Gloats...

For the second consecutive year, my work with The Beaver is up for a National Magazine Award. This year it's a Words and Pictures nomination for that illustrated story on Expo '67 we did for the fortieth anniversary. I wrote it, Michel Groleau (doing great things as Art Director for the mag) designed it, and Doug Whiteway edited the package. We are all up together on June 6 in Toronto. Details on all the nominees here.

Worth noting: Canadian Mysteries

Do people do "interactive history"? The "Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History" website, one of the more successful web enterprises in the field of Canadian history, recently announced the launch of several new episodes. The additions complete its package of twelve interest-provoking problems in Canadian history. If there's an audience for history on the web, this should be one of the hits.

Canadian Mysteries launched in 1997, making it primordial in web history. It has continued to add new funders and new contributors, until half the universities and history departments in Canada seem to have a stake in it. Its mysteries range from the location of Vinland to the death of diplomat Herbert Norman. They cast a pretty wide net, in fact: exploration, slavery, First Nations, biography, immigration, social history, murder... And to my eye, the site is handsomely designed, cleverly conceived, and often well-written (though needing a little updating here and there, having been written in pieces over the years by many hands).

The project's reputation still seems -- judging by its "reviews" page-- inside the academy more than beyond, which seems too bad, given its pitch to younger readers and school classes. Worth a look.

HIstory of prime-ministerial graves

The news this weekend that some goons defaced the family mausoleum where Pierre-Elliott Trudeau is buried (they spray-painted "FLQ" and so on) brought a couple of calls from journalists seeking a quick comment. Y'see, among my writings is a little text entitled Grave Sites of Canada's Prime Ministers.

I wrote it years ago on a commission from Parks Canada. Typically of bureaucrats (and I used to be one, so I know how it happens), when they got around to publishing it, they never bothered to send me a copy of my own work. And since I had my cheques, I pretty much forgot about it.

But in fact I now see it's a nice little piece of work, available as a download at http://www.pc.gc.ca/clmhc-hsmbc/pm/pdf/pm_e.pdf. You can read who is the only Canadian prime minister not buried in Canada and who was not amused to have Prime Minister Thompson drop dead while lunching with her. I have to admit I still have never visited the grave of any Canadian prime minister... but from the photos it looks like it could be a lovely tour.

And about the vandalism this weekend? Pretty much a non-story, was my opinion. Every society and every tendency includes some idiots; these ones hardly need the attention.

A word to journalists: I try to help, try to be available even. But if you need a quick quote, sending out an email ("please respond right away!") on a Saturday morning does not really exhaust the search possibilities a journalist should be capable of.

Anzac Day

Funny thing. In the Northern hemisphere, the commemoration of military sacrifice is a late autumnal thing: Armistice Day in some countries, Veterans' Day in the United States.

In the southern hemisphere, it's also a late autumn day. Today, April 25, is Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand, based on the first day of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli.

Late update: My peripatetic friend Gib, who was at Gallipoli recently, reminds me that the battle may be important to the Aussies and Kiwis, but it was really important to the Turks. Turkey's success in compelling the Allied invasion to withdraw really became the foundation of the new Turkish nation postwar.

Here's One for the Whole Country: Celebrate the Burning of Toronto

Indefatigable War of 1812 historian Robert Malcomson has a new book, Capital in Flames, about how the Americans torched little York on April 27, 1813.

Robin Brass Studios, the author, and the Friends of Fort York will launch the book at Fort York this Sunday, April 27, 2.30 to 4 pm. No cost if you register in advance by email to fortyork@toronto.ca. Info on the book at http://www.rbstudiobooks.com/

History of Corruption: Where the rot starts

Michael Ignatieff has a fundraising dinner to pay off $300,000 of debts he ran up in his unsuccessful bid for the Liberal leadership.

This is really where the democratic deficit starts: a system where some people acquire access to millions of dollars and to political power, and the rest of you are just citizens and spectators.

The ideal of the parliamentary system is to make all that impossible. In parliamentary theory, representatives are chosen locally, close to their constituents, accountable to them. And those representatives choose the leaders, who in turn are accountable to them.

The Canadian political parties have managed to interpose themselves in the midst of this system and to turn it all into a centralized process, governed mostly by money. Much of the money actually comes from the taxpayers (as Elections Canada's investigation into the Conservative Party is reminding us), but it's the money flow and control of the money flow that is now central in our politics. And leadership politics is where the money/power vote-buying nexus has most firmly wrapped its claws around the Canadian political system.

Sure the problem exists elsewhere too (which is why we take it for granted). Can we take seriously Barack Obama's claim of a new politics when campaign has spent $8 million on television ads alone, just for the Pennsylvania primary?

