Must read on museums, museums policy and the collapse of Bev Oda's credibility as Heritage Minister: once again it is Val Ross in the Globe & Mail.

Forty Years Ago

Boomer moment: Expo '67 opened. There's an graying cohort that still knows the words to "Ca-na-da" and "Ontari-ari-ari-o."

I have a reflection on Expo coming in the next issue of The Beaver. Subscribe.

Nice Expo-memories website at Expo67.ncf.ca. Terrific review of Expo's place in design history at the site of The Canadian Design Resource, whatever that is.

Read History; Claim Scoop

Young prof Matthew Hayday, at Pample the Moose, reads the Globe & Mail's breathless revelations about generations of neglected TB in residential schools -- and points out the historians who documented this important story long ago.

National Magazine Award finalist!

National Magazine Award nominations just announced, and my column in The Beaver is a finalist for best column. Other nominees on the NMA list (here) include such amateurs as Paul Wells, Robert Fulford, and Mark Steyn. Awards banquet at The Carlu in Toronto June 15.

My nominated columns, "Confronting the Dragons," "Electing the Senate - The First Time," and "Can History Save a Town?" either are or soon will be available from my website.

Now, can a "bloggie" be far behind?

Historians in the news: Wesley Wark

I'm mostly lukewarm about the Globe and Mail's Saturday Book section, but last Saturday I enjoyed Wesley Wark's takedown of several books on spy history. Wark teaches security and intelligence history at Toronto, and his assault on old and new spy books by William Stevenson (A Man called Intrepid, etc.) and E. Howard Hunt (Bay of Pigs, Watergate, etc.) was a tour de force of snark and evidence combined.

Shoring up his attack by citing the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, now discredited as much for the antediluvian prejudices revealed in his private letters as for that Hitler Diaries thing, was maybe not good strategy if an "exchange" is about to begin.

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The Birth of PR Politics: That Dion-May thing

I've been struck by how much attention that deal between Stéphane Dion and Elizabeth May provoked, and how long the discussion has continued. It's clear many politically-minded people are seriously perplexed by it.

Seems to me we need to understand it as post-Proportional Representation politics. The Greens' whole future prospect lies with PR. As far as we know, there still is not a single constituency where Canadian voters would chose a Green candidate in preference to the alternatives. Without PR, the Greens may well remain tourists on Parliament Hill. But PR advocates tend to be like Péquistes circa 1978: absolutely impervious to contrary arguments, and convinced the future belongs to them. So it makes sense on several levels that the Greens should operate as if PR already operated. And that Liberal planners should want to make contingency plans.

The deal Ms. May made with M. Dion fits the model that Canadian politics would adopt in a PR electoral system. In a PR world, we would often have a centrist party (the Liberals) securing and retaining power by brokering deals with leaders of small parties. In a PR world, PR politics is always rooted in backroom deals based on votes-for-offices, because once the votes are counted, all that matters is the party bosses and what proportion each controls.

Today it is reported that as part of the May-Dion deal, the Liberals promised to consider electoral reform.

I don't mean there is anything nefarious here. The Greens are simply getting down to the only kind of political business that offers them a future. This may what the future smells like.

Noah Richler and John English win prizes

The British Columbia Book Prize is not for BC books, it's a non-fiction prize given in and by BC. There's something wrong with a book prize being presented by a premier, but oh well.... Twenty-five thousand big ones for non-fiction.

Winner this year is Noah Richler for This is My Country... What's Yours?, his exploration of what Canadian novels have to say about Canadian history and identity. Good choice, I think.

And the $10,000 Dafoe Prize (from the Dafoe Foundation) for writing on Canada has gone to John English for his much nominated Trudeau biography.

History of grammar: where is "of" going?

As long as we are being peripheral: do you notice people writing "couple" in place of "couple of"? That is, you read "a couple times," "a couple guys," or as I read in a comic strip the other day, "You are a couple candies short of a pinata."

Start looking and it's all over the place, but it seems new. Is there a history to this? Is it some New Yorkism, like "standing on line"?

Meeting Place meat

I mostly stick to history and political culture here, but I want to give a shout-out to a new website for Meeting Place Organic Farm. Through Huron County connections, we met Tony and Fran McQuail years ago, and twice a year we get wonderful freezer orders of beef, pork, and lamb straight from their Meeting Place organic farm, delivered to us here in Toronto.

If you are in southern Ontario and you get tired of buying something in styrofoam from the supermarket every week, you could look into this.

Five Questions

Been meaning to say: my new efriend Alessandro Nicolo of Montreal recently made me the subject of his "Five Questions." See our Q&A at his website at the entry dated April 9.

Louis Riel the great Canadian politician?

That's the conclusion of the Great Dominion Dustup.

Canadian History at IdeaCity

On my webpage, (server's back up, hurray!) I've had a note about IdeaCity 07 in Toronto June 20-22. Moses Znaimer's fabulous think-in conference brings together nifty minds from around the world plus, this year, moi.

Turns out IdeaCity has ideas for Canadian history. Jack Granatstein, Charlotte Gray, Noah Richler and I will be doing some kind of four-headed thing for them.

PR: wisdom from the west

The blogger called Calgary Grit puts the problem with PR in a nutshell.

What's wrong with PR

Ontario's "Citizens' Assembly" has done as instructed by its handlers and recommended that Ontario vote on a proportional representation thingee next fall in the fixed election.

