Canada Day with Murray...

Canada Day sometime between 3 and 6 pm in Victoria, I'll be chatting with my new friend Murray Langdon of CFAX 1070 Radio.

Other than that, I'm off duty and you should be too. Go have a cold one on a hot day, if you can.

This day in history: Stonewall

Toronto has just wrapped up Pride Week, one of the economic engines of the city's summer tourist season. For all its omnipresence in the city, I had not realized the date was set as the commemoration of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, just forty years ago. Wikipedia has a good essay on the event.

Photo credit: The Star

Books I've been thinking of reading ... (an unending feature)

An American magazine review (it's a magazine published by something called the Nixon Centre, which is unnerving) makes Margaret MacMillan's The Uses and Abuses of History (retitled Dangerous Games for the American market, it seems) sound pretty interesting. The reviewer goes right off the deep end in his last paragraphs, riding (if I may mix metaphors) a hobby horse about banning reassessments of historical evils, but that's not MacMillan's fault.

And the Guardian profiles a new crowd of young British historians burning up the bestseller lists. "Theory is a thing of the past for these hip young historians," reads the teaser line. The oldest is 31.

Hmm, the face is familiar....

... would that be Tim Horton, maybe?

The Dominion Institute recently generated a lot of interest with its report on the what, when, and how of Canadian history teaching in high schools across the country. Now it has another poll study out.

This is the annual Canada Day poll, and this year they analyzed the visual memory of Canadians. Results are, well... pretty dire.
You can still take the faces test yourself, from the DI website.

Nature of the nation

Regarding the last line of yesterday's flaming of Doug Saunders, Mark Reynolds observes:

I don't feel Saunders' Northern argument makes a lot of sense: he claims we consider ourselves a "northern country" largely on the basis of one line in the anthem, and then proceeds to say that the north largely fails to figure in our history, art, literature or public policy. So precisely why does he think that we consider ourselves to be a northern country? I'm not saying we don't, but he hasn't presented evidence of their being much of a myth to deflate. It reads like straw-man argumentation at its finest.

He adds, "I'm inclined to be charitable: I've met Mr Saunders, and he's a smart guy." Concur!

Another Canada Day, another crank theory

It would not be Canada Day, perhaps, without some really loopy piece in The Globe & Mail announcing that "historians" have got Canadian history all wrong, and we need a radical new truth to set us straight. This year Doug Saunders got the assignment. He starts:

We are not the Canada we think we are.

The country of our imagination – northern, colonial, rooted in a history of British settlement and only recently becoming pluralistic and multihued – is an illusion.

Well, so far so good. I would have thought our historians have been working for decades to demonstrate the diverse sources of the Canadian population over many year. Surely Saunders has been to the prairies sometime and noticed that lots of those Ukrainian Canadians descend from people who came quite a while ago, or that the Jewish communities of our big cities are quite old, or that the Chinatowns of the west really go back quite a long way.

But when Saunders says "historians" he seems to mean what he remembers from his grade five. If he has the notion that Canada was uniformly British and French until 1967, it must be the fault of "historians."

Doug Saunders's radical discovery is that not all 19th century British immigrants who came to Canada stayed, that population growth was slow between confederation and 1896, and that, gee, quite a few immigrants before 1967 were non-British. Somehow he turns these data points into an assertion that, for all practical purposes no British immigrants came to Canada in the 19th century, and that Canada did not exist until the twentieth century.

I look across to my bookshelf. Where's my copy of Brown and Cook, Canada 1896-1921. Didn't it have quite a bit of influence in its day? Doesn't it have the subtitle "A Nation Transformed"? Isn't the transformation laid out in great detail there pretty much what Saunders is on about? Except Brown and Cook did not feel obliged to claim there was no British immigration pre-1867 or that British inheritances had no role in shaping the nation the early 20th century immigrants came to. That's Saunders' contribution.

The northern part -- okay, he may have something there.

Just gotta shake your head, sometimes...

Jim Travers, parliamentary columnist for the Star, despairs of the failure of Parliament to rein in our-of-control leaders. His solution: delegate that task to the governor-general

Surprising to all but constitutional experts, wonks and Jean's predecessors, Canada's de facto head of state could have reasonably met Harper's unusual demand with one of her own. She could have told him to find in the Conservative caucus another leader with a better chance of commanding the confidence of the House of Commons.

What a restorative moment that would have been for this country's failing democracy.

Some restoration, some democracy! Let's have our prime ministers and party leaders put in and out of their jobs at the whim of an unelected, unaccountable, appointed ceremonial figure with a very tightly limited set of constitutional powers.

Why can it never occur to someone as smart and well-informed as Jim Travers that it is the right and the duty of the caucus, the elected representatives of the Canadian people, to play this role. But even when they won't -- and we all endlessly tell them not to -- it's hardly reasonable to think it would improve things to have Ms. Jean impose her own preferences in their place. Let alone to call it democracy!

(h/t: Stephen)

History of crowds ... really, really early crowds

The idea that human cultural development took off a hundred thousand years or so after the emergence of modern humans, cause you couldn't sustain innovations without enough population density to safeguard and transmit them.

