History of leadership

Still in office?

On his website, Ottawa journalist Dale Smith, an Albertan who knows (and bemoans the follies of) western politics, reflects on the disastrous self-destruction of the NDP government in B.C. -- and his "side note" is worth reading too.

On a side note, maybe the fact that Doerkson was a caucus-selected leader who didn’t implode the party and won an election is a sign that maybe, just maybe, we might see the light and return to caucus-selected leaders in this country? (Yeah, I know, I’m dreaming. But still).

If caucuses selected leaders, someone as self-centered and short-sighted as Danielle Smith would never have been a provincial premier of Alberta.  Maybe Eby, too.  But one could say that about a lot of egomaniacal self-promoters whose deluded followers have been able to buy a party leadership and then luck their way through a general election. 

Uneasier lies the head

I support government's using constitutional measures rather than extra-legal measures in pretty much all circumstances.  But I can see Paul St-Pierre Plamondon's reasons for declaring that the Quebec legislature can defy constitutional law and simply ignore King Charles "the King of Canada" while having new members of the Quebec assembly swear allegiance to "Quebec" rather than the English toff.  

A lot of us will grudgingly admit that the constitutional niceties should to be followed. But practically nobody in Canada has any serious commitment to Charles as their sacred liege lord. It's all just rote, and GG and PMs endorse it fingers crossed, while whispering "I'm not really a monarchist, I'm not." Quebec's lieutenant governor shrugs and grins and says What can I do? 

Plamondon can hardly lose by poking all that pretension, even when he loses in the courts.  The way to take the wind out of his sails in this stunt, surely, is to join him in it. 

Let Prime Minister Carney and a few enlightened premiers propose a proper constitutional amendment declaring the throne of Canada vacant and empowering the Governor General to exercise all the power formerly accruing to the monarch.  And the thing is done.  Excise the foreigner wearing the crown and there's no great problem in leaving "the Crown" in place: Crown lands, and Crown corporations, and Crown attorneys.  Let the (empty) Crown symbolize Canadian sovereignty, and the sovereignty of each province too, and what's not to like.

Premier Plamondon would be left trying to complain about a revised oath to Canada and finding that tactic no more popular than his proposal for a third referendum .  

 

History of Alberta and separatism UPDATED

I'm old enough to remember the first Quebec independence referendum in 1980, and it was a scary time.  "I fear a PQ majority above all," I had written in a note to myself on the eve of the 1976 election that did, in fact, produce a PQ majority.  And the next four years were surely the high point of the independence movement.  The rejection of the independence referendum 40%/60% was no small relief to me.  I guess I have been glad about that result ever since.

I feared it because I took it very seriously.  Quebec had been going through an enormous change through the 1960s and 1970s.  For a century before that, there had been a sort of consensus in francophone Quebec that what guarded its survival was being at base a rural, traditional, agricultural, and Catholic society.

Of course Quebec was never that monolithic, and the "revolution" of the 1960 was partly the decision of modern, urban Quebeckers to stop pretending that real Quebecers lived on small farms with big families beside even bigger churches.  But Quebec's rapid shift from traditional values to modern ones, if one can put it so simply, must have been profoundly unsettling.

Had the change in Quebec doomed it to being swallowed up by Canada and by North America and ceasing to be seriously different  --that was the vital question?  Did modernity just make assimilation so much more likely?  If it did, then independence leading to a strong state able to create new institutions for a new kind of Quebec seemed absolutely essential to many Quebeckers.

If I had accepted that an independent state was the essential condition for a thriving, growing and evolving French-speaking society in Quebec, I might have accepted independence as a regrettable necessary.  I didn't accept it, however. I believed Canada and confederation need not be a threat to that kind of Quebec. 

And in the long run I guess I was right. There has been another referendum in Quebec, and several PQ majorities.  But by then I was pretty confident that the new Quebec had rooted itself beyond challenge, and with that certainty the case for independence being essential faded.  I did not take the election of Paul St-Pierre Plamondon with any of the anxiety that the election of Rene Levesque produced in me.  

