This post is not really about Toronto's bike lines, honest. There is a historical constitutional point!

I don't know if you are following the squabble between Toronto and Ontario about bike lanes. But if you are, I want to propose that the argument is proceeding on the wrong basis.  The court case recently decided in Ontario's Court of Appeal and possibly going to the Supreme Court of Canada hangs on an interpretation of one sentence in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms' Article 7. 

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

If you are interested in going deep into how this applies to bike lane planning, the recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision is here. And I recommend Emmett Macfarlane's analysis of the decision on his Substack.  

But the Charter should not at all be the relevant legislation here.  The debate would be better rooted in the fundamental principles of Canadian (and behind it British and English) parliamentary democracy.  England, by executing one king and deposing another, established very firmly the principle "Parliament is supreme."  Parliament is where the people are represented. Parliament are where governments are held accountable.  Parliaments tax and spend on behalf of the people they represent.  

Well before confederation, Canada made one significant amendment to the principle:  All Parliaments are supreme.  The people of the British North American colonies were subjects of the Crown and British citizens just as much as the people in England itself. 

They had the same rights to be represented by, and to have their taxes collected and spent by, the parliaments they elected, not by the distant British one.  That is, the colonial parliaments had to be supreme -- within their own jurisdiction. 

That was the achievement of responsible government in 1847-48. Britain conceded that parliamentary sovereignty required self-government for the Canadians. And a wise undersecretary at the Colonial Office in London understood it meant "real independence."  

The same principle triumphed in the constitutional negotiations of 1864-67.  Despite the musings of John A. Macdonald, first about "legislative union" (ie, one parliament only for all of British North America) and later about the need for the federal parliament to supervise these new provinces through disallowance, it was established firmly in the constitutional text that within their jurisdictions, the provincial legislatures were as much parliaments as the new one at Ottawa.  Sections 91 and 92 set out what lay within provincial jurisdiction and what lay beyond the province's power.

There had been an evolution here.  When the British North American colonies were founded, they was limited state capacity to tax and spend and rudimentary representative institutions.  But as the new colonial legislatures grew into their roles, they acquired the powers and rights of parliaments -- and in 1848, the British government conceded the evolution could not be turned back.  They had to be accepted as sovereign within their own jurisdiction, first vis-a-vis the British government, then vis-a-vis Ottawa.

In the Constitution Act's Section 92, Article 8 declares that one of the exclusive powers of each provincial government was and is: 

Municipal Institutions in the Province.

Ask any journalist, any political scientist, any lawyer, any talk show host -- ask anyone -- and they will tell you the provincial government can do anything they like with cities within the province, even the largest.  "Cities are creatures of the provinces," they will say, and if they are pedantic enough they will cite Section 92 .

Note: Section 92 does not say cities are creatures.  It makes provincial government responsible for municipal institutions.  To a  large extent in 1867, that meant creating them.  But as early as 1849 a Municipal Act had been passed for Upper Canada that gave municipalities full power to tax and spend, and as Robert Baldwin said, freedom to spend what they raised as they wished.  "Cities are creatures" is a legal fiction conjured up by a judge in the 1990s.  Once founded and grown, cities are parliaments as much as provinces are -- within their jurisdiction.

Surely this is what 92.8 means. Provinces are responsible for setting up and shaping municipal institutions.  But once created, cities go through the same evolution as the erstwhile colonies did.  Their new and fragile civic institutions have grown into parliaments.  The way to deal with overbearing provincial governments meddling in civic affairs for their own purposes is to declare that civic parliaments are sovereign within their sphere of responsibility. Just as Ottawa cannot dictate provincial spending, no province is entitled to interfere with how the cities spend their own money.