Warning: history geeking ahead

A consistently interesting history blog by "fledgling historian" Rachel Leow ponders the details of doing research in newspaper sources. Been there?

The benefits of an historical education?

Paul Lay, the editor of Britain's History Today magazine, ponders the fact that Gordon Brown has a Ph.D in history.

It is alleged that former Prime Minister Anthony ‘Tony’ Blair voiced to his mentor Roy Jenkins the regret that he had not studied history. He thought a greater engagement with the past might have made him a better politician. It is a claim made repeatedly by historians, most recently and most eloquently by John Tosh in his Why History Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). It is mirrored in another appeal of historians, that the study of their subject produces a more critical and engaged electorate. It’s a view I generally endorse.

But what to make of Gordon Brown? He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a first class degree in history yet he has become, by some stretch, the worst prime minister in living memory.

Counter-examples? By all accounts Lester Pearson was a lousy and uninterested history prof before he switched to diplomacy.Like Fidel, he was a decent baseball player -- maybe that's a stronger qualification.

A while ago the lively American history blog Edge of the American West (scroll way down) trashed the doctorate of historio-politican Newt Gingrich:

Once I actually looked up the story of Newt Gingrich’s scholarship. It's pretty hilarious. He was at Tulane, finished the Masters, had no idea of a PhD subject. A professor he liked told him to do the educational system in the Belgian Congo, even though Gingrich didn’t speak or read Flemish, Dutch or French and had never visited Africa. He barely finished the 160-pager (without actually visiting the Congo), then barely got the Community College job through contacts, then barely got renewed at the CC and was given a strong warning that his prospects for tenure were miniscule; it appears his teaching was not particularly distinguished either. He was spending all his time on politics and cheating on his first wife….

Oooh, do we dish! But I was forgetting Janice Potter McKinnon, erstwhile historian of the Ontario loyalists turned very successful Finance Minister in Saskatchewan.

Bonne fete, Quebec

C'est la Sainte-Jean-Baptiste (ou bien, la fete nationale, si vous la preferez.)

More on digital index cards

Mary Stokes, doing a doctorate at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, reports:

I was introduced to a free downloadable program called NetManage Ecco 4.0, an information managing program originally created for business use, in a graduate history course called Doing History with Computers. Paul Craven was the instructor for the course. He has used it for years. It’s a great replacement for cards, and especially great for coding; though it has some deficiencies. [....] he thinks it’s better than AskSam and some of the other commercial note-taking programs.

What Wikipedia sez here.

What to do for Canada Day

The strike at Toronto's civic parks has killed the Dominion Institute's bash at Fort York, but if you are in Saskatchewan, the Rural History and Culture Association is planning huge things around the North-West Mounted Police Trail.

What's an index card?

History News Network in the US is taking an online poll: do historians still use index cards? Funny and instructive comments.

Personally, I gave up index cards a long time ago, but I still have boxes of old ones, and sometime a card can transport me back instantly to the time and place and obsession under which it was made.

More than index cards, I mourn the demise of Squarenote, a DOS-based digital system that replaced index cards for me but that never made the transition to Windows. Have been using something called Personal Knowbase, but it's much less satisfying The HNN commentators seem to suggest Zotero. Suggestions?

Historical studies today: all theory, no practice?

Larry Kramer, reviewing a deeply researched book on gay history in 19th century Britain, says something we seem to hear frequently:

This is a very important book. It may even be a historic book, one with which gay history can arm itself with more sufficient factual veracity as to start vanquishing at last the devil known as queer studies. Queer studies is that stuff that is taught in place of gay history and which elevates theory over facts because its practitioners, having been unsuccessful in uncovering enough of the hard stuff, are haughtily trying to make do.

I seem to hear versions of this about history, English, social studies, Canadian studies, all forms of humane studies, really. The lament is that they are all theory no data, that no one, and particularly no one in the academy, where they ought to have the money and the time, is inclined to put in the archival hours required to actually gather original data. It's easier to spin theory.

Is this just not-like-in-our-day harrumphing? If it's true, what gives? But more important, has anyone actually gathered the data on this one?

Battle for the soul of the sixties

Reviewer Brian Fawcett is none too keen on Bryan Palmer's new history, Canada's 1960s, which he finds "dogmatic and aggrieved." Cy Gonick, in response, calls the book "beautifully written, carefully framed and comprehensive" and the review "mean-spirited."

RIP John Flinn 1920-89

John Flinn, professor of French and historical translator, was honoured July 11 at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography event I mentioned last week. July 14 he died at his home.

Normandy 1944 in photographs

Library and Archives Canada is one of the supporters of this French project to provide a huge online archives of high-res images of the Battle of Normandy.

