Beaver column: That Ontario separate schools thing

The December issue of The Beaver is reaching magazine stands and subscribers, and my column in it takes up that nasty separate schools issue that suddenly took over the Ontario provincial election campaign last September and October. I was struck by how everyone seemed to blame the problem on history, particularly on the politicians of the 1850s and 1860s who were accused of sticking us with a out-dated constitutional compromise and no tools to fix it.

That struck me as nonsense, so I talked to some knowledgeable historians, and ... well, read the column. Something in it to offend almost anyone, I think. www.historysociety.ca/bea.asp (though the story itself is not online)

Animating history at the NFB

Pat Dillon-Moore, genius publicist at the National Film Board, sent over a DVD of a new NFB documentary on Canada in the 1930s, "The Dark Years." (It will be on History Television around Christmas.)

The filmmakers had a nice idea here. Director Steven Silver says they worried about "archive fatigue": yet another doc scraped together from all the same black-and-white stills. So they animated it instead: a film history of the 1930s where they got to draw their own pictures (and slotted in some of those stills when they wanted to). You can take a look at clips from their site.

History book GG: Karolyn Smardz Frost's "Glory Land"

Karolyn Smardz Frost today wins the non-fiction Governor General's Award for I've Got a Home in Glory Land: a Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad.

A new writer, what the French would call a petite-histoire, a smallish press (Thomas Allen and Sons) -- a nice win altogether. (Guilty confession: I still have not read it.) Karolyn, archaeologist, educator, and writer, is also executive director of the Ontario Historical Society. She once directed excavations around the Toronto home of the escaped slave and early Toronto black citizen who is the subject of her book. Good on her.

[Correction made: somehow called the title "Beulah Land" originally]

National Archives is open

This is good. Following vigorous lobbying, Library and Archives Canada will return to having the archives' third floor consultation room open from 8 am to 11 pm weekdays, and 10 am to 6 pm on weekends. The radical cutback in hours has been... cut back.

Apparently the Canadian process has been noted in Australia, where similar cutbacks prompted no reaction from the historical community.

British Columbia Book Prize

Donald Akenson's nomination for the British Columbia Book Prize makes me wonder, should we just call it now: Donald Akenson is the best historian working in Canada today.

Not just that his methods of scholarship are rigorous and sophisticated. Not just that he's extraordinarily productive. Not just that he ranges the world and the ages for his subject matter. Not just that he is constantly wise where most historians are merely informative. Not just that he writes so vividly, so urgently, with such engagement, on subjects most writers would convince us are worthy but dull.

But when you add up the whole package, it's a pretty strong case. From Islandmagee to If the Irish Ruled the World to Conor to Saint Saul, that's some historical tour -- and that's just some of his works I happen to know.

I have not read his nominated book, Some Family, which is about genealogy and the Mormons' collection of genealogical information. But I will.. And that's win or lose.

Two more thoughts on this book prize.

One, the randomness of non-fiction prize nominations. There's no gold standard, no clear criteria, nothing that build toward a critical consensus on anything. Non-fiction jurors hardly know what they are looking for, and every jury comes up with a unique list, mostly of works no one has read or read about. I know nothing of Laura Goodison's From Harvey River (McClelland and Stewart) or Jacques Poitras's Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy (Goose Lane), and I mean no disrespect to the authors when I say that if their qualities are so clear, at least some reviewers and book journalists might have noticed them. It's the same with the GGs (to be announced tomorrow) -- another pretty random assortment of largely unknown works.

Late Update: I meant that about "no disrespect" quite sincerely; this post was meant to be about the inchoate state of non-fiction, where there often seems to be no established consensus about what makes a quality book, and attention even to good books often seems a matter of luck and chance. But it's been pointed out to me that both Poitras's book and Goodison's were prominently reviewed in Canada and Poitras's earned a place on bestseller lists. In both these cases (and doubtless others), unknown to me doesn't mean unknown -- and certainly doesn't mean unworthy! (CM --January 4, 2008)

Two, the British Columbia Book Prize needs a new name and a new organization. It's a disgrace to have a politically run book prize where the premier himself hands over the cheque. Arts should be arms-length, you dummies. And since it ain't for BC books, the name is never going to work. Sorry. Nice that it offers a ton of money, though.

Backhouse: Americans elect woman president

Got a notice about the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History (http://www.aslh.net/). Its annual conference will be held outside the United States for the first time ever in November 2008, and it's to be in Ottawa. Not by coincidence, I expect, the society also has its first non-American president this year and she is Constance Backhouse, professor of law at the University of Ottawa. And a tremendously gifted and prolific historian, I might add, having read quite a bit of her work over the years: Petticoats and Prejudice, The Heiress and the Establishment, Colour-Coded, and much more.

