Stephen Azzi and Patrice Dutil, ed., Statecraft: Canadian Prime Ministers and their Cabinets. Dutil's previous edited collections on political history have been very well received.
Ted Binema, The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title. With Haida title newly confirmed, sounds relevant.
Lisa Pasolli and Julia Smith, Rethinking Feminist History and Theory: Essays on Gender, Class, and Labour. A festschrift for Joan Sangster, with Canadian and international perspectives.
Ninette Kelley, Jeffrey G. Reitz and Michael J. Trebilcock, Reshaping the Mosaic: Canadian Immigration Policy in the Twenty-First Century. "Documents the lack of transparency and informed public engagement in policy formation, and the implications this lack may have on maintaining public confidence."Barry D. Lipson, The Canadian People: How We Became Who We Are. Would the White House have views?Gregory Marchildon, Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada. Should be substantial.Brian Tennyson, No Regrets: The Rise and Fall of Sir William Hearst. Political biography endures.
Greig Mordue and Dimitry Anastakis, The North American Auto Industry since NAFTA. Timely!
1. Interprovincial trade barriers.
I was heartened the other day to read the economist Mark Lee casting doubt on interprovincial trade-barrier reductions as a easy source of Canadian economic strength.
In response to the threat of Trump tariffs, an old narrative about interprovincial trade barriers has risen from the dead. The idea that eliminating supposedly massive internal trade barriers would lead to thousands of dollars per year in gains for ordinary Canadians makes for great soundbites, but should we really believe that there is a free lunch to be had?
While politicians have claimed that Canada’s GDP could grow by up to $240 billion, those numbers simply don’t make sense based on what we know about interprovincial trade.
If anything, Mark Lee is too polite. A decade or so ago, for a research project I was associated with, I found myself reading background papers for "Tear Down These Walls," a Canadian Senate report on interprovincial trade barriers and the need to reduce them. Some reliable economists, to be sure, argued there were gains to be made. But there were also claims that eliminating internal trade barriers could be worth "from $1 billion to $35 billion," which suggested the numbers were simply being pulled out of thin air -- much like today's $240 billion.
Things that were being claimed as "trade barriers" back then included: provincial retirement funding programs, provincial pension regimes, provincial securities regulation, provincial minimum wage standards, provincial environmental and health regulations, and many more (virtually all?) aspects of provincial policy, even provincial subsidies to First Nations communities.Today, our business leaders seem, above all, determined to use the Trump crisis to win concessions they’ve long sought from Ottawa, like more tax breaks and deregulation.Indeed, deregulation appears to be the main impetus for removing interprovincial trade barriers.
The main reason businesses do not have more interprovincial trade is primarily because of the structure of the Canadian economy and its geography. ... Mostly those businesses that find significant barriers to trade cite issues related to geography – mainly the cost of transportation.
In many cases, they [interprovincial "free trade" lobbyists] will focus on removal of crucial regulations that either protect people or allow provincial governments to promote their own economic and social policy objectives. Removing the policy tools of government undermines democratic control and makes it much harder to counteract the negative impacts of what Trump is now doing.
Richard H. Tomczak, Workers of War and Empire from New France to British America, 1688–1783, a study of corvee labour in New France and early Quebec
Martha Langford, History of Photography in Canada, Volume 1: Anticipation to Participation, 1839–1918. Has a substantial and authoritative ring.
Bohdan S. Kordan, No Place Like Home: Enemy Alien Internment in Canada during the Great War. Contemporary echoes for immigration policies?
Stuart Macdonald, Tradition and Tension: The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1945–1985. A Canadian institution needing a big survey history, no doubt.
Elizabeth Quinlan, Standing Up to Big Nickel: The Story of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Strike, 1958.
Cheryl Gosselin, Andrew C. Holman and Christopher Kirkey, eds.,Quebec’s Eastern Townships and the World: A Region and Its Global Connections.
Micah True, The Jesuit "Relations" A Biography. Looking at the whole project, rather than mining it for a few details.
Matthew Paul Trudgen, Securing the Continental Skies: The Development of North American Air Defence Co-operation, 1945–1958. Gee, they used to be allies.
But if you do care to follow the issues at stake in Ontario, a good source is The Local, a shoestring digital-only newspaper available by free subscription (and always seeking your patronage). The other day it put out a special election number (funded, it says, by a lot of friends of the paper throwing in the $200 "taxpayer rebate" cheques Ontarians are receiving from the government (sometimes arriving on the same day as their voters' card.) Here's the free link: 7 Years of Doug Ford | The Local.
I wonder if representative government is just fading away, given the dominance everywhere of showman, performers, charlatans, and celebrities. However, I'll get out to the polls on Thursday, voting who seems best placed against Ford's sockpuppet in our constituency. Medical system in near collapse, education shattered, housing starts worst of any province in the country, unemployment up throughout Ford's term, cronyism and special dealing everywhere. Hope you vote too, if you are in Ontario.
