Book Notes. Forthcoming: a backroom history of Canada

Jim Coutts was the brains behind Pierre-Elliott Trudeau.  Well, no, Trudeau has his own brains. But Jim Coutts was his indispensable righthand man, more powerful than cabinet ministers or deputy ministers, maybe the first hired strategist to have that much power. And he kept voluminous diaries.

Coutts died in 2013. His diaries, selected and edited by Ron Graham. will be published September 16. I'm now looking at an advance copy, courtesy of the publisher. It's going to make some news among political scientists, commentators, and backroom types for sure. I'd say historians of late twentieth-century Canadian politics writing after September 16 will be quoting extensively from it. Pre-orders are being taken here or via your favourite bookstore. 

More about Coutts here on the pub date. 

The Tour's dirty secret

A friend by the roadside

Canadian cyclist Michael Woods tried to ride with a breakaway group the other day.  Got lots of TV coverage for a while, and then seemed to vanish, ending up well back in the crowd again -- though not before scoring enough climbing points to rank him number three among climbers in this year's Tour so far.

Now Woods's blog explains what happened. You might say it's about circulation on Tour: not traffic circulation but something more internal. More about number two than number three.  Read it and laugh here. It's what Woods calls a Dumoulin moment -- an aspect of long distance bike racing I had never contemplated.

The Tour! The Tour! UPDATED

Why this man is laughing.

Ten days into the Tour de France, and no notice of it here yet? I'm betraying the masthead promise.  But I've been watching a fair amount of it. 

Theme of this year seems to be:  is Slovakia's Tadej Pogachar the god of cycling and destined to sweep all before him again this year?  Or is it possible that Visma, the team of the leading alternative to "Taddy," a Dane named Jonas Vingegaard (I know, the names are the best), is following a devious plot to let Tadej's UAE team lead most of the time -- while it gradually wears itself out in minor dominance displays, so Vingegaard can sweep past his tired-out rival in the last stages.

Well, maybe. But Tadej does seem to believe in himself, and makes dominating whenever he wants look almost easy. He is wearing yellow again today.  

On the other hand, his strongest supporting rider, the one who was supposed to clear his path all through the Pyrenees and Alps, had to withdraw yesterday after a crash. That has to be a boon to Team Visma -- but Team UAE is well supplied with other strongmen. Still a long way to go.

One of the pleasures of this tour is following Michael Woods, great Canadian cyclist and frequent top-ten contender in the Tour and the other grand tours. Woods is now 38 and has very publicly declared he has intentionally been sitting comfortably at the back of the race most days. He will only break out when he thinks he can jump from the pack and steal a stage somewhere (as indeed he did last year in 2023)  Here's hoping.

The more relaxed Woods actually has time to maintain a blog during this Tour.  He has been posting about Tour management's culpability in allowing, and even welcoming, the frequent crashes at this year's race -- and then blaming the riders for them.  He describes how to "sub" a time trial -- that is, loaf through it to save energy for another day, while avoiding being disqualified for missing the minimum time rules.  And he is particularly open in laying out his strategy for avoiding the chase for top standings, avoiding crashes, and awaiting the moment to have a single day of glory like last year.  It's a funny sport -- read his explanation of it all.  L'autre Canadien du tour, Guillaume Boivin, is still there in the rankings, but I have never spotted him or heard his name mentioned by the race commentators.

Meanwhile the scenery is gorgeous as ever.  I want to go to half the landscapes they have written through. This year Chinon may be the prettiest Tour town I know nothing about. No doubt other contenders will emerge.

Update, same day:  Well, I had not seen today's results when I wrote this.  Seems Tadej is out of leader's yellow again tonight. Apparently Michael Woods went with the breakaway for a while, but either thought better of it or could not keep up.  He's third over all in hill-climbing points, however. 

Update, July 15:  From Russ Chamberlayne 

"The current breakaway winner in the Tour de Nap"
source: @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt
('Historians Social' tab on the Mastodon social network!!)

Book Notes: Andrew Coyne on Canadian Democracy

[I've been slow to post this while trying to sort out my thoughts on this important book.  For those not so taken with the minutiae of Canadian parliamentary politics, I've put in a page break.  Click at the break to continue reading if you wish.]

Andrew Coyne’s The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is the book we really need right now. And rather disappointing at the same time.

Coyne, political columnist at the Globe and Mail and CBC commentator, starts with the blunt declaration that “our parliamentary system is a state of advanced disrepair – so advanced that it is debatable whether it should be called a democracy.” And he makes it so plain that I wonder why so few of our other pundits even notice – except perhaps when blathering about electoral reform once in a while. Coyne: “If we had the most flawless electoral system imaginable, we would still be a long way from a fully functioning democracy.”

