HIstory of MPs' privileges.

For those who like fine details of constitutional law, or parliamentary history minutiae, Emmett Macfarlane's Substack discussing the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in Alford v. Canada might be just your cup of tea.

Alford is a law professor who thinks that a law making it a criminal offence for members of the House of Commons National Security and Intelligence committee to disclose confidential information they receive in committee is an unconstitutional intrusion on Parliament's privilege to make its own decisions about what Parliamentarian may and may not do. 

The Supreme Court did not agree.  It upheld the law, and Macfarlane approves.  Parliamentarians' privileges, they both find, are essential but do not need to be unlimited, and can even be restrained by the criminal law of the land. 

Obscure historical research question about New France

I'm still reading Louise Dechêne's People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada, which I mentioned earlier. I read it in smallish chunks, with two bookmarks, one where I am in the text and another in the endless endnotes -- which constitute almost a parallel text. 

It takes time, but I admire the book enormously.  I am far from finishing it, but already I go from "Is this the best book ever written about New France?" to "Is Louise Dechêne the best Canadian historian ever?" This sentence from page 168 sums up this book's project and maybe Dechêne's whole historical career. 

The only way to know the thoughts of rural people is to listen to them: to dig through the jumble of judicial archives and find their words buried within, to chance upon a revealing account, to grasp the meaning of a word or incident, and so to elucidate the weaknesses and strengths of rural communities. 

This book does that work throughout.  The amount of work she put into it -- digging through the jumble, as she said, just to chance on something -- for years and years! And from that work she knows the people of New France more precisely (with many qualifications and doubts, to be sure) than one would have thought possible.

To my surprise, I found myself in one of her endnotes. She is discussing how many deaths the Seven Years War might have caused among the population of New France, and the endnote is mostly a long list of the historians who have failed to address this question, failed to do the work, she might say. Then she writes: 

To my knowledge, only Christopher Moore poses the question of loss of life during the Seven Years' War, conjecturing a proportion of 10 percent for the whole population.

I confess this pleased me a lot. I have been aware that I may be pretty much the only historian to have attempted such an estimate in public. I just did not imagine that anyone else had noticed. 

And I have a question for any specialists of New France history who may see this.  Because I didn't pull my estimation out of the air. 

My memory is that when I was preparing the essay in question (for my chapter in The Illustrated History of Canada) I came across an article that put forward something like a casualty estimate.  But when I came to write the chapter, I could no longer find that source. After much unsuccessful searching for it (even wondering if I dreamed it), I went ahead and made an estimate on my own, citing no support or source at all.  

So here is my question:  Does anyone know of a published work (earlier than 1987) that discusses Canadien casualties in the Seven Years War -- not military casualties, I'm talking about the whole population of New France.  I think the one I am thinking of was written in French, by a francophone historian, probably in an article, not a book. (If I could not get back to it then, and Dechêne had not noticed it, it might be rather obscure, even to specialists.

Ever since, I may have been slightly braced for someone to challenge my estimate or the basis for it. Dechêne refrains from making her own casualty estimate, but from what she writes I think she not only thought the question important but felt I was on the right track. She certainly thought the number was large: "the empty spaces left by the war," she writes, may well have left a measurable drop in the post-1760 population. And trauma that can be imagined. 

If you can enlighten me -- there is an email address at right.

 

  

New Map of North America -- (Greg Curnoe 1972)

 

History of empowering MPs

Aaron Wherry, politics columnist at CBC News, has just published a very calm demolition of the Conservative Party's efforts to delegitimize "floor-crossing." He then seizes the opportunity to raise the serious problem: how to empower MPs rather than parties in Parliament:. 

There are some practical questions to be asked about any proposed rules around floor-crossing. 

How, for instance, would Poilievre's proposal or an outright ban deal with a situation like what happened in February 2004, when all Canadian Alliance MPs and 15 Progressive Conservative MPs chose to sit together under the banner of the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada?

What about the Canadian Alliance MPs who, a few years before that, left their party and formed a group called the Democratic Representative Caucus? 

