Summer listening: with me

Quite by accident I have discovered that on Friday the CanHist podcast "Witness to Yesterday" reposted my half-hour conversation with Patrice Dutil from 2018 entitled "How George Washington Killed 10 French Canadians and started a World War."

Reheard after seven years, it's quite a delight  -- you oughta listen.

"Witness To Yesterday" has evolved since 2018.  It's now pretty exclusively a CanHist book review podcast, with a new crew of host interviewers.  But there was a time when "How George Washington" was its top-ranked #1 listened-to episode.

Patrice and I have evolved too. He has become perhaps John A. Macdonald's most vigorous advocate as I have continued to express doubts about "the man who made us." And I was dropping a few criticisms of his recent book Ballots and Brawls into my review of it in the current Canada's History mag.  

So it was a particular pleasure to hear us together in full sync over obscure details of 18th century New France. Thanks, Patrice!

 

Hugh Brody talks

NiCHE has just posted a terrific interview with Hugh Brody.  Originally a British anthropology student, Brody made himself into an embedded observer and recorder of how Indigenous and Arctic Canada dealt with government and industry interventions into the north from the 1960s to the recent past. He wrote much of the crucial volume of the Berger Report that helped stop pipeline development in the Mackenzie Valley fifty years ago. Very early among scholars and bureaucrats, he realized that the essential voices that had to be hear were not those of people like him but the people of the north.  To capture some of that he became a filmmaker.  Altogether an amazing career.

I began to realize that there had to be a completely different kind of voice in this, and it wasn’t the voice of people like me; it wasn’t the voice even of people like Tom Berger. The voice had to come from elders and leadership in the communities. 

... I came to be caught up in the courts: some of the important questions being raised by First Nations were being resolved not by Inquiries but by legal cases. [...]  where I could be an under-labourer to actions that came from the people themselves.

His book Maps and Dreams remains part of my essential Canadian books collection.

History of the Giller: money and politics in arts, culture, and sport.

I have to agree with a lot of the criticism online after the Giller Prize told Ottawa it might have to shut down if federal subsidy for the big fiction prize is not forthcoming.

If a private nonprofit foundation wants to give a literary prize, no one will stop them, say the critics I was reading. But there is no reason for taxpayers' money to take over when the foundation's aspirations start to exceed its budget. The withdrawal of Scotiabank funding after protests of the bank's alleged support for Israel is no doubt a factor in the Prize's financial woes. But if the feds want to support arts and culture, they can give more to the Canada Council and stop talking about more cuts to the CBC. 

It is not only literary nonprofits that go down the road of assuming the feds should pay for everything, of course. Look at the provinces on medicare and housing!  

Sticking to the arts/culture area: the history NGO Historica launched with a lot of billionaire money, but over the years it has gone to Ottawa for a lot of funding. It sometimes looked from here as if its choices seemed to reflect the historical preferences of the party in power at the time. (Lots of hockey and military Heritage Minutes in the Harper years, lots of diversity achievement Minutes in Liberal times?)  The situation may be a little different, however: Historica does things the feds would not do themselves, so contracting some work to the NGO makes sense, whereas the Canada Council is designed to support the arts, with the Giller as to some degree a competitor.

A different angle on politics and culture: an anti-Israel protester tried to run in front of the sprinters charging to the finish line at yesterday's Tour de France (and failed to cause a possibly fatal crash, fortunately).  The protest was demanding a boycott of the team Israel-Premier Tech, which this year is led by Canadian cyclist Michael Woods.

There is a lot of sports washing in Grand Tour cycling:  one leading team is called UAE  and another Bahrain Victorious, both subsidized by the governments of those states.  There used to be an Astana team, linked very closely to the Kazakhstan government.  Israel Premier Tech is sponsored by a wealthy Israeli private citizen and his partner, a Canadian, not by the Israeli government, apparently.

The solution should be a rejection of sportswashing by the cycling authorities:  no more state-sponsored teams.  (There are no Arabic riders on the Arabian teams, and no Jewish riders on IPT at the moment, I believe.)  But that's never going to happen.  Politicize your sport and political activists will respond, I guess.  

Book Notes. Forthcoming: a backroom history of Canada

Jim Coutts was the brains behind Pierre-Elliott Trudeau. Well, no, Trudeau had his own brains. But Jim Coutts was his indispensable righthand man, more powerful than cabinet ministers or deputy ministers, maybe the first hired strategist to have that much power. And he kept voluminous diaries.

