Book notes: the Osgoode Society histories

Downtown last night to attend the annual book launch of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, "the most successful legal history society in the common law world," as Editor-in-Chief Jim Phillips never misses a chance to say.  Pretty good evidence he has, too:  130+ books in Canadian legal history published in not quite fifty years.  Four more this year, and a big crowd of lawyers, judges, law profs, and historians to salute the society's four new books and their authors.  I'm just copying a big slab from the society's website below.

• 

  Robert Sharpe, My Life in the Law: Lawyer, Scholar, Judge 

  University of Toronto Press. As the title suggests, this book is a personal reflection on Robert Sharpe’s long, varied and influential career as a lawyer, scholar and judge, which incudes a decade as the President of the Osgoode Society.  

• 

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

  University of British Columbia Press. Eric Adams is Professor of Law at the University of Alberta, Jordan Stanger-Ross is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.  

• 

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

  University of British Columbia Press. Carolyn Strange is Professor of History at the Australian National University. In the mid-1950s most Canadians still believed that murder merited the death penalty.  

• 

  Jim Phillips, I Did Not Commit Adultery: Marital Conflict and the Law in Ontario in the 1870s 

  University of Toronto Press. Jim Phillips is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of History and the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies.  

Book Notes: Levine on Dollar-a-Year Men

A friend told me he has been enjoying Allan Levine's new The Dollar A Year Men.  I haven't seen it myself but here's a bit from the publisher's summary:

When Canada went to war in 1939, the goal was to provide the British with the ships, planes, and weapons that it desperately needed to defend their island against Nazi Germany. But at the time, Canada had little to offer in terms of military hardware. That was when Canada recruited top business leaders to take charge. In six years, they turned Canada into one of the greatest military powers in the world. They helped to win the war, and in the process they turned Canada’s economy into a modern industrial one. What’s more, they served the country for a dollar a year, or even nothing. This is an inspiring and patriotic story for Canadians in a time of crisis.

Same friend tells me Allan even cited a long-ago piece of my ephemeral journalism for something I said long ago about one of his people. I don't think I have a copy of it anymore.  

Book Notes: History of Adultery and the Canadian Senate

Some of you Canadianists may be aware that in 19th century Canada, the usual way to get a divorce was to go to the Senate of Canada and ask it to become a divorce court. But how did that happen? How did it work? Maybe it's another of those constitutional history details that make historians say "It's too picky and complicated, let's just handwave and skip across it."

Now historian and law prof Jim Phillips has put a catchy title on the whole thing. In I Did Not Commit Adultery, he's found a way to sort out the workings of the law of marital conflict through a deep dive into the unhappy marriage of Robert and Eliza Campbell, whose wrangles kept the courts and the Senate busy -- and the neighbours in Whitby, Ontario, talking -- for years and years.

I just received my copy and may have more to say about it when I have actually read it. Members of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History can restart Campbell family gossip and celebrate my friend Jim and its other 2025 authors when it launches its new books next Monday.

History of how not to reconcile

 

Charlie Angus's Ring of Fire Youtube ad --  cause you may be sick of Ontario's one.

Okay, Donald Trump hates the Reagan ad.  The widely circulating Ontario ad that makes me mad is the one endlessly proclaiming that the Ring of Fire is going to save us all: Give us $22 billion, give us 77,000 jobs. Rebuild the Canadian economy by digging up more minerals for the USA. 

The Reagan ad was legal, honest, and fair. The Ring of Fire ad is fake news all the way.

Happily, the antidote is found in Riley Yesno's article in the Toronto Star this weekend "The Truth about Ontario's Ring of Fire ads."  Here's the essential takedown of this miracle project in two sentences:

"So why hasn’t this project started already?

"The biggest problem: The province doesn’t have the right to the land."

That's the truth we need to start with. Treaty 9, which covers the so-called Ring of Fire  (a marketing slogan, recently coined; Yesno prefers "Mammamattawa") and most of northern Ontario, was an agreement to share the land.  The chiefs consistently refused to make treaty until they were told "the land will always be yours," "you may hunt and fish forever," "reserves are only places no white man can disturb up" over and over again.  

It is true Ottawa's official text of Treaty 9 uses words like "cede, yield, release, and surrender" and "the Crown may "take up" Treaty 9 where and when it choses to.  But the treaty text was written and printed up in Ottawa before the treaty commissioners ever set out for the Severn River. No commissioner dared to say these words aloud or allow them to be translated for the chief.  The real Treaty 9, the one actually negotiated on the land by the authorized parties on both side, was absolutely an agreement to share the land.

This reality behind Treaty 9 is unusually well documented, perhaps because it was one of the last made (in 1905). But the basis on which all the Canadian treaties were made and ratified is the same: an agreement to share the land.   There really is no legal basis for Ontario to develop extractive projects in Mammamattawa unless and until the two sides negotiate agreements as to how the wealth will be shared.  Ontario really has not even started bargaining.