The caption on this one says: "Les Français se rassemblent autour d'un véhicule chenillé pour recevoir des cigarettes et des sucreries des soldats canadiens. En arrière-plan, les immeubles sont fortement détruits." The town is Caen. (Mention obligatoire: p010274, Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie / Archives Nationales du CANADA)

Supreme Court: scholarship is inappropriate

Just yesterday I happened to be noting Donald Songer's impressive new study of the Supreme Court of Canada. Meanwhile the Supreme Court was moving to stifle a similar study by another academic. "Speak to this guy, you are out of the tribe."

In the last few decades, law clerks have been a valuable source of new information that has revitalized court studies (see Bob Woodward, see Jeffrey Toobin, see Donald Songer -- who interviewed Canadian law clerks for the book I noted yesterday). Their journalism and scholarship has been much to the benefit of the justice system overall.

One would think lawyers would support freedom of information and vigorous scrutiny of institution like courts. So it's discouraging to see the anti-intellectual anti-Americanism of Toronto lawyer and SCC loyalist David Stratas:

This academic in a foreign land, armed with Canadian money, is mass mailing all of us, trying to get us to disclose details about what our judges asked us to do when we worked for them,” Mr. Stratas said.

“What assignments Justice Bertha Wilson gave me to do 25 years ago is trivia of no scholarly value.... It's dubious information of little value and questionable ethics.”

I don't mean there is any obligation on law clerks to disgorge confidential information to any scholar who asks for it. Surely these law clerks, the smartest young lawyers in the country, can figure out for themselves where their ethical obligations lie, without these fatwas being issued.

Should be interesting to see how legal history scholars, many of whom are also lawyers, will respond to this one.

Update, June 22: Jeez, the Globe editorialists agree with me on something.

New Legal History Essays

Speaking of legal history, Irwin Law has out a new title, The Promise and Perils of Law, a collections of essays in legal history edited by Wesley Pue and Constance Backhouse with contributions from all the names and coming names in the field, plus me too. Content summaries here.

Both this book and the Songer one are grist for forthcoming contributions in my legal history column in the lawyers' paper Law Times.

Do Women Judges Made a Difference?

Donald Songer, an American political scientist, recently published The Transformation of the Supreme Court of Canada: An Empirical Examination with U of T Press. He's not kidding about the "empirical" part; whatever the question, he has compiled and analysed masses of quantifiable data. So, do women judges make a difference to courts?

In the pre-Charter era, conflict on the court was structured by political party, region, and religion. In the post-Charter era, while divisions are still somewhat related to the party of the appointing prime minister, conflict is more often structured by gender. These results appear to confirm the early prediction of Justice Wilson that the appointing of female justices would make a difference. Moreover, the finding of substantial gender differences in the voting patterns of the justices highlights the political significance of the long strides made in Canada compared to much of the common law world regarding the gender diversification of the bench. (page 245)

In other words, yes.

Not that he stresses the conflicts. He also finds "for the past thirty-four years the Supreme Court of Canada has been characterized by very high levels of agreement."

History of the University of Toronto History Department

Professor Michael Cross on yesterday's post "Endangered Canadianists":

I agree the U. of T. situation is not a happy one.
However, I think you exaggerate how much better it was in the 1960's. I taught there from 1968 to 1975, and Canadian history was
always undervalued.

Several people who wrote Canadian history -Ken McNaught and Gerry Craig- did not teach it;they taught US history. There was only briefly a French Canadian presence. Jean-Pierre Wallot came and went quickly, thanks to the atmosphere in the department.
I moved to Dalhousie in 1975 where Canadianists made up a larger proportion of the department, and generally were more valued.

Heard it here first

The Globe & Mail today covers what we brought you yesterday: the Dominion Institute report on Canadian history in the high schools. Must say, the photos they chose to illustrate the piece don't help much: history looks like dead white politicians, again. (Take my word for it, online Globe readers; the photos in the print edition are not carried in the link.)

Endangered Canadianists

James Muir of the University of Alberta ponders my recent comment about the possible decline of the Canadianist at the University of Toronto.

As for U of T (St. George campus): while the department's commitment to Canadian history is declining, there are still several profs there who would identify themselves as Canadian historians/canadianists:
Robert Bothwell, Steve Penfold, Ian Radforth for sure and I am pretty sure also Heidi Bohaker, Franca Iacovetta, Laurel MacDowell, Mark McGowan and Jan Noel (Allen Greer, still on their page, has left UofT for McGill). Nevertheless, this is not, despite how good these people are, the equivalent of what UofT was in the 1960s when Creighton, Careless, McNaught and others were all teaching there.

In part this stems from two things: First, there has been a change in Canadian hiring law that limits preference for hiring Canadians. Even when Universities had to interview and reject Canadian applicants before looking at foreign applicants, the number of faculty from away was high; now its much higher, fed by assumptions about where good students study (e.g. a good US historian obviously went to school in the US). This affects universities across Canada. Many of the people from away are good people, but some, without a Canadian identity for better or worse, question the global relevance of Canadian history and so urge curricular changes and hiring patterns that limit Canadian history. This is made worse at UofT by the second thing: UofT's self conscious attempt to compare itself to US universities. In this climate, there is less institutional support for Canadian studies of any sort because Canadian studies is not an important subject at Harvard/Princeton/University of Chicago/etc.

