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.

Peter Toner 1943-2026 RIP: Historian of the Canadian Irish

On the Acadiensis website, David A. Wilson gives a moving obituary of Peter Toner , 41-year member of the University of New Brunswick Saint John history faculty, in the form of an acute analysis of his work and its significance as well as a record of their (mostly long-distance) friendship. 

It is worth reading even if you have never heard of him, with glimpses into the strangeness of historical careers.  Wilson actually wrote this profile three years ago. Peter Toner died on August 9, 2026.

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

I recently picked up a copy of The Call of the World, a 2016 memoir by Chretien-era politician and foreign minister Bill Graham, having heard several comments about it being above the standard of most political memoirs.

Graham built a successful legal career in international law and, despite his conservative roots and inherited wealth, became a Liberal in politics.  He also learned French (in the early '60s, before it was fashionable for Anglo-Canadians) and he notes repeatedly how much bilingualism advanced his sense of the world as well as his business and political careers. 

I don't want to review the whole book or the whole life (he insists he is not a historian and the book is a memoir not a history). So just a couple of historically-oriented thoughts, maybe in a couple of posts. First, Graham's recollection of his 1960s involvement with tariffs -- an issue he probably thought dead and gone when he wrote this memoir.

For a business lawyer then, "international law"  -- still an embryonic field when Graham got into it -- mostly meant trade law. The sixties saw the ending of the post-Second World War GATT moment, when an international effort coordinated by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade succeeded in reducing the massive tariffs that had been standard in national economies worldwide for centuries -- both for government revenue and for protectionism.  

"The more tariffs were reduced, the more important the non-tariff barriers became," Graham writes. As typical tariffs in much of the world began to approach zero, the GATT morphed into the World Trade Organization. By the 1980s the WTO meant global standardization, broad and binding international trade rules, and more emphasis on regulation (read: reduction) of non-tariff practices that complicated or reduced trade among nations. 

Graham, like many trade experts, hoped the WTO would become in practice as well as theory an authoritative independent international court to ensure the fairness of global free trade rules.

Well it did not happen that way. But Graham's few pages on his GATT and WTO activities got me thinking about one of the great unexplained puzzles of our era:  the epochal change that occurred in the 1980s -- the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, more or less.  I don't know of a big authoritative interpretation of the roots of that 00 but it's not really my field (except that  I live in it like everyone.)

How did the postwar consensus on progressive taxation, growing governments, strong unions, and movement toward economic equality and social justice shift into an endless preoccupation with reducing taxes, shrinking (and disparaging) government, breaking unions, increasing inequality and promoting "anti-woke" hysteria?

  "Non-tariff barriers," broadly speaking, is code for government regulation. Did the global approval given to a war against non-tariff trade barriers become the doorway for the business world's adoption of an unrelenting war on all forms of regulation, and on all government as basically "bureaucracy," or "red tape" or "taxing and spending" -- worth doing away with as much as possible.

When we in Canada read of the reduction in "interprovincial trade barriers" could be worth "$250 billion!" we need to understand that would virtually require the abolition of all the Canadian provinces, since regulation is one of the main things they exist to maintain. It gets promoted as support for craft beer and local wineries, but those ain't the real target at all.

Graham on free trade in a post to follow.

Prize Watch: Dafoe and Cundill longlists

It's getting to be book prize season, and both the John W. Dafoe Prize (Canadian) and the Cundill Prize (international)  have nominee lists out.  The Dafoe longlist is ten, the Cundill "shortlist" is eight.

The JW Dafoe Book Prize ("awarded to the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year")  once again rather buries its longlist deep in its website -- but you can find it here.  in "news.  Last year's winner was Gerald Friesen's The Honorable John W. Norquay,

The Cundill Prize shortlist is here.  The Cundill, run by McGill University, with a mostly American jury and a prize of  $US75,000, is "awarded annually to the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal."
There are a couple of Canadians in the running this year:  Jonathan Cheng for Shattered Messiah and Eric Jennings of the University of Toronto, for Vanilla.

We'll get back to these as the Dafoe shortlist and winner and the Cundill finalists and winner are announced.

History of August 22

Last Saturday morning, waking up to news that the Canadian government had walked away from the trade negotiations in Washington, D.C. I felt a lightening of spirits: some good news!  I had never doubted that any deal would have been a surrender and a framework for ongoing surrenders to follow.  And a deal seemed very likely to be signed.

In the previous week, I'd lived with a depressing expectation that Mark Carney was going to cave again, giving in on cultural protections, supply management, booze bans, and much else in exchange from some partial tariff reductions that would be countermanded whenever the Americans felt like it.  

Mr Carney, after all, is a very conservative Liberal, a millionaire who has spent his life among billionaires. I feared those loyalties were still driving him. His "elbows up" phase seemed to have ended with his election campaign.