Harold Johnson, the Cree lawyer and writer, used to say the settlers of Canada have an absolute right to be here. That absolute right comes with the treaties they made with First Nations. 

And to validate that right, he would then say, all the settlers have to do is to live up to the commitments made in the treaties.

Maybe there has to be one BIG court case.  The Supreme Court has been begging Canada and the provinces to negotiate treaty rights and land claims , and not to force all the decisions into the courts.  But there is a lot of jurisprudence to suggest which way the courts will find if pushed to it.  

Why do so many people find it hard to articulate these realities.   As they say, it's hard to see the truth if your livelihood depends on not seeing it.

Vital Reading:  John Long: Treaty 9: The Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario (McGill-Queen's UP).

Cheater version:  "George McMartin's Big Canoe Trip" from CBC Radio Ideas .Online

Like French press coffee, our idea is filtering through. Slowwwwwly.

 

In this brief YouTube (above), Ottawa journalist Dale Smith goes in wholeheartedly on why MPs (and MLA, MMPs and the others in the provinces) have and always have had the right and the power to remove a party leader, even one picked by a mass party vote (particularly one picked by zombie voters with last-minute memberships supplied).  He doesn't emphasize the MPs parallel (and equally vital) right to choose the fired leader's replacement. But that will come.  

Here's examples of me making the case from, yeesh, the 1990s on. And in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, too, of course.  And this blog, passim.  

The idea remains well outside the Overton window however.  The standard understanding of political scientists and journalists was on show recently at Paul Wells's Substack, where Alex Marland discusses his theories of why party discipline is so strong in Canadian politics and never gets around to the leadership selection/deselection process.

New podcast at the CIHE

 

The Toronto organization called the Canadian Institute for Historical Education has drawn my attention to its new podcast History Matters, interviewing historians and commentators about the subjects that interest the institute. Indeed, it invited me to appear.  But for the moment I have declined.

The CIHE is a well-funded little organization founded a few years ago at a meeting at a private Toronto club. Who would not be in favour of historical education? But its concept of education concern me, frankly. 

It has been vociferous in opposing any suggestion that John A Macdonald bears any responsibility for the disasters that befell indigenous people, particularly on the plains, during his time. It strongly opposed changing the name of the former Ryerson University or renaming a Toronto public square to commemorate Afro-Canadian contributions to Canada rather than the British statesman Lord Dundas. It invited David Frum from the United States to minimize the horrors of the residential schools and Nigel Biggar, author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, from Scotland to explain that colonized people all over the world should be more grateful to the British, who are moral pretty much by definition. 

I believe it has never had an Indigenous scholar to speak about treaties or residential schools or reconciliation. No minority speaker has made the case to them for the name changes or for the importance of recognizing and honouring diversity and inclusion in Canada and in Canadian history. As far as I can tell, in fact, the CIHE has never featured a person of colour speaking on any historical subject. 

I'm not in the habit in turning down invitations to talk about Canadian history. Anyone who sets up a podcast series can invite whom they choose.  But until the CIHE is more welcoming to a diversity of viewpoints in historical education and to many fine writers, speakers, and historians who represent that diversity, I will remain reluctant to be part of its programming.  

  

It's Just a Movie!

The makers of the entertaining British film "The Lost King," which dramatized the discovery of the remains of King Richard III, have paid a substantial settlement to a British academic who was set up as the stuffy, snobbish pukka-academic who derides the plucky amateur Philippa Longley and her dream  -- eventually successful -- of finding the king's grave beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England.

Henceforth the film, featuring Sally Hawkins as the amateur, will begin with a disclaimer

Whilst in this film there is a character called Richard Taylor who is shown to be an employee of the University of Leicester, the portrayal of him is fictional and does not represent the actions of the real Mr Taylor, who was employed by the University of Leicester as its deputy registrar, and acted with integrity during the events portrayed.

Ouch!

I'm in two minds about this. I can see the point of the university guy unfairly typecast as, well, as the university guy. But, you know, it's a movie.  If you want to know the truth of history, you need to read and study history.  The job of a movie is to tell a story, and you are crazy to take it for an accurate account of anything.  Same with novels, for that matter. History doesn't tell the truth, but it searches for it. Movies and fiction, they imagine a truth. Totally different thing.

A moment in the history of blogging

Here's a little moment in blogging history. At the American politics/history blog  blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, historian Erik Loomis has been posting entries in a series called "Erik Visits An American Grave" since August 2013, when he had a few hours to spare in Pittsburgh and went to visit the grave of industrialist Henry Frick, "arguably the most cartoonishly super-evil villain in American history."

He has kept at it, let us say. Today he posted the 2000th in his graveside biography series. Two thousand posts in little more than a decade, in his spare time.  

You can find the list of 2000 American (and some other) biographies here (the first 1200 or so) and here.  He says about it today:

I generally hate navel gazing, but the grave series hitting 2,000 posts is kind of a moment to think about this project. ... I started this as what I considered the dumbest idea I ever had. And then it became a massive part of my career. A few things about it. First, there is nothing like this in the history of the internet.  

