The world’s leading liar on restoring truth

 

The New Yorker observes that American vice-president J.D Vance now sits on the board of the Smithsonian Institution, that country's premier collection of museums, with the assignment to remove "improper ideology" from it and particularly from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”  A recent tribute to baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson recently avoided mentioning his skin colour or just what he pioneered that earned the tribute

"Truth" will apparently include mandating the removal of references to slavery from the African American museum.

In Canada the Museums Act, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board Act, and similar laws give a broad autonomy to public cultural institutions, such that the government of Canada does not give direction to its museums "on cultural matters." But no doubt American legislation gives similar guarantees to the Smithsonian.

In Toronto groups such as the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and ABC Toronto fulminate against the "rewriting of history" every time someone suggests that white males from the 19th century are not the only ones for whom schools, streets, and public buildings can be named or statues raised.  (ABC hates bike lanes too -- being mostly a local politics pressure group.)  And Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre promises in the current election campaign to "defund woke nonsense" and punish universities that engage in it. So there is that.   

Book Notes: Marchildon on Tommy

I've been eager to read and take note of Greg Marchildon's Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare, published a few months ago by University of Toronto Press.  But UTP refers requests for review copies to NetGalley and NetGalley says UTP mostly doesn't supply it with titles, and not that one. And direct requests to UTP go unanswered.  

Anyway Marchildon on medicare seems big and timely and surely of interest. I hope to see it soon.  Guest reviews welcome here -- if you have managed to secure a copy faster than me.  

Update, April 22:  Blog grumbling gets results. UTP has been in touch and all has been sorted out -- (Thanks, Lucille!)  Expect some notes on Marchildon on Douglas soonish.

Obituary: John Meisel 1923-2025 (!) political scientist

Among the participants in last night's D'Arcy McGee dinner were historian Roger Hall and journalist Sandra Martin, the latter of whom mentioned to me that she had written the Globe and Mail's long Saturday obituary article on political scientist John Meisel, who for his work on the history of Canadian elections deserves note here.  

Also it's a gem of an obituary, well worth reading and not looking the least bit hasty. I didn't know John Meisel but I like him already. 

Writer to writer, Sandra grumbled a little about having to push out a long obituary article on a very tight deadline.  I said that surely for someone prominent and aged 102, as Meisel was, the Globe and Mail would have had a draft obituary prepared long ago.  

Does not happen, she told me. You gotta die to attract the attention of Canada's national newspaper, apparently.  Whodathunkit.

Happy birthday, D'Arcy McGee

He had been an Irish rebel who recanted, a patriotic American who grew disillusioned, an anti-clerical who made his peace with the Catholic church, a reformer who had gone over to John A. Macdonald, and a teetotaller given to alcoholic binges.

-- from 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal

Went down last night to the Duke of York pub in Toronto to observe the two hundredth birthday of Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825-1868). Would the Pogue Mahone pub or some other Irishy place have been more appropriate? Well, they are probably a bit Fenian still over there, and McGee was a loyal subject of Queen Victoria when he was not a rebel in arms.

Anyway, the Guinness flowed, and there were toasts, speeches, poetry, a genuine McGee descendant, and an Irish jig played on an tin whistle. David Wilson read the last paragraphs of his biography, about the man who "took an uncompromising stand against militants within his own ethnoreligious community" and was shot for it. 

It was a lot of fun and some good craic. The whole thing was orchestrated by the tireless Patrice Dutil, who insists last night's small commemoration should have been matched on a grander scale everywhere in Canada. On the centenary in 1925, apparently, the GG, the PM, and the leader of the opposition all showed up to a McGee tribute which was broadcast across the nation. 

I dunno. It takes a pretty big legacy to carry on more than a century in anything like living memory, methinks.  But thanks, Patrice.

"Trade" barriers, or just good government?

The office of the U S Trade Representatives is making it clear that its economic war on Canada is not just about imposing tariffs. In a new report,  it lists among the "wide-ranging and harmful foreign trade barriers American exporters face" such things as Canada's provincial liquor control boards, supply management in dairy and eggs, the recent federal digital sales tax, "French language requirements for companies" and "French on product packaging, signs and commercial advertising."