It it has been the same with the independence movement in Alberta.  I confess I have never taken its cause or its leaders very seriously at any time.  The polls have not yet closed in Alberta as I write this.  I certainly have some concern about the outcome.  I mean no disrespect to the people of Alberta, but I don't respect Alberta's claim to need independence the way I did Quebec's claim forty five years ago. And I can't think of any significant thing independence would achieve for Albertans if it did, God forbid, become independent. On verra. 

Update, next morning.  First thing I read on awakening was raw numbers and a separatist leader saying, "We are not going anywhere." And I had to laugh. Truer words were never spoken. These days, with unlimited cash and lots of organizing, you could elect a ham sandwich to high office.  At 24% after all their scheming, these guys are truly going nowhere. 

And Helen Webberley writes from Oz, October 20:

I can see from The Guardian that the vote for Albertan independence was significantly defeated. This seems a very sensible outcome because unless a province is isolated geographically (eg an island off the coast), it would split the nation internally. Imagine at the border having to ask other Canadians to check their passports, visas and police records.

Also think of Alberta having to pay for staff and a building for its own embassies, delegates to United Nations, World Health Organisation, World Health Organisation, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, etc., etc.

Worst of all, if the USA invades and moves the American border north as they have promised, who would defend the new Albertan nation?

Molly Ungar comments, October 20:

Anyone interested in understanding Quebec’s (or Alberta’s) desires for independence needs to consult Denys Arcand’s excellent film “Comfort and Indifference”.

I think I prefer Arcand's "Decline of the American Empire" -- more prescient!  Wikipedia on Comfort and Indifference:  "The film takes the position that the referendum result [1980] was a failure of courage and that the Quebecois were numbed by prosperity and the Machiavellian manipulations of federalist leaders."  Really?

To which Molly Ungar replies, October 21:

Wikipedia is very good, but not always – it depends on who’s writing. I just corrected the Wikipedia entry on Russell W. Belk at York U., where someone had written that Prof. Belk had been granted the “Royal Order of Canada”, adding that this is apparently the highest honour one can receive in Canada (Yikes).

Denys Arcand was addressing the issue of nationalism vs. separatism, and how separatists consistently mistake voters’ nationalist feeling for a desire to suddenly become a sovereign country. And yes – “Decline of the American Empire – also outstanding.

"Comfort and Indifference," a National Film Board of Canada production, remains available for viewing at the NFB website. I think I have to watch it.

Meanwhile in Alberta, counting proceeds on all the other referendum questions. As late counts come in, presumably from the cities, it now emerges that voters rejected all the constitutional nonsense options Premier Smith offered them. So all that came out of the whole thing was a lot of anti-immigrant bile on Question 1 to 5.  Stand your ground, fellow Canadians.  

 

 

Prize Watch: The Dafoe to Greg Mercer on the lobster crisis

The Winnipeg Free Press, once edited by John W. Dafoe, announces that Greg Mercer’s The Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink is the 2026 winner of the J W Dafoe Prize.

The $12,000 prize is given annually by the Dafoe Foundation to "the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world." Mercer is an investigative reporter for the Globe and Mail and previously its Atlantic Canada reporter.  The Lobster Trap is his first book. From the publisher's description:

 The great lobster boom that began in the 1990s has also led to violent fights over who has the right to catch this valuable seafood, including many Indigenous people in Canada, who until recently have been excluded from this industry. Now overfishing, trade wars, and climate change are threatening the future of this fishery in deeply troubling ways.

By 2050, scientists expect that warming ocean waters in the heart of North America’s lobster fishing region will cut catches by two thirds. In some parts of America, there’s hardly any lobster left to catch. Unlike previous collapses, there are few other large-scale wild seafood species left that fishing crews can switch to. The economic upheaval for fishermen and seafood companies alike could devastate coastal communities in both Canada and the United States.

Confession: I ate some lobsters at home-boil parties within sight of the ocean during our recent trip to Atlantic Canada without knowing any of this.