But lots of parliamentary regimes actually do short-circuit that money-power flow. In most parliamentary democracies, new leaders are chosen and old ones dismissed by the parliamentary caucus, by MPs chosen democratically (and cheaply) to represent their local constituents. Leadership selection (and removal) takes a day or two, it costs nothing, it guarantees accountability at the top. It's an accountability process, not a money process.

We seem to imagine doing it all over $1000 a plate dinners is part of the democratic process. Pity.

Ambrose Raftis 1922-2008

One of the great Canadian historians died the other day.

J. Ambrose Raftis, born in small-town Ontario in 1922, became a Basilian priest in 1948, but also pursued historical studies, first at the University of Toronto, later at Harvard and Cambridge. He began publishing in the mid-1950s and become one of the great medieval historians of his era, particularly specializing in the social and economic history of early England. Father Raftis spent his whole career at St Michael's College, where he both led and ornamented its "Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies." He kept publishing big books and scholarly articles until the late 1990s.

To really appreciate Raftis, you would have to immerse yourself in works like Peasant Economic Development within the English Manorial System. Or, just take the medievalists' word for it: Raftis was the real deal.

Update, March 7, 2013:  When this post was new, Ted Britton sent a comment which somehow never reached me.  We reestablished contact recently, and in case anyone wanders into the depths of this blog, I'm happy to offer Ted's recollection of Ambrose Raftis and how working with him shaped Ted's career in a very different field.

I was a Ph.D grad in the 70s with Ambrose. Through a byzantine series of events I ended up owning newspapers, which I created, in Muskoka.  … I lost track of Ambrose and then discovered your brief mention of his death.  … I am not sure Ambrose grasped the importance of his work. Certainly the British Marxists of the day ignored it, because it was unhelpful in advancing their dogma. The realization that the academic world was so disinterested in what original research on primary documents actually told us convinced me that reporting on the community activities of Muskoka villagers had more validity than the academic biz. Ironically, my study of social structure and village life in mediaeval Broughton was amazingly instructive in analyzing what made places like Bracebridge, Gravenhurst and Huntsville tick. Human nature does not change. Technology may "advance", but the way we organize ourselves in forming communities and power structures does not.

Canadian Historical Review online

Maybe everybody who's interested already knew, but it has come as news to me. As of this year, you can subscribe to the Canadian Historical Review online and access all its contents back to 1920. Not free, but available. Info here.

All those rows and rows of journals on professorial shelves -- to the blue box.

An Orange Prize for Old White Guys' Books?

Carolyn Weaver, the TV book critic, boycotted last night's Donner Prize, a $35,000 prize for Canadian public policy books, because the juries are always old white guys.

The Donner prize-giving managed to go on without her last night. The award went to The People's House of Commons: Theories of Democracy in Contention, a University of Toronto Press book by the senior political scientist David E. Smith of Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile a Canadian financial sector zillionaire named Cundill is going to endow a $75,000 annual prize for historical non-fiction. Cundill thinks historical writing is like financial analysis: you consider the past to see the future. He can't remember anything he studied in history at McGill but has a particular interest in General Douglas MacArthur. Biography, war, supreme command; the classic old-white-guy book topics. Carolyn Weaver should maybe keep an eye on jury selection for this one.

Happens I was reading David Smith's very book last night. I'm reading it for a review, so I'll save my thoughts. I'll just say it's a book to engage with rather than simply to admire, but he's entitled to his award, for it's an ambitious and substantial piece of work. Forget his age, skin colour, and gender. He's written a political science tract that is also a tragic lament.

Late update: Okay, give credit where it's due. The National Business Book Award ($20,000) is sponsored by a big bank and a giant accounting consultancy, but it has a track record of unconventional choices, ones that sometimes leave the commentators saying "That is a business book?" The 2008 winner, announced April 22, is William Marsden's Stupid to the Last Drop, a not-exactly worshipful study of Alberta's energy policies. A few years ago it was Naomi Klein's No Logo, also not a cheerleading-for-business title. The prize committee (former Ontario premier Bill Davis, chair) seems to believe the duty of business books includes telling business things it may not want to hear.

Junction of past and future

Been meaning to note a local-historical achievement. I went out on Monday night, a coolish spring evening in Toronto, to join the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city of West Toronto Junction. Considering that West Toronto Junction amalgamated with the city of Toronto barely a year later, it does not sound of earthshaking experience.

But the Junction neighbourhood has been kinda rundown and depressing for quite a while and is now achieving a startling renaissance. That's partly because nowhere in Toronto remains available to poor people, and even marginal neighbourhoods are upscaling fast. But it is also because local heritage activists, local artists, and local businesses around the Junction have been very clever and creative in promoting sensible preservation, adaptation, and development in the nabe. Community-building remains crucial to that project, and the commemoration delivered.

