History of democracy in the United States

Last Tuesday's American elections were a delight. Horrible people defeated.  Texas turned blue. Election-stealing loses to voter tsunami. 

But the constitutional problems of the United States remain enormous

• The House of Representatives:  The gerrymandering of constituencies for the United States House of Representatives is so deeply engrained, so accepted, and so excused by the American public, that it seems impossible to fix.  Yes, the Democratic Party has expressed support for independent districting, and the longstanding Republican refusal to take part is a serious part of the problem.  But surely the deep and long tolerated corruption in how the representative house is constructed leads to other, deeper corruptions that go unchecked.

• The Senate.  Upper houses are always created to rein in the democratic impulses of the lower, more representative house.  As a result, modern upper houses in most countries are either limited in power, or properly representative.  (See Canada, where appointment of senators ensures they lack the legitimacy to threaten the superiority of the lower house.)  But the American Senate is both extremely powerful and extremely unrepresentative -- a different kind of gerrymander, but this time a constitutional corruption, and therefore even more effective in blocking the will of the people.  And apparently quite unfixable.

• The Presidency.  There is an Electoral College because....? (The reasons are too bizarre to follow.) But the consequence is that even in a two-candidate presidential election, there is every reason to fear that in a close election the the election will not go to the people's preferred candidate.  Again the legitimacy of a fundamental process is corrupted.

• The Supreme Court.  The ease with which a few Republican presidents could stack the court with partisan supporters has produced a complete corruption  of much of the judiciary. Again: highly resistant to a fix, and surely tempting the other party to take similar steps in self-defence when it can.

With such institutional corruption, is it any wonder that someone managed to game the process -- and promptly add a layer of personal corruption as well?  Trump will go, but what rough beast will come around next, through these bypassings of legitimate governance.

Book Notes: the Osgoode Society books for 2026

Went downtown last night to Osgoode Hall for the annual book launch event of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, back in those august premises  after a few years in anonymous office tower gathering places.  The hall's Convocation Hall is one of my favorite rooms in all the world, both for itself and for my own associations with it over the years of dabbling in legal history.  It attracted a large crowd too:  lawyers, scholars, judges, publishing folk, historians, students, authors -- the diverse group that legal history seems to draw around itself.  The society was founded in 1979 and as of yesterday has published 135 substantial  and eclectic works of legal history.

Back in September, I noted one of this year's six books, distinguished civil litigation lawyer Earl Cherniak's In the Courts, which I had seen in advance. A couple more particularly caught my eye last night.

Making A Killing: Murder and Life Insurance in 1890s Ontario, by UToronto emeritus professor of history Ian Radforth is partly about the emergence of the life insurance industry in Canada -- where names like Sun Life, Canada Life, Manual Life and the other came from -- and partly about the emerrgence of a new kind of crime:  taking out a huge life policy on someone and then killing then in order to collect a fortune from the life insurance company.

Radforth explained last night that he was grateful that several of these people were very bad at murder -- so that they were quickly apprehended and put on trial, thereby giving him the records from which to document this odd corner of the insurance industry.  (He noted that there were no doubt some smarter insurance-policy murderers who never got caught and left no evidence behind for him.)

Evidently Making a Killing is a mix of a serious business history and a lurid crime story -- and I'm looking forward to getting into it.

I had not immediately tagged In The Shadow of the Manhattan Project.  It turns out to be kind of a banger too, for a serious academic legal history, anyway.  One of the co-authors Robert Bothwell (another UT History emeritus) wrote an official history of the uranium and radium mining firm Eldorado (nationalized during World War II) back in 1984.  Turns out that he had to leave out some substantial parts of the story, because there had been a lot of chicanery and criming all around the Eldorado story, and in 1984 the malefactors were alive and acquitted of all charges, creating libel problems any book publisher would be determined to avoid.

Now the principals are all dead and cannot be libelled.  So Bothwell partnered with a former PhD student of his turned legal star, Patricia McMahon, to explore how a trio of Eldorado insiders managed to make off with Eldorado money to the tune of about $50 million in 2026 dollars.  I'm looking forward to getting into that story.

Both books suggest something of the value of a dedicated legal history publishing society like the Osgoode.  Neither the insurance industry nor the rare-earths mining industry, significant though they both are, necessarily sound like the liveliest corners of legal history.  But a smidgen of murder, crime, and legal chicanery can really add some life to the story.  The Osgoode Society has midwifed dozens such works over its not quite fifty years.

Shutting Down Parks Canada

The Carney government's focus on economic development and foreign relations to the exclusion of almost all else is seen again, as its war against the Canadian civil service -- and nearly every Canadian cultural agency in particular -- continues.  CBC News reports that no less than 3000 Parks Canada staffers have been told their jobs may soon be redundant. Parks Canada is now busy laying off the wardens who protect wildlife in the national parks -- something one might think of as fundamental and irreplaceable.  Jobs of more than half the Parks Canada staff are under threat in Prince Edward Island alone, where the role of the agency in tourism, culture, and history plays an immense part in the island's tourism industry

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for Canada's History on the reconciliation agenda at Parks Canada's Historic Sites Branch.  One thing that was not really part of the story but which struck me repeatedly as I interviewed Parks historians, display technicians and others was their sense of how much of the institutional capacity of the agency had never been recovered after a round of funding cuts as far back as 2012. 

 These ones look more severe.

The Carney government talks a lot about sovereignty.  But some days it is hard to say what we are going to be sovereign over, besides a bunch of new pipelines and data centres.