Obviously cities and provinces need to cooperate, as provinces and Ottawa must.  (Medicare, housing, education: these are the key provincial powers, but the provinces work with Ottawa and Ottawa's money all the time. Could not live without them.)  It would take time to disentangle cities from provincial meddling and reset the partnership. But the place to start is to start declaring the principle.  Cities are not creatures.  Cities are parliaments, and must be empowered to act like them.  Our present system for cities is so unparliamentary as to be unconstitutional. 

 Amirite? 

 

Obituary: Sumit Sarkar (1939-2026), Historian of India

I had never known of Sumit Sarkar before I came across this obituary appreciation, but a great historian of India is surely a great world historian.  Particularly since he:

transformed the study of modern India by bringing class, caste, gender and popular politics into the historical narrative while teaching generations to question neat conclusions and remain open to complexity.

His works, including Modern India 1885-1947 and Modern Times: India 1880s-1950s 

 

This quarter at Canada's History: Olympics, Charter, drag balls, lost Manitoba and more

Canada's History magazine, six issues a year since beyond living memory, recently switched to a quarterly format.  I might have hoped it would go monthly instead.  But the quarterly format has its advantages, I admit. More space, a greater diversity of stories for starters. 

Fall 2026 looks good.  I'm happy to say one of the feature stories is mine.  The Charter's Course started as a report on how the Hudson's Bay Company's 1670 Charter, a unique piece of 17th century calligraphy, was saved from the commercial auction-market hammer and finally found its proper place in the collection of a great Canadian public museum.  

With the presence of pungent comments from Grand Chief Phil Fontaine and former GG Edward Schreyer, it grew into something more: themes of tyranny and resistance, and the fundamental question of who owns Canada and who should. You can read it right here: The HBC Charter Comes Home - Canada's History

The issue also has a substantial section for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, and it's not just anniversary commemoration: there's good tough pieces on "the worst case of artistic censorship in the country's history" by Taylor Noakes, and and interview with Richard Pound, not only an Olympics competitor but also Canada's most influential Olympic Committee player.

Drag balls in 1950s Toronto -- a new field for Canada's History, I think, and well tendedby Christine Sismondo.

And, as they say, much more.  If you subscribed like you should you would already have it.

CH Cover art: Ken Danby.

History of democratic collapse?

With the retreat of the United States into authoritarianism, there seems to be an urge for Canadians to declare that, gee, we could have that too.

Adam Dodek, Ottawa law professor, had a long essay in the weekend Globe and Mail arguing "It Can Happen Here" and "it" means Donald Trump, whose name is in almost every sentence of his opening paragraphs. I've also become aware of the forthcoming Democratic Collapse by Quebec City journalist and podcaster Nora Loreto -- which is actually the third book in her series Canada in Decline, the others focusing on the social safety net and corporate control.

I've been thinking of a response to some of the points in Adam D's essay that cry out for revision, but parliamentary journalist Dale Smith is way ahead of me with an online takedown today on his website. Dodek in his essay argues that the pathway to salvation is a massive expansion of the Reform Act (2014). For Smith the Reform Act is always "the (garbage) Reform Act," and he goes full-tilt for Dodek's praise of it. 

How exactly Dodek would get the anti-democratic forces to enact such legislative amendments is a puzzle. And Smith's arguments  -- essentially that the Reform Act has put all kinds of limits on parliamentarians that did not exist in legislation previously -- are worth pondering.

Myself, I still rather like the Reform Act, and I admire Michael Chong, Canada's most successful backbencher, for getting it heard and passed (in a weakened form, it is true) against the instincts of most of his fellow Conservatives and most Liberals too.  

What both Dodek and Smith need to recognize is that the Reform Act is like those fixed election laws that Canadian legislature constantly pass, but which premiers and prime ministers ignore whenever it suits them -- without suffering any pushback. 

The Reform Act, like the fixed-election acts, needs to be understood as essentially aspirational. They both urge parliamentarians to follow certain paths. But fixed election laws cannot cancel a premier's constitutional authority to dissolve the house (as courts have already ruled). And the Reform Act can in no way constrain the freedom of MPs to remove their leaders, defy their parties, and even defeat their own government.  Those are the constitutional powers of the elected representatives of the Canadian people and cannot be abridged. To the extent the Reform Act hobbles them, it is suggestive only and has no power.  