I like how he starts out. Not least because by page 6 he is quoting me by name – from a piece I wrote in 2002 AD, no less – but more because of how powerfully he sets out parliament’s comprehensive failure to hold government to account, an issue I was going on about even before 2002. He considers how caucuses have abdicated their role in holding leaders accountable, and why cabinet ministers have let themselves been reduced to a thoroughly peripheral role. That’s more than a hundred of the book’s 250 pages, and if you have followed (or endured) endless blog postings here on these topics (talk about blathering on!), you know why I’m glad to see it laid out so comprehensively.

 He has more. How both the Senate and the Supreme Court, neither of which is elected, overstep their proper roles in the affairs of the nation. (Well, maybe.) And a great scream of fury and contempt at: the inane spectacle presented by the political parties’ national election campaigns; the sleaziness of their direct mail campaigns; the collapse of parties into perpetual campaign machines running corrupt leadership sales; the lack “of a sensible of coherent system of campaign finance regulation;” and the failure of televised debates to serve our needs. Kinda everything about our parties and our elections, in fact. (Yes!)

There’s a long and detailed critique of “first past the post” elections and the need for a better system, with most of the alternatives laid out in great detail. At 60 pages, it’s the longest single part of the book, and he comes out endorsing proportional representation (particularly of the multi-member constituency variant) and mandatory voting too.  (Another maybe. And -- see quote at the start of this post -- he’s for PR mostly as one last desperate chance to slow the rot, not as a serious solution to the general crisis.)

It's a bracing read. All in all, he sees an almost complete collapse of accountability: the idea that in a working democracy voters have real influence on those who represent them, and those representatives are able to judge the performance of governments – and able to punish, change, or improve governments that resist accountability.  Somebody had to say it. 

The disappointing part is Coyne's conviction that such changes are not even remotely possible.  He’s not very optimistic about electoral reform, but it’s almost the only change he can imagine actually happening. He practically dismisses the possibility that cabinet ministers will ever regain some measure of parity with the prime minister, or that MPs will ever resist the orders of their own leaders (or the leaders' flunkies).

This month at Canada's History: Aug Sept 2025

Lead article at Canada's History this month is a long reported piece on all the indigenous art pieces that were collected for a 1925 exhibition at the Vatican to celebrate the Catholic Church's global reach  -- and have stayed there ever since, though it seems many were acquired as temporary donations, or else more-or-less plundered.  

Kate Jaimet, until recently senior editor at the magazine, interviewed Indigenous artists and curators from West Coast First Nations, and her article is a deep dive into the ways Catholic evangelization went hand in hand with Canada's war on the potlatch and Indigenous culture in general.  "The masks represent not only art and history but a tangible connection to our ancestors and the ongoing efforts of our community to reclaim and protect its cultural legacy," she quotes Irwin Prince of the Quatsino First Nation."  

Also:  Dianne Dodds looks at the 1918 sinking of the Llandovery Castle by submarine action in 1918 -- the worst Canadian maritime disaster of the First World War, made more tragic by the deaths of 14 Canadian nursing sisters and many of their patients.  The Llandovery Castle is in the news these days, with the recent publication of Nate Hendley's well-received book Atrocity on the Atlantic.  

Elsewhere in the issue: a nice photo essay on the legacy of the one-room school across Canada, and Christopher Guly on Canada's movie history. The Canadian roots of a strange art theft.  And news, reviews and more.

Plus -- in the reviews -- my review of Patrice Dutil's recent account of Canada's first federal election, Ballots and Brawls, from UBC Press.  I'll be in the next issue too, with a feature timed to Remembrance Day.  

Also of interest:  the magazine's regular acknowledgement of all its donors and supporters. The list and the amounts donated are, well, immense -- great to see how strongly Canada's History is supported. Special callout to all my friends and colleagues whose names I spot on the lists! (Good to see Kate Jaimet got some funding from those donors to cover the costs of her extensive reporting on the potlatch masks story.)

Paul Wells on the Canadian face

Sean Downey, Near the Elevator, Kingston Prize 2023

The quest for a national portrait gallery for Canada is too long and convoluted to think about, but Paul Wells, ex-Maclean's political columnist, now Substacker  (and despite my doubts about anyone in Canada making a living from writing on the internet, I hope he prospers) has a lively column about something unknown to me:  the Kingston Prize for portrait painting. Worth a look.