Coutts died in 2013. His diaries, selected and edited by Ron Graham. will be published September 16. I'm now looking at an advance copy, courtesy of the publisher. It's going to make some news among political scientists, commentators, and backroom types for sure. I'd say historians of late twentieth-century Canadian politics writing after September 16 will be quoting extensively from it. Pre-orders are being taken here or via your favourite bookstore. 

More about Coutts here on the pub date. 

The Tour's dirty secret

A friend by the roadside

Canadian cyclist Michael Woods tried to ride with a breakaway group the other day.  Got lots of TV coverage for a while, and then seemed to vanish, ending up well back in the crowd again -- though not before scoring enough climbing points to rank him number three among climbers in this year's Tour so far.

Now Woods's blog explains what happened. You might say it's about circulation on Tour: not traffic circulation but something more internal. More about number two than number three.  Read it and laugh here. It's what Woods calls a Dumoulin moment -- an aspect of long distance bike racing I had never contemplated.

The Tour! The Tour! UPDATED

Why this man is laughing.

Ten days into the Tour de France, and no notice of it here yet? I'm betraying the masthead promise.  But I've been watching a fair amount of it. 

Theme of this year seems to be:  is Slovakia's Tadej Pogachar the god of cycling and destined to sweep all before him again this year?  Or is it possible that Visma, the team of the leading alternative to "Taddy," a Dane named Jonas Vingegaard (I know, the names are the best), is following a devious plot to let Tadej's UAE team lead most of the time -- while it gradually wears itself out in minor dominance displays, so Vingegaard can sweep past his tired-out rival in the last stages.

Well, maybe. But Tadej does seem to believe in himself, and makes dominating whenever he wants look almost easy. He is wearing yellow again today.  

On the other hand, his strongest supporting rider, the one who was supposed to clear his path all through the Pyrenees and Alps, had to withdraw yesterday after a crash. That has to be a boon to Team Visma -- but Team UAE is well supplied with other strongmen. Still a long way to go.

One of the pleasures of this tour is following Michael Woods, great Canadian cyclist and frequent top-ten contender in the Tour and the other grand tours. Woods is now 38 and has very publicly declared he has intentionally been sitting comfortably at the back of the race most days. He will only break out when he thinks he can jump from the pack and steal a stage somewhere (as indeed he did last year in 2023)  Here's hoping.

The more relaxed Woods actually has time to maintain a blog during this Tour.  He has been posting about Tour management's culpability in allowing, and even welcoming, the frequent crashes at this year's race -- and then blaming the riders for them.  He describes how to "sub" a time trial -- that is, loaf through it to save energy for another day, while avoiding being disqualified for missing the minimum time rules.  And he is particularly open in laying out his strategy for avoiding the chase for top standings, avoiding crashes, and awaiting the moment to have a single day of glory like last year.  It's a funny sport -- read his explanation of it all.  L'autre Canadien du tour, Guillaume Boivin, is still there in the rankings, but I have never spotted him or heard his name mentioned by the race commentators.

Meanwhile the scenery is gorgeous as ever.  I want to go to half the landscapes they have written through. This year Chinon may be the prettiest Tour town I know nothing about. No doubt other contenders will emerge.

Update, same day:  Well, I had not seen today's results when I wrote this.  Seems Tadej is out of leader's yellow again tonight. Apparently Michael Woods went with the breakaway for a while, but either thought better of it or could not keep up.  He's third over all in hill-climbing points, however. 

Update, July 15:  From Russ Chamberlayne 

"The current breakaway winner in the Tour de Nap"
source: @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt
('Historians Social' tab on the Mastodon social network!!)

Book Notes: Andrew Coyne on Canadian Democracy

[I've been slow to post this while trying to sort out my thoughts on this important book.  For those not so taken with the minutiae of Canadian parliamentary politics, I've put in a page break.  Click at the break to continue reading if you wish.]

Andrew Coyne’s The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is the book we really need right now. And rather disappointing at the same time.

Coyne, political columnist at the Globe and Mail and CBC commentator, starts with the blunt declaration that “our parliamentary system is a state of advanced disrepair – so advanced that it is debatable whether it should be called a democracy.” And he makes it so plain that I wonder why so few of our other pundits even notice – except perhaps when blathering about electoral reform once in a while. Coyne: “If we had the most flawless electoral system imaginable, we would still be a long way from a fully functioning democracy.”