Still the Reform Act urges MPs to be more assertive, and surely that is an appetite that grows with the eating -- and therefore a good start, if insufficient. More assertive MPs is the thing we need -- really, the only thing we need -- not amendments to the Reform Act.

Book Notes: Unparliamentary

I was browsing in Unparliamentary: Tales from Canada's Colourful Parliamentary Past, a recent book by scholar of parliament Charlie Feldman. Anyone who writes or talks about Canadian parliamentary doings is going to want to mine this book for its wealth of stories about funny, bizarre, and unexpected events unearthed from Feldman's trawls through Hansard and other sources.  (He also has a lively presence on Bluesky, presenting more of the same.) 

Feldman regrets, in an amusing way, that his publisher (University of Toronto Press) insisted on putting all his notes in the back as endnotes, when he thinks they should all be footnotes at the bottom of the pages to which they connect. He might do better to distinguish source notes (for which endnotes are perfect) from commentary notes, which make excellent foot-of-page notes. The trick is not to run wild with marginal comments: one's editors are likely to tolerate a prudent amount. Many of Feldman's would-be footnotes could have been incorporated in the text itself, I suspect. But a book like this with no index -- that's a publishing crime!

His commitment to annotation reflects his efforts to distinguish between true (or at least documentable) parliamentary stories and ones he suspects are apocryphal (i.e., invented).  His test case is the story of John A. Macdonald vomiting in mid-speech on an electoral platform and getting away it with a clever joke.  I read his analysis of that one nervously since I've used that story myself. 

But like Feldman, I cited it to Biggar's Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald, (p. 193), and I am glad he thinks there is at least some basis for it.  Biggar indeed is almost single-handedly responsible for the image of Macdonald as a fun guy to be with.

From Molly Ungar, August 12

Thank you for mentioning that often-neglected but very significant element of publishing – the back of the book Index. In my time, I’ve indexed a number of books, and contrary to (perhaps) popular belief, the best Index is human-created.

 

Unfortunately, an Index costs $$$ and a really good Index costs even more $$$$ and takes time. Apart from the $$$ aspect, if and when the author has anything to say, it’s usually something stupefyingly impolite. 

Loved each and every one of my Indices.

Reviewing notes

One of my neighbours occasionally gifts me a batch of his old Times Literary Supplements (and other publications, too  -- he's a very literate man). I was browsing through the May 15 issue of TLS recently and came across a recent review by the admirable British historian Richard J Evans of two recent books on German-Russian history during the 20th century.  Of one, he says.

Hellbeck is living in the past. To call his assertions a travesty is being too kind. One throws up one's hands when a university professor of history peddles such ignorant twaddle.

He does not like the other book much either. 

History of the atomic secret in Canad,a and Elon's grandpa

Mark Bourrie has a lively story in The Walrus about Elon Musk's grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who used to be a chiropractor in Saskatchewan, and how he almost leaked the secret of the atom bomb in 1944.

I liked it even more because we already had a story on this blog about Joshua Haldeman in 2023.  Not the bomb story, but quite a bit about other aspects of his history -- gleaned from Jill Lepore's journalism.

About that Tour de France

Tadej -- fifth time in a row.  Maybe the greatest?

Okay the Tour de France ended on Sunday.  Tadej Pogacar's dominance was such that much of the race was not very close, but apparently the shortened circuit around Paris on Sunday was pretty dramatic.  I missed it.

But it says "and the Tour de France in July" on the masthead of this blog.  Dedicated readers (well, maybe one or two) must be wondering where their grand tour news is.

Sorry, fellow Tour-ists.  I did not really watch much of the tour this year.  And went I went to catch up, I discovered my credit card info had expired and I was locked out.  Okay it was only a credit card update away, but I took it as a sign.  So far I have not renewed.

