everyone. The archaeology collection of practically every post-1750s historical site in much of the world is heaped with Potteries pottery.

This all means something particular to me, too. I was born within the smell of Wedgwoods' chimneys (hey, we're a country of immigrants), and throughout my childhood, my Canadian childhood, my parents could hardly go into a restaurant or even a private home without wanting to turn over a dish to see the maker's mark of whichever Potteries factory had produced them.

Well, those days were going a long time ago. Before the end of my childhood, you couldn't rely on finding those British brands everywhere. Long term consequence: the Wedgwood group declared bankruptcy today.

Turns out Wedgwood and Royal Doulton and the German Rosenthal and the Irish crystal-maker Waterford are all one company nowadays, and all toast together. Wikipedia has a pretty decent summary of the history of Wedgwoods here. No doubt someone will pick up most of these brands in some form.

Waterford has resonance for me too. Someone long ago gave us some gloriously heavy Waterford cut crystal tumblers, and it's been always strangely reassuring and comforting to me to sit with an inch of Scotch in one of them, savouring the weight and the splintering light. Dickens knows the feeling precisely: "At Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass: two tumblers and a custard cup without a handle." Ah, gentility.

Historian of the week: Benny Morris

Benny Morris defends the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian of leftist political views. He became famous and controversial in 1988 with the publication of The Palestinian Refugee Problem, the first major work by an Israeli professional historian using Israeli sources to document the extent to which the flight of 700,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948 was provoked not by the Arab leadership, as Israel had always declared, but by Israeli military action against Palestinian towns and communities.

Morris, who refused to do mandatory service in the Israeli army in the early 1980s and was jailed, was widely accused of disloyalty, anti-Zionism and undermining Israel.

Last week Benny Morris published an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Israel Feels Threatened.” He followed up with an interview with CBC Radio’s "The Current" (podcast available here ). Benny Morris, the scourge of Israel’s official history, in a country with a strong left-wing peace movement, supports the military action Israel is currently conducting against Gaza.

Morris had abandoned none of his historical views or political positions. He’s ready to accept a Palestinian state. What he argues, however, is that as long as the Palestinians support entities like Hamas and Hezbollah that are dedicated not to peace but to victory (essentially defined as the removal of every living Jew from the Middle East and the establishment of a theocratic autocracy throughout the region), it is futile for Israel to talk of peace and negotiation. Israel simply has to defend its existence and try to encourage the emergence of a genuine negotiating partner on the other side. Morris believes bombing Gaza may or may not be effective (the Times piece is coolly pessimistic), but he sees no fundamental moral objection to it.

Morris has the support, actually, of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas was quoted the other day as saying Hamas has only itself to blame for the attack on Gaza. As the head of Fatah, the rival faction whose leaders in Gaza were killed off by Hamas last year, Abbas is no friend to Hamas, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. And Gazans voted to bring Hamas to power.

Morris made his case just days after the death of the Irish historian Conor Cruise O’Brien. In the 1970s, O’Brien made the case – indisputable to me -- that progress in the Irish “Troubles” required the defeat and repudiation of the Irish Republican Army and, until that happened, talking peace with the killers and their apologists was useless and self-defeating. It took about thirty years, unfortunately, before the IRA was beaten and its ideology collapsed – but who can doubt Ireland, both north and south, is in a much better situation for it. The civil rights of northern Catholics could have been addressed thirty years sooner had the IRA violence campaign never begun.

I’m willing to see the force in Morris’s argument that much the same applies in the Middle East. The Palestinians can have peace, and a state, and self-determination, and social and economic progresss – but they can’t have all those things and at the same time support genocidal theocrats and their armed militias.

We in the west are appalled by the suffering in Gaza, where some 500 people (perhaps a fifth of them non-combatants) have died. But Hamas feels no such compunction. “It does not matter how many are killed,” Hamas leaders say over and over.

The people of Gaza have had choices and elections, and for the moment they have chosen to support Hamas. They have chosen war. Now it has come to them, the effects are appalling. But it’s hard to see them as merely its victims. The historian Benny Morris makes a strong case.

Local History Blogger cited as Mover, Shaker

On December 16, I sloped down to the Dominion Institute Christmas party several flights up (walk up, that is) in an old Toronto industrial building. I had a good time, met some old acquaintances, made some new ones, and was struck again by the range of friends and supporters the Institute has built. I schmoozed briefly with Globe & Mail reporter Deirdre Kelly, who was there with a photographer. Got my photie took and thought no more about it. No coverage in the paper in the following days.