I like how he starts out. Not least because by page 6 he is quoting me by name – from a piece I wrote in 2002 AD, no less – but more because of how powerfully he sets out parliament’s comprehensive failure to hold government to account, an issue I was going on about even before 2002. He considers how caucuses have abdicated their role in holding leaders accountable, and why cabinet ministers have let themselves been reduced to a thoroughly peripheral role. That’s more than a hundred of the book’s 250 pages, and if you have followed (or endured) endless blog postings here on these topics (talk about blathering on!), you know why I’m glad to see it laid out so comprehensively.

 He has more. How both the Senate and the Supreme Court, neither of which is elected, overstep their proper roles in the affairs of the nation. (Well, maybe.) And a great scream of fury and contempt at: the inane spectacle presented by the political parties’ national election campaigns; the sleaziness of their direct mail campaigns; the collapse of parties into perpetual campaign machines running corrupt leadership sales; the lack “of a sensible of coherent system of campaign finance regulation;” and the failure of televised debates to serve our needs. Kinda everything about our parties and our elections, in fact. (Yes!)

There’s a long and detailed critique of “first past the post” elections and the need for a better system, with most of the alternatives laid out in great detail. At 60 pages, it’s the longest single part of the book, and he comes out endorsing proportional representation (particularly of the multi-member constituency variant) and mandatory voting too.  (Another maybe. And -- see quote at the start of this post -- he’s for PR mostly as one last desperate chance to slow the rot, not as a serious solution to the general crisis.)

It's a bracing read. All in all, he sees an almost complete collapse of accountability: the idea that in a working democracy voters have real influence on those who represent them, and those representatives are able to judge the performance of governments – and able to punish, change, or improve governments that resist accountability.  Somebody had to say it. 

The disappointing part is Coyne's conviction that such changes are not even remotely possible.  He’s not very optimistic about electoral reform, but it’s almost the only change he can imagine actually happening. He practically dismisses the possibility that cabinet ministers will ever regain some measure of parity with the prime minister, or that MPs will ever resist the orders of their own leaders (or the leaders' flunkies).

This month at Canada's History: Aug Sept 2025

Lead article at Canada's History this month is a long reported piece on all the indigenous art pieces that were collected for a 1925 exhibition at the Vatican to celebrate the Catholic Church's global reach  -- and have stayed there ever since, though it seems many were acquired as temporary donations, or else more-or-less plundered.  

Kate Jaimet, until recently senior editor at the magazine, interviewed Indigenous artists and curators from West Coast First Nations, and her article is a deep dive into the ways Catholic evangelization went hand in hand with Canada's war on the potlatch and Indigenous culture in general.  "The masks represent not only art and history but a tangible connection to our ancestors and the ongoing efforts of our community to reclaim and protect its cultural legacy," she quotes Irwin Prince of the Quatsino First Nation."  

Also:  Dianne Dodds looks at the 1918 sinking of the Llandovery Castle by submarine action in 1918 -- the worst Canadian maritime disaster of the First World War, made more tragic by the deaths of 14 Canadian nursing sisters and many of their patients.  The Llandovery Castle is in the news these days, with the recent publication of Nate Hendley's well-received book Atrocity on the Atlantic.  

Elsewhere in the issue: a nice photo essay on the legacy of the one-room school across Canada, and Christopher Guly on Canada's movie history. The Canadian roots of a strange art theft.  And news, reviews and more.

Plus -- in the reviews -- my review of Patrice Dutil's recent account of Canada's first federal election, Ballots and Brawls, from UBC Press.  I'll be in the next issue too, with a feature timed to Remembrance Day.  

Also of interest:  the magazine's regular acknowledgement of all its donors and supporters. The list and the amounts donated are, well, immense -- great to see how strongly Canada's History is supported. Special callout to all my friends and colleagues whose names I spot on the lists! (Good to see Kate Jaimet got some funding from those donors to cover the costs of her extensive reporting on the potlatch masks story.)

Paul Wells on the Canadian face

Sean Downey, Near the Elevator, Kingston Prize 2023

The quest for a national portrait gallery for Canada is too long and convoluted to think about, but Paul Wells, ex-Maclean's political columnist, now Substacker  (and despite my doubts about anyone in Canada making a living from writing on the internet, I hope he prospers) has a lively column about something unknown to me:  the Kingston Prize for portrait painting. Worth a look.