Beyond the practical concerns, limits on floor-crossing risk further empowering party leaders and whips, at the expense of individual members. And at the heart of the debate about floor-crossing is a question about what should be considered the fundamental building block of Canada's parliamentary democracy: the individual members who are elected, or the political parties whose banners they run under?

If switching parties is fundamentally wrong, what about voting against the wishes of your party? Should MPs be beholden to every element of their party platform?

Wherry is not ready to suggest that making MPs the "fundamental building blocks" of Parliament really means making party leaders accountable to their caucuses, rather than vice versa.  That seems to remain beyond the pale of Canadian political speculation. But his arguments do help to move the needle:

Putting committee membership beyond the immediate control of party whips wouldn't necessarily lead to all of the investigations, hearings and legislative amendments that opposition MPs might like to see. But it would at least increase the ability of committees to more often act with a mind of their own — regardless of whether Parliament is operating with a party majority.

In that way, the path forward for Parliament after these remarkable 12 months might have less to do with reinforcing the importance of party affiliation, and more to do with actually empowering the individuals that Canadians elect to represent them. 

Worth Reading: Jean-François Nadeau on secularism

On his Substack, Paul Wells reprints in translation Jean-François Nadeau's recent column on Quebec's secularism law, currently at the Supreme Court of Canada, now leading to hundreds of firings, all Muslims, all women, mostly in child care centres:

We show the door to women who have broken no law, harmed no one, and failed in no professional duty. Their veil becomes a pretext for fantasies and suspicions, in contempt of the essential work they perform every day for children.

In a school system already grappling with challenges like dropout rates, overcrowded classrooms, special needs, and lack of resources, was it really so urgent this spring to fire appreciated, qualified, well-integrated women? Is this truly how the injustices within this leaking-from-every-seam education system will be corrected?

Book Notes: Ghosts of Ortona

I have not read this, but it sounds like an interesting take on military history by an anthropologist  -- a history of what people don't talk about, almost.  

As a young anthropologist, Ian Cosh set out to document the memories of a little-known but costly World War II battle fought over Christmas in the Italian town of Ortona. His research took him across western Canada, and to Italy and Germany, interviewing veterans and civilians. In their stories, he encountered puzzling details—hints of things unspoken and unresolved. Sam was obsessively mapping a minor skirmish on graph paper. Mel kept mentioning an Indigenous sniper he’d never met. Ted was haunted by the ghost of a church. Bill recalled nothing of Christmas dinner, though his comrades swore he was there.

When the project ended, Ian tried to leave it behind. Now returning to his field notes and interview transcripts, he’s determined to understand what was missed.

-- from the publishers' blurb for Ian Cosh, Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian World War II Veterans. 

History of voting, of accountability, of the conventions of the parliamentary system

This op-ed about electoral corruption in Alberta, by Rachel Notley, former NDP premier of Alberta, is worth reading (gift link) and very discouraging too. 

...the UCP proposed a plan for Trump-style gerrymandering. They rejected the independent boundaries commission report, silencing the voices of the thousands of Albertans who participated in a fair, transparent and democratic process. Instead, an advisory panel will propose a new electoral map for Alberta, overseen by a committee of politicians dominated by UCP members. They will not be required to consult with the public. It seems likely that the final say on the map will rest with the politicians.

Blatant corruption of the electoral process is troubling enough. What's worse is the sense that this kind of majoritarian autocracy is gaining ground across Canada. 

Today political parties are almost entirely run by professional managers and strategists instead of elected caucuses  and volunteer members. The faith that there are conventions of appropriate behaviour in politics is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Governance really is all about winning and getting one's way, and not only in Alberta. (Compare: Quebec, and examples don't lack in Ontario, either.) Political processes where customary behaviour is expected but not protected are widely endangered.  

It has long been shocking how deeply electoral gerrymandering has been routine and normal for both parties in American politics. Though the Democratic Party has long been prepared to ban the practice, the Republican Party defends it to the last ditch.  So it becomes more extreme  and more accepted --even necessary -- with each electoral cycle. 

(Add to that the constitutional gerrymanders of American Senate representation, the Electoral College, etc. US electoral problems do not start or end with the Trump regime.)