Despite the first of the two problems I identified above, however, Canadian history is predominant at most, if not all other English language Canadian universities. A simple comparison to York would suffice. There are 77 Grad faculty at UofT, with the above 3-8 Canadian historians. At York there are 72 Grad Faculty, and 28 identified under the Canadian field (this overstates it, I think, but 21 or 22 are exclusively or predominantly Canadianists in their research and teaching). At my own institution, Canadian history has taken a hit in terms of full time History faculty, but it is still the single largest field (and a recent external review urged more hirings in the field).

All this to say, I don't think Canadian history is going the way of "Diplomatic history". I don't think you were intending to imply their equivalence, however, but to raise a parallel question for discussion.
The two are not really comparable: the former is a geographic area/country/society/insert your chosen term; the latter a field of study for one or more geographic areas. At my institution, the Canadianists divide as something like (topic / time & region):
Aboriginal History / 19C West: 2
Immigration history / 20C West: 1
Sport History / 20c national: 1
Rural History / 19C Ontario: 1
Environmental history / 20C North: 1
<20C North: 1
Political History / 19c national: 1
Legal History / 18C Atlantic: 1
Social history / 20C West: 1

If I recall, my informant's point was partly about the power of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities analysis to make national history unfashionable in the academy: okay to do labour, or women, or post-colonial or legal or social, but even if one's sources or subjects are Canadian, it's unfashionable to take on the national label.

National Business Archives

A new National Business Archives opened in Toronto recently:

In the near term, the Archives will exist as a virtual centre and digital knowledge base of artifacts and historical resources. In the longer run, a business centre, library and public exhibit gallery are planned.

Andrew has details and thoughts at his blog.

Dominion Day at the Dominion Institute

Happy Bloomsday, by the way. I like the postcard the Dominion Institute found to illustrate its upcoming Dominion Day event. (One little institute and they have their own day!) "All manners forgotten, they made a mad dash for the grill."

More substantive: the Institute's new research (released yesterday) on Canadian history teaching in high schools across the country. Press summary here; full report here. Quebec, British Columbia, and Ontario come out best (or maybe, least worst).

Supine MPs (the ones across the pond)

Charles Moore (no relation I know of) in the British paper The Telegraph emphasizes the essential point : MPs have the powers they need to control the government. But he looks at a recent British House innovation (a secret ballot election for the House Speaker) and he's not made hopeful:

When you look at the state of the race for Speaker, MPs seem rather like freed slaves who, so used to their manacles, feel lost without them.

Canadian MPs have been using a secret ballot to elect the speaker for some time now. It has made for more legitimate speakers, but no one can say it has inspired MPs to show any appetite for the other powers they have at their disposal any time they choose to assert themselves.

Gordon Brown, meanwhile, survives as leader of the Labour party. I'm okay with that; it indicates that, despite all the noise, his opponents in caucus could not muster sufficient votes (only about 75 needed) to bring on a review. True, a successful caucus review would not have removed Brown, but only triggered a mass party convention and that must be inhibiting in itself.

But recall the Canadian comparison: in 1988 a majority of the Canadian Liberal caucus asked John Turner to step down, and he just ignored them. (I'm going on my recall of the story as reported in a book I don't have at hand, Playing for Keeps, an account of the 1988 election by Graham Fraser, now the commissioner for official languages).

(h/t Stephen)

Abolishing the Senate... not ours, though

The State of Maine is moving toward abolishing the upper house of its state legislature. It would join Nebraska, currently the only state without a state senate. [Later: no, actually the proposal died.] The discussion here, on a liberal American blog, is interesting, with some reference to Canadian provinces that did away with their upper houses long ago, and some attention to the principle behind upper houses.

(h/t: Fruits and Votes)

What do historians study today?

The American Historical Association counted heads.

During a recent spirited online discussion among diplomatic historians prompted by the journal’s proposed name change, Brett Lintott, a first-year Ph.D. student in international relations at the University of Toronto, wrote of feeling a bit like the last woolly mammoth at the end of the Ice Age.

Someone told me a while ago there are no longer any self-identified "Canadianists" in the University of Toronto history department, though it's the field most of their students want to study.

(I don't really follow the New York Times -- but would the Globe & Mail ever do a story like this one I've linked to above?)

Update, June 15: is "collapse of diplomatic history" just a euphemism for "now it includes women"? She says so.

John Flinn and the DCB

Down yesterday to the University of Toronto to have a drink in honour of John Flinn, who has just endowed the Dictionary of Canadian Biography with a couple of hundred thousand dollars to sustain its endeavours, particularly in translation.

Appropriately, the DCB responded with a biography. They told us Flinn, born in 1920, went to Harbord Collegiate in the 1930s and studied Greek, Latin, German, French, and English there. He spent much of the war listening to German military radio traffic, then spent most of a decade in France working up one of those immense French doctorates in medieval French literature (and yet still speaks the language with one of those charming Toronto accents). And then he did the French to English translation for all the DCB volumes from 1966 to 1998. Well, he might still do a little something for them if they asked, he said yesterday. He's only 89.

