A political scientist and a historian step up

I have mixed feelings about Substack and how it commodified and monetized the old blogosphere.  But my inbox today had three Canadian Substacks I was glad to see.

The historian turned security analyst Wesley Wark has a powerful piece on something Mark Carney might achieve, or at least try to achieve, at the NATO conference in Ankara: pull Orange Hitler back toward the side of Ukraine. ("Ballistic Terror wesleywark@substack.com)  

Wark had another powerful post yesterday, about the barbaric Russian destruction of the Mariupol Theatre and all the unhoused people sheltering in it

And a little closer to home, Emmett Macfarlane fulminates against the stupid and self-defeating decision of the prime minister to make the Canadian Senate once more a patronage house.  

Carney’s record so far is revealing. He has abandoned climate policy, he is cutting important institutions and programs, from mental health and disease prevention to international aid to Library and Archives Canada, and he plays partisan institutional games with the best of them. The 2025 election was framed around Justin Trudeau’s unpopularity. Once Trudeau resigned, voters surged to Carney, not only because of the Trump threat but because they didn’t want Pierre Poilievre. It’s becoming increasingly clear, that in avoiding Poilievre, Canadian voters did not get a Economist Party PM. What they got was basically Oxford-educated Stephen Harper.

Our CEO prime minister, a millionaire who has spent his career among billionaires, thinks anything he does not know already is not worth knowing, and in the process demonstrates his blinkered ignorance of the needs and requirements of parliamentary government.  Take a stick to him, Macfarlane. 

Macfarlane notes he has some insider status here -- he advised the Trudeau government on the non-partisan Senate ideas. For the details see his book on the Senate, Constitutional Pariah.  Probably the only good book ever written about the Senate.

I have some, well, adjacent if not inside claims here.  It has been suggested that my 1867 and Three Weeks in Quebec City established the idea (later taken up by the Supreme Court of Canada, that the only thing the confederation makers required of the senate was that it be weak.  See this article for a summary.

Historians in the news, mostly elsewhere

Globally, historians are having rather a moment, while maybe the political guys are somewhat in disarray.

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are among the wisest commentators on everything that is wrong with the United States of America these days.  Anne Applebaum is tops on developments in Europe  -- Snyder matters there too.  Phillips O'Brien has terrific insights into Ukraine's growing strength against Putin. 

Update, July 7:  Should add to the list Jill Lepore, who's so often good on American history, 

Canada not so much right now.  Look at the piffle our political analysts get away with:  they are regurgitating off the cuff ideas C.E.S. Franks first came up with in the 1960s as if they were scripture.

History of Winning

A pleasant thought to start the day with.  While every one of the other thirty teams still contending for the World Cup is facing a tough ninety minutes in the next few days to see if they can qualify for the round of sixteen -- CANADA IS ALREADY THERE.  

'Course when the fifteen qualifying matches are done, fifteen teams will have joined Canada in the bracket. But they ain't there yet. And when they are, fifteen others will be going home. Not us. Not yet. 

Photo:  Globe and Mail

Read of the day: Wesley Wark on leaving NORAD

Historian and security analyst Wesley Wark has an (admittedly) provocative article up at The Walrus online today, setting out why Canada should be planning for the end of NORAD and for a new NATO-based security alliance for the North American and European north.  (Wark's childhood experiences, we discover, include some years spent at a NORAD base in Montana.)

Image: Stanley Kubrick, "Dr Strangelove."

Carlo Ginzberg (1939-2026) and Orde Morton (1940-2026) RIP, historians

To my surprise, the Toronto Star published an article recently on the passing of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg.  It's from a wire service, not a Star original, but still, I would not have thought his importance was enough to catch the's Star attention.  

The article says his: 

pioneering work transformed the study of the past by recovering the voices of marginalized people. ...

Ginzburg was a pioneer of microhistory, which focuses on small, specific units of analysis — such as an individual, a community, or a singular event — to reveal broader themes and issues within history.

That's about right, though surely it was not an entirely new idea. Sometime in the 1980s I made a radio documentary for CBC Ideas that we called "Four New Historians" -- and each of the four historians I profiled had recently written a book that might have been called microhistory.  

I went to New Haven, Connecticut, to interview Ginzberg, then a visiting scholar at Yale University (CBC budgets in the 1980s!), about his recently translated book The Cheese and the Worms. It explored the world of  a sixteenth-century miller in a north Italian village who argued that life emerged from the universe as easily a worms arose in cheese -- and was eventually executed for heresy for the vigour with which he defended his atheistic views.  The other three were Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, author of Montaillou, Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre, and Jonathan Spence, author of The Death of Woman Wang.   