Image: Paul Wells's Substack.

Borealia blog shutting down

After a decade of encouraging academics to exchange thoughts and theses and opinions about early Canadian history (most of which emphatically confirmed there actually is a lot going on in pre-Confederation studies), the blog Borealia/Early Canadian History is doing a controlled shutdown, with just a couple of posts yet to come before it goes silent.  The editors say in a closing statement that they need a break "for a variety of entirely normal professional and personal reasons."

There ought to be room for academically-centred blogging, but maybe those blogs sometimes get caught up in academic models of operation: administrative teams, concern for teaching applications of the blog, beset with budgetary concerns, competing with alternate publishing opportunities, etc. 

The blogs that survive, I come to believe, depend on having a few logomaniacial egomaniacs who rarely have an unexpressed thought and cannot be prevented from sharing most of them.  Some pretty lively blogs have resulted.  See Lawyers, Guns, and Money, run by a bunch of history profs in the US.  Or Paul Krugman.  Blogs do best with a personality or personalities behind them, I suspect.  Opening a blog and asking other busy people to provide you with its content may always be an uphill struggle.

But: Type "Borealia" into the search box at top left and you can see how often this blog linked to Borealia, including this first notice posted very soon after Borealia launched ten years ago.  So I'm sorry to see it go.  Well done, editorial team.  I'll miss Borealia.  Is someone seeing a space open up for a new entry in the CanHist blogging world?

Honours Watch: Historians at the Order of Canada

A few historically relevant careers honoured in the Canada Day appointments to the Order of Canada yesterday:  

Robert Janes, eminent museologist active in return of Indigenous heritage materials,

David Pelly, Arctic ethnologist and writer, 

and (my personal favourite) Stephen White, the great Acadian genealogist. White was a New England Acadian (no doubt with some Leblancs in his own family tree) and was practising law when the Centre d'Etudes Acadiennes in Moncton recruited him to run its Acadian genealogy project in the 1970s, leading to the publication in 1999 of the essential reference on the subject, the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes.  (How many genealogists have received an Order of Canada?  Probably some.)

Among writers and litterateurs generally, not a long list this time: novelist Miriam Toews, poet Sky Dancer Louise Halfe, and francophone children's writer Marianne Dubuc.

Prize Watch: True North for Patrice Dutil

A new-to-me Institute called the Canada History Society -- "dedicated to promoting and preserving the history of Canada" --has announced the inaugural winner of its True North Prize "awarded annually for an outstanding work of historical writing that deepens public understanding of Canada’s past." 

The winner is Patrice Dutil for his book Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885, published by Sutherland House. Congratulations, Patrice.

Happy Canada Day

 

Janet Ajzenstat (1936-2025) RIP: political philosopher

Unlike most of the prominent historians of Confederation (and virtually all of the political scientists), Janet Ajzenstat grasped (and conveyed) the depth and seriousness of the political thought that underlay the constitution-making of the 1860s.  She died about a month ago, and I missed the notice of it.

I called her out of the blue at McMaster University in 1991, when I was making an Ideas radio documentary "Historians on Confederation." I was just beginning to think of constitutional history as something worth working on. She had been deeply engaged with 19th century political thought for a long time by then, but she was still on that contract/sessional/temporary pilgrimage that so many of the most original scholars seem to endure.  

She seemed at once like the someone who actually knew about the things I wanted to know about, and we kept loosely in touch. (Happily, the next time we talked she was a real professor, at McMaster.) I promoted her Canada's Founding Debates in 19998; she gave my 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal its most penetrating review.  Her book Discovering Confederation: A Canadian's Story is something unique: a memoir about confederation.  

She moved in circles much to the right of mine, but I never found her scholarship "Conservative"  -- the values she upheld were closer to the 19th century liberalism that she saw underpinning the confederation settlement. 

I think I last saw her in 2024 at a conference in Quebec City on the 1864 Quebec Conference.  She had given up posting to her blog by then (though it's still available online).  

Image: from the online obituary.

Who gets to write history

Moi?

This morning I read in a Toronto Star op-ed by pollster Allan Gregg how:

Wilfrid Laurier won the 1911 election by rejecting the Conservative government’s proposal for a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States.

It's not so much that we need the kids to learn history. It's that we need the adults to keep reading it. 

Update, June 18.  A correction appeared a few hours later. Seems Robert Borden won the election of 1911.