In Canada, the profoundly corrupt wartime election of 1917 persuaded even the winner of that election to support the Dominion Elections Act, which led to the establishment of the independent Chief Electoral Officer for Canada. Partisan influences in election processes, and eventually in constituency boundary-setting, were gradually replaced. 

Details of how electoral processes were gradually corruption-proofed -- and then corrupted again -- in the provinces are less well documented. But some provinces are demonstrating how easily independent commissions are easily bypassed by majoritarian interference of the kind Rachel Notley exposes in the article cited above.

Unlike the United States, we do have courts in Canada that will consider ruling against electoral corruption.  A 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision sets out "effective representation" rights that courts can enforce.  Quebec has already run up against these, and Alberta now seems likely to. In both those provinces, setbacks in the courts tend to lead to "notwithstanding" legislation and/or separatist agitation.  

Judicial review is something. But look how easy it is to corrupt the process for appointing judges!   

Book Notes: Greer on Rum in the Seaboard Review

In these days of the dwindling of book reviews and publications that run them, it's worth noting a newish (two years) review dedicated to reviewing Canadian fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and doing so on a frequent basis -- sometimes several times a week, it seems. 

It's called The Seaboard Review and its webpage is here.  It's a Substack production, actually, and the webpage is mostly just a link there.  Its review skew more to fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary nonfiction than historical writing.  But this week it includes a thoughtful review of Allan Greer's recent MQUP history, Canada in the Age of Rum.

If you like a book review with diverse interests written and published in Canada , it's worth a look,  They welcome subscriptions but you can read it free.

History of space travel: Artemis at the moon UPDATED

I watched quite a bit of the NASA YouTube channel during the ten day voyage of Artemis II to the moon and back. I’m a fan. I like all that space stuff.

But I’m old enough to remember – vividly -- the Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. A lot of Artemis looked … familiar.

Yes, of course the technology is light-years ahead of what they got by with in the 1960s. Good to see the capsule full of screens and digital readouts. The colour pictures and videos were great. The iPhones they carried had infinitely more computing power than everything on Apollo 11. Even the cameras they used to photograph the lunar surface had hundreds of times higher resolution than those of 1968. And in fifty years the crewcut can-do white-guy fighter jocks of Apollo have morphed into a diverse and laidback quartet who gushed affection and love back to the home planet. They probably set off with much more confidence about getting back home than Armstrong and Aldrin, too. So: much change.

But during their flight someone noted that the time from the Wright brothers’ first flight to Apollo is almost the same as the time from Apollo to Artemis. I can’t help thinking the first half delivered much more change than the second one. I guess those were the easy bits.

There is still no space plane. The space shuttle (that could at least fly down to an airfield) was a dud, and the space station is going to be “deorbited” long before a replacement takes shape. There is still no permanent facility either in earth orbit or circling the moon, and none spoken of. Elon Musk is no longer promising to go live on Mars. Just as their predecessors did, the Artemis crew went up on a pillar of flame and came down to bob awkwardly in rubber boats. Artemis III will make its moon landing with the same capsule-and-lander process that operated in the 1960s. Indeed the whole Artemis program seems to follow pretty much the well-worn flight path and landing methods of Apollo, and the astronauts still lack the relay satellites that would allow communication from behind the moon. Anything like routine space travel remains in the realm of science fiction.

I have never forgotten reading an observation, not long after Apollo, that the first trips to the North and South Pole were hellishly difficult and dangerous voyages. But when people went back there, those were routine journeys using new submarine and aircraft technology that made the poles an afterthought. I thought then it might be like that with the moon.  After the dangerous and risky and incredibly expensive flights of Apollo, the next people on the moon would just drop in as part of a general achievement of spacefaring.   

It’s still damn hard just to achieve earth orbit and return. No space planes, no liveable platforms parked above earth and moon, let alone Mars. It’s still absolutely cold and dark and airless everywhere up there, and we still live at the bottom of a deep gravity well that strongly resists us going up and out. Spacefaring is still a long way away.

Next time I dip into a galactic space war novel or a world-building epic of routine travel and trade across and beyond the solar system, I won’t be thinking that’s any closer than it was in the sixties.