Loomis welcomes financial support for his project.  See practically any of his posts at LGM for details.  Congratulations, Erik Loomis.  (Maybe all blogs start with a dumb idea.)  

Tim Cook (1971-2025) RIP, historian

I never intended this blog to become an obituary column, and I certainly didn't expect to write this obit. Tim Cook, the extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily productive historian of Canada's wars and Canada's soldiers, has died at the age of just fifty-four. 

In a publishing career of barely twenty-five years, he came close to a book-a-year pace, many of them very substantial titles, while holding down a big job as Chief Historian at the Canadian War Museum. 

I saw a piece today that explained he had suffered from, and apparently survived, Hodgkin's over a decade ago.  In that interview he also explained how he evolved from academic scholarship to trade-market historical writing.

I’m an academic-trained historian . . . but part of this is having the pleasure of working at the Canadian War Museum. Our job is to present history for all Canadians.

It's good to be reminded from time to time of the central importance of the historians in museums, in historic sites work, in all those fields.

I was emailing briefly with Tim Cook last month. I didn't know him well, but I'd talked to him for my article in the current Canada's History, for which he put me in touch with a vital interviewee -- also at the War Museum -- and he responded to my note of thanks/link to the story.  

I hadn't expect it to be a final contact. 

Photo credit: Adrian Wyld Canadian Press, via CBC News 

Paul Wells on Quebec ... and monetizing blogging

I was quibbling the other day about something Paul Wells had on his Substack, so it's only fair to say I am charmed as well as enlightened by his most recent Substack post,  a memoir about covering the 1995 Quebec Referendum as a newish journalist in Montreal that also offers some perceptive testimony to that moment in history .  

I retain very vivid memories of the 1976 Quebec referendum, and somehow the 1995 one seemed at the time like "first time tragedy, second time farce" and I obsessed much less over it. 1995 was not like that for Paul Wells.  Go read it.

In recent years I've been interested in Paul Wells not just for his commentary, but also from wondering if he will make a go of it as a self-sustaining commentator on Canadian politics. We always hear of people -- from the Kardashians to Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson-- making nice incomes from Patreons, YouTube channels, Substacks, and all the other digital media that become hot for a while.

But I'm pretty sure those people are pretty much all Americans or people pitching to the vast American (and global) audience. 

Does any individual make any significant revenue through income from online subscribers who are paying for material directed exclusively at Canadian topics?  Yes, collective journalism projects like The Tyee and The Local continue, though always seeking more support. But I'm thinking of writers, individual journalists, maybe videographers, and the like.

When Paul Wells left magazine journalism, he had (I seem to recall) both some university support and some private or foundation backing for his venture into becoming self-supporting online, as well as lots of Canada-wide name recognition  -- and lots to say too, for sure. Few others had a better shot at succeeding, I thought. If he made a go of it, it would be a sign it was at least possible.

Recently, at a time when Substack, having swallowed paleo-blogging, seems to be becoming swallowed up by video presentations, Wells reported he was giving up the video portion of his Substack as not cost-effective.  That did not sound like a Paul Wells IPO might be coming soon. Do online videostorians and the like actually have real revenue to support their habit of presenting Canadian content? 

I have never monetized this blog, first because I never expected anyone to read it.  And even when I realized it was getting views, I still very much doubted the revenue potential in that.  Also, the fact that I can quit it whenever it ceases to amuse me has remained important to me.  The moment this became an income source, I would suddenly have a goat to feed. Who wants that responsibility?

But I remain intrigued by the market for Canadian-focussed online commentary.  Thoughts?  

Prize Watch: The GGs

No suspense here.  History is hardly present in the shortlists for the Governor-General's Literary Awards, our most prestigious and comprehensive prizes for literary writing in Canada.  

On the nonfiction list -- five titles -- Wong's "multigenerational family odyssey" and Diaz's biography of Vancouver's legendary black swim instructor Joe Fortes both sound at least history-adjacent. I have not read either and know little of them, though I'm pleased to see their small press publisher defying the branch-plant hegemony. Memoir remains deservedly strong. 

But the jury found no big-history, big-research-based, big-historian books of the kind that used to appear on these lists from time to time.  It just ain't the zeitgeist -- until someone comes along with a book big enough to shift the zeitgeist.

All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey by Teresa Wong (Arsenal Pulp Press)

How to Survive a Bear Attack by Claire Cameron (Knopf Canada/PRHC)

Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes by Ruby Smith Dίaz (Arsenal Pulp Press)

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memoir by Vinh Nguyen (HarperCollins Canada)

What to Feel, How to Feel: Lyric Essays on Neurodivergence and Neurofatherhood by Shane Neilson (Palimpsest Press)

Full details here.  The fiction shortlist looks nothing like the Giller's, which suggests there is no critical consensus on that side either. Winners announced November 6.