All of these, Canadians will and are entitled to say, are legitimate policy matters approved by Canadian legislatures in pursuit of goals valued and supported by Canadian electorates. The prime minister was quick to say in response  that “the French language and Canadian culture, including Quebec culture, and supply management will never be on the table”

It is strange, however, how closely this list mirrors the lists offered by those Canadians who claim we need to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers in order to give Canadian a wonderful boom in domestic prosperity. The gurus of interprovincial free trade usually start talking out by about providing wider options in beer and wine. (They never talk about tariffs, because there are none in Canada.) The "threats" to free trade within Canada they really care about generally turn out to be legitimate provincial regulatory regimes: truck safety regulations, minimum wage laws, supports for local industries and cultures, and so on.  Their real beef is with legitimate public regulation, not obstacles to trade.

Not simple, these trade wars.  Everyone has an agenda.

Book Notes: Mark Bourrie on Poilievre

In the Globe and Mail, Charlotte Gray gives a long, thoughtful, and positive review of Mark Bourrie's new biography of Pierre Polievre, The Ripper. The book is also long and thoughtful, but not positive. Gray: 

Ripper has one message: The Pierre Poilievre we see today is the same person as the teenager he was in Calgary’s Reform Party backrooms. Mark Bourrie describes that 1990s teenager as “the political equivalent of a hockey goon,” and argues that he hasn’t adjusted his behaviour or outlook since then.

Bourrie is borrowing a New York Times columnist's division of today's politicians into "weavers" striving for consensus and "rippers" who see politics as war.   Gray suggests his book is as much about the socio-economic transformations and media revolutions that have "spawned a crop of right-wing dictators, and caused the deterioration of traditional journalism and public discourse."

Bourrie conclusively proves his point that the politician is an Olympic-class ripper, a viciously brilliant critic who has shown no potential, as yet, to become a weaver who could bring the country together.

Sounds like the book Mark Bourrie was born to write.  Good on him and Biblioasis for getting it out in such timely fashion  (something the Globe has also chronicled).

New Canadians and non-Canadians in history

History Notes from the Media

1. I nearly posted last week about historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore and philosopher Jason Stanley, all Yale University professors and students of fascism and authoritarianism, who had announced they had moved permanently to Canada and to positions at the University of Toronto -- out of concern for events in the United States, doubtless also over fears for their own safety. 

But I held off, because I had only seen the news on BlueSky. And all social media are prone to frauds and false trails. So I waited a while, and then when it was confirmed, I was on to other things.

Goes to show that little in the United States is too crazy to be true, I guess. On the other hand, the Canadian Conservative Party platform today promises to end "woke ideology" in our universities if elected. And even trailing, those guys are still on track to win 120 or more parliamentary seats.  

Not.

2.  When I saw that today's Toronto Star editorial about the collapse of the Hudson Bay Company starts out with many paragraphs about Prince Rupert, its founding governor back in 1670, I was prepared to despair about how the dumbest parts of history live forever in the media. I still cringe over the cover story Canada's History once ran featuring Rupert as "Canada's Warrior Prince." (That one was NOT by me.)

In fact, the Star editorial people have Rupert dead to rights. 

The op-ed brings up Rupert and his horrors only to make clear he was named governor by his brother the king only so he could skim off large fees from the enterprise, in which he was otherwise largely uninterested. He never came anywhere near Canada. The essay uses him to make a nice segue into an analogy with Richard Brooks. The last governor of the HBC resembles the first one: a foreigner interested in the Bay only for what he could plunder from it. Poor Canada.     

History of spitting in an envelope

What's your DNA worth?

Is a commercial DNA-genealogical site part of history-news coverage?  Sure.  I've been working on a DCB biography recently and while the subject I'm writing about has nothing to do with my own family tree, I have found Ancestry very useful not only for confirming basic birth-death-parentage data but for tossing out all kinds of other details: foreign travel, voters lists, leads on newspaper references....

But the news of 23andMe's impending bankruptcy, and the potential sale of all its confidential DNA from millions of customers, not only makes me glad I have always preferred text-record genealogy over the spit-into-our-envelope kind.

23andMe has always been more interested in the medical aspects of DNA testing than the who's your granny part -- and got into trouble with regulators over some of its medical claims.  But it has always been kinda dedicated to the enriching-the-founder part as well. Anne Wojcicki is the ex-wife of Google founder Sergei Brin, and apparently very much part of the Silicon Valley billionaire set and mindset.