Update, same day:  Molly Ungar responds:

Thank you for your excellent comments on the Artemis II mission. We are also fans, and as we watched the splash-down and crew retrieval, we decided then and there to re-visit two films: “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13”.  Both are as engrossing as when they were first released.

 

However, thus far I’ve not heard of any goal attached to the Artemis program other than that of mining for critical minerals on the moon, which of course reminds me of the movie “Alien”, and look how that turned out. I would say that the Cold War “space race” buoyed up government and public interest until the U.S. declared victory and departed the field.

Like yourself, we were interested in the changes you point out, and noticed how much was familiar.

History of Unwritten Histories at Active History

Active History is taking note of the tenth anniversary (and also the end of) the blog called Unwritten Histories. UH's authors have been reposting some of their fave posts at Active History as a farewell from their site.

Unwritten Histories may have been on my History Blogs of Note for a while; certainly I remember reading it. I admired its "Guide to Resources"  and "Canadian History Roundup" posts. It was also a support blog for emerging historians, particularly women, struggling with graduate school and the search for employment (not my own situation at all, but an admirable service):

When I started Unwritten Histories, it was due to frustration and anger after having worked at a history department for three years, only to not even get an interview when the first permanent Canadian History job came up. At that point, I had been working as a sessional instructor for over 5 years, and I was exhausted. In one memorable semester, I had to get up at 5:30 am to take a coach bus and then a shuttle bus to teach an 8 am class two cities over from where I lived. The trip took two hours.  After that class was over at 11, I had to wait 3 hours (because of conflicting bus schedules) before taking the same trip in reverse, to teach another 3 hours class from 6 to 9. I still don’t know how I did it. All I knew was that, after finding out I didn’t get the interview, it felt like my entire career had been a waste of time and I needed a new plan. 

I'm side-eyeing that tenth anniversary announcement a little bit. UH launched in 2016, went silent in 2020, and now returns to claim ten years -- as it closes down. I'm entitled to quibble, I think; this blog has been running since (checks notes) 2004 and has barely missed a week. But history blogs, particularly Canadian ones, are always scarce, and Andrea Eidinger and Stephanie Pettigrew gave a lot to this one.  

And good to note Active History remains very active and worth looking at. Here, for instance, is a note about its year-long Indian Act 150 series -- the Indian Act having been given royal assent on April 12, 1876. 

History of Talking in the changing city

We went to the Daniels Spectrum in Toronto's revitalized Regent Park neighbourhood last night to attend a WalrusTalks discussion sponsored by the magazine. The talk title, "Power and Belonging," was not very descriptive in advance, but the speakers turned out to be young, mostly indigenous, of colour, immigrants --  and all of them articulate, passionate, a bit pissed-off, and positioning themselves as community rather than power in their commitments (though they include a Canada Research Chair, a Vanier Scholar, and so on).

On the streetcars there and back we passed by Sankofa Square (formerly Yonge-Dundas) and connected through TMU subway station (TMU being formerly Ryerson, and the station formally Dundas). Good to go to an event where the speakers matched the new place names beginning to reflect the new city. 

It was a great pick-me-up when so many of the comfortably placed and well-funded old white historians and writers I know are still trying to roll back reconciliation and put the statues back up.

The event was livecast and is to be available with other WalrusTalks at Walrus Video.

Book Notes: Karen Dubinsky on Cuba

Queen's University historian Karen Dubinsky has a new book out: Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters. It's an exploration of many Canadian networks of contact with Cuba during the long American crusade against the island: everything from engineering to cattle breeding to salsa music. It includes her own contacts: Dubinsky has co-taught a course at the University of Havana for years and has visited constantly.

The Canadian government does not seem to think Cuban survival in the face of Trump holds much value, but over the decades a lot of Canadians have seen it differently.

Book Notes: John Fraser on the GGs

Went down last night to Massey College to join a noisy sociable crowd at the book launch of The Governors General of Canada: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office, by John Fraser, the journalist, homme de lettres, and man-about-Toronto. I have been browsing in it in advance thanks to a copy sent by publishers Sutherland House.

