Worth Reading: Jean-François Nadeau on secularism

On his Substack, Paul Wells reprints in translation Jean-François Nadeau's recent column on Quebec's secularism law, currently at the Supreme Court of Canada, now leading to hundreds of firings, all Muslims, all women, mostly in child care centres:

We show the door to women who have broken no law, harmed no one, and failed in no professional duty. Their veil becomes a pretext for fantasies and suspicions, in contempt of the essential work they perform every day for children.

In a school system already grappling with challenges like dropout rates, overcrowded classrooms, special needs, and lack of resources, was it really so urgent this spring to fire appreciated, qualified, well-integrated women? Is this truly how the injustices within this leaking-from-every-seam education system will be corrected?

Book Notes: Ghosts of Ortona

I have not read this, but it sounds like an interesting take on military history by an anthropologist  -- a history of what people don't talk about, almost.  

As a young anthropologist, Ian Cosh set out to document the memories of a little-known but costly World War II battle fought over Christmas in the Italian town of Ortona. His research took him across western Canada, and to Italy and Germany, interviewing veterans and civilians. In their stories, he encountered puzzling details—hints of things unspoken and unresolved. Sam was obsessively mapping a minor skirmish on graph paper. Mel kept mentioning an Indigenous sniper he’d never met. Ted was haunted by the ghost of a church. Bill recalled nothing of Christmas dinner, though his comrades swore he was there.

When the project ended, Ian tried to leave it behind. Now returning to his field notes and interview transcripts, he’s determined to understand what was missed.

-- from the publishers' blurb for Ian Cosh, Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian World War II Veterans. 

History of voting, of accountability, of the conventions of the parliamentary system

This op-ed about electoral corruption in Alberta, by Rachel Notley, former NDP premier of Alberta, is worth reading (gift link) and very discouraging too. 

...the UCP proposed a plan for Trump-style gerrymandering. They rejected the independent boundaries commission report, silencing the voices of the thousands of Albertans who participated in a fair, transparent and democratic process. Instead, an advisory panel will propose a new electoral map for Alberta, overseen by a committee of politicians dominated by UCP members. They will not be required to consult with the public. It seems likely that the final say on the map will rest with the politicians.

Blatant corruption of the electoral process is troubling enough. What's worse is the sense that this kind of majoritarian autocracy is gaining ground across Canada. 

Today political parties are almost entirely run by professional managers and strategists instead of elected caucuses  and volunteer members. The faith that there are conventions of appropriate behaviour in politics is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Governance really is all about winning and getting one's way, and not only in Alberta. (Compare: Quebec, and examples don't lack in Ontario, either.) Political processes where customary behaviour is expected but not protected are widely endangered.  

It has long been shocking how deeply electoral gerrymandering has been routine and normal for both parties in American politics. Though the Democratic Party has long been prepared to ban the practice, the Republican Party defends it to the last ditch.  So it becomes more extreme  and more accepted --even necessary -- with each electoral cycle. 

(Add to that the constitutional gerrymanders of American Senate representation, the Electoral College, etc. US electoral problems do not start or end with the Trump regime.)

In Canada, the profoundly corrupt wartime election of 1917 persuaded even the winner of that election to support the Dominion Elections Act, which led to the establishment of the independent Chief Electoral Officer for Canada. Partisan influences in election processes, and eventually in constituency boundary-setting, were gradually replaced. 

Details of how electoral processes were gradually corruption-proofed -- and then corrupted again -- in the provinces are less well documented. But some provinces are demonstrating how easily independent commissions are easily bypassed by majoritarian interference of the kind Rachel Notley exposes in the article cited above.

Unlike the United States, we do have courts in Canada that will consider ruling against electoral corruption.  A 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision sets out "effective representation" rights that courts can enforce.  Quebec has already run up against these, and Alberta now seems likely to. In both those provinces, setbacks in the courts tend to lead to "notwithstanding" legislation and/or separatist agitation.  

Judicial review is something. But look how easy it is to corrupt the process for appointing judges!   

Book Notes: Greer on Rum in the Seaboard Review

In these days of the dwindling of book reviews and publications that run them, it's worth noting a newish (two years) review dedicated to reviewing Canadian fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and doing so on a frequent basis -- sometimes several times a week, it seems. 

It's called The Seaboard Review and its webpage is here.  It's a Substack production, actually, and the webpage is mostly just a link there.  Its review skew more to fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary nonfiction than historical writing.  But this week it includes a thoughtful review of Allan Greer's recent MQUP history, Canada in the Age of Rum.

If you like a book review with diverse interests written and published in Canada , it's worth a look,  They welcome subscriptions but you can read it free.

