Art, culture, prime ministers

Right here, you can view the whole collection of prime ministerial portraits from the House of Commons collection. I like this one of Mackenzie Bowell, prime minister very briefly in the 1890s. The portrait is by Joanne Tod. She did it circa 2001, when the House collection was playing catch up, and it is based on the best-known photograph of Bowell, but who cares? She's a terrific portraitist.

They have just unveiled a new portrait showing a youthful, skinny Joe Clark circa 1976, and it looks like a good one too. The artist is Patrick Douglass Cox. Stephen Harper will join the group in due time, proving, I suppose, that the prime minister may not respect the arts, but the arts will pay him his due.

Hairy Hockey History

Who started this tradition of "playoff beards" among NHL hockey players? The one time of the year they are guaranteed some serious media attention, and they come out even more scruffy and north-woods than American viewers expect them to be? Lookin' good, guys, you want to be lookin' good.

The player who can kill off the superstition is Sid the Kid. Crosby's play is brilliant, but if anything could weaken his endorsement prospects, it would be corporate executives' exposure to those wispy little chin-hairs. If Sid resumes shaving, the league will follow. Photo: The Globe & Mail.

Ontario History

Reading some issues of Ontario History in the library the other day (yeah, that still happens), I couldn't help thinking what a good little journal it has become in recent years. Attractively designed with a good range of material, and thoughtful about who its audiences might be -- not something you can always say about scholarly journals!

Its parent, The Ontario Historical Society, is having its annual conference in Guelph June 13-14, with the theme of Environmental History and a substantial program. Details at the OHS website.

Siberia? Hostie, non!

I knew, vaguely, that Canadian troops participated in an attempt to put an end to the new Russian revolutionary government in 1918. But a mutiny in Victoria, B.C., a month after the First World War ended? By conscripts from Quebec who did not want to go? That was a new one on me -- courtesy of the Canadian historians' listserve H-Canada.

Historian Benjamin Isitt is trying to track down descendants of the Quebeckers who mutinied in Victoria in December 1918 while being deployed to Vladivostok to serve in the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force. If you happened to be related to, say, Rifleman Onil Boisvert of the 259th Rifle Battalion (Canadian Rifles), born Drummond County in July 1896, a farmer, sentenced to two years hard labour, he'd like to hear from you. (He is: Benjamin.Isitt@gmail.com)

Those would be some stories....

More Gloat, more glory

My article "An Expo 67 Kaleidoscope," already up for a National Magazine Award, is also nominated for a Gold Medal in the Western Canada Magazine Awards. Details of all nominees here. Results June 20, at a party in Richmond, BC.

Sweet complication: one of the other nominees in my category is another Beaver article, and it's for a terrific article by Lawrence Hill, one that grew from his novel The Book of Negroes, which I was celebrating below.

This is your brain on Canadian Studies funding

Recently the Canadian Association of University Scholars and the Canadian Library Association presented the Senate with briefs to support artists and filmmakers who are protesting the federal government's proposal to vet films seeking public funding and to fund only those the Minister likes. Good for them.

Now it's return the favour time. This week the Writers' Union of Canada will join the Association of Canadian Studies to protest another government plan: that funding for Canadian Studies projects will only go forward if the scholars work on the government's favoured topics. The government's favoured topics are: Afghanistan, economic development, US-Canadian-Mexican relations, environmental change, and managing diversity.

The shoes are dropping. First this government wanted to shape what filmmakers film; now it's what scholars study.

The union thinks scholars of Canadian studies who are entitled to support should determine what constitutes Canadian Studies. "One of the things they do like to study," Writers' Union chair Susan Swan told Canadian writers attending the Union's AGM on Saturday, "is us."

Beaver goes to Louisbourg

Great to see, in the new issue of The Beaver, hitting mailboxes and newstands this week, a vivid and vividly illustrated article called "D-Day at Louisbourg," marking the 250th anniversary of that battle. All the better that it is by my old colleague and friend John Johnston (that's A.J.B. Johnston if you are googling the author) whose book on the subject, Endgame 1758 , appeared last year.

Nice also to see my own book, Louisbourg Portraits: Five Dramatic True Tales of People who lived in an Eighteenth Century Garrison Town [Amazon.ca link]also gets a note.

My own column this month in The Beaver looks at the career of Michael Bliss, recently honoured by a tribute volume, Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss. 'Course if you subscribed, you would have it in your hands already.

Late Update: While I'm shouting out to friends, I should note Ray Argyle also has a terrific article in this month's issue: on the history of ragtime music in Canada. There's more than the Maple Leaf Rag.