History of Theatre

At Theatre Passe Muraille to see the revival of the 1997 hit "The Drawer Boy" by Michael Healey, we learned that TPM is celebrating 40 years and 500 new works since 1967. Five hundred new works.

The TPM building, a rough cubic space with an awkward upper level and no lobby to speak of, still looks jerry-built, still speaks of that 1960s moment when Canadian theatre was like a guerrilla movement, when art in Canada typically took place in scrounged spaces like this half-converted 19th century brick factory. Not a Scotiabank logo anywhere to be seen.

"The Drawer Boy" seems to be about city boys and farm families in the 1970s, about stories and memories and secrets. It's rooted in something that happened when TPM actors went to Huron County to make one of its early triumphs, "The Farm Show." But Michael Healey, in his author's notes in the program (photocopied, b&w, thin) says the play, written in 1995, is really"an argument for government involvement in arts" and an attack on the Mike Harris government of that day.

"The Drawer Boy" starts from untold stories that need telling, and Healey explains that is why the play is political, and also why the TPM building has such a bygone-days feel to it. "The theatre you sit in was nearly a casualty of the cuts of the 1990s. Theatre Passe Muraille, a place that exists solely to create new plays, found itself unable to do much of that for a decade or so... Even this play, celebrating as it does TPM's history, had all but its final workshop funded by another theatre."

It's not that TPM looks old that matters, he means, it's what kept it looking that way. And that it still survives.

Good play. Good place. Some amazing evenings in those 500 new works.

Valour and the Honour

I missed the notice on this one, but on November 2 Brian McKenna received the Pierre Berton Award for his contributions to Canadian history from Governor General Michaelle Jean at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

Brian and his Montreal-based colleagues have made successful documentaries on Pierre Trudeau, the First World War, the War of 1812 and much else. But he's mostly famous for his searing, critical and very controversial WW2 doc The Valour and the Horror. That's the one against which veterans' organizations, Senators, and far too many Canadian historians ran a campaign of vilification and tried to remove from circulation -- with the usual craven compliance from the CBC.

Good for McKenna. Good for the History Society. 'Course, 8 out 10 Canadian military historians probably spewed hot coffee out their mouths when they read the news. But Pierre would have liked this one.

Today in History

Eight o'clock in the morning, Regina time, 122 years ago today, Louis Riel was executed.

Lieutenant Governor Dewdney promptly sent John A. Macdonald a telegram reading "Hindrance carabine avenger," code for "hanged, buried as directed." In a follow-up letter, he acknowledged the "buried" part was not quite right, as Riel's family claimed his body for eventual burial in St Boniface, Manitoba.

Why "Creative Non-Fiction" should stop whining

What he said: Russell Smith, "In Defence of the Novel, and the Test of Time," in the Globe & Mail, November 15, 2007 (except it's behind a paywall).

Why don't magazine writers get residuals?

What he said: Canadian Magazines

Where should the National Portrait Gallery Be?

Y'know, I don't mind.

Sure, I like it that Ottawa has such an array of national monuments, galleries, and special places. Ottawa, a place of culture and architecture -- it's not how we usually think of it, but there it is. And I liked the idea of repatriating the old US embassy for that purpose: great site. But not every national institution needs to be in Ottawa-Hull. To let other cities have a crack at hosting The National Portrait Gallery doesn't seem bad to me.

I know, the government will probably let the choice be determined by political pork-barrelling rather than the inherent qualities of the available sites, and probably some cheapshot developer who offers a site and building will be given a million kickback concessions and allowed to put the corporate logo all over it. But that's the process, not the idea itself.

National Portrait Gallery in Charlottetown? Yeah, I'd go. (I know, it's not on the current list.)

What everyone knows about Fort York is that it is a relic of the past buried in the shadow of the Gardiner Expressway, overwhelmed by the roaring modernity of downtown Toronto around it, and only school groups would go there.

Amazing how nobody knows anything. Fort York is one of the most architecturally-striking, most mood-inducing landscapes anywhere in the city, a remarkable oasis that almost instantly imposes its own scale and its own pace upon its visitors. We often take out-of-towners there as part of the city tour; and it never fails us.

And as high rise residential development surges around it, the fort and Garrison Common become more, not less, effective, as a counterpoint. To that end, the city and Friends of Fort York have some ambitious plans. Fort York is not shrinking away. It plans to grow: restoring vanished buildings, developing a visitor centre, boosting visitor traffic, becoming more vital to culture and heritage in Toronto. The detail is in a booklet the Friends recently sent me, boldly entitled Fort York: Adding New Buildings. Online: http://www.fortyork.ca/.

