How to elect parliamentary leaders responsibly: a hint from Japan

One month. 185 to 154

Party leadership contests in Japan always seem to be studiously ignored by Canadian strategists and commentators, but I find them fascinating.

Shigeru Ishiba, who was selected as Liberal-Democratic party leader and prime minister of Japan in the fall of 2024, began losing support in public opinion and by-election results early in 2025. He resisted resignation and considered calling a snap election but finally resigned as party leader September 7, 2025.  Potential leadership candidate began jockeying for position.  A twelve-day leadership contest began on September 20.  

Canadians, are you amazed already? In real parliamentary democracies, a leadership choice takes twelve days! 

On October 3, just under a million LD party-members (longtime members, not the instant-members who dominate Canadian leadership races) and all LD members of the legislature voted.  The mass membership votes determined 50% of the outcome and the elected MPs provided the other 50%. Parliamentarians with power -- what a concept.

No candidate secured a majority on October 3. On October 4 the MPs alone (plus one vote per constituency as determined from the October 3 vote) voted to determine a winner between the two strongest candidates in the October 3 results.

 Sanae Takaichi won the leadership on October 4 by a vote of 185 to 156 -- 54% -- so she became president of the LD party -- equivalent to what Canadians call party leader. Parliament will meet on October 14, and the LD controls enough parliamentary seats to ensure Sanae Takaichi will become prime minister.

A leadership decision determined by 341 elected representatives of the Japanese people. One month plus one week to determine a new leader. Cost: a pocketful of yen. 

It's not very Canadian.  No months-long, million-dollar "campaign" determined by which campaign organization buys the most party "memberships" -- which become meaningless the moment the race ends. A contest where those who seek leadership have a real incentive to serve in parliament, not to avoid it.  And as previously demonstrated in Britain, India, etc., women can win! 

Most important, a real chain of accountability. The new leader, chosen by caucus, remains fully accountable to caucus, which remains accountable to the voters. Like her predecessor, she can be removed and replaced by the same process that elected her should she fail to satisfy Parliament and public opinion.  

Meanwhile in Canada:

• The NDP, though it can hold the balance of power in the Canadian parliament if it wishes, has essentially dropped out of politics for six months while a bunch of candidates and their hired strategy companies rush around the country raising money to buy up party memberships.  
• Rumours circulate that Pierre Poilievre is at risk in his upcoming Conservative party leadership review, so he's as preoccupied as ever with cultivating his base and selling new memberships.  No doubt the strategists are raising money like mad.
• In Ontario, both the Liberal Party and the Ontario NDP are essentially in the same position:  more focussed on endless and expensive internal leadership struggles than on their role in providing a legislative opposition. It is to weep. 

You can't have a parliamentary system without parliamentarians.  Like Japanese ones, who have real power and real responsibility.

 

Prize Watch: Raymond Blake for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

I missed this one last week. The Writers' Trust announced the 2025 winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing (given annually for a book of literary nonfiction that embodies a political subject relevant to Canadian readers and Canadian political life) is historian Raymond Blake of the University of Regina, for Canada's Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity. 

Quite a few historians have been nominated for this prize over the years, but it's not a historical prize per se, and only a handful have won. Good year to win it too: they just raised the prize to $40,000.  The CBC's coverage says

Blake is a Regina-based author and editor of more than 20 books. His book Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland's Rocky Road Towards Confederation, co-authored with Melvin Baker, won several awards, including the Pierre Savard Award from the International Council for Canadian Studies. Blake is professor of history at the University of Regina and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

I think of Raymond as a friend, and I have not read Canada's Prime Ministers, so I won't say more.  But I like this win.  And Where Once They Stood is a terrific window into Newfoundland history in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Blake comes from one of the farthest-out of the old outports.) 