Monday night's event was simple enough: a brief announcement, a walking tour, wrap-up at a local pub with video greetings from Mayor David Miller. But lo and behold: at least a hundred people took the time and trouble to join in.

And the event delivered for them, I'd say. Tour leaders, including local councillor Bill Saundercook, were stylishly dressed in formal wear of the period (reminding us that the age of elegance is dead, alas). The tours were suitably brief, skillfully scripted, surprisingly informative, and damned good entertainment. Everyone who went along went away thinking, this neighbourhood came from somewhere and it's going somewhere, and that's good.

Kudos to Gib Goodfellow of the West Toronto Junction Historical Society and to Neil Ross, who engineered most of the events. They provided a model of the unique service a historical society can offer to its community. Civil society at its best.

Info on Junction history at www.wtjhs.ca/centennial/index.htm

Alan Borovoy on the role of Human Rights Commissions

What he said.

Plaquing Toronto

A Beaver column I wrote last fall on the evolution of the historic-site plaque (cellphone plaquing, art-installation commemoratives, guerrilla midnight plaquing) drew an email from Alan Brown of Toronto. Alan has been photographing every historic plaque in Toronto, and posting the results at www.torontohistory.org. Browseable!

History of the funding of ideas: "If it is not against the law, you get to say it"

From Sarah Polley via the Globe and Mail, a pretty good summation of what is wrong with C-10, the federal government's bid to dictate content to films that may be funded by Telefilm Canada.

Governments, taxpayers, don't have to support the arts, culture, intellectual life. But if they do, they have to support them, not control them. The way to support culture is to support it, and to let it work out its own expression... subject only to the law, as Polley explained so succinctly to the senators yesterday.

To my knowledge, no universities, scholars, or historians have bothered to engage with the government's effort to prevent controversial filmmaking. Maybe they should. The principle is the same. If governments direct the content of films they subsidize, why would they not direct what is done and said by universities and their employees? Should professors be funded to say controversial things when filmmakers are not?

But it has always been hard to get academics to see their common interest with other intellectuals and artists.

Late update: I'm now informed that CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, (and I believe the Canadian Library Association too) submitted briefs supporting the film-makers and artists in opposition to Bill C-10. Bravo.

Recently wrote....

Got my copy of The Beaver for April-May '08. Ken McGoogan's essay on the Northwest Passage highlights historical voyages, but the emphasis of his story is what global warming is doing to the passage, namely, making a real passage where before there was mostly a notional one.

Canada has tended to be defensive on this one: worrying that other country's vessels might meanly use "our" passage. But if it becomes an international waterway, does Canada really need to put a gate across the entrance. Surely we can assert enough sovereignty to control pollution risks and other dangers without claiming a right to exclude non-Canadians. On The Beaver's website: a podcast interview with Ken about the passage. Read. Listen. Subscribe.

My own column in that issue of The Beaver is on the television programs Ancestors in the Attic and Who Do You Think You Are?, lead-ins to some reflections on the genealogy boom, the new "deep ancestry" possibilities of DNA matching, and the meaning of ancestry in a transient world where it's said a quarter of all Canadians do not know their grandmother's maiden names.

And speaking of linkage, Law Times, including my monthly columns on legal history, is now even more available online at www.lawtimesnews.com.

Miscellaneous historical things this morning

1.. British historian John Burrows's history of history-writing, A History of Histories, reviewed here.

2. I only know Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought, the big book on 19th century American history that won the Pulitzer Prize in history yesterday, from this review by Jill Lepore. Lepore made it sound pretty terrific; made her sound a pretty good historical critic too.

3. Not exactly the golden treasures of Tutankhamun -- but a fascinating story on evidence of early human presence in North America from, um, the turds they left behind.

4. Last week's post on proportional representation brought in a couple more comments, mostly questioning my character or my sanity. But one anonymous poster told me the whole policy of moderating comments, let alone discouraging anonymous comments, was "cowardly."

I don't agree. This web thing is still evolving its practices, and I've been intrigued by the arguments for and against anonymity, often via The Ethical Blogger (see link at right). So far I feel more solidarity with the blog authors who encourage signed contributions. I'm not wedded to that; I do think the practice is evolving, and I'm still thinking about it. Thanks for your notes, even the unsigned and unpublished ones.

History of Anne of Green Gables

Amid the commemorations of the centenary of Anne of Green Gables, I recall that Anne is actually a child of federalism.

When Prince Edward Island joined confederation in 1873, among the first senators the Island sent to Ottawa was Donald Montgomery, a farmer in his sixties who the next year became grandfather to Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Lucy Maud's mother died before she was two. Her widowed father, the senator's son Hugh John, was a not very successful merchant. So the senator, in the best traditions of Canadian political patronage, secured Hugh John a government job in the new North-West Territories. Off he went, leaving his baby daughter effectively orphaned, in the not-so-tender care of her grim and elderly maternal grandparents, the MacNeills of Cavendish.