In 2021 she took 23andMe, which she founded in the early 2000s, public. It raised $6 billion and instantly made her fabulously wealthy in her own right. But barely three years later its value had fallen to 2% of what it was at the launch. Wojcicki now offers to take it private and "buy it back" -- at pennies on the dollar, one assumes. One point the business pages are not raising much: is this much different that the crypto pump and dump scams that any conscious person should already know to avoid? They do, however, urge 23andMe customers to rush to delete all their data there before it is sold to the highest bidder. 

Maybe don't willingly entrust your DNA to Silicon Valley. The Mormons have some odd ideas about using genealogy to baptise their dead ancestors and such, but so far Ancestry seems to have been pretty straight about its genealogy services, at least by comparison.

Book Notes: New Histories from UBC Press

In order to stay out of the rabbit hole of politics here and to the south of here, for now at least, another round-up of some forthcoming history books from the university presses. McGill-Queen's and Toronto presses, we covered in the last few weeks. Here, from UBC Press forthcoming histories:

Patricia E. Roy, John Hart: A Businessman in British Columbia Politics   A 20th century BC premier, and the rest of his career too.

Patricia A. McCormack, Becoming Métis in Northern Alberta 

Carolyn Strange, Fatal Confession: A Girl’s Murder, a Man’s Execution, and the Fitton Case

Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross, Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution 

Patrice Dutil, ed, The Enduring Riddle of Mackenzie King

Jack Cunningham and John Meehan, ed., Chrétien and the World: Canadian Foreign Policy from 1993 to 2003.

Robert J. Muckle; Foreword by Karen Rose Thomas, Once upon This Land: Archaeology in British Columbia and the Stories It Tells

Guy St-Denis, An Honourable and Impartial Tribunal: The Court Martial of Major General Henry Procter, Minutes of the Proceedings  -- an unsuccessful commander from the War of 1812 seeks vindication.

Ask a Historian: Tariffs at Active History

 

Active History has been active in recent days, by offering a set of backgrounders on tariffs.  The material came from a roundtable on tariffs at Bishop's University last month.  Good to see both the university and Active History responding so promptly to an urgent need for informed explanations on this once-again current topic.

Tariffs were a big deal in the 19th century, when countries mostly did not have sophisticated tax collection systems, it was easier to fund governments by imposing some tariffs. In that time, tariff were either called "revenue" tariffs (if they were simply to fund government spending) or "protective tariffs" (if intended to support local producers by making imported goods more expensive. 

The third entry in the series makes the point that even as national taxation systems developed (enormously) most countries continued to levy tariffs for protective reasons until after the Second World War, when a broad movement to reduce tariffs led to their near eliminations in global trade.  The general understanding was that trade was a good thing, and also that taxes were a much more fair way to fund governments than tariffs could ever be. 

The organization that managed the tariffs eliminations from the 1940s to the 1960s was so successful that it had to abandon its name -- the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT -- and become the World Trade Organization.

The Canada-US free trade agreement of 1988 hardly reduced tariffs at all, because there were few tariff remaining in place; "free trade" in 1988 was mostly about reducing trade-inhibiting laws and regulations by governments -- that is, fixing in place the neo-liberal view that the place of governments in regulating the economy should be reduced as much as possible. 

Here's the first one by Heather McKeen-Edwards. 

And the second one by Gordon Barker.  

And the third one by Gilbert Gagne.

I'm trying not to repost every single story about newly stupid and cruel things being done by the Trumpazoid fanatics in Washington DC, but here's one if you want to laugh and cry at once.  It's from the AmHist blog, Lawyers Guns and Money.

Remembering Academic Freedom in the United States

Reported on Bluesky:

So Northwestern University, an institution with a $14.3 billion endowment, pulled support for the 2026 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities (the “Big Berks”), forcing the organization to cancel the meeting. Such cowardice on Northwestern’s part.  

Apparently the Board of Governors of Northwestern University has announced the university can no longer host a conference of women historians, given the political situation in the United States of America. 

Apparently no other potential host site can or will step up to take its place. As a result, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has cancelled the 2026 session of its triennial "Big Berks' conference, a huge event that has brought together women historians of all topics and backgrounds since the 1930s. 

It was usually held in the eastern US but gathered in Toronto about ten years ago, where if I recall correctly it was directed by Franca Iacovetta of the University of Toronto.