Interesting question arose. Will the DCB (now fifty years old) continue that long line of handsome volumes -- or will future development be entirely online? John English, the general editor, mentioned that the average length of stay for a visitor to the DBC online is eleven minutes -- apparently that is huge, for online statistics. (Scholarship with an attention span of eleven minutes?)

Ancestry and the wiki-census movement

Historian Charles Levi on the Ancestry.ca census launch that I noted yesterday:

Oddly, at the same time Ancestry was doing this, a volunteer group also indexed the 1901 and 1911 census, and their version is available free on: http://www.automatedgenealogy.com/

My experience is that this site has fewer typographical errors than the Ancestry data, and it also allows individuals to suggest corrections based on their own research. Census takers were notorious for making spelling errors (and transcribers sometimes have trouble with the handwriting).

It is not as comprehensive as the Ancestry site.

And familysearch.org has provided the 1881 census on-line, free and searchable for years.

These digital resources would have been a great help to me years ago when I was doing my thesis (I used the 1871 on-line Ontario index, which was available in the late 1990s on-line and searchable by head of household only). I'm not sure how much quantitative history is still being done -- it would be a shame if it stopped now because there is a wonderful 20-year window open now for historians to exploit these on-line resources before the price of electricity makes it as prohibitive as the price of computing was in the 1970s and 1980s.

Short History of the End of the World II (economic history section)

From Beijing, James Fallows lays it out this way.

*China is the world's workshop the way the United States was in the 1920s. So the global recession hits China's export hard (relatively harder than the global recession hit the U.S. in the 'thirties). A hitch in the Chinese economic explosion threatens social and political upheaval. (Done.)

*To avoid that, China takes desperate measures to try to save its export industries -- giving export subsidies, tinkering with the value of the currency, restricting wages, limiting imports -- much as the U.S. did in the 1930s. The rest of the world interprets these actions as dumping and protectionism. ((Largely done.)

* Everyone puts up retaliatory walls, as in the 'thirties. World trade plunges steeply for everyone.... (To do?)

Short History of the End of the World I

Forget global warming. Do a straight-line projection of these two trends, and a really science-fictional future looms....

One leading Canadian news outlet reports that funeral home business is way down -- people just aren't dying like they used to.

The other major news outlet notes that boys are not being born, and if they are, they are disfunctional (even more than normally) -- something to do with all the stuff in the environment?

'Course you could maybe graph these stories against the rise of the summer doldrums slow-news cycle, and find a different history emerging.

Ancestors in the Databases

Went down today to do a little speak at the Ancestry.ca event launching the Canadian Census Collection today in Toronto: all the Canadian censuses from 1851 through 1916, fully indexed and searchable online -- with an ancestry.ca membership required, bien sur. (Promotional consideration: I just got mine in exchange for speaking about the historical value of censuses.) Not to be immodest, but David Miller and I killed -- and the mayor tweeted about it several times.

Talked to some Library and Archives of Canada people there; it's an interesting deal that archives are making with companies like Ancestry. The censuses belong to us the people of Canada and the archives retain custody of them. Anyone can research in them at the archives or online. But no everyone goes to the archives, or can master archival research online. Ancestry claims it adds value by making the censuses, in this case, all fully indexed and searchable and accessible to anyone willing to invest in a membership and then packaging them with a growing range of other Canadian and international family-history resources.

When would the archives (which get access to the Ancestry organizing) ever be able to invest in those additional services? It's a strong claim. And another way in which the monetizing of the internet continues apace, despite all those IP law profs insisting information just wants to be free. Certainly looks like a valid business proposition for the worldwide and growing Ancestry group of companies.

Censuses have fuelled Canadian historical scholarship back to Michael Katz's The People of Hamilton, Canada West and David Gagan's study of 19th century Peel County, Ontario, Hopeful Travellers. I'm not sure how digitizing of census data will influence scholarship, but clearly it's transforming genealogy. I wrote about that phenomenon for The Beaver in a column last year, and the response was strong enough that the magazine has been covering the genealogical scene ever since.

But what I really like about censuses is (to paraphrase my own remarks from this morning) the quick and powerful confrontation with human reality they provide. Looking randomly in the 1851 Canada West census, I encounter Donald Clark, 42, a blacksmith in Oxford County, his wife Jean, 41, and their three daughters and four sons. They and their eldest daughter Catherine, 19, were born in Scotland, but the 15-year-old and all the rest are Canadian-born. They live in a log house, and six of the seven children are attending school. They are nothing to me, but in one family’s entry, I can see the peopling of pre-confederation Ontario. Novels have been written from less.

In the 1901 Alberta census, I encounter Wah Chong in Canmore. Wah Chong is 55, born in China. His son Sam Chong, 16, is American-born. Wah Chong is as married, but no wife is present. Imagine the choices and constraints that brought these two to the mountain town beside the railroad tracks.