It's up: Moore on the Dead of Durie Street

I know what that means. Gregory Joseph Clancy died at the age of 20 on April 16, 1945, in the sinking of HMCS Esquimalt, the last Canadian warship sunk by enemy action in the Second World War.  Years ago, I learned from the Poppy File that he lived in the house next to ours almost fifty years before we moved there. An only child, his parents long since dead, he might easily be forgotten. But now he seems like a neighbour.  I think of him on Remembrance Day. A kid from our street

        --last paragraph of Moore, "Remembrance Day Project" in the current Canada's History. 

The story is now up at Canada's History magazine online, and you can read it from the start.  For even more impact, buy the magazine by November 11.  Or subscribe. 

 

  

J.R (James Rodger, Jim) Miller 1943-2025 RIP: Historian of Canada-Indigenous Relations [Updated]

Saw this recent obituary for J. R. Miller, longtime history prof at U. Saskatchewan and the historian of treaties, residential schools, and much else.

[Update, October 6: a more detailed obituary, recently published in the Globe and Mail, is here.]

I did not know him well, but many years ago, I talked to him for an article about Canadianists teaching Canadian history far away from Canada.  (In those days, maybe there was more funding for Canadianists abroad. I wonder what a new story on those lines would tell.)

Anyway Jim Miller described how teaching outside Canada helped shift his career around. I knew of him for articles on 19th century politics, D'Alton McCarthy, French-English relations. Miller told me how a year teaching as visiting scholar at a Japanese university led to a big change: 

Jim Miller found a year away gave him a chance to assess his career. “While I was in Tokyo, I was thinking of shifting away from my original field of French-English relations. I was reading some Japanese sociology -- in English -- just to get a handle on this society I was living in. And something about schooling and its role in socialization sank in, and that connected to my existing interest in native issues in Canada.”  Miller has been writing notable books about native schooling in Canada ever since.  “So academically it changed the shape of my career dramatically.”

And that was the beginning of Shingwauk's Vision, Skyscrapers Hide the Sky, Compact Contract Covenant, Sweet Promises, and other groundbreaking studies that went well beyond indigenous schooling alone, long before the Truth and Reconciliation Report began to transform Canadian historical thinking about Canada's dealings with indigenous relations.  

History of Free Speech

Like many Canadians, I'd barely heard of Charlie Kirk.  I try not to get very deep in the weeds of Trumpazoidal America. 

But given how it's becoming the American Right's opportunity to silence just about anybody, it seems worth saying something.  

But it's a Canadian issue too.  I saw Kara Swisher noting that the appropriate headline today for any serious media is not "ABC cancels Jimmy Kimmel over Kirk comments"  but '"ABC cancels Jimmy Kimmel after threats from Trump." Sadly, both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail failed this test this morning, both going for the first of the two headline options above.

I still don't know that much about Charlie Kirk, except that he apparently once said  

"It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment."

The Second Amendment is the one about gun rights.  The free speech one, now seemingly in abeyance, is the First. 

 Someone who does know about Kirk and what he represents is the American writer Ta-Nahesi Coates. I haven't heard if Vanity Fair has been ordered to cancel him but just in case, here's the link.

 

Hot Histories at the Cundill

I figure, who but the author cares about the tenth or fifteenth book on a "short" list? CBC Books had a twenty-five title shortlist recently.

But the Cundill Prize's short list (8 this year) is sometimes the most interesting thing it issues.  The Cundill goes looking for the best book about history published in English in the past year, and it gathers a crew of mostly Ivy League and Oxbridge historians to pick 'em.  Their selection usually offers a look at what some credible observers consider to represent some of the world's best historical writing at this moment.  When they get down to the winner, well, we may or may not be interested in its particular topic.  But there's gotta be something in the longlist that sparks some interest.

This year's eight books, introduced by previous winner Ada Ferrer:  

Ada Ferrer, Chair of the Jury, said: “The eight books on our list are all quite different from one another, but all share some essential characteristics: analytical sharpness, engaging writing, and a firm belief that what the past reveals must be urgently understood. The committee is so proud to present this slate of eight books to the world.”