History of space travel: Artemis at the moon UPDATED

I watched quite a bit of the NASA YouTube channel during the ten day voyage of Artemis II to the moon and back. I’m a fan. I like all that space stuff.

But I’m old enough to remember – vividly -- the Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. A lot of Artemis looked … familiar.

Yes, of course the technology is light-years ahead of what they got by with in the 1960s. Good to see the capsule full of screens and digital readouts. The colour pictures and videos were great. The iPhones they carried had infinitely more computing power than everything on Apollo 11. Even the cameras they used to photograph the lunar surface had hundreds of times higher resolution than those of 1968. And in fifty years the crewcut can-do white-guy fighter jocks of Apollo have morphed into a diverse and laidback quartet who gushed affection and love back to the home planet. They probably set off with much more confidence about getting back home than Armstrong and Aldrin, too. So: much change.

But during their flight someone noted that the time from the Wright brothers’ first flight to Apollo is almost the same as the time from Apollo to Artemis. I can’t help thinking the first half delivered much more change than the second one. I guess those were the easy bits.

There is still no space plane. The space shuttle (that could at least fly down to an airfield) was a dud, and the space station is going to be “deorbited” long before a replacement takes shape. There is still no permanent facility either in earth orbit or circling the moon, and none spoken of. Elon Musk is no longer promising to go live on Mars. Just as their predecessors did, the Artemis crew went up on a pillar of flame and came down to bob awkwardly in rubber boats. Artemis III will make its moon landing with the same capsule-and-lander process that operated in the 1960s. Indeed the whole Artemis program seems to follow pretty much the well-worn flight path and landing methods of Apollo, and the astronauts still lack the relay satellites that would allow communication from behind the moon. Anything like routine space travel remains in the realm of science fiction.

I have never forgotten reading an observation, not long after Apollo, that the first trips to the North and South Pole were hellishly difficult and dangerous voyages. But when people went back there, those were routine journeys using new submarine and aircraft technology that made the poles an afterthought. I thought then it might be like that with the moon.  After the dangerous and risky and incredibly expensive flights of Apollo, the next people on the moon would just drop in as part of a general achievement of spacefaring.   

It’s still damn hard just to achieve earth orbit and return. No space planes, no liveable platforms parked above earth and moon, let alone Mars. It’s still absolutely cold and dark and airless everywhere up there, and we still live at the bottom of a deep gravity well that strongly resists us going up and out. Spacefaring is still a long way away.

Next time I dip into a galactic space war novel or a world-building epic of routine travel and trade across and beyond the solar system, I won’t be thinking that’s any closer than it was in the sixties.

Update, same day:  Molly Ungar responds:

Thank you for your excellent comments on the Artemis II mission. We are also fans, and as we watched the splash-down and crew retrieval, we decided then and there to re-visit two films: “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13”.  Both are as engrossing as when they were first released.

 

However, thus far I’ve not heard of any goal attached to the Artemis program other than that of mining for critical minerals on the moon, which of course reminds me of the movie “Alien”, and look how that turned out. I would say that the Cold War “space race” buoyed up government and public interest until the U.S. declared victory and departed the field.

Like yourself, we were interested in the changes you point out, and noticed how much was familiar.

History of Unwritten Histories at Active History

Active History is taking note of the tenth anniversary (and also the end of) the blog called Unwritten Histories. UH's authors have been reposting some of their fave posts at Active History as a farewell from their site.

Unwritten Histories may have been on my History Blogs of Note for a while; certainly I remember reading it. I admired its "Guide to Resources"  and "Canadian History Roundup" posts. It was also a support blog for emerging historians, particularly women, struggling with graduate school and the search for employment (not my own situation at all, but an admirable service):

When I started Unwritten Histories, it was due to frustration and anger after having worked at a history department for three years, only to not even get an interview when the first permanent Canadian History job came up. At that point, I had been working as a sessional instructor for over 5 years, and I was exhausted. In one memorable semester, I had to get up at 5:30 am to take a coach bus and then a shuttle bus to teach an 8 am class two cities over from where I lived. The trip took two hours.  After that class was over at 11, I had to wait 3 hours (because of conflicting bus schedules) before taking the same trip in reverse, to teach another 3 hours class from 6 to 9. I still don’t know how I did it. All I knew was that, after finding out I didn’t get the interview, it felt like my entire career had been a waste of time and I needed a new plan. 

I'm side-eyeing that tenth anniversary announcement a little bit. UH launched in 2016, went silent in 2020, and now returns to claim ten years -- as it closes down. I'm entitled to quibble, I think; this blog has been running since (checks notes) 2004 and has barely missed a week. But history blogs, particularly Canadian ones, are always scarce, and Andrea Eidinger and Stephanie Pettigrew gave a lot to this one.  

