New Zealand elections: the "chrisis"

New Zealand law requires a  federal election every three years, not five.  In the recent one, the result has been something like a tie, and it may take weeks to sort out whether National or Labour, the dominant parties will form a government.

New Zealand has used a form of proportional representation for many years.  The centrality of the two main parties has endured, but governance of the country has been complicated by the to-be-expected proliferation of minor parties, which in NZ are often led by charismatic egomaniacs surprisingly willing to support whoever will give them a cabinet post and a dignified title.

In this year's election, the fine details of PR have conspired to give National an "overhang" --  more seats than its share of the vote would provide, the very thing PR is supposed to prevent.  But I can't resist noting the NZ wits who are focusing on the fact that both major parties have leaders named Chris  (challenger Hipkins and incumbent Luxton), and speculating whether what is happening can be dubbed a constitutional chrisis.

Prize Watch: The GGs, Strange, Bothwell

There was not a lot of history in the nominees for the Governor General's Literary Award in nonfiction this year.  The winner, announced this morning, is Trina Moyles's Black Bear, a memoir about living in the presence of bears in northern Canada.

Among other recent prize nominees, I was disappointed that Carolyn Strange's Fatal Obsession, the only nonfiction nominee for the Toronto Book Award, was not the winner.  (When a "book" prize has one nonfiction among four novels, one never knows if it may be a doomed token nominee or if the lone outlier is about to win.) In this case, there were some very strong novels in the running, including Kate Cayley's Property, which did win.  Congratulations to Carolyn Strong anyway.

Among other historians having a moment, notons Robert Bothwell, whose new book In the Shadow of the Manhattan Project is a sort of supplement to his 1980s book on Eldorado Nuclear -- while Susan Delacourt reports the following about another of his books: 

Just a few weeks ago, when I was interviewing Finance Minister François Philippe Champagne, he told me that no book has helped guide him more in his current job than “C.D. Howe: A Biography,” by Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, published 1979.

A document for Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is for remembering the dead above all.  But I also remember my father, who was not among the dead of the Second World War but saw a lot of service at the sharp end during the Second World War.

c1940, drafted, 

This is an excerpt from the regimental War Diary of 1st Derbyshire Yeomanry, Sixth Armoured Division, British Army, operating as armoured reconnaissance in Sherman and Honey tanks. It summarizes the last day of front line combat for Lieut. Vincent Moore, commanding 2 Troop of "B" Squadron a little north of Perugia in central Italy. 

As military historians know, Official War Diary daily entries are brief and full of acronyms and "inside" knowledge. They can still be dramatic and personal at times: 

June 23 [1944]      "A" Squadron No. 2 Troop was on right at 697963. In the morning it was moved forward to the Y-roads (Sheet 122) 701969, but was heavily shelled and retired to its former position and remained in observation.  Nos. 1 and 3 Troops on the left as far forward as the farm (Sheet 122) but were eventually spotted and retired after being shelled with HE to (Sheet 122) 687963 where, with the help of the Medium Regt. O.P. [observation post] working to his regiment, and with their own direct fire, they engaged several suspected targets.  "C" Sqn in the centre were still compelled to limit their activities to the Y-roads by SAN MARCO owing to the high ground on either side of the road being occupied by enemy O.P.s who, with excellent observation, could bring very accurate fire to bear wherever they wished, whilst no amount of shelling on our part appeared to disturb them in any way.

              "B" Squadron was put directly under command the Grenadier Guards in a supporting role in case of a counter-attack after the Grenadiers achieved their objectives.  Major Trollope, at a conference in the morning, had a narrow escape from some shelling, one of the Guards’ Colonels being wounded. The squadron, drawn up along on a road and unable to disperse, came in for a severe “stonk.” Later a bridge on which Lieut. Moore’s (M.C.) tank was, collapsed whilst the Squadron Leader was in the turret with him and they were trapped for an hour when the tank turned over.  When eventually they did get out, still under shell-fire, Lieut. Moore was wounded in the “bottom” and evacuated.  However, they achieved their intention, and the Guards occupied their intermediate objective before the squadron was withdrawn for the night. 

c1946, ret'd.

My father was taken for treatment at a military hospital in Todi and then recuperated at Sorrento. The regiment having replaced him and moved on, he was transferred to staff duties with Divisional Headquarters when he recovered, and he survived the war. 

Update:  Molly Ungar sends a link to a 2014 "Poppy Project" in Chilliwack, BC -- which is maintained by a local museum.  

I wish some Toronto museum would take on the hosting of the Toronto Poppy Map. One day, a Canada-wide one?

 

A Remembrance Day story for tomorrow

Here's a link to my Canada's History magazine article of last year about all the dead Canadian soldiers, sailors, and fliers from one street in West Toronto, and about They Walked These Streets, a local project that recognizes them and others. 

An excerpt, slightly abbreviated: 

On Remembrance Day last year, I walked along leafy residential Durie Street in the Toronto neighbourhood known as Bloor West Village. I started where the street does, at Morningside Avenue near Lake Ontario. I climbed the hill up to Bloor Street and continued north to where Durie ends at Dundas Street. It’s about 2½ kilometres.

On the way, I passed at least twenty-seven addresses that were homes to young men who went out to serve in Canada’s wars — and never came home. Cpl. Henry Aishford, killed in action in Belgium in 1916, once called 19 Durie home. Cpl. Arthur Bensley, who died of his wounds in 1943 at Casa Berardi, Italy, lived at 703 Durie. Between them lie the houses of twenty-five other soldiers, sailors and fliers who never returned.

History of Comedy? You Must be Joking

 Is there a history of funny? Bien sur. And to prove it, here is Sorry, We're Funny: How Canada became a Comedy Powerhouse by Kliph Nesteroff, a Castlegar, BC, boy who has been called "the preeminent historian of comedy by the New York Times, no less.  (The Times knows funny?)

Nesteroff has been all over CBC Radio the last few days, and yes, he's funny, too.

For an illustration of what comedy he's talking about, look to Netflix for SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard of. It's funny too, though as Canadians, who have all heard of SCTV, I'm sure we can all remember a sketch that's even funnier than the ones the Yank talking heads mention.  (Anyone remember "Jaysus Jaysus Jaysus Jaysus Jaysus," their take on those 70s Canadian theatre classics about Newfoundlanders in Toronto.)

Is this guy really called "Kliph"?  

Another Canadian who can deliver a funny line turns out to be astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who did a long radio interview today that's available here .  Describing the launch to the moon, he explains how, given the frequency of postponements and cancellations, he was not entirely accepting they were going anywhere even as the rockets powered up.

And when the big solid-fuel rockets beneath him opened up -- one sensation the astronauts had never been able to simulate exactly in training -- his reaction was to wonder if this tremendous blast was normal.  "And then, three seconds later, when we were still alive ... guess that's normal."

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 .