The thing about the Tour is it really takes a lot of time commitment.  If you don't watch multiple hours of coverage nearly every day for 21 days, you get hopeless out of touch with all the small dramas, the emerging personalities, the hidden rivalries -- and of course all the landscape scenery passing by.  

Somehow I used to be able to make time to do that -- for years -- and I always felt well rewarded.  But lately, there is not really a dominant Canadian to focus on.  I watched through the heydays of Ryder Hesjedal and Michael Woods, which covered quite a span.  But Derek Gee, currently the closest thing to a potential contender, has not been quite so present.  And all the teams and personalities I used to know have vanished.  I just don't seem to make the time investment to know what's going on with the Tour anymore.

So maybe Tour coverage next year -- or even the Vuelta this fall?  Come back to find out.  But I think it is fading. 

Canadian history?  A little politics?  Those should continue.  

Acadian Genealogy and Citizenship Part 2: a comment from Patrick Lacroix AND A BRIEF RESPONSE TOO

Patrick Lacroix, who is unfailingly interesting on Bluesky and on his blog Query the Past, has thoughts on my post of June 23 about the new options for those with ancestral connections to Canada to acquire Canadian citizenship:

I hope the summer finds you well! I imagine you are enjoying Tour de France coverage.

I read with interest your latest blog post. I have a special interest as director of the Acadian Archives in Fort Kent, Maine. Due to Bill C-3, the number of inquiries we received in the winter and spring easily set a new record for our institution. It was at times overwhelming—as it has been for other collecting institutions in both Canada and the United States.

The IRCC did itself and many applicants a disfavor by only updating its guidelines in June, about six months after Bill C-3 passed and became effective. Granted, I don't think anyone in Ottawa was prepared for the volume of inquiries that they would receive. It remains that many eligible people in the United States, using the broad guidelines available to them from the IRCC website, submitted applications that will ultimately be rejected through no fault of their own. Then, when resubmitting, they will have to wait an additional 19 months (the current processing time for U.S. applications).

The issue is not so much that the records are not Canadian. Some applicants are four or five generations (or more) removed from a Canadian ancestor. So, most of their paperwork documenting Canadian ancestry will come from U.S. sources—birth and marriage certificates issued by states. The sticking point comes with the new guidelines issued in June, specifically that "[y]our documents must be issued by the original authority that created or keeps the record." This is especially difficult for the colonial era and doubly so for Acadians. The IRCC seems to be sensitive to the fact that the civil registration of births and marriages only began in the 1880s and 1890s in most North American jurisdictions. Prior to that time, we are chiefly reliant on church records. But the original authorities for the colonial period are often no longer extant.

It seems obvious to us, in history, who are outside of the bureaucracy and looking in. But, if the Canadian government is really doing away with generational caps of any kind, it seems that the IRCC should have a team of historical consultants who can properly adjudicate the soundness of submitted documentation.

As for the rest ("Surely it would make sense for Canada to say that a Canadian connection that was interrupted almost 300 years ago should not entitle someone with no other connection to Canada to acquire Canadian citizenship"), I agree. I don't know that this eventuality ever crossed the minds of the folks who, when responding to the Ontario Superior Court ruling, drafted this piece of legislation. But some policymakers probably realized that they would tap into a well educated, highly skilled population that would benefit the Canadian workforce. For the most part, such are the folks who are contacting the Acadian Archives for assistance.

Always a pleasure to read you.

I have thanked Patrick and told him I will ponder all this and respond soon.  I posted based on a single newspaper article, and need to know more! 

Update, July 28.  Today is the 271st anniversary of the start of the Acadian deportation, I am told, so maybe an appropriate day to respond.  

Basically I was drawing on a single newspaper story for my post on this matter, and Patrick Lacroix is so far beyond me in understanding of the mechanics of Bill C-3, that I can't say much beyond thanking him for his comment here.

