Sign of the Apocalypse

The Globe and Mail reports that terminally dumb History Television generates more revenue than Space channel, which is frequently smart and clever.

Update, May 2: History Television has friends. Jordan Kerr:

What are your issues with history television? Sure they play mindless repetitive stuff a lot of the time, but as far as history tv goes I find it fairly balanced. I'm thinking shows like Norm Christie's various series, History of the Underworld, Ancestors in the attic etc.

Well, fair comment. Thanks.

For me, mostly it's the amount of the "mindless, repetitive stuff." It has always seemed a channel without a personality. Canadian Discovery Channel has always given the sense of having some people involved who actually take an interest in science and nature from a Canadian point of view. Ditto Space, ditto some others.

History Television (our Canadian channel, I mean) always seems like a marketing guy's idea of a network: what can we get those history "buffs" to watch? All the more credit to some terrific little production companies who have managed to get some good stuff on to the channel, for sure.

It was when I saw Ann Medina "commenting" on the historical significance of some J-Lo movie for "History on Film," practically with a thought bubble coming out of her head saying "I'm a serious journalist, why do I have to do this shit?" that I pretty much gave up on the channel. Why indeed?

History of the Financial Meltdown

Don’t comprehend the big financial meltdown of 2008 and all that stuff about sub-prime mortgages? Michael Lewis offers a pretty good orientation in The Big Short. Since he is truly a marvellous writer, it’s a very funny and entertaining read too.

This ain’t really a history of the financial crisis. Lewis is a magazine journalist, and the book is just a set of linked profiles of a handful of investors who concluded a big crash was inevitable and started betting on it big-time. As Lewis says, lots of people will tell you they saw the financial meltdown coming. A few were willing to risk their money on it ahead of time -- and also knew how to. They provide Lewis with a great story.

The Big Short does explain one little wrinkle I never saw sorted out in the business press. The billions of dollars of bonds that turned out to be worthless (and took down AIG Insurance, and Fanny Mae, and Lehmann Brothers, and Northern Rock Bank, and anyone else who did not get bailed out in time) were based on mortgages. As everyone has said, Wall Street somehow took millions of lousy, risky, unsecured, individual sub-prime mortgages, bundled them into big compilations of the very same mortgages – and somehow managed to reclassify and sell the collections as Triple-A secure.

Huh? you said every time you read that.

Lewis explains it. It was a sort of perversion of the principle of insurance. Sell insurance on one house, and there’s some risk it will burn down and you will be ruined. But sell insurance on 10,000 houses, and it’s unlikely they will all burn down. Some will, but the premiums on those that don’t will cover the cost of the few that do.

That was the principle on which sub-prime mortgages, packaged together, seemed less risky. They could not all collapse at the same time, any more than all the houses could burn down. Put enough of them together, and the ones that carried on would cover those that went bad.

Trouble was, they could go bust together. They did. The United States is basically one big housing market. When some subprime mortgages began to be defaulted on, they pretty much all did. When payments stopped being made on that riskily mortgaged house on that dusty hillside in California, payments were stopping on all its neighbours too, and on all the riskily mortgaged houses in Florida and Ohio and everywhere else. They all caught the same fire, you might say.

That’s the underlying explanation. You’re welcome.

Lewis profiles a few cranky, eccentric, not-part-of-the-Wall-Street-consensus, investors who figured that out and bet on the collapse. It’s a terrific story. But the misallocation of risk is not really the heart of his explanation of what happened, though he’s pointedly funny about the failures of the ratings agencies like Standard and Poors. At conventions, he observes, the investment bankers swagger about wearing shorts and Hawaiian shirts or, sometimes, really fabulous Italian designer suits. The ratings guys, salarymen all, wear suits and ties – but off-the-rack suits and cheap ties. A menswear salesman could tell at a glance who dominates who.

So Lewis's explanation is partly about stupidity: if his characters could read the situation, the Wall Street zillionaires should have been able to. But really he locates the cause in the failure of the investment markets, which is to say the corruption of the market. Back to his 1980s book Liar’s Poker, about his own days as a Wall Street investment banker, Lewis has always presented Wall Street as a rigged game, not a real marketplace but a rigged one, designed to enrich the traders who control the markets.

