Historians passing on: Berger, Steele, Proulx RIP

 Some historians Canadian history lost recently:

• Carl Berger (1939-2026), longtime historian at the University of Toronto, mentor to many Canadianists, historian of ideas in Canada, author of The Sense of Power and The Writing of Canadian History (Governor General's Literary Award 1976).  I never really accepted his argument that "in Canada imperialism was a form of nationalism for some."  Still seems like a form of colonialism to me, but even ideas you want to argue with can be formative ones.

• Ian K. Steele (1937-2026), Western University historian and pre-confederation scholar, author of several works on colonial and settler-indigenous wars in British North America and the Thirteen Colonies, perhaps best known for The English Atlantic, which started the historical "turn" to considering the whole Atlantic "world" as a sphere of English influence ... and in time a French Atlantic world too, and a Spanish one.

• And my mentor and friend Gilles Proulx (1942-2026), longserving Parks Canada Historic Sites Service historian, a key figure in the research program at Louisbourg in the late 1960s and early 1970, then a vigorous scholar of New France with Parks' Quebec City office. His works include Combat at Restigouche (I visited Restigouche National Historic Site a few weeks ago and saw his contributions) and the New France section of  Jamestown-Quebec-Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings.

Allan Levine replies

I was sorry to hear about Carl Berger’s passing. A fine historian, he was a tough instructor. In the fall of 1978, during my first term as a novice graduate student at the University of Toronto, I took Berger’s half-course Canadian Intellectual History. It was an experience I still remember with great trepidation. The class had about 10 or 12 male students. Once a week we would crowd into Berger’s small and hot office to discuss that week’s topic that one of us had to present in the seminar. There were no tests or exams; you were graded on your own presentation and your contribution to the seminar. This, of course, set up a tense dog-eat-dog scenario in which some members of the class—in particular, an outspoken Marxist and a snobby Ontarian—would go after each other for two hours. All the while, Berger would sit back, nod, smirk, but not say a lot. It was very unsettling. Somehow, I managed to do my seminar presentation and survived this ordeal. But that was the last course I ever took from him.

Levine's The Dollar-a-Year Men is up for the Dafoe Prize in History -- to be announced later today.

 

Book Notes: Truth Before Reconciliation

(I meant to post this yesterday on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, but things intervened.)

Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, edited by Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, was number 6 on the Globe and Mail Canadian nonfiction bestsellers list last week. Timely, given the neo-Nazi activities and the media's growing awareness of the attacks on reconciliation.  

History of railroading

You can say almost anything about Canadian history if you put John A. Macdonald in the story:

"If John A. Macdonald . . . can build a railroad from one end of our country to the other in four and a half years, why can't we build the pipeline even quicker with the technology we have?"

            -- Doug Ford, promoting the Northern Shield cross-Canada pipeline proposal, September 30, 2026. 

We'll see how long that pipeline takes, if it ever starts. But the railroad took almost fifteen years from the first commitment in 1871, and much of the preparatory work was done by the government of Alexander Mackenzie. 

"Province House in Charlottetown, where ... in 1864, Sir John A. Macdonald gathered delegates in the Confederation Chamber and began the negotiations to create Canada."

            --  Steve Paikin visiting Prince Edward Island, September 30, 2026.

But Macdonald did not "gather" anyone at Charlottetown. He was one of twelve members of the Province of Canada delegation. It was invited by the Prince Edward Island government to meet three other provincial delegations. He spent much of his speaking time there vainly advocating for legislative union rather than federation, and did not chair any of its sessions. He wasn't a knight then, either.

Book Notes and Prize Watch: City of Toronto, Dafoe, Cundill, Cherniak, and Kostash

 At last weekend's legal history gathering, I reconnected with a longtime acquaintance, Carolyn Strange, the Canadian scholar who is now the very accomplished professor of history at Australian National University.  

And I learned that her 2025 book Fatal Confession: A Girl's Murder, a Man's Execution and the Fitton case, co-published by the University of British Columbia Press (in its 'Landmarks in Canadian Law' series) and the Osgoode Society for Legal History, is a shortlisted title for the City of Toronto Book Award -- the only nonfiction work alongside four novels.

I also met and chatted with Earl Cherniak, hale and vigorous in his 'nineties, whose forthcoming book In The Courts (with praise from me on the back cover) records his extraordinary career as a civil litigator in many Canadian courts and tribunals at all levels and across the country.  To quote my own blurb, it is an account of:

a long successful career in civil litigation in Canada between 1960 and 2025 [demonstrating] how lawyers, judges, courts, and law firms have transformed both the law and the practice of civil litigation during his lifetime.