Image: Paul Wells's Substack.

Borealia blog shutting down

After a decade of encouraging academics to exchange thoughts and theses and opinions about early Canadian history (most of which emphatically confirmed there actually is a lot going on in pre-Confederation studies), the blog Borealia/Early Canadian History is doing a controlled shutdown, with just a couple of posts yet to come before it goes silent.  The editors say in a closing statement that they need a break "for a variety of entirely normal professional and personal reasons."

There ought to be room for academically-centred blogging, but maybe those blogs sometimes get caught up in academic models of operation: administrative teams, concern for teaching applications of the blog, beset with budgetary concerns, competing with alternate publishing opportunities, etc. 

The blogs that survive, I come to believe, depend on having a few logomaniacial egomaniacs who rarely have an unexpressed thought and cannot be prevented from sharing most of them.  Some pretty lively blogs have resulted.  See Lawyers, Guns, and Money, run by a bunch of history profs in the US.  Or Paul Krugman.  Blogs do best with a personality or personalities behind them, I suspect.  Opening a blog and asking other busy people to provide you with its content may always be an uphill struggle.

But: Type "Borealia" into the search box at top left and you can see how often this blog linked to Borealia, including this first notice posted very soon after Borealia launched ten years ago.  So I'm sorry to see it go.  Well done, editorial team.  I'll miss Borealia.  Is someone seeing a space open up for a new entry in the CanHist blogging world?

Honours Watch: Historians at the Order of Canada

A few historically relevant careers honoured in the Canada Day appointments to the Order of Canada yesterday:  

Robert Janes, eminent museologist active in return of Indigenous heritage materials,

David Pelly, Arctic ethnologist and writer, 

and (my personal favourite) Stephen White, the great Acadian genealogist. White was a New England Acadian (no doubt with some Leblancs in his own family tree) and was practising law when the Centre d'Etudes Acadiennes in Moncton recruited him to run its Acadian genealogy project in the 1970s, leading to the publication in 1999 of the essential reference on the subject, the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes.  (How many genealogists have received an Order of Canada?  Probably some.)

Among writers and litterateurs generally, not a long list this time: novelist Miriam Toews, poet Sky Dancer Louise Halfe, and francophone children's writer Marianne Dubuc.

Prize Watch: True North for Patrice Dutil

A new-to-me Institute called the Canada History Society -- "dedicated to promoting and preserving the history of Canada" --has announced the inaugural winner of its True North Prize "awarded annually for an outstanding work of historical writing that deepens public understanding of Canada’s past." 

The winner is Patrice Dutil for his book Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885, published by Sutherland House. Congratulations, Patrice.

Happy Canada Day

 

Janet Ajzenstat (1936-2025) RIP: political philosopher

Unlike most of the prominent historians of Confederation (and virtually all of the political scientists), Janet Ajzenstat grasped (and conveyed) the depth and seriousness of the political thought that underlay the constitution-making of the 1860s.  She died about a month ago, and I missed the notice of it.

I called her out of the blue at McMaster University in 1991, when I was making an Ideas radio documentary "Historians on Confederation." I was just beginning to think of constitutional history as something worth working on. She had been deeply engaged with 19th century political thought for a long time by then, but she was still on that contract/sessional/temporary pilgrimage that so many of the most original scholars seem to endure.  

She seemed at once like the someone who actually knew about the things I wanted to know about, and we kept loosely in touch. (Happily, the next time we talked she was a real professor, at McMaster.) I promoted her Canada's Founding Debates in 19998; she gave my 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal its most penetrating review.  Her book Discovering Confederation: A Canadian's Story is something unique: a memoir about confederation.  

She moved in circles much to the right of mine, but I never found her scholarship "Conservative"  -- the values she upheld were closer to the 19th century liberalism that she saw underpinning the confederation settlement. 

I think I last saw her in 2024 at a conference in Quebec City on the 1864 Quebec Conference.  She had given up posting to her blog by then (though it's still available online).  

Image: from the online obituary.

Who gets to write history

Moi?

This morning I read in a Toronto Star op-ed by pollster Allan Gregg how:

Wilfrid Laurier won the 1911 election by rejecting the Conservative government’s proposal for a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States.

It's not so much that we need the kids to learn history. It's that we need the adults to keep reading it. 

Update, June 18.  A correction appeared a few hours later. Seems Robert Borden won the election of 1911.