History Wins

Lawrence Hill, for his historical novel The Book of Negroes, the Commonwealth Literary Prize. Larry was missed at the start of the Writers' Union AGM in Toronto yesterday, but we hear he's just back from the Commonwealth Prize ceremonies in South Africa and off to the Calabash Literary Festival (specializing in literature of the African diaspora) in Jamaica. Interesting: the American edition of The Book of Negroes will be called Somebody Knows My Name. And to Guy Vanderhaege, novelist recently most noted for his two novels of western history, The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing, a Trudeau fellowship.

On the academic side, Angus McLaren, of the University of Victoria, BC, historian of sexuality and mores, gets a Killam Fellowship. And there's one for legal historian Constance Backhouse of the University of Ottawa Law School, too.

Gérard Bouchard, sociologist?

Recently, I was noting the slight presence of historians on a survey of the world's leading public intellectuals.

Today I notice that in the media coverage of the Bouchard-Taylor report on "reasonable accomodation" in Quebec, released yesterday, Gérard Bouchard, the distinguished historian of Quebec, is consistently identified ...as a sociologist. The reporters probably mean it as a compliment.

A Senate for Saskatchewan

Premier Brad Wall's announcement that Saskatchewan plans to hold elections to select candidates for appointment to the Senate of Canada makes one wonder: what about a Senate of Saskatchewan?

If Western conservatives believe so much in bicameralism, why don't they act on their principles? It would be easy for the conservative majority governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan to create upper houses in each of their provinces. They could put their principles into action and make their provincial senates fully triple-E. Half the seats in the Saskatchewan Senate would come from north of Prince Albert; half the seats in Alberta's new upper house would come from north of Edmonton. To be "effective," (the third E in Triple-E), the new provincial senates would have full powers to reject legislation passed by the (southern) majorities in the lower houses.

Of course it will never happen, and I'm not serious in proposing it. I'm not that keen on bicameral parliaments with powerful upper houses. I raise the spectre only to underline the inconsistency of the Triple-E Senate campaign. Its supporters are keen to have a powerful Senate in Ottawa, because they believe it will assist them in hobbling the will of the majority in the representative House of Commons in Ottawa. But they would not be willing to see a similar institution hobbling the majority will in their own provincial legislatures. Howzat?

Triple-E advocates may say it's different in Ottawa, that a Triple-E Senate is necessary to strengthen federalism by giving the provinces a direct say in the national Parliament. But federalism is expressed by Sections 91 and 92 of the Constitition, the sections that set out the respective powers of the national government and the provincial governments. The provinces are already powerful by virtue of their constitutional powers. There is no necessity within federalism to give the provinces a veto in national policy by turning over the national upper house to them.

The rationale for the Senate was bicameralism, to create a chamber of sober second thought. And while the constitition-makers of the 1860s valued sober second thought, they carefully hedged in the Senate to ensure that it could never defeat the truly representative legislature, the lower house. To ensure its weakness, they made it non-elective.

If the Triple-E advocates believe so strongly in bicameralism (and that was the message being preached by Saskatchewan's attorney general when I heard him on CBC Radio yesterday), they should follow their principles and endow their provincial legislatures with upper houses first. That would truly be federalism in action: testing the idea out in a few provinces and comparing those that do it with those that don't.

A Senate in Ottawa that is "elected" but unreformed (Nova Scotia 10 senators, British Columbia 6, and so on) will be powerful, but it will never be legitimate. The best argument establishing this comes from Gordon Gibson of British Columbia, and it's doubly persuasive because Gibson was one of the authors of Regional Representation, the 1981 book that launched the Triple-E campaign. In his 2004 Fraser Institute study Challenges in Senate Reform (downloadable here), Gibson vigorously attacks the idea that we could make the Senate elective without otherwise reforming it -- precisely what Premier Wall (and Prime Minister Harper) are intent on doing.

Late Note: To read how and why the constitution-makers in the 1860s designed a weak senate to strengthen parliamentary democracy, you should read my 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal. Amazon.ca link here.

NatPost on Canadians among Public Intellectuals

Great to see the mainstream media catching up on May 17 to a story covered here on May 1!

Why are we in Afghanistan?

Dooney's Cafe, the always promising online magazine driven by the concerns and interests of Stan Persky, though he's not its only author and the site takes its name from a coffeeshop in Toronto's Annex, not one in Vancouver's Kitsilano, has the most damnedly interesting discussion of Canada's presence in Afghanistan. Its a conversation between Persky and the westcoast activist and environmental writer Terry Glavin. This may need an apoplexy alert for conventional progressives: they explain why they support the war. Full essay is here.

[PS. Score a point for Ivor Tossell (see below). Dooney's Cafe is a dot.com, not a dot.ca]

History of Poetry; History of Bronze

Next Tuesday, May 20, at 4.30 pm, friends of poetry and sculpture will gather at Toronto's Queen's Park, north of the legislature, for the unveiling of a bronze sculpture of poet Al Purdy. The public is invited.