It’s not that kind of intimate; it gets its title from the way Fraser has managed over the years to be in the company of quite a few of the GGs, sometimes covering them as a journalist, sometimes inviting them to Massey College during his years as master there. It’s short, chatty, gossipy, and manages to be a Fraser memoir as well as a set of profiles of the Canadians who have held the post from Vincent Massey on - with some serious reflections on the office itself. It's a lively read. About the most disparaged office the country has, that's no small feat. 

Fraser, who loves the monarchy, likes the office of governor general for its reflected glory, and he likes most those GGs who are most in the monarchical style, that is, dignified, reserved, mannered, and a bit de haut en bas. Massey, Georges Vanier, Roland Michener, Jules Leger, and recently David Johnston pass muster. Somewhat to my surprise, he respects Adrienne Clarkson as well. He explains by quoting another anecdote: “She’s a total monarchist. She just thinks the wrong person is on the throne.” She filled the role, in other words, and Fraser respects that. He likes as well how well John Ralston Saul handled the difficult role of GG spouse.

He’s less keen on Sauvé, Schreyer, Hnatyshyn, and Leblanc – too political, too ordinary, and a bit too “just folks” for his taste. He’s cool about Michaelle Jean, too. Perhaps, Fraser admits, it’s because he never managed to have her visit Massey College. Perhaps, he also admits at some length, because his daughter may be right when she accuses him of thinking of her mostly as a DEI hire despite all evidence to the contrary.

Fraser is most blinkered on Mary Simon, whom he calls “a one-trick pony,” “missing the boat” -- because all she talks about is reconciliation. For Fraser, reconciliation is causing national depression and Simon is failing to get “us all” safely past it. Madame Simon, stay on your pony – John Fraser inadvertently shows us how much we need you.       

Monarchical slop

AI slop -- the crazy stuff when AI starts to hallucinate or people use it to do really stupid things -- is in the news regularly, and the media are constantly being warned to avoid it.  But we need to pay attention to monarchy slop -- the crazy things that reputable publications will disseminate when it comes to the British royal family.

Here from CBC News no less, is a story about how Donald Trump's respect for King Charles is what has saved Canada from annexation.  

Now any sentient person knows that Donald Trump does not do respect. He is not into friendship. But this Charles-saves-Canada story seems to get all kinds of space, as if it were a real story with political significance  Here is Susan Delacourt, national affairs columnist at the Toronto Star, taking the whole thing at face value.

Thanks to a British author, we learned this week that all the 51st-state talk is now on the back burner for two reasons: one lies in Trump’s respect for King Charles, and, maybe more significantly, the president doesn’t have enough time to annex this nation.

Look into this story, and one learns it's from "a prominent royal commentator" with a new book being serialized in the Daily Mail. He reports that he happened to be chatting sociably with the American president when the matter came up. Does this happen? Did he buy a membership at Mar-a-Lago, possibly?   

Quick trip to Quebec et la Nouvelle-France

We were briefly in Montreal last week  -- colder and snowier than Toronto, but still a pleasure to visit.  

While we were there, the debate about Quebec's Bill 21, the one about secularism that mostly bans various clothing items for Muslims, Jews, and others, was in the Supreme Court of Canada and in the news.

As it happened we were staying on Rue Saint-Paul, and the streets around us were called Francois-Xavier, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Sulpice, and so on.  When we took the subway we noted stations with names like Pie IX, and l'Assomption, and Sainte-Catherine. Way above us the cross atop Mont-Royal shone bright.

Either the movement for official secularism has a long way to go, or maybe the critics are right to say it is mostly cover for an effort to keep the visible minorities in their place.

Meanwhile, I have been reading People, State, and War Under the French Regime in Canada by Louise Dechêne, translated by Peter Feldstein. The original French-language edition was published (posthumously) in 2008 and the translation in 2021. I regret having to admit I had not been aware of either until very recently.

Because Louise Dechêne really was a terrific historian, and this, like all else she wrote, is most original, deeply source-based, deeply thought-out, and frequently takes no prisoners in what she says of other scholars of New France.  I admire her immensely, and may have more on this book when I'm done with it.