But for all that, surely Carney is a smart guy and a canny negotiator, with a sense of what Canadian survival required. When Saturday's news came in, I wondered if in the previous week he had just been stringing out the surrender possibilities precisely in order to make Canadians more and more alarmed by a growing awareness of all we might lose. And perhaps also to encourage the Americans to keep pressing their presumed advantage, raising their demands to ensure Canadians would support Carney when he walked away. That suspicion was heightened on Saturday morning as news came in of late American demands even more excessive than the previous ones.

Among the floods of commentary, I was struck by journalist Stephen Maher's Substack of August 23 entitled "Carney's FAFO Moment."  

I am inclined to think that Mark Carney set a trap for Trump and has judged, correctly, that he can beat him in a trade war. ... I think he kept poor Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette in talks, knowing that there was no win on the table, then blew up the whole thing on Friday night, knowing that Canadians would rally behind him while Americans would wonder why they are entering a trade war with Canada during a cost-of-living crisis.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Stephen Maher?  Not quite, actually.  On August 23, Maher did not believe Canada's claims that it was last-minute American demands that killed negotiations.  "I am inclined to believe [American trade rep Jamieson] Greer, who says that it was Canada who introduced last minute demands and then walked away from the table."

But since posting the Substack, Maher has received a flood of comments denouncing him for believing Americans and documenting all the late and extreme demands the Americans actually did place on the table.  ("Oh Stephen. You're inclined to believe Greer over our Prime Minister?") And by August 24 he had added an addendum, acknowledging what was becoming the (Canadian) consensus:  that the confident Americans kept adding demands until Carney thought he had amassed enough red flags to safely walk away with near-unanimous domestic support.  (Even Erin O'Toole, Mr Tax-Cuts-at-any-Cost, says this week he might even support restoration of the Digital Services Tax!)

I must say I like the theory of Maher II:  Carney never intended to surrender, and was just playing along for most of last week.  It bolsters my confidence in Canada's survival, let us say.

Someday people will write books about August 22, 2026 -- and even then we may not have the full story.

Disuniting the States: Updated

The Lawyers Guns and Money blog -- a bunch of historians, but in US election years the blog is all local politics all the time, as now  -- has a note about a couple of recent novels about how the United States splits into rival states along ideological grounds.  One they mention is by Emily St. John Mandel, whom we claim as Canadian. Omar El Akkad, also Canadian, made his name with a new-civil-war novel. I think there was a modern civil-war movie too for about five minutes.

It's been my theory for years that all that really holds the United States together is ruling the world.  Absent that, what do Oregon and Texas and Minnesota and Florida and South Dakota and Maine have in common?  Some fiction writers are awakening to the possibilities.  

Instead of busily negotiating another surrender to the almighty United States, as we seem to be doing again this week, maybe we should just wait out the completion of these novelistic predictions. 

Update, August 22, 2026:  With Prime Minister Carney's government declining the surrender demands of the United States, today feels like Liberation Day, whatever hardships ensue. Molly Unger sums everything up:

                     What really holds the US together is:

a) a deep conviction that the US is the best, most powerful, most enviable, most righteous country in the world;

b) a deep conviction that the US needs no one and nothing from any country, ever;

c) a deep conviction that everyone in the world wants to live in America and be an American;

d) a deep conviction that the US must take continuous action to keep everyone out;

e) a deep conviction that organized government is greatly overrated;

f) a deep conviction that history comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Next Update, August 26, 2026:  Molly Unger reports on:  "The Only Time I've Ever Agreed With Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper""And if I was still prime minister, I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we're facing... I would accept any level of damage to preserve the independence of the country."

 

 

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

Toronto

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 be the relevant legislation here. The debate about civic interference in civic affairs 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 that "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. And within their responsibilities, no other power has standing to interfere.  

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." (Canada left quite a few governance functions to Westminster initially, but Canada's authority to claim them when it wanted to was always pretty clear.)

Montreal

 The same principle triumphed in the constitutional negotiations of 1864-67. John A. Macdonald mused 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. But 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 provinces' power.  When Macdonald sought to interfere, Ontario PM Oliver Mowat took him to the JCPC and won every time on the argument that on the principles of the British parliamentary system, parliaments must be sovereign within their jurisdiction.

There had been an evolution here.  When the British North American colonies were founded, there was limited state capacity to tax and spend and representative institutions were rudimentary.  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 (1867)'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.  Why? "Cities are creatures of the provinces," they will say, and if they are pedantic enough they will cite Section 92. They are mistaken.

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 at the time, freedom to spend what they raised as they wished.  

"Cities are creatures" is a legal fiction conjured up by a judge in the 1990s. But cities once founded and grown to the point they can run their own administrations, are parliaments as much as provinces are -- within their jurisdiction.

Vancouver

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.  Today their once-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 establish the understanding 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.