There was so much money for Wall Streeters to make, and so easily, and with all the risk being to other people’s money, that Wall Street did not really care, had no incentive to look more closely and discover the flawed principle (yes, they could all catch fire at once!) on which these bonds were based. They could afford to be ignorant enough to destroy the American financial system; indeed they were becoming fabulously rich doing precisely that. Working in an unrigged game would be much harder and not nearly so lucrative.

Gradually, however, Wall Street made so much money on subprime mortgage bonds that it came to believe in them. The investment banks put their own money, not just the customers’ money, into the subprime mortgage packages. Which is why the Wall Street investment banks were swept away along with customers like AIG and Fanny Mae. But even then, the actual managers mostly did fine – because they had long since made the investment banks into public companies and merged them with retail banks. It still was not their own money they were risking in pursuit of those seven- and eight-figure bonuses, it was the shareholders’ and depositers’ money.

Distilling the message of The Big Short, I’m making it sound like a finance treatise, when really it’s a fast and funny book-length piece of magazine journalism by a master of the craft. Read it for the entertainment. The lessons are optional.

Donner Prize to Bow on Can-Am Relations

Brian Bow, Dalhousie political scientist, won the 2010 Donner Prize (for books on Canadian public policy), for The Politics of Linkage: Power, Interdependence and Ideas in Canada-US Relations.

CBC has the details here.

Shortlisted: Who Owns the Arctic?: Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North by Michael Byers; A Thousand Dreams: Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and the Fight for Its Future by Larry Campbell, Neil Boyd & Lori Culbert; and Branding Canada: Projecting Canada's Soft Power through Public Diplomacy by Evan H. Potter.

Wilson on Abbott on Sugar in the TLS

Cliopatria notes that Toronto historian Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar: A Bittersweet History is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement -- by Bee Wilson, author of a history of honey.

I'm profiling Abbott, whose most recent book is A History of Marriage, in a forthcoming column in Canada's History.

Prizes: Butcher on Gage

I'm told the 2010 Donald Grant Creighton award for a biography related to the history of Ontario has been awarded by the Ontario Historical Society to Alan Butcher for his life of sculptor Frances Gage, Unlikely Paradise: The Life of Frances Gage, published by Dundurn Books.

Is this a leak? It does not appear on the Ontario Historical Society website, and the 2010 ceremony is more than a month away. It comes from a reliable source.

Speaking of Donald Creighton, we wish the History Department at the University of Toronto did not keep its once prestigious and buzzworthy annual Creighton Lecture so secret. Wish I'd known this year's lecturer was aboriginal law scholar John Borrows -- whose speech can now be listened to as a podcast, it says here.

And speaking of both that department and leaks, I heard a rumour about a prominent Canadianist who may become the next head of the department.... which would increase the population of Canadianists there to approximately one.

History of Parliamentary democracy: the Milliken ruling

Speaker Peter Milliken ruled yesterday that, if the Commons insists, the government is obliged to deliver to it the unedited documents on Afghan prisoners that Parliament had requested. The full text of the document, clear, precise, and brief, is available here, (courtesy of Katy O'Malley's blog at CBC.ca) and it’s worth reading. (It may be on the Parliament of Canada website, but I can't find it there.)

This is not of itself a groundbreaking document. Most of what Speaker Milliken says about the authority of Parliament and the obligation of the government to respect it is a recitation of grade-five civics truisms about how parliamentary democracy works and must work.

At least, it should be. Only the extraordinary defiance of the Harper regime, its anti-constitutional effort to place itself beyond accountability to Parliament, required the Speaker to reaffirm constitutional bedrock. “In a system of responsible government, the fundamental right of the House of Commons to hold the Government to account for its actions is an indisputable privilege and, in fact, an obligation…. [I]t is the source of our parliamentary system from which other processes and principles necessarily flow.”

The Speaker also makes clear that, for all the bluntness of his declarations, he is no arbitrary authority. “Ultimately it is the House which decides whether a breach of privilege or a contempt has been committed.” The Speaker's ruling only binds if he is supported by the House that elected him.

Indeed, the Speaker’s statement consistently affirms the authority the House has, when and if it chooses, to fulfill its responsibilities. “[I]n instances where a Minister refuses to provide documents that are requested, it is clear that it is still ultimately up to the House to determine whether grounds exist to withhold documents.”