Not coincidentally I had recently written about marginalized people who had lived in 18th century New France, and while I had written it before I encountered any of these books, they had given me a sense that I was not completely alone in the world in what I was writing about.   

I remember Ginzberg as quiet, thoughtful, fluent in English, perhaps less talkative than he might have been in his own language, but generous with his time and attention. Reading the article, I recalled him fondly. 

***

F. Orde Morton was the son of W.L. Morton, the historian of Canada, Manitoba, confederation, and much else. Like his father he was a Rhodes Scholar, but his first career was with Canada's department of External Affairs. I note his passing because he made some history as well as writing about it. His recent death notice says: 

In 1969 Orde was informed that he would be dismissed from External Affairs on the ground that his being gay made him a security risk. In 1970 he returned to Oxford at St. Antony’s College on a Canada Council doctoral fellowship, and in 1974 completed a doctorate with a thesis on Brazilian history at the time of Independence.

He taught and wrote Latin American history for a time, before turning to a business career. 

Leadership woes #1,000,000

After the by-election victory yesterday of Andy Burnham, a longtime power in the British Labour party, here is what another party powerbroker said about how the future of current Labour leader and prime minister should be determined

Harriet Harman, the party’s former deputy leader, who was appointed by Starmer as his adviser on women and girls just a few weeks ago, said she wanted Starmer, Burnham and any other potential leadership contenders to agree to put their parliamentary support to the test but without involving the wider Labour membership.

Harman told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What should happen is that the three contenders – which is obviously Keir Starmer, who’s the prime minister, Andy Burnham, who’s the challenger, and Wes Streeting, who’s also a challenger – should be got in a room by the deputy leader of the Labour party, Lucy Powell, and the chair of the parliamentary Labour party, Jess Morden, to agree a process whereby Labour MPs choose who they want.”  (Italics added)

I'm not a huge admirer of Britain or its politics. Britain been a godawful mess for a long time. Besides, it has banned me from entry. (I'm a Canadian citizen and passport-holder, but I was born in Britain, and so Britain does not recognize my Canadian passport as valid.)  

But the way Harman proposes to review and perhaps change the party leadership is, in the end, the only way that is compatible with functioning parliamentary democracy, and British politicians seem to be recognizing that. When MPs are accountable to the electorate, and the parliamentary leader is accountable to the MPs in caucus, a constant accountability chain is maintained -- which is the whole point of parliamentary representation. 

If you are in Canada, this post will almost certainly be the only place you will see this viewpoint expressed.  Pity. 

(Canadian MPs on their leaders:  "But if we say anything, he yells at us!")

Monarchy notes

I'm a bit irritated by a New York Times story, "One City Might Have Cracked the Housing Crisis," about a BC First Nation that is spearheading a large residential housing development in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood.  The theme seems to be that the one good thing about indigenous title is that it enables developers to thumb their nose at city-planning regulations.

I did laugh, however, where the reporter notes that NIMBY Vancouverites 

sent protest letters to Queen Elizabeth II. (In Canada, complaints about federal land are still addressed to the British sovereign.)

It is funny, I guess, that the New York Times promotes this medieval idea of how Canadian government works. But Canadian monarchists (and constitutional nerds, too often) often make much of the claim that there really is a Canadian monarchy and a king of Canada. Here's another proof that no one in the world takes them seriously. We shouldn't either. 

The Globe and the Tk’emlúps "anomalies"

I was slow in giving a close read to the long story by Patrick White and Willow Fiddler about the Tk’emlúps Residential School and residential school denialism that the Globe and Mail published on May 22.  I think I was mostly put off by the Globe’s editorial on the matter, which seemed like straight-up encouragement to denialism.

But in the end it is a good piece of journalism. 

White and Fiddler make clear enough that apart from a few ill-chosen words, the Tk’emlúps leaders mostly spoke carefully in June 2021 about how the ground-penetrating radar showed anomalies that were suggestive of graves. The article also states clearly that there is no doubt about substantial numbers of children dying at residential schools (and their remains being undocumented). It cites Canadian government documentation back to the 1920s confirming the death rates. It notes cases like the Dunbow school in Alberta where flooding in 1996 exposed (and carried away) many skeletal remains.

That is, the story makes it plain there is very good reason to assume that the “anomalies” at the Kamloops site are exactly what everyone in 2021 assumed they were.  Journalists who understood that the anomalies could be taken as gravesites were not failing us when they drew plausible conclusions.