Hey, there we all are in the society pages on January 3, lucky guests at the party that Kelly, the Globe's official partygoer, now declares "the surprise hit of the season." In Kelly's words,

These were serious movers and shakers, among them Howard Millard, former chief of staff for Liberal House leader Ralph Goodale; Christopher Moore, the Canadian history writer; and Jaime Watt, former communications director for Ontario premier Mike Harris.

Actually I met neither of those other MS-types. But it was a busy room, and they did not meet me either.

Best History Blogs USA

Cliopatria lists 'em. I wish there were enough worthwhile Canadian history blogs to make an equivalent list....

To the Nines -- reviewing the centuries

This science-fictional date 2009 has me rolling back through the centuries of Canadian history.

In 1509 a few Europeans were already beginning to fish, hunt whales, and trade in a very small way with the native inhabitants of "Canada." At this time, "Canada" means "town," more or less, in the Iroquoian languages, and the "Canadians" are the town-dwellers who live in agricultural settlements in the area around what is now Quebec City (Quebec = "the narrows," in the Algonkian languages).

From 1509 to 1609 the Europeans made remarkably little progress in Canada. In 1609 a few handfuls of fishermen sometimes winter in Newfoundland. Champlain has just founded a fortified trading post at Quebec, and his fight against a Mohawk army near Lake Champlain seals the great alliance with the Hurons and Algonkians north of the St Lawrence/Great Lakes line that initiates New France's near-hundred-year war against the Iroquois Confederacy south of the lakes.

In 1709 New France, a colony of about 15000 people, is growing rapidly along the St Lawrence, in Acadia, and in the fur trade upcountry, but the colony is caught up in the European dynastic war that pits France's empire against Britain's. French forces harry Newfoundland, raid New England, and occupy all the Hudson's Bay Company posts in the north.

In 1809 the situation has changed enormously. New France is gone, and all of European-settled parts of the future "Canada" are now absolutely controlled by British governors, who are beginning to battle with the democratic claims of elected legislatures. The United States has been born in hostility to British Canada. They'll be invading Canada in a couple of years. Europeans are caught up in the rise and fall of Napoleon's empire.

In 1909 it's all completely different again. Wilfrid Laurier is prime minister of the self-governing nation of Canada -- where'd that come from? The really huge changes are in the way Canadians live: industrialization, railroads, factories, intercontinental telegrapy, mass literacy, democratic government.

In 2009... well, a lot has happened in the century, but 2009 might seem more recognizable to 1909 than 1909 was to 1809, or 1809 to 1709. Canada is still here, we are still defined by our technology and industry....

Course, we could reverse all this, and look not from the newcomers' point-of-view, but from the point of view of Canada, of people who have always been here.

1509 might as well have been 1491 for Canada. As of yet, there is practically no serious contact between Canadian First Nations and Europeans. Across what is now Canada, First Nations pursue their historical development oblivious to the presence of Europe. How many in Canada would have heard rumours of what was happening in the Caribbean? Not many. At this time the Spanish are not yet even in Mexico.

By 1609 there had been enormous changes across eastern and central Canada. The Huron and Iroquois confederacies have coalesced into compact, powerful, large-in-population, and mutually hostile societies. The St Lawrence Iroquoians -- those "Canadians" of 1509 -- had been dispersed entirely even before the French settle the St Lawrence valley. There is already mass depopulation among eastern First Nations, such as the ancestral Mikmaw.

1709 is a period of relative power for Canadian First Nations vis-a-vis the newcomers. They have adjusted to first contact, built alliances, become central in the fur trade out of both Montreal and Hudson's Bay. The Metis are an emerging people. Pacific Coast nations and far northern people remain largely out of contact with Europeans (and Asians), though surely aware of and part of Europe-linked trade networks. The Pacific Coast nations may still be rebuilding from the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami of 1700.

1809 sees the heyday of the plains equestrian culture and the buffalo-hunting societies. The fur trade has now crossed the entire continent, and control of it is beginning to shift from native hands to European corporate control. Eastern and central first nations are reeling under population pressure from the newcomers.

1909 is pretty close to the nadir for Canadian first nations: continued population decline, the land base lost, their societies under explicitly hostile colonial control, culture and rights denied and derided.

2009.... Again we might wonder, has so much changed in a century? Yeah, some has. Maybe the last couple of decades suggest 2009 might eventually be seen as lying near the start of a First Nations renaissance.

2109? Haven't a clue, not a clue.