Back to 1851 and the parish of St-Janvier in comte Terrebonne, north of Montreal: Joseph Savard, 54, his wife Marguerite Paquet, 46, and seven children live in a wooden piece-sur-piece house with two chimneys. He's a cultivateur, and three sons are listed as journaliers, day-labourers. One of the labourer sons is 26 and married, but his wife does not live in the Savard home; one might guess she lives with her parents, while her husband has to stay with the father who employs him. The other children, girls 16, 9 and 8 and a boy of 10 are all attending school. There's the social and economic history of Canada-East that Fernand Ouellet needed several volumes to elucidate.

Books by two Harvard guys

The Guardian happens to be reading what I'm reading: Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. Just published in Britain evidently, whereas I waited about six months for it on the Toronto Public Library wait list (450th when I started on it). Haven't read enough to offer my own response yet, but the British cover (click the link) is more fun than the North American one I have.

Recently found myself, by mere accident, dipping into Journals 1952-2000 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. And found them amazingly interesting. Here was a historian who had intimate lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties (late in life he sees the advent of white wine and Perrier as a harbinger of the collapse of civilization), with absolutely everyone in liberal, north-eastern American circles of power for fifty years. Not just all the Kennedys, and every Democratic presidential contender, but Kissinger, and Lauren Bacall, and Adolph Green and Betty Comden, and Norman Mailer, even Bianca Jagger. Then he went home and wrote it down in his diary. Not particularly salaciously -- he's not the guy for Kennedy dirt -- but always vivid and thoughtful. He's an absolute liberal -- he finds Jimmy Carter insufficiently liberal and becomes so partisan about it he thinks of voting for Reagan, who he expects to be a harmless dunce. Then he notes George McGovern, similarly at odds with the Carter presidency, admitting he voted for Gerald Ford over Carter. He will think well of almost anyone (Margaret Thatcher, Pat Buchanan) who is good company at a dinner. His one enduring hatred is for Dick Nixon -- and then Nixon moves into the house across his back fence. (Hilarity ensues.)

Schlesinger knew lots of the academics, too. He's interesting on the experience of a historian who more or less abandoned the university for public life (tho' indeed he taught all his life, and he published a lot more history than most of those he left behind.):

"My academic friends are mostly those like Ken Galbraith and Dick Wade, for whom academic life is also a means rather than an end. The historians with whom I feel intense sympathy are those like George Bancroft and Henry Adams who abandoned academic life for the world of affairs."

One sad motif in the later pages -- he keeps trying to find time to get down to the fourth volume of his Age of Roosevelt. It never appeared. I wonder what Niall Ferguson says about that kind of thing in his journal.

Update June 16: Ferguson's Ascent of Money? I don't think I'm going to get too far with it. You know how films get novelized? Maybe this is the equivalent for his television documentary. Seems pretentious to find a history of finance a bit... trivial, but there we are.

New Titles (New Guru)

I noted recently the CHA's Macdonald Prize for Ian McKay's new history of the left in Canada.

That's not the only recent tribute to McKay. University of Toronto Press has out a new volume Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution. The collection of papers edited by Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme is a set of responses to McKay's 2000 "The Liberal Order Framework." And that was just an essay in the Canadian Historical Review!

Janet Ajzenstat notes the successful seminar on McKay at the CHA sessions and offers some polite but deeply sceptical notes on his ideas.

Books new and books timely

That's enough politics for a while -- this is a history blog.

New: Irene Howard's Gold Dust on My Shirt, a memoir that is also a powerful history of hard-as-the-land Swedish immigrants in northern British Columbia.

And timely: Ted Barris's Juno book is not new, but I heard him on the radio from the beaches this morning.

And The Historicist -- Kevin Plummer at the all-things-Toronto blog Torontoist -- has a nice piece on the 2oth century photographers the Turofsky brothers, with some great images.

Update: And, surely an historic first, Stephen Michael MacLean is Twitter -ing the 118th anniversary of the death of John A. Macdonald .

Back to Reviewing the Leader

Denis Smith sticks to his point:

Yes, British Conservative MPs showed they could do it when they removed Margaret Thatcher in 1989, and Labour MPs may do it in the next few days. But the Canadian House of Commons is a different place, where backbenchers show their deference to leaders whatever follies the leaders commit. For us, I think the question still stands: how do we get there from here?

Seems to me this is one of those "click" situations, get it/don't get it. Canadians don't get it.

Canadian MPs see themselves as accountable to the leader, rather than the other way round, not because they are uniquely cowardly or unambitious or masochistic or even stupid. Getting to be an MP is no easy business, and most of the ones I have met are assertive, ambitious men and women, and at least cunning if not brilliant. But they listen, they imbibe what the culture tells them. And the Canadian political culture is devoted to insisting that MPs have to be -- it's their duty to be, it's the nature of the parliamentary system that they just are -- simply so many tally sticks for the leaders to toss in whenever a vote comes up.