Historians passing on: Berger, Steele, Proulx RIP

 Some historians Canadian history lost recently:

• Carl Berger (1939-2026), longtime historian at the University of Toronto, mentor to many Canadianists, historian of ideas in Canada, author of The Sense of Power and The Writing of Canadian History (Governor General's Literary Award 1976).  I never really accepted his argument that "in Canada imperialism was a form of nationalism for some."  Still seems like a form of colonialism to me, but even ideas you want to argue with can be formative ones.

• Ian K. Steele (1937-2026), Western University historian and pre-confederation scholar, author of several works on colonial and settler-indigenous wars in British North America and the Thirteen Colonies, perhaps best known for The English Atlantic, which started the historical "turn" to considering the whole Atlantic "world" as a sphere of English influence ... and in time a French Atlantic world too, and a Spanish one.

• And my mentor and friend Gilles Proulx (1942-2026), longserving Parks Canada Historic Sites Service historian, a key figure in the research program at Louisbourg in the late 1960s and early 1970, then a vigorous scholar of New France with Parks' Quebec City office. His works include Combat at Restigouche (I visited Restigouche National Historic Site a few weeks ago and saw his contributions) and the New France section of  Jamestown-Quebec-Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings.

Allan Levine replies

I was sorry to hear about Carl Berger’s passing. A fine historian, he was a tough instructor. In the fall of 1978, during my first term as a novice graduate student at the University of Toronto, I took Berger’s half-course Canadian Intellectual History. It was an experience I still remember with great trepidation. The class had about 10 or 12 male students. Once a week we would crowd into Berger’s small and hot office to discuss that week’s topic that one of us had to present in the seminar. There were no tests or exams; you were graded on your own presentation and your contribution to the seminar. This, of course, set up a tense dog-eat-dog scenario in which some members of the class—in particular, an outspoken Marxist and a snobby Ontarian—would go after each other for two hours. All the while, Berger would sit back, nod, smirk, but not say a lot. It was very unsettling. Somehow, I managed to do my seminar presentation and survived this ordeal. But that was the last course I ever took from him.

Levine's The Dollar-a-Year Men is up for the Dafoe Prize in History -- to be announced later today.

 

Book Notes: Truth Before Reconciliation

(I meant to post this yesterday on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, but things intervened.)

Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, edited by Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, was number 6 on the Globe and Mail Canadian nonfiction bestsellers list last week. Timely, given the neo-Nazi activities and the media's growing awareness of the attacks on reconciliation.  

History of railroading

You can say almost anything about Canadian history if you put John A. Macdonald in the story:

"If John A. Macdonald . . . can build a railroad from one end of our country to the other in four and a half years, why can't we build the pipeline even quicker with the technology we have?"

            -- Doug Ford, promoting the Northern Shield cross-Canada pipeline proposal, September 30, 2026. 

We'll see how long that pipeline takes, if it ever starts. But the railroad took almost fifteen years from the first commitment in 1871, and much of the preparatory work was done by the government of Alexander Mackenzie. 

"Province House in Charlottetown, where ... in 1864, Sir John A. Macdonald gathered delegates in the Confederation Chamber and began the negotiations to create Canada."

            --  Steve Paikin visiting Prince Edward Island, September 30, 2026.

But Macdonald did not "gather" anyone at Charlottetown. He was one of twelve members of the Province of Canada delegation. It was invited by the Prince Edward Island government to meet three other provincial delegations. He spent much of his speaking time there vainly advocating for legislative union rather than federation, and did not chair any of its sessions. He wasn't a knight then, either.

Book Notes and Prize Watch: City of Toronto, Dafoe, Cundill, Cherniak, and Kostash

 At last weekend's legal history gathering, I reconnected with a longtime acquaintance, Carolyn Strange, the Canadian scholar who is now the very accomplished professor of history at Australian National University.  

And I learned that her 2025 book Fatal Confession: A Girl's Murder, a Man's Execution and the Fitton case, co-published by the University of British Columbia Press (in its 'Landmarks in Canadian Law' series) and the Osgoode Society for Legal History, is a shortlisted title for the City of Toronto Book Award -- the only nonfiction work alongside four novels.