Book Notes: Gates, "Northern Brothers"

Michael Gates, the leading historian of the Yukon (I thought it was now just "Yukon," but he says "the Yukon" is making a comeback) has a new book, his seventh: Northern Brothers: the History of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, this one co-authored with Kathy Jones-Gates. 

Their subject, the YOOP, was founded four years before the Klondike Rush of 1898  -- and not at Dawson but downriver at Forty Mile, then thought to be in Alaska but later confirmed to be within the Yukon Territory. YOOP continues to thrive in the Yukon, and indeed helped fund publication of this work.

"Pioneers" societies were a big deal in the late 19th century all down the west coast of North America. Much recent scholarship has defined them in similar terms: patriarchal and masculine, part secret society and part community agency, and generally espousing a traditional and conservative settler-colonial ideology. 

The Gates note in their opening pages that "Indigenous peoples lived everywhere in the ice-free Yukon for millenniums before the first Europeans arrived." The YOOP's ideological roots are strikingly similar to the motives that created the Native Sons of British Columbia and similar societies in the western United States.  But the focus here is not comparative Northern Brothers is very much about the traders and miners who founded colonial settler society in the Yukon and those who have striven to keep their legacy. 

The NorthWest Mounted Police arrived in the Yukon in 1894 just months before the founding of the YOOP. Indeed the Gates make clear that the arrival of Canadian authority in the Yukon, by undermining the unfettered rule of volunteer "miners' committees"  helped bring about the foundation of the YOOP as the miners sought ways to maintain their influence.  Gradually governance triumphed over community -- the significant Alaska membership of the early YOOP gradually broke away to found its own settler societies, and the YOOP's boundaries came to match the territorial map.

The Gates's history is a very detailed and well-illustrated record of how this voluntary society has maintained its influence in the territory for going on a century and a half. The Gates's vast knowledge of Yukon history enables them to give capsule portraits of significant leaders and member of the YOOP throughout its history and to track its shifting roles in Yukon (settler) society.  Northern Brothers is also a kind of archives of the society, with extensive name lists, biographical notes and other sources.

Northern Brothers is published by Lost Moose, an imprint of Harbour Books of Vancouver, which sent me a review copy.     

History of Lincoln and Doerkson

Lloyd Doerkson -- at least I think that's him

Walter Bagehot (1826-77) had many terrible views about government and democracy. He thought it perfectly appropriate that Britain be governed by a voting bloc called "the ten thousand"  -- a group that very much included him, though it excluded the vast majority of Britons. He was blithely certain that the rest just were not fit to hold the right to vote let alone to govern.  

So I'm not an uncritical reader of his book The English Constitution, published in the year of Canadian confederation.  From 150 years on, he's pretty wierd sometimes,

Yet every time I browse in the book I find something sharply relevant to parliamentary democracy as we practise it in the 21st century.  

He notes, for instance, that in a parliamentary system "the determining efficacy in matters political resides in the people -- not necessarily in the whole people ... but in a chosen people," by which he means the legislature and particularly the cabinet.

One great thing about this, he argues, is that "at a sudden emergency this people can choose a leader for the occasion."  At the time of the Crimean War, he observes, Britain turned out a very successful peacetime government in favour of a war cabinet.  "We turned out the Quaker and put in the pugilist."  

This he compares to the American republic's reliance on fixed terms for its president, senators, and congressmen, all of whom are immune to being removed in mid-term, no matter how urgent the need for a change.  He notes the extraordinary case of Abraham Lincoln, who turned out to be exactly the right person to lead the Union through the Civil War -- but whose skills were largely unknown when he was elected, so that he might have been the worst possible war president and they would still have been stuck with him for four years (if the Union survived that long).  And after Lincoln, they were stuck with Andrew Johnson, who pretty much was the worst possible choice.

Because in a parliamentary system leaders can be ousted and replaced at any time by legislators and particularly cabinet ministers, Bagehot goes on, "The notion of employing a man of unknown smallness at a crisis of unknown greatness is to our minds simply ludicrous."  

I happened to be reading this page just as a man of unknown smallness called Lorne Doerkson (I first wrote "Lloyd Dirksoen," so unfamiliar is he) became premier of British Columbia.  And as Danielle Smith, having had her policies and projects spectacularly rejected and having been shown to be manifestly too small to govern Alberta, governs serenely on, right through the crisis of her own making. 

It reminds me how totally, and with no one even noticing (since no one would ever dream of comparing our parliaments to those of 150 years ago), we in Canada have completely inverted the parliamentary system, so that cabinet ministers and legislators have absolutely no authority over their own leaders.  And how those who do select new premiers and prime ministers in Canada now almost always choose the unknown man.   

I doubt Premier Doerkson will every be compared to Lincoln.

      

Cundill Prize to Beth Lew-Williams

 John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law  by Beth Lew-Williams (Harvard University Press) is the 2026 winner of the Cundill Prize 

The Cundill is given annually to the best history book of the previous year published in English.  It is administered on behalf of the Cundill Foundation by McGill University Press.

Beth Lew Williams is the ninth consecutive female winner of the Cundill Prize.  

 

New biography, new General Editor at the DCB

The biography of the week just out from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is of Earl William BeSaw, tiremaker and president of Firestone Canada until his early death in 1932. 

It is signed by Dimitry Anastakis, who has recently succeeded David A. Wilson as General Editor of the DCB.  David Wilson has returned to teaching at the University of Toronto and St Michael's College after 13 years at the head of the DCB.   

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.