It's nonsense. Not only in Britain, but in Japan, and Ireland, and India, and Australia, and fifty other countries where the parliamentary system thrives, the foundational rule is that the government is accountable to the legislature because the leaders are accountable to the caucuses. Around the world, sitting prime ministers and opposition leaders alike are removed from office by their own caucuses as a matter of routine. (Years ago, I provided a long list of examples here, and there have been many more since.) Practically every parliamentary country in the world understands you cannot have a successful parliamentary system on any other basis.

Why is parliamentary culture here so out of step with generally understood principles and practices of parliamentary government? Mostly because we keep telling ourselves that what we currently do is the norm and there are no alternatives. Every political scientist in the country will tell you it is the nature of Westminster systems that prime ministers hold semi-dictatorial powers and MPs must do what the party leaders dictate. Every political analyst agrees there is no greater failing than a leader who cannot wield absolute discipline on even the most trivial matters. Every commentator declares that our national problem is a lack of "leadership."

Our MPs (and MPPs and MLA -- if anything, the situation is worse in the provincial legislatures than in Ottawa) fail to fulfil their constitutional obligation to hold leaders and governments accountable quite simply because we all tell them, endlessly and in all media, that it would be wrong and evil and probably illegal for them to do otherwise.

So how do we get from here to there? I would guess Canadian legislators will change their behaviour the moment someone they will listen to tells them not just that they are allowed to, but that they have a duty to. It will seem crazy and heretical for a moment. Then it will become a landslide.

A technical note: yesterday I cited the "rules" the British Labour Party proposes for reviewing a leader. Canadian parties have these kinds of rules too. In a nutshell, Canadian party rules claim to transfer authority over leadership from elected MPs to anyone who has purchased a vote in a party contest.

It is important to be clear about this: MPs, as the elected representatives of the Canadian people, have constitutional standing and constitutional responsibilities. The 308 men and women who compose the House of Commons have an absolute constitutional right and duty to hold governments accountable, and they betray that duty when they delegate that authority to any self-selected extra-parliamentary organization (e.g., the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, etc). The thousands of men and women who have purchased memberships in these organizations can meet however they like and elect anyone they choose to positions within their own organizations. But constitutionally the power of leadership in the House of Commons rests exclusively with the men and women the Canadian people elect to the House of Commons. Canadian MPs have all the powers they require right now to hold governments and leaders accountable. All we have to do is stop telling they do not.

Update: Come to think of it, I have a modest suggestion. If you agree with some or all of this, why not forward a link to this post to Paul Wells, or Andrew Coyne, or whoever your favourite journalist or commentator is? Maybe your MP too. 99 chances out of a hundred they will find the whole argument crazy and heretical... but what's the harm?

Reviewing the leader

In response to my recent comments about Denis Smith's Ignatieff's World Updated, the author sent a friendly note ending with the question:

You're certainly right that the parliamentary system must harness the ambitions of prime ministers if anyone is going to do it. But how do we get there from here?

Like this, Denis.

The Guardian treats the decision of the Labor Party parliamentary caucus on Gordon Brown's future as party leader as a normal and appropriate (though undoubtedly dramatic) aspect of parliamentary politics. This is how Westminster systems work; when a party leader loses the confidence of the party caucus, it removes him and names his successor.

It is striking how Canadian coverage of the British struggle, as here in The Globe & Mail, speaks of betrayal ("a sudden avalanche of betrayal"). In Canada we still believe that Members of Parliament, the elected representatives of the Canadian people, are not allowed to hold their leaders accountable -- when in fact it is virtually the only important role MP have.

And we still complain about out-of-control prime ministers. We get what we deserve.

Addendum: It's worth noting that British Labor has moved a fair way in the Canadian direction in recent years, empowering extra-parliamentary forces to circumvent the will of caucus.

Labour rules mean that challenging a sitting leader is extremely difficult, requiring both the signatures of 71 MPs backing a single challenger and the endorsement of delegates at a party conference.

Note that what The Telegraph calls "extremely difficult" is nothing like the Canadian norm, where a party leader can ignore the will of 100% of MPs if he chooses.

More on the Canadians in Normandy

Apropos of yesterday's note about D-Day history, Paul Dickson writes:

It should be said that [John A. English] bases much of his criticism of Canadian generalship on the assessments made by British generals. He relies heavily on Field Marshal Montgomery, who was particularly hard on Canadians, with one exception, his protégé Guy Simonds. All that said, useful counterbalances to reading English's work are Terry Copp's Fields of Fire and Cinderella Army and (shameless plug) my own A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar.

June 4, 1989

[Photo: The classic Jeff Widener photo for AP is part of The Guardian Online's Tiananmen photo gallery.]

Update June 5: Don't miss this -- an extraordinary new angle on the confrontation as it developed.

Will Canadian reviewers get to this book?

British historian Anthony Beevor has out the one-millionth history of D-Day. The Guardian rather likes it. Canadian vets, maybe not so much:

Though it is hard to match Hastings's Overlord in particular, the fact is that Beevor has indeed added to the account. Accruing greater detail, he has made use of overlooked and new material from more than 30 archives in half a dozen countries. His skill with German archives (a former Hussars officer, he served in the British Army of the Rhine) is especially evident. He addresses controversies in military history - [....] How badly were the Canadians led?