The article might have been more clear about a point of view I remember hearing in 2022:  that the Tk’emlúps people, while making it clear that they had no doubt what the anomalies meant, had no great need or inclination to dig up what they assumed to be the remains of their small friends and relatives for scientists to stick on a shelf in some research lab for a century or so, in the name of research. (It does at least cite one person calling such demands "morbid and unnecessary.")

The story makes it clear enough that Tk’emlúps provides no serious basis for denying or minimizing the crimes and tragedies of the residential school system, despite the denialists “bones or nothing happened” approach to reconciliation. As is said in the article:

“I think a lot of denialism’s roots go back to the fact that lots of these folks don’t want to acknowledge or face the fact that atrocities happened to children,” said Manny Jules, chief of Tk’emlúps through much of the 1980s and nineties.

The Globe’s editorial and self-criticism has given new fodder for denialists everywhere in their campaign to stop progress towards reconciliation. There is no reconciliation without truth, as the editorial says. But the fundamental truth remains: residential school kids died and were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country.      

Plagiarism: A new history

Cory Doctorow or Michael Geist or someone may have already written an essay about why this phenomenon is a good thing.  But I found Who Is Blake Whiting? - The American Scholar disturbing in its implications for intellectual life, and you should too

Prize Watch: The Canadian Historical Association Prizes; and one for Martha Langford's Canadian photography history

The Canadian Historical Association's recent Annual Meeting in Charlottetown included a giving of prizes.  According to Google's AI, these are some of the prizes.  I was unable to find any prize list later for 2025 yet posted on the CHA website so far, so this seems to be the best we can offer. Congratulations to these winners and the others not listed here.  

The Clio Prizes are for works in local or regional history, and the Albert Corey Prize is given for works in Canadian-American history, so there may be some AI slop here. But until the CHA updates its website prizes page, we are kinda stuck

Best Scholarly Book Prize: The Jesuit Relations: A Biography by Micah True.

Clio Book Prize (Atlantic): Publishing Place: Transatlantic Modernity and Periodical Culture on Canada’s East Coast by Billy Johnson.

Clio Book Prize (Ontario): Students by Day: Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School by Jackson Pind.

Clio Book Prize (Québec): Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City by Matthieu Caron.

Clio Book Prize (Canadian Committee on Women’s and Gender History): Their Benevolent Design: Conservative Women and Protestant Child Charities in Montreal by Janice Harvey.

Albert B. Corey Prize: Tradition and Tension: The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1945–1985 by Stuart Macdonald.

I confess that when I saw first saw notice of the publication of Micah True's study of the Jesuit Relations, I concluded there could not be much new or original to say on that subject.  Evidently I was wrong: the CHA jury concluded it was the best work of historical scholarship on Canada published last year.  Congratulations and apologies to Micah True.  We should agree that there are new things to be learned about every topic in Canadian history. 

Update, same day

Martha Langford's new History of Photography in Canada: Volume 1 has been selected by the Art Libraries Society of North America as the 2026 winner of its best book prize.

I happened on this book in a bookstore the other day, and was impressed first by its weight and size. It has the problem that with a history of photography, one rather expects a lavishly illustrated "picture book" when in fact this one is necessarily dominated by a lengthy and very detail text.  There are photographs, yes, but they seemed to me as very much an accessory to the historical text.  Still, a discerning specialist jury loves it, and I'm sure their verdict is more authoritative than mine.

There is also a volume 2.

 

History of parliament: What would Robert Baldwin say

"Doug Ford fires PC Caucus Chair" says the Toronto Star headline,  

But why doesn't the PC caucus fire Doug Ford instead? You know they have the power.  Let the caucus fails to show up just once for a Ford government legislative bill, and the guy is toast -- that's their superpower, and the essence of parliamentary accountability. 

Meanwhile Althia Raj documents the bullying tendency of Prime Minister Carney, whose billionaire-CEO mindset is more deeply engrained than his parliamentary understandings as he deals with a caucus afraid to apply its authority to him.

“He yells,” said one MP who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution from the Prime Minister’s Office. “He punches down at caucus all the time.”

But the bit of the TorStar file on parliamentary ignorance that really sticks is one from Christopher Hume.  Hume is an architecture critic and a friend of cities, but on parliament and the constitution, he's as deluded as, well, as everyone else in this amnesiac political culture of ours.

Because Canada’s bizarrely conceived constitution reduces cities to mere creatures of the provinces, the premier can interfere to his heart’s content.” (Toronto Star, May 30, 2026.)