Late addition: That's his statue at top, now unveiled. Looks brilliant. The photo is courtesy of www.quillandquire.com, who commented "Al Purdy would not even dress up for his own statue."

Plain-spoken down-to-earth Al Purdy probably doesn't seem like a cast-in-bronze kind of guy, and portrait statuary has been out of fashion for quite a while. These days we tend to create a memorial scholarship or prize, or rename some tatty park. If there's an artistic tribute, it's likely to be "non-representational."

But I like the idea of representational statues as, literally aide-memoires, and I like including Canadians who are neither statesmen nor monarchs. One of the best statues among the long sequence that adorns the central boulevard of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue is an impressively informal one of the American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, perched on a rock as if on the bow of his sailing ketch. (That's it in the second photo, at right, courtesy of Wikipedia, and making me wonder if Purdy's sculptors -- Edwin and Veronica Dam de Nogales -- knew of it.)

Who among Canadian historians would rate a statue? Pierre up in Kleinburg, or in Dawson City? Donald Creighton glowering over the University of Toronto?

Talking Western History

Next month, June 19 to 21, the University of Alberta and several other sponsors will host "The West and Beyond: Historians Past, Present and Future," a conference on "the writing and teaching of historians of Western Canada of the past and present," -- and some new perspectives too. There's a banquet, music, tours as well as the discussions. More info here: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~wcsc/ or contact Sarah Carter and/or Peter Fortna at wchc@ualberta.ca.

When is this blog going to get a travel budget? I'd be there.

History of Airplane Reading:

• David A Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee. Big, terrifically readable, tremendous confidence, no fear of detail. This is only Volume One, and it never actually gets McGee to Canada, so a lot of us will be waiting for Volume Two. But One is the most successful launch I've seen in years of the big two-decker authoritative biography. (Okay, David's a friend of mine, too.) What a sinkhole Irish nationalism has been for 150 years!
• Late Update: Now I've finished the book, I'm struck by what a ... well, what a ninny young McGee was. (Born in 1825, he was barely 30 at the end of this first volume.) He had an astounding capacity for being absolutely, loudly, publicly committed to one public-policy stance, and then for adopting its polar opposite a year or so later -- over and over and over. He had an endless ability to absorb new ideas, it seems, but no bottom at all, no grounding in a set of principles. Living in Ireland, he barely noticed the Famine until he saw its potential as a stick with which to beat the English. Campaigning for Irish freedom in the United States, he vigorously supported American slavery, because southern Americans seemed likely allies for his projects. None of this makes the book or its subject less interesting. I look forward to David's second volume to see if McGee really matured in his Canadian phase... or simply found some causes that worked longer.

• Tom Holland's Persian Fire. It becomes a retelling of Marathon and Salamis and Thermopylae and the salvation of "the West" and all that. But Holland's actually interested in those Persians who provided the invading hordes, and they turn out to have a pretty interesting history too. Memo to self: read Xenophon. Tom Holland, not previously known to me, is one of these Brits who take a double first at a posh university and then become freelance historical writers like it was a respectable career choice. That kind of thing that never happens here. Not that we don't have freelance historical writers, but they are all journalists first (and, yeah, it shows). Anyone with a history degree sinks into the tenure pits.

How do you spell Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug?

The Algonkian language family includes most First Nations languages in the boreal forest region of Canada, from the Atlantic Coast pretty much to the Rockies. Speakers of these languages build compound words (like German does, say) as a basic part of their syntax.

So all those syllables in the heading above? They are just the combining of what we English-speakers would consider several words into one compound word. I understand "Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug" means "the people who live at the big lake with the trout in it." And Ontario maps would locate these people's community at "Big Trout Lake," about 650 k north of Thunder Bay, in the James Bay lowlands. Still, you can see why they get "KI" a lot.

Anyway, that's by way of introduction to my column about the KI-Platinex controversy in Law Times. You can read it in the digital edition at http://www.lawtimesnews.com/ now.

History of Parliamentary Sovereignty

In The People's House of Commons, a recent winner of the Donner Prize in public-policy books, the political scientist David E. Smith expresses his ambivalence about the rise of parliamentary officers in Canada. Part of the appeal to Canadians of the auditor-general, the ethics commissioner, the chief electoral officer, and the rest, he suggests, lies in the fact that they are not politicians. They seem impartial, non-partisan, above the fray, and we like that.

But the officers are unaccountable. They are much like civil servants (though reporting to Parliament not to the government). Smith is aware that delegating too much authority to unelected officials undermines the accountability of the democratic process.