That and to endorse strongly his suggestion that  

it seems that the IRCC should have a team of historical consultants who can properly adjudicate the soundness of submitted documentation

Always amazing that people can think history is just something you might look up in Wikipedia once in a while. 

Still, the idea that is wise for Canada or any country to offer anyone citizenship on the basis of a multi-generational ancestral link centuries in the past is still one I have some difficulty grasping, no matter what documentation can be amassed.  Let's welcome immigrants who want to come here, and with less concern for the state of their great-grandmother's paperwork.

Acadian genealogists and citizenship by Ancestry.com WITH AN UPDATE

I believe I have some sort of entitlement-by-ancestry to Irish citizenship (and the European Union rights that would come with it).And Britain is so eager to claim me as British that I'm not even allowed to visit that country unless I make myself a British subject first.  But I have not sought either of those statuses, believing my Canadian passport should suffice.  

I'm not a fan of the trend to encourage people to collect multiple passports and citizenships -- including Canada's new openness to granting citizenship to foreigners with some distant Canadian ancestor adorning their family tree. If they will give you a second or third passport, eventually they will get in line to tax you, or conscript you, or something.

But Acadian genealogists and historians are claiming that if Canada is prepared to give citizenship to people with distant Canadian roots, they should apply their rules evenly -- and not throw out the Canadian documentation that foreign citizens with Acadian roots have been using to support their claim to Canadian citizenship.

Canada declares it will only accept Canadian documentation to prove Canadian ancestry.  Which seems fair.  But according to historian Maurice Basque and other Acadian historians and genealogists, Canada must accept Acadian parish registers that went south with Acadian deportees in 1755 as legitimate Canadian evidence, even if they have been held in Louisiana or French archives ever since.  

One of those whose citizenship certificate was suspended in June is an Acadian whose family settled in Louisiana, and has lived there since.

She received citizenship this year after the passing of the new federal law. 
But IRCC determined she may not be entitled to Canadian citizenship after all because she included in her application family records held in France and the U.S.

She had traced an ancestor born in 1730 in Acadia, sending IRCC their baptism certificate from Baton Rouge’s Archives and Records Center in Louisiana, which was an extract from the record of St. Charles Aux Mines Catholic Church in Acadia.

Surely it would make sense for Canada to say that a Canadian connection that was interrupted almost 300 years ago should not entitle someone with no other connection to Canada to acquire Canadian citizenship. But if the country has already made the commitment to unlimited ancestry, surely it has to be consistent about it.

Meanwhile, business for genealogical consultants (and document forgers, maybe) must be booming.  

UPDATE, 25 July 2026:  Toni Walker comments from Iowa: 

More to the point you could have just said "I don't want foreigners immigrating to MY country". Instead you wrote a blog post using many more words to say the same thing. Nothing else to write about that day?

Toni,  thank you for getting in touch. But either I have been spectacularly unclear or you have misunderstood the topic here. Actually I am vigorously in favour of 'foreigners immigrating to my country.'

There is barely an immigration issue here at all. Let me take another shot at this, and I hope you will bear with me.

Canada recently revised its citizenship rules (not its immigration rules) to make it easier for people who live in and hold citizenship in other countries -- but who have a Canadian grandparent or other family relation who once lived in Canada -- to apply for and receive Canadian citizenship in addition to whatever other citizenship they already hold.

I think it is fair to assume, and generally expected by those who amended the law, that most of those who pursue this path and acquire Canadian citizenship will remain living where they are and simply remain living where they are. For most it will be a second citizenship, perhaps a second passport, and a sentimental link to that remembered ancestor. 

No matter how many non-Canadians living in the USA or France or Poland or Australia or wherever acquire Canadian citizenship on the basis of their relationship to an ancestor who lived in Canada centuries ago, I doubt that more than a handful will want to move to Canada -- any more than the many proud Canadians who hold British or European or American or Israeli citizenships are about to move to those countries.