The two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 is five years away. And on the history of Fort York, Carl Benn has recently produced this new Fort York: A Short History and Guide.

Robert Stacey 1949-2007 RIP: art historian extraordinaire

I dreamed last night that The Globe was running an obituary essay on Robert Stacey, the historian and curator of Canadian art. But they aren't and probably they won't. He was not that well-known. There was just a few lines on the death-notices page last Saturday. 

In the mid-1980s, I was one of the authors preparing a book called The Illustrated History of Canada. In time it became a best-seller, and it remains a standard and strong-selling history of Canada. But a year before publication, it was in crisis. It was going to be an illustrated history... but neither the publishers nor most of the authors really knew much about illustrating Canadian history or illustrating a book. It seemed I knew enough to be worried, but not enough to convince anyone we had a problem. It was just some pictures. 

Way late, someone recruited Robert Stacey to help with the pictures. I remember meeting him at Beaujolais, the then-trendy Queen Street restaurant that for a time served as lunchroom for those of us on that project. Related to Charles Stacey the historian, I asked? No, but the grandson of Charles Jefferys, the historical artist. 

Bob Stacey saved our ass on The Illustrated History, is all he did. Here was someone who knew every image of the Canadian past, knew what it signified and how to use it, and knew where to secure prints and rights at blinding speed. Suddenly the Illustrated History had illustrations, and that many of them were superb and surprising was all to Bob Stacey's credit. 

Not that he got much of it. He got paid a pittance and no royalty share, he told me later, and he devoted ten times as much time to the project as he should have. Somehow his career was often like that. He worked on art history projects, book publications, documentary films, gallery shows, and academic study projects from one end of Canada to the other. But it barely jelled into a career. He was always simultaneously a freelance art curator and the most authoritative student of Canadian art that anyone knew. And in a position like that, no one really appreciates an independent mind. Everybody just wants some images found, just wants some authentication, just wants it done quick and cheap. 

And in every project he took on, Bob Stacey would discover a whole lost neglected history of Canada and Canadian art that needed his attention, whereupon which he would lavish upon it time and attention out of all proportion to his clients' wishes or his own financial well-being. Instead of a memo, he would deliver a monograph no one had expected to publish. 

Over twenty years, I used to get together with Bob Stacey from time to time, to be amazed at his erudition and bemused at the precarious position he occupied. In a series of offices around Toronto, one on Britain Street, one later on Wellington, he maintained the most extraordinary archives: seemingly every art catalogue and illustrated book ever published, and a vast collection of references works, offprints, posters, along with a great archives and collection of Charles Jeffreys material. It was always a mystery who was going to pay the rent, who was going to support the fifteen projects he had in the air, who would do the cataloguing, who was ever going to appreciate the riches available here. 

But we would go for a beer, and he would be entertaining and funny and mordant. Knowledge and passion about Canadian art history would flow from him. I would go away inspired everytime, wondering if sometime Robert Stacey would have his breakthrough to recognition and applause. I profiled him for The Beaver once, trying to suggest my admiration and amazement. His health failed a couple of years ago. Now the death notice. 

Late update: Dreams do come true. The Globe called; they are preparing an obituary and saw this post. I'm kind of moved.

History NGO merger?

There have been rumours for a couple of years about a merging of Historica (the history foundation founded by big donations from Charles Bronfman and Lynton "Red" Wilson), Canada's National History Society (the foundation midwifed by the Hudson's Bay Company principally known for publishing The Beaver), and The Dominion Institute (the brash upstart foundation launched by a savvy gang of twenty-somethings and committed to giving historical policy flash and flair).

Word was, the feds wanted the merger, since all these orgs are interested in public money, and the feds always prefer one big partner to several independent ones. Various efficiency arguments were floated. But the foundations seemed so different in what they did that a merger seemed most likely to make one big, bloated, directionless mess.

But it must be going again. Yesterday Rudyard Griffiths, impresario of the Dominion Institute, published an op-ed calling for the merger. Rudyard's so connected and savvy that if he's going public, there must be something in the works.

Reading List: Donald Smith on Honore Jaxon

William Henry Jackson, Ontario Methodist farmboy turned acolyte to Louis Riel and self-professed Metis, renamed himself Honoré Jaxon. Later a Bahai, a labour organizer, a businessman, an activist for native and minority rights, a friend to American Nazis, and much much else. Finally furnaceman in a New York apartment building. Evicted with a pile of records and papers onto the street in 1951. Papers go to the dump, Jaxon to the grave.