Legal historians will take note of the evolution of the law and legal practice as he documents it. I suspect it may be more widely read by litigators and intending litigators, as virtually the whole book is Cherniak's detailed and opiniated insiders' recounting of many hard-fought trials and appeals large and small, and how he won them or why he lost them. 

About the same time, I saw news of the five-book shortlist for the John Dafoe Prize  (at right, winner October 13, profiles of nominees on the website until then)  and the three-book finalists for the Cundill Prize in History (winner announced in Montreal October 30) which includes Canadian Jonathan Cheng's biography of Kim Il Sung, the ur-dictator of North Korea.

And while we are tallying all these honours, how about the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Alberta to my friend and nonfiction guru Myrna Ann Kostash, BA '65?  Can an honorary degree be far behind, U of A?

 

History of Legal History: Backhouse Girard and Phillips

I spent part of the weekend very comfortably hosted at Osgoode Hall Law School's downtown centre and the University of Toronto's Faculty Club for Reimagining Justice: A Conference in Honour of Constance Backhouse, Jim Philips and Philip Girard.  

The conference was a celebration of the thriving state of legal history in Canada and of three still-active scholars who have done much to make that so -- by their scholarship but even more by their work to build and sustain an informal scholarly community admired by its membership for how collegial, supporting, diverse, and effective its various gatherings and projects always seem to be.  

One reason for why that is so is that the legal history community has always included law professors, history professors, and scholars from other disciplines, and also independent scholars, legal practitioners, and members of the judiciary.  Somehow that turns out to be a good thing. Among a range of presentations of very specialized topics in legal history, for instance, one panel included a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Chief Justice of Ontario, and two other eminent judges discussing the significance of legal history for their jurisprudence. 

Another reason for the healthy state of legal history is the existence of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Supported by a similar mix of members, it is a highly effective publishing arm for Canadian legal history (some 135 books since 1979) that gives potential legal historians confidence in having somewhere to publish.

 Phillips and Girard are the Society's editors-in-chief. They are also co-authors with R. Blake Brown of the groundbreaking History of Law in Canada, the third volume of which is soon to be published. Backhouse's many works are the backbone of feminist legal history in Canada and her networks and protegés are practically a conference in themselves.

The organizers of this conference, all veteran conference organizers, said in some amazement that getting this one set up was actually "fun." As a sometime part-time legal historian, it is indeed the collegiality of the legal history people that keeps me coming back to events like these.      

History of passports

Columnist Stephen Maher attacked MP and former Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer in the Toronto Star of September 23, pointing out that while campaigning to become prime minister Scheer was "revealed to possess American citizenship, which he hadn’t previously disclosed." Maher goes on to suggest that Scheer, who never did renounce his foreign allegiance, may have voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

When Tom Mulcair was leader of the NDP at the height of its post-Jack Layton tally of parliamentary seats, he too was also attacked for holding a foreign passport, in his case a French one.  Evidently there is something unpatriotic and faintly sinister about claiming to be a Canadian while holding some other country's passport, even if it's only politicians that get publicly assailed for it.

But these days Canada has been handing out Canadian passports by the thousands to foreigners (mostly Americans) who have never have lived here and quite likely never will, on the basis of their descent from some distant ancestor who did live in Canada but left, perhaps centuries ago.

Is dual citizenship evil, as the Mulcair and Scheer smears suggest? Or is passport collecting a hobby that anyone can pursue, like stamps or coins, as the Canadian government (and many thousands of dual passport holders) seems to believe? 

Like many people from immigrant families, I am eligible for several foreign citizenships. I could seek British citizenship, having been born there, and Irish (with European citizenship attached) on the basis of long-dead ancestors. Indeed, Britain is so eager to have me apply (and pay exorbitant fees) for a British passport that they will not permit me to enter Britain on my Canadian passport. Canada, in fact, takes the same position with citizens of foreign countries who were actually born here -- it won't let them in unless they first acquire a Canadian passport.  The theory here seems to be that it is illegitimate to change one's citizenship, and countries are entitled to disrespect the passports of their ex-citizens' new countries. 

For the record I have never held a passport other than a Canadian one.  Think of it this way: if you hold a nation's passport, chances are it will eventually want to tax you or conscript you.  Choose carefully. 

Meanwhile, the Canadian government is encouraging non-Canadians to acquire a second passport as a souvenir, while public opinion makes it faintly shameful for anyone in public life to hold more than one. 

We need to sort out how we feel about this multiple-passport marketing. That is, we need to agree it is nuts, even if the Supreme Court told the feds to do it.