When historians go bad

 Timothy Garton Ash on the newly elected President of Poland

Nawrocki is a 42-year-old nationalist historian and historical propagandist with virtually no international experience and an extremely dubious past as a young man (violent football hooliganism, strong connections with gangsters on the Baltic coast, an unsavoury story about more or less tricking an old man into handing over his council flat, alleged involvement in pimping prostitutes to guests at the hotel he was working at as a bouncer). He lacks, to put it mildly, the professional qualifications and personal qualities one would hope to see in the head of state of an important European country at a crucial turning point in European history.

Poland has a directly elected president whose role is largely ceremonial -- mostly, signing Parliament's bills into law.  But he's elected, so if he decides not to sign the bills into law, the government in parliament is pretty much blocked from doing much of anything.  

The government he can now block is progressive, pro-European, pro-Ukraine, and committed to civil rights and free speech.  Nawrocki is associated with the authoritarian-nationalist rival party that has been active in threatening to jail any historians who might publicize unflattering aspects of Polish history and in cleansing museums and textbooks of thoughtful and challenging aspects of the national history.  

A Short History of Death UPDATED

Ruth Compton Brouwer's recent article in the Journal of Canadian Studies, “'[L]ike a page from history'? A Half-Century of Death Notices in The Globe and Mail" might be said to break new ground. It's a study of the history of paid death notices over the last fifty years.

These aren't the obituaries written by journalists about the famous. Brouwer is interested in the paid death notices submitted to newspapers by families seeking to inform their friends and acquaintances about the death of a loved one. (The last surviving trace of the classified ad, almost.) 

Brouwer observes that death notices used to be short, factual, semi-official: date and cause of death, family links, time and place of funeral, etc. Not much more.

Barebones and sober in 1970, death notices evolved, albeit slowly, over the next several decades until, in the 21st century, they have become a lengthy and fulsome celebration of a life, a determined attempt to vivify the deceased’s unique personality. Their content reflects both the era when their subjects were in their heyday and the narrative choices that their biographers make in presenting their life and values.

Brouwer observes that "obvious airbrushing notwithstanding, death notices are a valuable source for scholars, providing a wealth of information about such matters as the significance, and signifiers, of social class, gender, religion, and family values in the fashioning of the deceased’s identity."

It has struck me occasionally that whenever the deceased had that simple cottage on Lake Whatever, the death notice will emphasize what an important place it played in their life. By comparison, actual homes barely rate a mention.

Update, June 13: Charles Levi writes:

Thanks for alerting me to the CJS article.  As someone who actively uses death notices in their sideline historical work (that PhD thesis will never really be finished) I also have noticed how hard it is to ferret out the essential biographical details from the massive texts.  

And also what tends to be missing (often discarded partners). And yes, there is a distinct focus on cottage country and international travel, and not much about primary residences.

What is more striking, over the last seventy-five years, has been the complete disappearance of marriage and birth notices, which used to take up a fair amount of space. and which were very useful.  I am curious to know why that happened.

Is it that Facebook and Insta and whatever are good enough for births and marriages but a death still requires a "tombstone," particularly when the remains are as likely to be scattered as interred? 

Update, June 16:  Charles Levi:

There was something more public about the birth and marriage notices when they were in the newspaper. You didn't have to guess whether anyone had been married, and then search for whatever social media notice they had posted.

 It probably has to do more with the breakdown of "society", which has been facilitated by those smart phone things and social media. After all, even when birth and marriage notices were in newspapers, it was only certain types of people who posted those notices. As far as I know.

  

 

Moving pictures from Canada a century ago

We get mail, in this case from David Sobel:  

I wanted to share my website The Moving Past which has been in operation for a few months now.

Canada was the first country in the world to have a government-sponsored motion picture bureau. In 1917, Ontario formed its own motion picture bureau. The following year the Government of Canada created the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau, renaming it the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau in 1923. The reasons for their formation are discussed on the website. These two bureaus left behind a remarkable legacy of an estimated one thousand films, most of which are unknown and difficult to access.

My website hopes to change that. Seeking to capture the attention of academic historians and educators, the goal of the site is to make some of these productions available through streaming. Fifteen films are available right now, with plans to add six more by the Fall. More than 2,000 historians, from over 40 countries have watched the films so far. The site relies on small donations to function.

I invite you to take a look. There's a brief description of each of the films, which vary in length from three to 14 minutes. Some historiographical research has also been added. These productions are a mix of what I call "industrial documentaries" and "narratives of instruction". They have been edited slightly for more contemporary pacing and each film features either period or commissioned music to cater to classroom use. Silent film is somewhat of a misnomer anyway. Films were usually accompanied with live music.