And good to note Active History remains very active and worth looking at. Here, for instance, is a note about its year-long Indian Act 150 series -- the Indian Act having been given royal assent on April 12, 1876. 

History of Talking in the changing city

We went to the Daniels Spectrum in Toronto's revitalized Regent Park neighbourhood last night to attend a WalrusTalks discussion sponsored by the magazine. The talk title, "Power and Belonging," was not very descriptive in advance, but the speakers turned out to be young, mostly indigenous, of colour, immigrants --  and all of them articulate, passionate, a bit pissed-off, and positioning themselves as community rather than power in their commitments (though they include a Canada Research Chair, a Vanier Scholar, and so on).

On the streetcars there and back we passed by Sankofa Square (formerly Yonge-Dundas) and connected through TMU subway station (TMU being formerly Ryerson, and the station formally Dundas). Good to go to an event where the speakers matched the new place names beginning to reflect the new city. 

It was a great pick-me-up when so many of the comfortably placed and well-funded old white historians and writers I know are still trying to roll back reconciliation and put the statues back up.

The event was livecast and is to be available with other WalrusTalks at Walrus Video.

Book Notes: Karen Dubinsky on Cuba

Queen's University historian Karen Dubinsky has a new book out: Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters. It's an exploration of many Canadian networks of contact with Cuba during the long American crusade against the island: everything from engineering to cattle breeding to salsa music. It includes her own contacts: Dubinsky has co-taught a course at the University of Havana for years and has visited constantly.

The Canadian government does not seem to think Cuban survival in the face of Trump holds much value, but over the decades a lot of Canadians have seen it differently.

Book Notes: John Fraser on the GGs

Went down last night to Massey College to join a noisy sociable crowd at the book launch of The Governors General of Canada: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office, by John Fraser, the journalist, homme de lettres, and man-about-Toronto. I have been browsing in it in advance thanks to a copy sent by publishers Sutherland House.

It’s not that kind of intimate; it gets its title from the way Fraser has managed over the years to be in the company of quite a few of the GGs, sometimes covering them as a journalist, sometimes inviting them to Massey College during his years as master there. It’s short, chatty, gossipy, and manages to be a Fraser memoir as well as a set of profiles of the Canadians who have held the post from Vincent Massey on - with some serious reflections on the office itself. It's a lively read. About the most disparaged office the country has, that's no small feat. 

Fraser, who loves the monarchy, likes the office of governor general for its reflected glory, and he likes most those GGs who are most in the monarchical style, that is, dignified, reserved, mannered, and a bit de haut en bas. Massey, Georges Vanier, Roland Michener, Jules Leger, and recently David Johnston pass muster. Somewhat to my surprise, he respects Adrienne Clarkson as well. He explains by quoting another anecdote: “She’s a total monarchist. She just thinks the wrong person is on the throne.” She filled the role, in other words, and Fraser respects that. He likes as well how well John Ralston Saul handled the difficult role of GG spouse.

He’s less keen on Sauvé, Schreyer, Hnatyshyn, and Leblanc – too political, too ordinary, and a bit too “just folks” for his taste. He’s cool about Michaelle Jean, too. Perhaps, Fraser admits, it’s because he never managed to have her visit Massey College. Perhaps, he also admits at some length, because his daughter may be right when she accuses him of thinking of her mostly as a DEI hire despite all evidence to the contrary.

Fraser is most blinkered on Mary Simon, whom he calls “a one-trick pony,” “missing the boat” -- because all she talks about is reconciliation. For Fraser, reconciliation is causing national depression and Simon is failing to get “us all” safely past it. Madame Simon, stay on your pony – John Fraser inadvertently shows us how much we need you.       

Monarchical slop

AI slop -- the crazy stuff when AI starts to hallucinate or people use it to do really stupid things -- is in the news regularly, and the media are constantly being warned to avoid it.  But we need to pay attention to monarchy slop -- the crazy things that reputable publications will disseminate when it comes to the British royal family.

Here from CBC News no less, is a story about how Donald Trump's respect for King Charles is what has saved Canada from annexation.  

Now any sentient person knows that Donald Trump does not do respect. He is not into friendship. But this Charles-saves-Canada story seems to get all kinds of space, as if it were a real story with political significance  Here is Susan Delacourt, national affairs columnist at the Toronto Star, taking the whole thing at face value.

Thanks to a British author, we learned this week that all the 51st-state talk is now on the back burner for two reasons: one lies in Trump’s respect for King Charles, and, maybe more significantly, the president doesn’t have enough time to annex this nation.