• Emily Callaci (Allen Lane) Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise
• Kornel Chang (The Belknap Press of Harvard University) A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation
• Marlene L. Daut (Knopf) The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
• Greg Grandin (Penguin Press) America, América: A New History of the New World
• Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press) To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
• Lyndal Roper (John Murray Press) Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
• Sophia Rosenfeld (Princeton University Press) The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
• Martha A. Sandweiss (Princeton University Press) The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West

The only one I have heard any review comment about is Roper on the German Peasants' War.  Winner: October 30.

A fixer's history: the Coutts diaries

Down last night to the gothic halls of Trinity College, U of T, for the launch of The Coutts Diaries: Power, Politics and Pierre Trudeau. It’s a selection by Ron Graham from the massive private journals of the late Jim Coutts (1938-2013), longtime Liberal political fixer and chief of staff to Pierre-Elliott Trudeau.

Sutherland House had kindly sent me an advance copy. My first reactions to it were none too positive (except to admire what a handsomely produced volume it is).  I was probably jaundiced against Coutts from the start, for I thought of him as not exactly the cause, but certainly a symbol of the degradation of Canadian politics: its takeover by the unelected strategists, marketing guys, and poll analysts who give marching orders to cabinet ministers, caucuses, and the whole “representative” side of political life.

So at first I was both annoyed and bored with Coutts’ endless recounting of strategy sessions and speech-drafting at Pierre's elbow, as if the diaries were a rewriting of his appointment book.

But the book grew on me gradually. I conceded that John Ibbitson had a point in his rave review in the Globe and Mail, summed up in his quotation from Ron Graham’s introduction:  

at their best [the diaries] are “extraordinary: vivid, insightful accounts of one of the most turbulent times in Canadian history”

The diaries will have great value for researchers and journalists looking for new clues to the mind and measures of Trudeau the First. Trudeau gave him great latitude to drive all the (many) matters that did not engage Trudeau himself. For most of a decade, Coutts was in (often shaping) every significant conversation in the Prime Minister’s office, in the cabinet room, and in endless Ottawa lunches, dinners, and telephone sessions with the powerful and connected.  Historians, political scientists, journalists, and aspiring apparatchiks will be mining Coutts's testimony for decades as to how politics was done in the first Trudeau era. 

And as I kept browsing through – what’s a published diary for if not for browsing through? – I sorta came around to the man writing them.  

They remain intensely focused on political detail.  Beyond a few descriptions of visits to his parents in Alberta and an occasional touch of angst over his long-floundering relationship with a woman from a prominent political family, it's mostly just the job, the job, and the job. But gradually I had to acknowledge Coutts was more than a guy selling politics like cornflakes. 

He did wield way too much power for someone never elected to anything, but he surely had a brilliant policy mind and immense skills at getting real politicians to do what he wanted them to do. And I don’t doubt he cared deeply about devoting his life to something he actually hoped would make his country a better place.

In the end, however, he was not a great writer (except of policy briefs and campaign speeches, I guess). Maybe the Coutts diaries are an important book but not a great diary. He's not Charles Ritchie.   

Paul Wells’s Substack the other day had an interview with Ron Graham about the book.  These are two veteran political journalists, and both are concerned about whether who might read a book like this and the larger implications for serious researched nonfiction in Canada. Graham says:

There’s been a total collapse of the Canadian newspaper and magazine publishing businesses. There are many guilty suspects out there, but we all sort of know what's happened. One thing is that there's just not the vehicle. I mean, when I was doing those Saturday Night articles, I was allowed to spend 3 or 4 months following Joe Clark around the country during an election, with expenses. Now, sometimes I had to sleep on a friend's couch, but they were pretty good. They gave me the length to write about them.