Karen Dubinsky 1957-2026 RIP: historian of Cuba-Canada

I was sorry to read of the sudden and too-soon death of Queen's University historian Karen Dubinsky. I did not know her, but I was struck a long time ago by the range of her interests and the clever title of her (scholarly) book The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls.

Above all, I was always impressed to follow the work she did studying Cuban history, music and culture, and Cuban-Canadian relations in general. The Wikipedia entry on her gives a good account of that, and I'm copying a big chunk of it:

Dubinsky first visited Cuba in 1978 and lived in Havana intermittently beginning in 2004. Her visits led her to study Cuban history, music and culture, as well as unofficial relationships between Cubans and Canadians. 

With Susan Lord, Dubinsky developed Queen's University's Cuban Culture and Society program, a collaboration between Queen's and the University of Havana that lasted 15 years. More than 350 Queen's students travelled to Cuba through the program, while more than 20 Cuban scholars, musicians, filmmakers, artists and curators participated in activities at Queen's and in Kingston.  Several Cuban participants subsequently undertook master's or doctoral studies at Queen's.  The program received the Queen's Award for International Educational Innovation in 2016 and the Canadian Bureau for International Education's Panorama Award in 2021. 

Dubinsky also researched music as a form of political expression in contemporary Cuba. With Caridad Cumaná and Xenia Reloba, she co-edited the Spanish-language Habáname: La Ciudad Musical de Carlos Varela and its English-language edition, My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela. She later published Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana. 

Dubinsky co-hosted Cuban Serenade, a 13-episode podcast about Cuban musicians in Canada, with Freddy Monasterio, and produced a biweekly CFRC program about Cuban-Canadian music for two years.  She also organized performances by Cuban musicians in Kingston and helped arrange honorary doctorates from Queen's for Cuban musicians Carlos Varela and Alex Cuba.

Her 2025 book, Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters, examined personal and cultural relationships between Cubans and Canadians, including exchanges involving educators, musicians, filmmakers, activists and international-development workers.  The book received the 2026 Wilson Book Prize. 

Cuba needs friends like Karen Dubinsky 

Sergeant York returns.

Sgt York, bronzed

CBC News notes the return of the strange story in which American Christian-nationalist and Republican Party activist Doug Mastriano received a doctorate in history from the University of New Brunswick -- for a dissertation that argued that the World War One feats of Medal of Honor winner Alvin York were the result of God's direct intervention on the battlefield. It also offered footnotes and interpretations that were vigorously questioned when a long-standing embargo on release of the dissertation ended.

CBC reports that Mastriano's attempt to sue the University of New Brunswick and Canadian scholars at the university and elsewhere for defamation has been dismissed by a court in Oklahoma because "UNB is an 'organ of a foreign state'" and the American court has no jurisdiction over it and other Canadians named.

This may be fortunate for UNB. The original acceptance of the much-criticized dissertation and the award of the doctorate provoked controversy within the university and beyond, and involvement in a defamation trial might have raised these issues once again. UNB launched an investigation of the matter in 2023. Apparently the results have not been released.

This blog last looked at the Mastriano story here in 2022, when Mastriano was running (unsuccessfully) to become governor of Pennsylvania. 

From Molly Ungar, September 25, 2026

Well, it’s very likely that God was on Dr. Mastriano’s side. I sense material for a new course: “Divine Intervention 101”.

Back to Blogging: museums, books, elections, universities

Back home and with thoughts.

The Maritimes -- never had a bad holiday there. One of our projects this time was chasing sites where my wife's Acadian ancestors had lived and died in various obscure corners of New Brunswick and Quebec. Surprising, the fun to be had in arriving in a small town and chasing down its original cemetery, its "old" cemetery, its current cemetery, and its various memorials, and actually finding headstones of great-grandparents, buildings they went to school in, and so on. Much aided digitally, of course, but in the end being there matters, too.  And great seafood everywhere.

Also, I could not help reflecting pretty much everywhere on the qualitative improvement in small and local museums. Fifty years ago a lot of these, even the charming ones, were basically lineage shrines, haphazardly filled with stuff out of people's basements explained on cheaply printed labels reflecting, shall we say, an unsophisticated historical consciousness. (Come to think of it, the seafood restaurants were often not so great then either.)

No more. I was impressed in several places: the Institute Lefebvre in Memramcook, the Village Historique Acadien near Caraquet, Parks Canada's Restigouche historic site, and particularly the Museum of Quebec Acadians in Bonaventure, Qc. A lot of people have gone through museology courses and programs in the last fifty years, and it shows. Museum funding may have become more sophisticated too. I was educated and entertained and impressed by the professionalism of each of these in their own way. 