Alarming new case in point: the ruling of the Parliamentary ethics commissioner on the implications of a libel suit launched against Liberal MP Robert Thibault by Brian Mulroney. The libel suit could take care of itself, even though one may suspect it is one of those nuisance suits (like Stephen Harper's against Stephane Dion) that is unlikely to go all the way through the courts to a verdict.

We could mostly ignore that, except that the ethics commissioner has now ruled that as a party to the suit, Thibault can no longer participate in House of Commons proceedings related to Mulroney or to the whole Mulroney-Schreiber affair. Thibault, of course, was front and centre in the Mulroney-Schreiber parliamentary hearings during the winter.

This has to be a misjudgment by the Ethics Commissioner. If parliamentary debate can be silenced or skewed simply by throwing down a libel writ, Parliament will be even less useful than we feared. Parliamentarians need to assert their privileges here. Free speech in the House of Commons!

Techobabble

Technology columnists are supposed to be wrong most of the time, given the uncertainty of their field. But Ivor Tossell in the Globe, who seems to be wrong about everything, was never more so than in sneering at the dot.ca registry in a column back on May 2.

Tossell thinks dot.com is the real suffix, and dot.ca is for losers. But look around the world. British sites are routinely dot.uk, Russian dot.ru, Australian dot.au, German dot.de and so on throughout the world of the WorldWideWeb. And Canadian sites are dot.ca.

The only place that doesn't understand national-domain suffixes is the place where the appropriate ending (that you never see) would be dot.us

Everyone but Tossell understands that dot.gov means American government, dot.edu means American university, and dot.com means either American business or wants-to-be-American business.

Late Update: Ivor Tossell points out that our viewpoints are not that far apart, and that he too was noting the American-wannabe flavour of dot.com. Fair enough. I was recalling, without rereading, a piece read sometime earlier (and the column had been paywalled by the time I got to commenting on it. Tech columnists tend to be digital-freedom advocates -- but somehow the newspapers that publish them always get their revenues. )

History of a non-blogging week

Travelling last week, I was both pressed for time and net-connection challenged, which is why the blog faltered unexpectedly. Howcumzit every bargain Quality Inn had free and faultless hi-speed, while an upmarket downtown hotel (I was billing someone else this trip) charges outrageous rates for the kind of wonky connection that makes you despair of even reading your email?

But in Vancouver the halibut was succulent and the rhododendrons were spectacular. The transit system is good too. When the new subway along Cambie Street is done, Vancouver will be much better provided with rapid transit than Toronto, where we have spent 50 years agreeing that subways are too expensive. (True, it's Canada paying for much of Vancouver's new lines, not something Toronto should hope for!)

The dank old main library at UBC has been reborn as the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (and universities say they are underfunded!). When a visitor wants to use the services of the "learning centre," they ask you to fill in a form for a daypass, which seems very civilized. UofT Library would charge $200 for that kind of access if they let you in at all.

On the way home to Toronto, I sat across the narrow economy-class aisle from one of Canada's leading political commentators. He's seriously smart, but I was meanly pleased to see him struggling with the Globe & Mail sudoku that I had already completed.

Historians as Public Intellectuals

Foreign Policy, the American magazine, offers its tally of the world's one hundred leading Public Intellectuals. Still a work in progress -- you can vote if you wish.

How are historians doing as public intellectuals? Not very strongly, I would say. On the FP 100, just eight of the magazine's choices are identified as historians:

• Anne Applebaum, USA, historian of post-communist Europe and Washington Post columnist
• Jared Diamond, USA, biologist and historian of the world
• Drew Gilpin Faust, USA, American Civil War historian and Harvard president
• Niall Ferguson, Britain, economic historian and commentator
• Ramachandra Guha, India, historian of India and commentator
• Tony Judt, Britain, historian of postwar Europe and essayist
• Enrique Krause, Mexico, historian of Mexico and commentator
• Bernard Lewis, Britain/US, historian of Islam

This is a list of public intellectuals, so it's no surprise historians who want to be on this list had better double as commentors or journalists. Still, these are also the authors of some pretty solid and substantial historical works, to my eye (though I confess I needed a little wikipedia/google help with Applebaum, Guha, and Krause). For what it's worth, Ferguson and Applebaum are the youngest, both born in 1964, and Applebaum and Faust the only women.

Eight historians in a hundred strikes me as low. (Political scientists and economists rule.) Four Canadians, however, might be a small country punching above its weight. Except two of them are "Canada/US."

• Malcolm Gladwell (Canada/US), pop sociologist and New Yorker writer
• Michael Ignatieff, human rights expert
• Stephen Pinder (Canada/US), scientist of the mind
• Charles Taylor, philosopher

No one, need we say, is both Canadian and historian -- though you could make a case for Ignatieff based on his education and early work at least.