The pay was always crummy, but it's even worse now. In fact, I think it's the same dollar per word as it was in 1970. Then you get into all kinds of issues with attentive readers. Who's buying a book anyway, these days? Then you get into the much more complicated— and I think more important— public policy issue of our shameless abandoning of the nonfiction and historical side of our country. Our publishing industry is foreign-owned, our newspapers are broke, our magazines are charities effectively.

True, all that. Boy, is it ever.

Coutts wrote frequently in his diary about people telling him it was time he got elected to Parliament, took a Cabinet seat, prepared to run for the leadership. I must say, nothing in the book made me feel it was a brilliant idea or even very likely to come true.  

Wells reminds us that Coutts actually did decide to run for election in 1981, and Trudeau sent a backbencher off to the Senate to open a safe seat for him. But he lost. And then the diary, the political diary at least, stopped dead.  

The Trinity book launch was not the usual drinks and book-selling thing, but mostly an interview by Ron Graham of Coutts alter-ego Tom Axworthy and Alexandre Trudeau, all three of them lively and insightful.

 

History talks at Yorkminster in Toronto

Yorkminster Park Baptist Church hosts an impressive speakers' series open to all each year from its spacious premises just north of Yonge and St. Clair. They always feature a strong complement of historical topics, and this fall it's history all the way.  If you are in the big city, look at the list.  (Actually, all available on Zoom as well.)

This Month at Canada's History: Remembrance and me

The cover story at Canada's History magazine for October-November is a Remembrance Day story -- and it's mine.  

Here's the cover. Story not yet posted online at Canadashistory.ca.  You ought to read it. Update:  September 24:  now up here.

Other stories include Gary May's "Driving Change" -- the 1945 autoworkers' strike that paved the road for union rights, worker benefits, and national prosperity. Gabrielle McMann on archaeology, indigenous remains and cultural sensitivity. Amelia Fay and Cortney Pachet on HBC artifact collections at the Manitoba Museum.  Francis Carroll on the why of the Northwest Angle at Lake of the Woods.  And genealogist Paul Jones's farewell from fifteen years of columns.

If you subscribed like you oughta, it might have reached your mailbox today.

Paul Rutherford (1944-2025) RIP: historian of media and culture

The Globe and Mail reports the death at 81 of historian and longtime University of Toronto professor Paul Rutherford:

Paul was a historian of popular culture and mass media in the Department of History at the University of Toronto for 43 years. He was the author of seven books and editor of two volumes that explored this academic space. His ideas profoundly influenced the field of cultural history, emphasizing the role of mass media in shaping society. In so doing, he advanced the field of cultural theory in Canada.

One way or another, I met, or interviewed, or somehow knew most of the Canadianists around the UT history department over quite a few years, but I don't think I ever met or spoke to Paul Rutherford. My early impression was that it was fresh and somewhat bold to have a UT history prof who didn't do national political  history.  Historians could do media? -- it sounded like a good idea to me, and Rutherford was very productive in that field. 

History of The Game

 

 

Sometimes called the greatest sports book ever.  I've had this copy since it was first published.  Glad to have it. Just noticed: it's a signed copy: 

(Not for sale)

 

Irish Famine echoes

The Irish Famine of 1845, now 180 years in the past, is having a moment. The Champlain Society recently posted a "Finding"  -- a document and commentary  -- focussed on a cache of previously neglected records of Toronto area immigrant agents who were claiming government subsidies for their services to "indigent immigrants" in 1845 and subsequent years.  Laura J. Smith, who wrote the Finding and provides an image of one of them (above), has catalogued 1500 heads of households representing about 5000 immigrants who were aided under this subsidy program  -- a notable record, since relatively few Irish Famine migrants have their names recorded. That 5000 people landed at Toronto and Cobourg alone suggests the impact of the Irish influx upon Upper Canada. In 1847, some 90,000 Irish came to British North America.