Look into this story, and one learns it's from "a prominent royal commentator" with a new book being serialized in the Daily Mail. He reports that he happened to be chatting sociably with the American president when the matter came up. Does this happen? Did he buy a membership at Mar-a-Lago, possibly?   

Quick trip to Quebec et la Nouvelle-France

We were briefly in Montreal last week  -- colder and snowier than Toronto, but still a pleasure to visit.  

While we were there, the debate about Quebec's Bill 21, the one about secularism that mostly bans various clothing items for Muslims, Jews, and others, was in the Supreme Court of Canada and in the news.

As it happened we were staying on Rue Saint-Paul, and the streets around us were called Francois-Xavier, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Sulpice, and so on.  When we took the subway we noted stations with names like Pie IX, and l'Assomption, and Sainte-Catherine. Way above us the cross atop Mont-Royal shone bright.

Either the movement for official secularism has a long way to go, or maybe the critics are right to say it is mostly cover for an effort to keep the visible minorities in their place.

Meanwhile, I have been reading People, State, and War Under the French Regime in Canada by Louise Dechêne, translated by Peter Feldstein. The original French-language edition was published (posthumously) in 2008 and the translation in 2021. I regret having to admit I had not been aware of either until very recently.

Because Louise Dechêne really was a terrific historian, and this, like all else she wrote, is most original, deeply source-based, deeply thought-out, and frequently takes no prisoners in what she says of other scholars of New France.  I admire her immensely, and may have more on this book when I'm done with it.

Book Notes: Allan Greer on the Rum Economy

Nice to see a substantial early Canadian history piece by Allan Greer, McGill University historian, featured in the Toronto Star, and based on a book published by McGill Queen's University Press.

The story is about the enormous role of rum in early Atlantic Canada, with particular focus on how the truck system in the transatlantic cod fishery enabled captains and proprietors to sell large quantities of greatly marked-up rum to their employees so as to drive them into debt and avoid having to pay their wages.  

The statistics are persuasive. Still, I'm not sure if it is Allan Greer or just the way the Star selected a bit from his book, but I have to be a little sceptical of the article's suggestion that every poor fisherman was inevitably driven hopelessly into rum-fuelled debt for the profit and convenience of their owner. 

There are many anecdotal accounts of fishers in the records who made long careers -- sometimes credited with making forty or even more annual visits from European ports to the North Atlantic fishing grounds. Presumably at least some were not ruined every year, or the whole economy of the fishery would have collapsed. It was a grim proto-industrial business altogether, no doubt, but its survival for several hundred years suggests it was not a completely irrational economic system.  

Still, a fun read on a Saturday morning. And for once major media runs a history op-ed that is about history, and not a diatribe against wokeness in history and how we are not doing enough to ram patriotic facts down the throats of school children so we can all forget about it later.

Ancient History

A day will come when the passage of time and the assiduous exploration of long centuries will bring to light what now escapes us, and our posterity will be amazed that we were ignorant of such evident things.

             -- Seneca (4 B.C.E - 65 C.E.)

[Shared and suggested by Russ Chamberlayne.]

Submarines all the way down: Carney's cultural policy cuts UPDATED

So this happened:  

In February Colin Coates, professor of history, wrote in his role as president of the Canadian Historical Association to Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Heritage, expressing the CHA's concern over the way the budgetary choices made by the Carney government have led to serious closures, service reductions, and staff reductions at almost every federal agency charged with creating, preserving, and distributing historical and cultural knowledge, and particularly Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum, Parks Canada, and Statistics Canada. As he says:

I am sure that you are aware of the key roles these agencies play in encouraging interest in Canadian history. At this particular juncture in the history of our country, active engagement with the complicated Canadian past is more necessary than ever. Canadians need to understand, for example, the features of our past that distinguish us from our neighbours to the south and that have led us to adopt different paths to our concepts of citizenship, democracy, and civic engagement. 

On March 18  (lightspeed by Government of Canada standards) the minister replied, saying (I paraphrase): hey, we only make the budget, these agencies make their own choices, why complain to me?

We have had a deluge of propaganda about how "wokeness" is somehow killing Canadian history.  Now we can consider where the real problem begins.

This Carney government is beginning to shape up as the most philistine Canadian government in a long time. I did not love the Harper government's historical priorities (war, hockey and the crown, mostly) but at least they had some history they valued. This government: seems like it's just submarines all the way down.

See also this

Global News has put up two charts of how much the Carney government plans to cut spending or increase spending in each department.  This below is the hit list. Take a deep breath. And Canadian Heritage is not even one of the big losers, despite the damage summarized above.