'Mazing story, and Donald B. Smith, prof at U. Calgary, has now made Jaxon the third in his trilogy of studies of people who reinvented themselves as aboriginal Canadian. Archie Belaney/Grey Owl. Sylvester Long/Buffalo Child Long Lance. And now Bill Jackson/Honoré Jaxon.

Honoré Jaxon, Prairie Visionary, just published by Coteau Books of Regina.

A little thing about Donald Smith. In another of his books, he includes in his acknowledgments thanks to his Ojibwa language teacher.

Robert Bringhurst, poet and transator of the Haida classical literature, once said what is needed is for every North American poet to learn one North American language. It might have applied to historians, too. Smith is one of the very few who took up the idea.

Update: For readers in Toronto, Smith is talking about Jaxon at University College on Friday Nov 16 at 1.00 pm

When an archives goes into the archives

"You're history! You're in the archives!" I think the fashion for that dismissive slur has faded. I have an image of Michael Keaton shouting it at someone, but I can't remember the movie.) But what happens when a whole archives is history?

The United Church of Canada maintains an archives on the grounds of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. It's a handsome, wellrun place, useful to many researchers even with interests that run far from the United Church (me, for instance). But an archives is costly. The Church wants to close it, or at least to move it to somewhere where storage becomes cheap (and usage becomes rare, presumably).

Craig Heron, the unusually activist president of the Canadian Historical Association, is helping organizing a protest and inquiry at the United Church archives Tuesday, November 13, at noon. I'm going to be speaking. Info at www.savethearchives.ca

Opinions -- we have a few

This weblog has recently been selected for inclusion among those sampled at Opinions Canada. Now posts from here occasionally turn up there, along with commentary from a zillion other Canblogs. Take a look at www.opinionscanada.net

Referendum for the hell of it

Prime Minister Harper muses, "This country is hardly overdosed on referendums at the national level," and suggests he might just hold one on the future of the Senate.

I went back to John Ralston Saul's Reflections of a Siamese Twin for its intriguing, slightly counter-intuitive argument: referendums are mostly an anti-democratic device. In a functioning parliamentary democracy, even a few are an overdose. Referendums foster divisive yes-no, either-or polarities over reasoned accomodation. And like polls, they mostly empower those who define the question.

"The history of the referendum over the last two centuries has almost always fallen into two streams. The first has used the mechanism to destroy representative democracy, usually replacing it with Heroic false populism. The second has used the referendum as a way to structure the citizenry into doing what they would never do in the more careful, balanced context of representative democracy." (Reflections, p.248)

Not that Saul will have any influence with Harper (!) But the prime minister is being clever rather than wise again.

More Rewriting History

National Capital Committee put up some signage recently to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Ottawa being chosen as the capital in 1857. (Yeah, I missed the memo on that one.) The signs noted Ottawa was initially the capital of the union of Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec), a union proposed by Lord Durham in his report of 1841.

Now the NCC has removed the signs for... purification. A pressure group called Imperitif francais does not like Lord Durham. It complained. Bam, Lord Durham has ceased to exist, at least on the NCC historical plaquing. Depressing details here.

And, to change the subject, it's Last Spike day. 122 years ago, Craigellachie, B.C.

Governor General Lansdowne wanted to drive the last spike himself, and he hung about the west for weeks that fall, hoping for the chance. But in the end he was needed in Ottawa -- mostly in case there was a last minute commutation of the death sentence on Louis Riel -- and he had to head back. So it was mostly executives of the railroad company that got to be there.

The Senate

Somehow the Canadian Senate inspired nonsense from almost everyone who comments about it. At risk of falling into that morass, let me try hack away some of the brambles.

1. It doesn't represent the provinces or their people; it was never intended to

In the Globe & Mail on Nov 5, Professor David Bercuson argues Senate abolition would be a huge transfer of power to provincial premiers. Why? Because "the senate's role in Confederation -- to represent the people of Canada's diverse provinces (as opposed to the governments of those provinces) in the development and making of federal policy -- is a vital part of a healthy federal system."

But no, surely that cannot be the Senate's role. In reality, the Senate plays practically no role in representing the provinces and only a minor advisory one in developing and making federal policy. If it were a vital part of a healthy federal system, surely there would be some record of achievement in the last 130 years that people could point to.

Professor Bercuson is speaking politically, not historically. He would like to have a Senate that represented the provinces in Ottawa, that had a substantial policy-making role to match that of the House of Commons. He'd like a Senate that was elected and powerful.