Smith notes the chance that led her to these LAC documents, though she had long suspected their existence and had searched for something like them.  Also by coincidence, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has just published its entry on the Quebec novelist Laure Conan (Félicité Angers), who was born (at La Malbaie) in the Irish famine year of 1845.  The biography of her mentions in passing another indication of the impact of the Irish famine migration on Canadian society:

During her three years with the Ursulines, from 4 Oct. 1859 to 1 July 1862, Félicité was already attracting attention because of her literary talents. There were so many Irish Catholic girls at the convent that she lived in a naturally bilingual environment. (italics added)

My wife's Irish forebears came to Upper Canada in the early 1830s and were already well settled before the Famine migration. My own Irish great-grandfather and great grandmother were born in the depths of rural east Galway in 1839 and 1843 respectively -- and somehow both survived the Famine and lived to ripe old ages in the 20th century. Lots of Irish yet to come....

Prize Watch: The Dafoe Prize

The J.W Dafoe Book Prize, presented by the Dafoe Foundation that honours the crusading twentieth-century journalist John W. Dafoe, announced a long list of ten books on Bluesky today. It's for "the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year."

I like shortlists better (isn't three usually enough?) but I suspect no writer agrees with me. And there's some good history and some good friends on this long one, so why not?  Here's the list.

Short list of five to come on September 25. Winner October 14. The fall book prize season is underway. 

Crystal Gail Fraser’s By Strength, We Are Still Here

Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh’s Reconciling History: A Story of Canada

Raymond B. Blake’s Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity

Asa McKercher and Michael D. Stevenson’s Building a Special Relationship: Canada-US Relations in the Eisenhower Era, 1953–61

M.G. Vassanji’s Nowhere, Exactly

Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay

Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship

Mark Bourrie’s Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia

Tim Martin’s Unwinnable Peace: Untold Stories of Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan

Niigaan Sinclair’s Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre

History of the Internet: Thirty Years

The ever-curious Lawyers, Guns and Money blog claims today, more or less, as the arrival of The Internet.

[W]hen did people in general start using the internet exactly? This doesn’t have an exact answer, it turns out, but after a little internet research I think a roughly accurate answer is that in 1994 very few people were on the internet, and by 1997 the vast majority of non-geriatric college-educated people were on it regularly, so September 1, 1995 is a good birthday more or less.

Yes there was an internet earlier than that. But those dates work for me. In 1995 I was writing the history of Law Society of Upper Canada on a commission, and the society provided me with a cubicle in their archives to enable my progress.  (The book that resulted is still in print and much admired; you should read it.)  

As part of being a temporary person-around-Osgoode Hall, I acquired my first email address. 

You can see how unfamiliar all this internet stuff was for everyone by that address: cmoore@educ.lsuc.on.ca  ".Ca" is the familiar Canada ending, but the new email administrators at the Law Society added ".on" for Ontario, ".lsuc" for the Law Society, and "educ" for its education department, home to the archives where I sat. No one would build such a clunky e-handle today, and anyway it's now The Law Society of Ontario.

I did quite a bit of emailing from it, but I got my own one fairly promptly. By then both cmoore and chrism were taken at the service provider I was dealing with, the late (lamented?) Interlog, so I seized on cmed, in honour of the fact that I had almost simultaneously incorporated as Christopher Moore Editorial Ltd. and it seemed short was good.  I was quicker getting to www.christophermoore.ca

(The LGM post also muses thoughtfully about the history of how things become timeless, just part of the landscape. I am old enough to remember a time before personal computers, and even a time before television, and I do recall the novelty of the introduction of each.  (Computers! I typed the manuscripts of my first two books.  Television: we lived in a small town in the British Columbia mountains when I was a kid -- you could buy a TV but getting channels was a problem.)  

I wrote a piece about the arrival of the Internet in Canada, which you could find in the Canada's History online archives here:  Canada's History Dec 2010-Jan 2011 at page 46. Did'ja know the whole corpus of The Beaver and Canada's History over more than a century can be searched there?