The fall book season is upon us.  Two books whose imminent arrival caught my eye are Matthew Hayday's biography Joe Clark, Progressive, Conservative, Canadian (McGill-Queens UP), and Truth before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism (Manitoba UP) edited by Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair.  More about them and other books, I hope, before long.

David Eby's election call in British Columbia, two years early and prompted by a crisis in the opposition that is already over, reminds me how badly governed almost all our provinces are at present.  It's the kind of decision that is driven by the triumph of the pollster-strategist-political gamester mentality that is so powerful in Canadian politics.  

Not that I want Eby's government defeated, given the alternative, but if it is, it will be richly deserved. 

Higher education strategy is not one of my preoccupations, but I seem to come back to Alex Usher's Higher Education Strategy blog surprisingly often.  Currently he has a lively conversation posted with the historian behind what sounds like a lively book on the history of the university, William Whyte's The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood.

Okay, itch to blog scratched for the moment.

 

Blogger on the road

I used to declare a blog hiatus, with an announced return, when I went on holiday travels.  But then I started occasional more-or-less historical postings from Germany or Italy or wherever we happened to be on vacation. So I stopped announcing time-outs.

Right now we are travelling in Atlantic Canada.  Seeing much worth blogging about, but also busy enough to be kept from blogging at all.

So:  we are on semi-hiatus at least.  But substantive postings from the road still possible.  Home by September 22 when more systematic posting should resume.

The Secret History

Westley Wark, historian and security policy consultant, has a new post on his Substack about Nazi war criminals in Canada and a recent court decision granting more access to still-classified materials from the Deschenes commission on War Criminals in Canada and studies connected to it. 

Wark, on the basis of great experience in historical records of Canadian security policy and practice, suspects there is not too much to be found in the still-secret materials. But he also notes the Canadian penchant for keeping things secret that do not need to be secret.  There is a subtext here about Wark's history of Canadian security matters, which he researched on a classified basis and which has never been granted a proper publication -- at a time when British and American presses have long since published analogous histories of  their own security services.  

Where's the Wark history is a good question, and it should not all be up to Wark. Is some editor and publisher at an academic (or trade) publisher pushing to get hold of the manuscript and give it proper publication? 

Book Notes: Bill Graham, The Call of the World (part two)

In the previous post inspired by Bill Graham's memoir The Call of the World,  I was contemplating Graham's brief vivid summary (pp 76-77) of the 1980s shift from global tariff reductions (largely completed) to a global campaign against non-tariff barriers to trade.

Did the World Trade Organization's official approval of a war on non-tariff barriers (virtually all of which are governmental or quasi-governmental actions) give cover and impetus to the anti-regulation, anti-government ideological crusade we have all been plagued by in the recent half-century -- with dire consequences for everything from house prices to economic inequality to the survival of democracy.

As an international trade lawyer in the 1980s, Graham was instinctively supportive of free trade.  His whole career had concerned smoothing the international business operations of his clients, and any government policy that complicated such operations seemed worth opposing.

But in 1988, Graham was running as a Liberal candidate in that year's federal election, and his party and its leader John Turner were basing the whole Liberal campaign on opposition to Prime Minister Mulroney's free trade agreement with the United States.

Graham's explanation for why he supported the Liberal's anti-free trade campaign is instructive:  

If you are going to have economic integration, you'll need an institutional framework to oversee it. The tighter the integration, the more sophisticated that international framework has to be. [at p.105-6]

Graham had spent many years observing the range of trade courts and other impartial arbiters that the European community had established and also the long struggle to make the World Trade Organization into a kind of global trade court -- on the principle that independent tribunals were essential to preventing larger economic powers from bullying smaller ones under the guise of harmonization.

"The Americans would never agree to a similar framework in North America," Graham continues. Canada's 1989 Free Trade Agreement, with only one large economy and one small one participating:

was a North American model with inadequate institutional mechanisms to protect our interests. Given the asymmetry, the most powerful guy usually rules.

When the FTA and then NAFTA came into effect, Graham noted how the American advantage worked out.  If the US disregarded its free-trade commitments (e.g., softwood lumber), Canada's only recourse was to impose tariffs as punishment.  But the American counter-tariffs would always be more damaging.  In practice, there was no recourse.

The looser the rules and the looser the dispute-resolution mechanism to enforce those rules, the more the Americans could get away with." (p.137)  

Graham wrote this in 2015 and died in 2019. Trumpian tariffs were not on his horizon. Still, it's a more precise and succinct description of our current relationship with the United States than most of what is being written today.