My post above was that having a three-hundred year old Canadian ancestor seems to me dubious grounds for citizenship, quite apart from the difficulties in assembling the evidence that would be needed to prove the relationship.   

As to immigration, I'd be delighted if people who do use the new ancestral grounds to gain Canadian citizenship also seek to immigrate here. Immigration is great for this country and always has been. Canada has been immeasurably enriched by immigration. I believe we should continue welcoming immigrants in large numbers -- and welcome those who have no ancestral connection to Canada as well as those who do.  

 

 

 

 

History of Bessie Borden

I recently caught the episode of Witness to Yesterday (Canada's busiest history-book podcast, I'd say) in which Donald Wright converses with Carmen Miller about Miller's book The Black Box: Lady Bessie Borden's Family 1863-1956, newly published by University of Toronto Press.

I might have left "Lady" out of the title. Any Canadian with Sir or Lady before their name seems distinctly passé in our times.  We don't have Australia's colourful phrase about a bunyip aristocracy. But we know that whole thing didn't work here either, despite the efforts of families like the Bordens.  The wrongest aphorism ever coined about Canadian history is Carl Berger's "[Canadian] Imperialism was a form of nationalism."  No, the belief that titled Canadians really could share in running Britain's empire for them always was a form of colonialism.

So I  would not rush instinctively to a book about the knights and ladies of the Borden family of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nova Scotia and Ottawa (and London, England).  

But the podcast episode kept me listening throughout -- it's a lively interchange. Maybe we should read The Black Box. 

Carmen Miller had already published a book about Sir Frederick Borden, but he could not get much of a grasp of the personality behind the politician until a Borden descendent gave him a black box full of the personal papers of Fred's wife Bessie -- papers Miller says the archives he visited had never found worth acquiring. His conversation with Donald Wright nicely captures the surprises of archival research and the pleasures of family history. From the UTP blurb for the book:

In a remarkable tale of tragedy, war, family conflict, and imperial diplomacy, The Black Box presents a collective biography of four generations of women in an elite Nova Scotia family during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. These intelligent, educated, artistic women.... 

Listen and see if you have the same reaction -- and check out a hundred other CanHist conversations there.

History of place and Prince Edward Island

The Canadian Historical Association has published on its website the keynote address recently given at its annual general meeting in Charlottetown by Edward MacDonald, museologist, UPEI history professor, and public historian, on the subject of place in history.  It's a lively, thoughtful and pleasantly modest -- how often are historians modest? -- essay. MacDonald calls it "Reckoning With Place."

But the question I asked Andrew Nurse remains valid: what wisdom do I have to offer? Only the kind you can buy at any corner store. So, I’ve decided it is safest for me simply to remind you today of things that you already know. Then we can both feel smart! 

Modest as it may be, however, the essay offers testimony to how much good history has been done in and on Prince Edward Island in the last fifty years or so, with lessons worth noting by anyone who writes about places not their own. Detail matters. 

History of the Grimke family -- and the new book about them

Allan Levine draws my attention to a story in the New York Times about an emerging scandal in historical scholarship and publishing.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family by Tufts University historian Kerry K. Greenridge starts with the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of a slave-owning plantation family in South Carolina who became famous for their abolitionist activity in the Northern states well before the Civil War.  But she also introduces the black Grimkes, who include three black sons of Sarah's and Angelina's plantation-owner brother; the three sons' mother, the enslaved woman Nancy Weston; and other black members of the extended Grimke family down to the twentieth century.

Published in 2024, The Grimkes became a much praised and widely read new study of slavery and freedom. Until lots of scholars of slavery began questioning the source notes for the book -- many of which they said could not be found in the cited archives -- and for uncredited borrowings from other historians.  Book and author are in trouble, the author is fighting back, and her university and publishers are distancing themselves from her. 

Full story in the New York Times: if I have done this right, non-subscribers to the Times should be able to access this gift link.