Well, he's entitled to want that. But he is not describing the role of the Senate. He is inventing an entirely new role for it. When the Senate was created in 1867, the one overriding requirement was that it be weak. The confederation-makers were parliamentary democrats: they wanted to focus power in the lower house that was legitimately elected, representative of the population, and able to keep the government accountable to it and to it alone. They understood a powerful upper house would be a threat to that, and so they ensured that the Senate would be weak and largely advisory.

To do that, the confederation-makers made sure Senators did not (despite Professor Bercuson) represent provinces or provincial populations. They allocated senate seats mostly by region, not province. Senators authorized to speak for provinces might have hoped to claim some authority for themselves, but regions had and have no official political status and a much less clear identity than provinces.

It was to buttress the authority of the Commons and ensure the Senate's role would be weak and advisory that the confederation-makers put an end to the pre-confederation process of elective upper houses. Making the Senate appointive meant a deliberate choice to make it weak. And in that the confederation-makers were absolutely successful. No appointive house could claim real authority, not in 1867, not in 2007. The Senate was born to be largely ceremonial and advisory and has remained so ever since.. Good thing too, sez I, but then I'm a parliamentary democrat too.

Professor Bercuson wants a totally different Senate for a totally new purpose: to create a "double majority" system, in which a powerful Senate would be able legitimately to block and oppose the Commons. I prefer what we have.

It is true that the House of Commons, the place where the people really are and should be represented, the place where regional and provincial interests should be accounted for, is not working well. But the solution to that is to fix the Commons, not to meddle with a Senate that, elective or not, can never be truly representative and should not be truly powerful.

2. Australia's Senate is no panacea

Today the Globe & Mail quotes PM Harper declaring "Australia's Senate shows how a reformed upper house can function in our parliamentary system."

Well, Australia's Senate is elective. But it's worth noting:

• how shockingly unrepresentative Australia's Senate is. Tasmania has as many Senate seats as New South Wales, which has six times the population. Being elective doesn't make it democratic; representation matters too.
• how little the Senators actually represent the Australian states. Senators are elected on party tickets. When the governing party controls the Australian Senate, it becomes a rubber stamp. When the opposition controls, it blocks and opposes. Party loyalty trumps regional loyalty every time.
• how sceptical informed Australians are about their Senate -- too much power, too unrepresentative, too party-driven, etc.

The case still needs to be made that there are democratically-based arguments for a powerful Canadian Senate. Most arguments for a powerful elected Canadian Senate are covers for a rightwing gerrymander, since upper houses are by design and definition more conservative than the more representative lower houses, the "common" houses. The other motive for Senate reform is the desire to fix the democratic deficit, not where the need for fixing is real and pressing (in the Commons), but somewhere else.

Don't worry about the Senate. It cannot do much harm. The problem is in the House of Commons, and so is the solution.

Canadian History Still Not Dead Yet

Harper Collins has a tenth anniversary edition out, substantially updated (I hear), of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History?

Granatstein was hugely successful in provoking controversy when the book first came out -- and I'm always in favour of lively debate about history, so I was okay with the book even when I disagreed with it.

It is, however, a book that brings out the mouth-breathers and doom-predictors, and it seems to license them to say anything. HarperCollins's webpage for the new edition declares that "Canada is one of the few nations in the western world that does not teach its history to its young people." This has been said so often people seem to take it seriously.

Point one: Substitute the name of any western nation for "Canada" and you will be able to find an identical claim from someone in that country.

Point two: I have had two children in Toronto public schools. Canadians history is all they do. Endlessly. Repetitively. I have lost count of how many times my kids have done Canada in the First World War.

McGoogan: non-fiction don't get no respect

Ken McGoogan's polemic about non-fiction in Saturday's Globe here. "Have I gone mad?" he asks. Well, yes, you have, Ken, when you propose three Governor-General's Prizes for various kinds of non-fiction. There are already 14 GGs a year -- do we really have 14 masterpieces to support them. But otherwise it's a lively essay.

I wonder how many of the Ottawa backbenchers are looking over their shoulders as Conservative Party HQ defenestrates MPs and candidates for being insufficiently robot-like. Who is next? Hell, why not replace them all... maybe with cardboard cutout?

Since in Canada all party leaders either act this way or aspire to, this is not a Conservative crisis, but a crisis of the Canadian parliamentary system. Does our system elect 308 MPs or just five party leaders and a mass of inanimate tally sticks to be tossed in whenever decisions are required? The only people who can address this question are the MPs themselves (though they will only do it if we stop telling them not to).

Ultimate authority in a parliamentary party lies not with the leader but with the caucus.

Should blog comments be signed?

From the Guardian (UK) Online "Comment is Free" section, some thoughts on signed comments and internet anonymity.