I also met and chatted with Earl Cherniak, hale and vigorous in his 'nineties, whose forthcoming book In The Courts (with praise from me on the back cover) records his extraordinary career as a civil litigator in many Canadian courts and tribunals at all levels and across the country.  To quote my own blurb, it is an account of:

a long successful career in civil litigation in Canada between 1960 and 2025 [demonstrating] how lawyers, judges, courts, and law firms have transformed both the law and the practice of civil litigation during his lifetime.

Legal historians will take note of the evolution of the law and legal practice as he documents it. I suspect it may be more widely read by litigators and intending litigators, as virtually the whole book is Cherniak's detailed and opiniated insiders' recounting of many hard-fought trials and appeals large and small, and how he won them or why he lost them. 

About the same time, I saw news of the five-book shortlist for the John Dafoe Prize  (at right, winner October 13, profiles of nominees on the website until then)  and the three-book finalists for the Cundill Prize in History (winner announced in Montreal October 30) which includes Canadian Jonathan Cheng's biography of Kim Il Sung, the ur-dictator of North Korea.

And while we are tallying all these honours, how about the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Alberta to my friend and nonfiction guru Myrna Ann Kostash, BA '65?  Can an honorary degree be far behind, U of A?

 

History of Legal History: Backhouse Girard and Phillips

I spent part of the weekend very comfortably hosted at Osgoode Hall Law School's downtown centre and the University of Toronto's Faculty Club for Reimagining Justice: A Conference in Honour of Constance Backhouse, Jim Philips and Philip Girard.  

The conference was a celebration of the thriving state of legal history in Canada and of three still-active scholars who have done much to make that so -- by their scholarship but even more by their work to build and sustain an informal scholarly community admired by its membership for how collegial, supporting, diverse, and effective its various gatherings and projects always seem to be.  

One reason for why that is so is that the legal history community has always included law professors, history professors, and scholars from other disciplines, and also independent scholars, legal practitioners, and members of the judiciary.  Somehow that turns out to be a good thing. Among a range of presentations of very specialized topics in legal history, for instance, one panel included a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Chief Justice of Ontario, and two other eminent judges discussing the significance of legal history for their jurisprudence. 

Another reason for the healthy state of legal history is the existence of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Supported by a similar mix of members, it is a highly effective publishing arm for Canadian legal history (some 135 books since 1979) that gives potential legal historians confidence in having somewhere to publish.

 Phillips and Girard are the Society's editors-in-chief. They are also co-authors with R. Blake Brown of the groundbreaking History of Law in Canada, the third volume of which is soon to be published. Backhouse's many works are the backbone of feminist legal history in Canada and her networks and protegés are practically a conference in themselves.

The organizers of this conference, all veteran conference organizers, said in some amazement that getting this one set up was actually "fun." As a sometime part-time legal historian, it is indeed the collegiality of the legal history people that keeps me coming back to events like these.      

History of passports

Columnist Stephen Maher attacked MP and former Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer in the Toronto Star of September 23, pointing out that while campaigning to become prime minister Scheer was "revealed to possess American citizenship, which he hadn’t previously disclosed." Maher goes on to suggest that Scheer, who never did renounce his foreign allegiance, may have voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

When Tom Mulcair was leader of the NDP at the height of its post-Jack Layton tally of parliamentary seats, he too was also attacked for holding a foreign passport, in his case a French one.  Evidently there is something unpatriotic and faintly sinister about claiming to be a Canadian while holding some other country's passport, even if it's only politicians that get publicly assailed for it.

But these days Canada has been handing out Canadian passports by the thousands to foreigners (mostly Americans) who have never have lived here and quite likely never will, on the basis of their descent from some distant ancestor who did live in Canada but left, perhaps centuries ago.

Is dual citizenship evil, as the Mulcair and Scheer smears suggest? Or is passport collecting a hobby that anyone can pursue, like stamps or coins, as the Canadian government (and many thousands of dual passport holders) seems to believe? 

Like many people from immigrant families, I am eligible for several foreign citizenships. I could seek British citizenship, having been born there, and Irish (with European citizenship attached) on the basis of long-dead ancestors. Indeed, Britain is so eager to have me apply (and pay exorbitant fees) for a British passport that they will not permit me to enter Britain on my Canadian passport. Canada, in fact, takes the same position with citizens of foreign countries who were actually born here -- it won't let them in unless they first acquire a Canadian passport.  The theory here seems to be that it is illegitimate to change one's citizenship, and countries are entitled to disrespect the passports of their ex-citizens' new countries. 