I don't like Citizens' Assemblies. Isn't this why we have legislatures? Can you see a problem with the proposition: "Hey, this issue is too important to be left to the people we the people actually elect to represent us. Let's set up another tribunal that's not elected at all."

The Citizens' Assembly of Ontario has rapidly become as mealy-mouthed as "the politicians" they were supposed to supplant. They want to enlarge the house by about 30% -- gee, more politicians, what a great idea! -- but they only want about a third of the legislature to be appointed by the parties, rather than 50%, which is what the PR zealots usually go for. (Ten to 15% would pretty much solve the votes/parties imbalance that PR claims to address.)

But it's PR, PR itself, we need to talk about. I keep reading that the justification for First-Past-the-Post electoral systems is that they are designed and intended to provide majority governments.

No. The point of First Past the Post is that representatives are to be chosen by communities of citizens rather than by political parties. The point of PR is that citizens hand over their votes to political parties, so that the parties can appoint their devoted loyalists to permanent sinecure seats in the legislature.

Now if you want more dedicated party hacks and flunkies in our legislatures, you are entitled to say so. But that's the point of PR. I wish its backers would say so.

I think our legislatures are already way too full of party hacks and flunkies. But that's a problem that could be fixed if we agitated for it.

The point of PR is to entrench the hacks and flunkies in place forever. This is a good thing, why?

Mike Pearson?

I've been noting the "Dominion Dust-up," a March Madness kind of elimination vote on great Canadian politicians, organized by an Ontario Tory MPP named Tim Hudak, otherwise unknown to me. Somehow it's come down to a final between Louis Riel and Mike Pearson, and Riel is running away with it. Voting ends tonight.

Peruvian gold: superb. Exhibit: not so much

Went to see the pre-Inca exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum over Easter. A Japanese archaeologist from an American university spends 25 years investigating a previously unknown pre-Inca civilization, about a thousand years gone now, that he calls the "Sican." All his major finds come from very deep excavations that go below what the looters cleaned out. Important stuff, well worth showing the world.

The Sican are another early civilizations with agricultural bounty used to support a godlike ruling caste. The principal excavation behind this exhibit is one tomb that was much laden with grave goods. Gold was the tribute the society paid to its rulers. (Bronze, too, actually, and there was lots of fine weaving, mostly now eroded away, and much else). The gold was mostly not the heavy metal form; they liked to hammer gold into paper thin sheets and then work it into amazing forms. Impressive.

It's a travelling exhibit, so probably the exhibit design and the captioning are not the ROM's. But once again, how disappointing it is see a high-profile museum exhibit that gives us first-rate artifacts with such mediocre interpretive materials.

The captions dump barely understandable technical detail on us, and they skimp on answers to the obvious questions any reader wants to have answered. They are consistently badly written, ignoring basic good-writing rules. Why can't museum curators write? Why won't they think like visitors?

Server issues

The server went down on Wednesday where my website www.christophermoore.ca is hosted. Promised it will be back momentarily.

Must Read: Hayes et al on Vimy Ridge

Geoffrey Hayes and most of the youngish military history professors in Canada have put together Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Re-appraisal, edited by Hayes and others, and just coming out from Wilfred Laurier UP.

Haven't read it, and not sure if it's a real revision or just "Let's try to dull this down a bit." In the same way the RCMP became what someone called "the world's only souvenir police force," Vimy sometimes threatens to become more symbol than battle. Over the years I've sometimes found our academic military historians a bit too "official," their writing a bit too identified with the military perspective. If this signals a more risk-taking attitude, I'm all for it.

Dustup smackdown

Dominion Dustup looking like it will be Joey Smallwood vs John A on one side, and Louis Riel versus Wilfrid Laurier on t'other leading to the final smackdown on the great Canadian politician. Likely to lead to Riel vs Macdonald, hmm: the rebel or the power?

History Television rebuked by CRTC

Failed network History Television rebuked by CRTC for running CSI: New York as a history program. Well, it's about New York, and New York is where 9/11 happened and 9/11 is history -- apparently this really was HT's lame-o defence.

Good on the Writers' Guild for turning them in.

Amazing Grace movie

Caught the William Wilberforce biopic Amazing Grace. Amazing good. No lack of great acting among the Brits! Beautifully set, beautifully filmed, a nice 18th century feel without going all museum on us. Amazing how gripping a film of parliamentary debate can be!

Still problematic. Lots of Americans will tell you Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, as if Walesa, Havel and their organizations, plus Leipzig and Timosoara, to say nothing of ol' Gorby, were just spectators. This film wants to tell you the slave trade was ended by William Wilberforce. No-o-o-o.

Oddity: why would they make the Duke of Clarence (the future King William IV) one of the film's key characters defending the slave trade? Nicely played by Toby Jones, Capote in Infamous, as another nasty dwarf, but Clarence wasn't in politics.

Demagogues and legislatures

Paul Wells (the must-read on Canadian politics) links to a superb demolition of Newfoundland premier Danny Williams -- by a fellow Newfoundlander. They can talk down there.

Despite Wells, root of the problem isn't Williams's demagogue tendencies. It's the lack of checks and balances to control them. We can't go on with this system by which someone wins (buys, more often) a leadership convention -- and gets dictatorial powers for four years. Caucus! In a parliamentary democracy you have duties. Say no.