Actually the constitution doesn't. That phrase about cities as creatures is not in the constitution at all.  It's from a Supreme Court of Canada opinion of 1993. It's a legal fiction. The BNA Act, which is more democratic than most of us today, gives the provinces the responsibility to create municipal governments. It was the SCC's ignorance of constitutional history that gave them the right to tyrannize the cities.  

It's bedrock in Canada's constitutional history: once you create a level of government accountable to voters and authorized to tax and spend on their behalf, then you are stealing their money when you meddle in its affairs. That was how Canada became self-governing in the 1840s. It was the basis on which Macdonald's misuse of disallowance powers against the provinces was struck down. Far from authorizing provincial bullying of civic governments, the Canadian constitution rejects it as defiance of the principles of parliamentary democracy. The SCC will figure this out when friends of cities who figure it out start publicizing the idea.

Jeez, Robert Baldwin understood the principle  of municipal self-government a couple of decades before Confederation. This is the historian Michael S. Cross describing Baldwin's Municipal Act of 1849:

For Baldwin it was a rational division of power that required municipalities to accept responsibility for their own progress…. A measure of local autonomy gave elected township councils unlimited taxing and debt authority.  (Cross, Robert Baldwin, p.283.)

Some years later, as co-premier of the United Canadas, Baldwin retired from parliament and from politics the moment he lost the support of his parliamentary caucus. His caucus would not have tolerated any other choice. 

Baldwin could tell Mark Carney a thing or two about accountability.  He could tell Doug Ford too, but Ford would not have a clue.

Canadian at the Giro d'Italia

Jonas Vingegaard left, Derek Gee right

The Giro d'Italia ended on Sunday with a crazy sprint through the streets of Rome, and I feel I have been remiss in not keeping you up to date.

I've mostly been keeping up with the race through the daily "extended highlights" (on the Cycling part of the streamer FloSports).  These last about 20 minutes, and give a sense of the route, some of the landscape and monuments, and a least a sense of who's winning.  But not watching about three hours a day, you are a bit on the outside.  It's hard to get informed about all the teams' new colours, and the riders numbers, and the thousand of ins and out of who's crashed, who team looks strongest, and who might step up in the big mountains.

So briefly Jonas Vingegaard of Denmark is king of any race that Tadej Pogachar of Slovenia does not enter.  Tadej skipped this year's Giro, so Vingegaard dominated whenever he chose, and looked like being winner long before it ended on Sunday.

Notons, however, number five in the overall standings, and second only to Vingegaard on the highest peak of the whole 21 days of racing, was Canadian Derek Gee.  Gee is now definitely the heir to Ryder Hesjedal and Michael Woods as the latest "big Canadian boy" who can storm up the mountains with the best of him.  (Recently married, he's now Derek Gee-West, not that it gets him any more coverage in the Canadian sports press.)

Last year Gee suddenly quit the Israel-Premier Tech racing team, seemingly in protest of the actions of the Israeli state sponsor in Gaza.  In response the team threatened to keep him off the road for the duration of his contract.  But this year the Premier Tech has a new co-sponsor, and Gee is riding for one of the very strong teams, Lidl-Trek.

Both Vingo and Gee are expected to contend in the Tour de France in July. And so will Tadej Pogachar

History on the beach

Now this is a historical conference!

I don't understand why this year the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities is not holding its enormous conference of all the "learned societies" of Canadian academic disciplines. Is it just that Zoom is trying to kill every kind of in person human contact? 

Nevertheless, the Canadian Historical Association is bravely going ahead with its own annual multi-day meeting in Charlottetown, June 1-3. (Program here; registration is now closed). 

But if I was tempted to attend an academic conference, I could really get behind the one the Canadian History and Environment Summer School is holding the day before the CHA one starts. Since it's just one day, Sunday, May 31, they are calling theirs SpeedCHESS. The program:

9:00-10:00 Bus to St. Peter’s on the Island’s North Shore.

10:00-1:30 Tour the Canadian Centre for Climate Change; hear from Don Jardine on the environmental history of the Greenwich peninsula; & enjoy lunch from Black & White café.

1:30-4:00 Bus takes us to Greenwich Interpretation Centre, PEI National Park, where we get a guided tour from Parks Canada staff; hear from Barbara Rousseau about coastal change; and have a great walk at Greenwich Beach.

4:00-5:00 Bus takes us back to UPEI.

5:30-6:45 Prof. Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown U, author of Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean & host of The Climate Chronicles podcast will give a public talk, “Reflections on Resilience: 20,000 Years of Climate History,” at UPEI’s Murphy Student Centre 110 (McMillan Hall).

Take some sunscreen.