For the record I have never held a passport other than a Canadian one.  Think of it this way: if you hold a nation's passport, chances are it will eventually want to tax you or conscript you.  Choose carefully. 

Meanwhile, the Canadian government is encouraging non-Canadians to acquire a second passport as a souvenir, while public opinion makes it faintly shameful for anyone in public life to hold more than one. 

We need to sort out how we feel about this multiple-passport marketing. That is, we need to agree it is nuts, even if the Supreme Court told the feds to do it.

Karen Dubinsky 1957-2026 RIP: historian of Cuba-Canada

I was sorry to read of the sudden and too-soon death of Queen's University historian Karen Dubinsky. I did not know her, but I was struck a long time ago by the range of her interests and the clever title of her (scholarly) book The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls.

Above all, I was always impressed to follow the work she did studying Cuban history, music and culture, and Cuban-Canadian relations in general. The Wikipedia entry on her gives a good account of that, and I'm copying a big chunk of it:

Dubinsky first visited Cuba in 1978 and lived in Havana intermittently beginning in 2004. Her visits led her to study Cuban history, music and culture, as well as unofficial relationships between Cubans and Canadians. 

With Susan Lord, Dubinsky developed Queen's University's Cuban Culture and Society program, a collaboration between Queen's and the University of Havana that lasted 15 years. More than 350 Queen's students travelled to Cuba through the program, while more than 20 Cuban scholars, musicians, filmmakers, artists and curators participated in activities at Queen's and in Kingston.  Several Cuban participants subsequently undertook master's or doctoral studies at Queen's.  The program received the Queen's Award for International Educational Innovation in 2016 and the Canadian Bureau for International Education's Panorama Award in 2021. 

Dubinsky also researched music as a form of political expression in contemporary Cuba. With Caridad Cumaná and Xenia Reloba, she co-edited the Spanish-language Habáname: La Ciudad Musical de Carlos Varela and its English-language edition, My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela. She later published Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana. 

Dubinsky co-hosted Cuban Serenade, a 13-episode podcast about Cuban musicians in Canada, with Freddy Monasterio, and produced a biweekly CFRC program about Cuban-Canadian music for two years.  She also organized performances by Cuban musicians in Kingston and helped arrange honorary doctorates from Queen's for Cuban musicians Carlos Varela and Alex Cuba.

Her 2025 book, Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters, examined personal and cultural relationships between Cubans and Canadians, including exchanges involving educators, musicians, filmmakers, activists and international-development workers.  The book received the 2026 Wilson Book Prize. 

Cuba needs friends like Karen Dubinsky 

Sergeant York returns.

Sgt York, bronzed

CBC News notes the return of the strange story in which American Christian-nationalist and Republican Party activist Doug Mastriano received a doctorate in history from the University of New Brunswick -- for a dissertation that argued that the World War One feats of Medal of Honor winner Alvin York were the result of God's direct intervention on the battlefield. It also offered footnotes and interpretations that were vigorously questioned when a long-standing embargo on release of the dissertation ended.

CBC reports that Mastriano's attempt to sue the University of New Brunswick and Canadian scholars at the university and elsewhere for defamation has been dismissed by a court in Oklahoma because "UNB is an 'organ of a foreign state'" and the American court has no jurisdiction over it and other Canadians named.

This may be fortunate for UNB. The original acceptance of the much-criticized dissertation and the award of the doctorate provoked controversy within the university and beyond, and involvement in a defamation trial might have raised these issues once again. UNB launched an investigation of the matter in 2023. Apparently the results have not been released.

This blog last looked at the Mastriano story here in 2022, when Mastriano was running (unsuccessfully) to become governor of Pennsylvania. 

From Molly Ungar, September 25, 2026

Well, it’s very likely that God was on Dr. Mastriano’s side. I sense material for a new course: “Divine Intervention 101”.