Surely any time sooner than never would be too soon. Involving the British King would only confirm American illusions about the colonial status of Canada and our "need" to be given American "freedom." Whatever we do, we need to do this ourselves.
We did not import any British hockey stars last night, did we?
I have no desire to change our structure of government, not much anyway. But the royal family... is foreign. Full stop. The aristocracy with the king at its centre, is part and parcel of British society and culture; the titled elite still owns half the land of Britain, is still prominent in society, business, the arts, and much else. The king and royal family make sense in that context, but NOT in any Canadian context.
Nothing is more alien to Canada, nothing is more foreign. It just doesn't work here. The "Crown," meaning abstractly the federal or provincial state (as in Crown land, Crown prosecutor, Crown corporation), works well enough in Canada: it, the Crowns federal and provincial, are ours, are us. But we could operate with a Governor General, a vacant throne, and no royal family claiming any Canadian role. This gent over in Buck House.... no, just no.
There are about 25 Christopher or Chris Moore SubStacks. As far as I know none of them is mine. But recently I got an email from Substack reporting that a good friend of mine had subscribed to my SubStack.
I asked the friend and he says he did indeed subscribe assuming it was my SubStack he would have access to, but now he thinks perhaps it isn't. But SubStack seems to have associate my email with something in order to congratulate me on my new subscriber. Anyway, I repeat, as far as I am concerned I do not have a SubStack.
SubStack may feel differently. If you understand what is going on here, your social media expertise would be welcomed.
His obit says proudly:
His analyses irked some colleagues while others lionized Tom as a direct intellectual descendant of Harold Innis. Such responses neither deterred nor encouraged him. As Tom told a McGill News interviewer in 2014, "I don't think I set out to disturb things. I think things deserve to be disturbed."
Naylor was a prolific author on many aspects of economic, financial, and business history. His best-known book may have been his two-volume History of Canadian Business from 1975.
BTW, the brotherhood endures. Bryan D. Palmer is speaking in Calgary in a few days about his new two-volume history of Canada, Colonialism and Capitalism.
Following the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the Canadian Encyclopedia is the latest standard reference work to reflect on and revise its coverage of John A. Macdonald and indigenous relations as part of the general rethinking of Macdonald that has been taking place in Canadian life and letters..
TCE has acted cautiously. At the end of January it posted two "editorials," one an essay by Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, entitled "John A Macdonald was no Friend to Indigenous Peoples" and the other "A Few Facts Everyone Should Know about Sir John A Macdonald" by Greg Piasetzki. (The sir/no sir usage alone is indicative of the mindsets behind each.)
I can accept this both-sidesing of the question, though surely an encyclopedia usually canvasses the best sources and makes up its mind, doesn't it? Let there be debate as we move toward a new historiography as part of the slow process called Reconciliation, and I am confident which viewpoint will have the strongest arguments and ultimately the most credibility. The Carleton/Sinclair text seems likely to become the received standard before long, anyway.
Carleton and Niigaanwewidam are both professors at the University of Manitoba. Carleton's doctorate is in history, Niigaanwewidam's in Literature, and both are prolific writers and activists on indigenous and reconcilation matters widely published on matters of public policy, history, and indigenous rights and titles.
Piasetzki is a private practice lawyer in Toronto, whose public statements seem to have mostly been defences of Macdonald and and anti-woke declarations.
I was fact-checking Piasetzki's "A Few Facts" by the second paragraph. ("He is widely considered to have written a majority of the terms of Confederation." suggests the low standard of what is "widely considered" about the drafting of confederation, but it is surely not a fact.)
But read both essays and see which seems more credible and substantial to you.
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| Fun to watch all the enthusiasm for flying the flag these days |
In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today. [from the publisher's notice]
His new book, Averting the Digital Dark Age How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory explores, well, just what the title says: how all that material came to be preserved in the first place.
The Bibliophile from Biblioasis Publishing reports on how its new biography of Pierre Poilievre, called The Ripper, came about. Gradually, and then suddenly, reports publisher Dan Wells.
No cover image yet!
Partly it's that Andrew Lawton's recent biography of Poilievre "seems to border on hagiography." Not this one. The title comes from the idea that politics today is about "rippers and weavers," and that Pierre Poilievre, "the angriest man on the political stage, constantly flinging rage" is emphatically among the rippers.
Biblioasis's author is Mark Bourrie, author of the histories Bushrunner and Crosses in the Sky, but also a journalist and a lawyer very much at home in the Ottawa political world. Bourrie may be a bit of a ripper himself -- I've been amazed by the venom he can direct against reviewers who don't treat his books with unrelenting praise. He's likely to be unsparing on Pierre Poilievre.
The Ripper should be in bookstores in March. Bourrie and Wells first discussed a book last spring. Bourrie delivered a manuscript in December, and with the Christmas turmoil in Canadian politics and the election date moving up from fall of 2024 to sometime in the spring, Biblioasis sped up its processes to have books into bookstores by the end of March.
The book could be newsy then. Good thing we have some fast-on-their-feet Canadian publishers still.