'Course, one of the standard Canadian works on the topic is subtitled: "A Study of Failure in High Command" So perhaps it's not entirely British snottiness Beevor expresses.

History of slavery

Here's something you don't often hear about:

At the time of Emancipation under the 1833 Abolition Act, £20million – an enormous sum of money at that time – was paid as compensation to owners of the enslaved throughout the British colonies

There's a list of all the owners who got cash, and British scholars are now going to use it to measure how much slavery contributed to the British economy.

CHA Awards now up

The awards the Canadian Historical Association awards presented a week ago are now announced on the CHA website here.

I'm pleased to see that Dorothy Harley Eber, who I profiled for the Beaver a couple of issues back, was honoured. And Timothy Brook, the subject of a forthcoming column (the CHA announcement spells his name wrong, unfortunately), won the Ferguson Prize for a book on a non-Canadian subject. Congratulations to all.

Denis Smith on Michael Ignatieff

Denis Smith kindly had his publisher send me a copy of his recent book Ignatieff's World Updated: Iggy goes to Ottawa (Chindigo link here), and I've been reading it with interest -- not much distracted by the announcement that Peter C. Newman, that connoisseur of power, has started his own book on the new Liberal leader.

Smith wrote the first version of the book, minus the "Updated" in the title, in time for the Liberal leadership race of 2006. He concluded with the verdict:

For the sake of the party, for the sake of the country, the Liberal convention should not choose Michael Ignatieff as leader in December 2006.

Well, it did not, but now he's baaaaaack. And so is Smith: Updated means the original text plus seventy-five new pages up to February 2009 and Ignatieff's installation as Liberal leader.

Ignatieff has always been a writer, and in the original section of this book, essentially a long review essay of the Ignatieffian oeuvre up to 2006, Smith looks into his mind by actually reading what he has written. Smith's theme is how Ignatieff the critic of power and the human rights advocate became such an advocate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and, in effect, a cat's paw of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policies of aggressive war.

Smith's reading of Ignatieff's ideas is hostile; to oversimplify, he finds in Ignatieff an unseemly and anti-democratic weakness for power, sees a member of the international elite coming home to his natural habitat. Ignatieff is just too enamoured of the power of the American empire and Canada's subaltern position in it, argues Smith.

It's a powerful case well argued. I must say I found the story more complicated. Ignatieff, it seems to me from Smith's exigesis of his work (and my own more limited reading in it), concluded in the 1990s that human rights are often unlikely to be advanced by handwringing, that effective defences of international human rights positions frequently do need force behind them. Ignatieff became one of the first advocates of the doctrine of "responsibility to protect" (or "r2p"), which aimed to modify the traditional idea of state sovereignty by asserting that states have a responsibility to protect the peoples under their sovereignty -- and that when they themselves became a threat to their own people, other states could be justified taking up the responsibility.

It is clear now that Ignatieff's interpretation of r2p in the early 2000s did deliver him into the hands of Bush et al. Ignatieff wanted to use their forces for an r2p motive, one might say. But they were still Bush's forces and Bush, having secured the support of Ignatieff the r2p liberal, used force quite differently for quite different ends (and spectacularly ineptly and evilly as well). Smith thinks this was inevitable; that Ignatieff was always in thrall to force and empire, because of his unseemly identification with power and specically American power.

Even through Smith's reading, I find Ignatieff's situation interesting, even moving; we watch Ignatieff trying to figure out where to go from here, his steps via Rwanda and Bosnia into international real-politik having come to such a disaster in Iraq. Muscular liberalism of the kind Ignatieff was groping toward around 2002 is a much derided idea right now, as a result of Iraq. But if the abandonment of r2p means leaving rights unprotected, well, were do we go? Ignatieff doesn't have the answer (Smith dismisses his recent acknowledgments of error and distrusts his retreat from the embrace of American power he espoused in the early 2000s.) But the question remains.

Smith's new section, written with commendable speed, inevitably depends largely on what Smith clipped from newspapers during the fast-changing domestic political situation of last winter. But he still has a theme about Ignatieff, and again the theme is power and its abuse. In the same way that Iraq exposed Ignatieff's identification with power, says Smith, the seizure of the Liberal leadership in December 2008 showed his willingness to abuse due process in pursuit of power. His reading of those events is harsh on Ignatieff, but he concludes with a call for a better process of leadership selection and leadership accountability. His conclusion:

Canada's political parties must concern themselves with constraining the power of the prime minister; and equally they must examine how their own leaders are chosen, assessed, and constrained... Under the leadership of Michael Ignatieff the party is unlikely to get that self-examination. The country will suffer from that failure.

Well, that's been a longstanding theme of mine, too, and Smith is nice enough to footnote me to that effect: "The historian Christopher Moore has been urging [caucus authority to hire and fire leaders] for many years." Smith remains concerned about Ignatieff's weakness for power. But we should look, I think, not for leaders who are diffident about power, but for systems to harness such ambitions. That has to come from MPs, not from leaders.

I'll get back to this.