It's generally agreed by critics, I think, that Lucy Maud's unloved childhood inspired the wish-fulfillment story of orphan Anne, who is loved and who teaches her adoptive parents to love. But no one ever seems to note it was confederation politics that left her abandoned by her surviving parent.

Newman ...still bitter after so long?

Peter C. Newman reviews James Raffan's George Simpson biography, Emperor of the Bay, in the current Literary Review of Canada here. But Raffan's book hardly gets the attention it deserves. Most of the review is Newman's petty, whiny attack on Jennifer Brown for her unflattering review, years and years ago, of one of Newman's own Hudson's Bay Company books.

Newman's had an extraordinary career; as his recent encounter with Brian Mulroney proved again, he is a genius with an interview. But you cannot interview the dead, and Newman never got into his historical subject the way he does with his live ones. His HBC histories were tone-deaf, confused, and canting, and Professor Brown did the world a service by saying so. Raffan deserves Newman's praise; the rest should have been left lying.

Wilson on D'Arcy McGee

Great to see an announcement that David Wilson's big biography of D'Arcy McGee is about to appear, with a launch for the first volume on April 21 at Ben McNally Books in Toronto.

Okay, David's an old friend of mine, and I'm looking forward to his getting the attention he deserves. And I've had my appetite whetted by hearing him talk of this book; there will be new things.

But I'm just as chuffed to see proof that a serious nineteenth-century Canadian political biography is possible, both in the academy and in Canadian publishing. When I wrote a book about Confederation ten years ago, I was very much aware of writing about a field no one wrote about. Richard Gwyn's John A. helped show those days are passing. I hope David's McGee book definitively re-establishes that such subjects can be done and are distinctly worth doing.

Accountability and Proportional Representation

Fruits and Votes, the nicely eccentric blog about electoral systems (and tree fruits, go figure), has here a note about New Zealand politics.

New Zealand, let us recall, has more or less the MMP system of proportional representation Ontario voters rejected last fall (except that Ontario would have had 30% of members appointed from party lists; in New Zealand it's fully 50%)

In preparation for an election, the Labour Party prime minister, Helen Clark, and her party president recently sat down to prune their party lists. They are getting rid of any backbenchers whom they find insufficiently loyal -- pour encourager les autres, you might say. They have moved no less than a quarter of the sitting MPs so far down the party's list of candidates that they will no longer have seats after the election.

The decisive criticism of MMP in Ontario's debate last fall was that it would allow the parties to fill the legislature with their hacks and flunkies. It was a criticism that reduced PR advocates to hysterics. I never saw any rational response to it from the Yes side in Ontario's referendum. "PR is more democratic. That's the end of it. The lists will be democratic. It's a no brainer. Shut up!" pretty much summarized the Yes side's response to the No side's concern that members appointed by MMP would be even more beholden to the party than they already are, in effect making our system worse in the name of making it better.

PR advocates often point to PR's successes all over the world. Surely this latest news from New Zealand is more evidence the No side's criticisms were well founded. New Zealand used to have a vigorous tradition of backbencher activism. The caucuses of elected MPs made policy, influenced cabinet-making, and dumped underperforming party leaders -- things Canadians might envy. All that stopped dead with the switch to MMP, now that Kiwi MPs who disagree with their parties lose their seats.
BC is gearing up to rerun its prop-rep referendum in 2009. But the favoured system there is a complicated transferable vote system, one that would not give the parties a hammerlock upon who got to sit in the legislature.

Later update: An anonymous reader observes that MMP lists need not be under party control; they could be done by vote of party members.

He/she goes on to say, 'You describe STV-PR on which BC will vote next year as "complicated". But from the voters' perspective STV-PR is much simpler than MMP. With STV the voters just vote for the candidates they really want to see elected.'

Matthew Shugart, who runs Fruits & Votes, says: 'I believe you are likely drawing more from that story [ie, the New Zealand one his site reported on] than is warranted. It is unclear (to me, anyway) how many of those MPs will continue to have their own constituencies, where they can run and "be accountable." The changes are also not all about "loyalty," per se, but about cutting the safety of the list out from underperforming members (such as the head of the Labour Maori caucus in that story). It seems that those concerned about accountability would rather cheer such a result, actually.'

Should we cheer? In this situation "underperforming" means "underperforming in the eyes of the party leader." It's in the nature of parliamentary systems (if not human nature) that party leaders will prefer blind loyalty over most other qualities. Still seems to me that letting the leaders pick their own followers reduces accountability instead of reinforcing it.