"It is up to the House." Among those tarnished by comparison with Speaker Milliken, I think, are the many constitutional lawyers and political scientists who have suggested the solution to this impasse (indeed, to all political questions, it sometimes seems) should be court-centred rather than parliament-centred. (I’m thinking of Patrick Monahan and C.E.S. Francks in particular – you can find them all over the Globe and Mail today.) The intellectual current, encouraged by far too many scholars, that would have all important decisions referred to unelected judges, not to legislatures, has contributed to the Commons’ tendency to deference and timidity and encouraged the government’s belief it can defy parliament. Speaker Milliken nicely demolishes the government’s latest attempt to use the judicial trick, namely its “referral” of the problem to the arbitration of retired judge Frank Iaccobucci. “Mr. Iaccobucci reports to the Minister of Justice; his client is the government,” Milliken observes.

Speaker Milliken’s statement of Parliament's powers ought to be routine and banal. There’s a good chance of more fireworks, however. This government does not like to be told its duty in any situation, and it is entirely likely that ministers, confident that they could withhold the documents from Parliament, have been lying about the Afghan prisoner issue.

The Speaker has informed the government of its obligation to respect the will of Parliament, but there is every chance the government will prefer defiance. The Speaker has informed the House of its powers, but who knows if the house will steel itself to use them? Speaker Milliken advocates a compromise, but he is very clear that this is not a negotiation; it is for the House to set the terms of the compromise. It can yield as much or as little as it chooses or dares.

So the issue may not be settled; indeed, it may be just about to get serious. Members of Parliament, long trained to have no political views beyond deference to leadership, might back down. The government might win an election and renew its defiance with a new mandate. But at least we have a clear and unequivocal statement of the powers of Parliament, and of the vital importance of having parliamentarians who understand their right and duty to wield those powers. That cannot be bad.

Update, May 2: Jordan Kerr, history undergraduate at Carleton reports:

Great article on the speakers ruling and if you're still interested I found the ruling on Hansard - Today in the House- Debates (Hansard)-Apr 27. - Oral Questions - Privilege. Though I'm sure Katie O,Malley got it right:)

(Image from CBC.ca/news)

History of Law Firms

In the Lawyers' Weekly, Christopher Guly considers little law firms, how they got big, and the evolution of the legal market over the last hundred years, with copious quotes from a slew of legal historians, and even a photo of me with Edward Blake -- something you don't see every day, since he died in 1909.

Historians having ethical issues

Don't do this.

Orlando Figes, British historian of Russia, here, writes anonymous reviews trashing his rivals, then threatens lawsuits, then lets his wife take the blame, then....

Update: Now he says Stalin made him do it.

Update, April 29: But this is weird: someone called Jonathan Jones thinks it's only those tedious profs who complain when someone "popular" trashes the books of rivals anonymously and threatens libel action when exposed.

Stephen Ambrose, American historian of presidents and war, here, seems to have made up his oral-history interviews.

Too much military history?

Andrew goes to town against over-emphasis on European wars in Canadian history.

Update, April 28: Meanwhile History News Network reports on Australian historians going after each other about Anzac Day, celebrated last Monday.

Human nature does not change?

Sure it does. What interest would history have otherwise? But novelist Allan Massie, in a review of the state of the historical novel, assures us it does not. Maybe novelists need to think that way about their characters.

Prizes: British Columbia Book Awards

Since I'm in British Columbia (and blogging has been light, not by coincidence), I got to follow the British Columbia Book Awards last night. Not a whole lot of history, but a history of a lot of good books and good writers. And recognition for Stan Persky, a pretty terrific writer, "our Socrates," as the citation calls him. Details here.

Reel Injun History of Indians in Film

Not actually intending a First Nations theme on this blog these days, but I was at the Air Canada film festival today -- that is, I was on an AC flight, marvelling at the wealth of film that those little seatback screens make available. All the Hollywood stuff that's in theatres, sure, but lately I've watched a number of Canadian films I'd not otherwise have heard of.

Today's was Reel Injun, a doc by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, with NFB support, about the way aboriginal people have been portrayed in film over a century and more. Funny, fascinating, powerful, personal, and kinda optimistic at the end. A Navajo filmmaker calls Atanaarjuak, The Fast Runner "the most Indian film ever made."

Dafoe Prize to Sean Cadigan

Memorial University historian Sean T. Cadigan's Newfoundland and Labrador: A History had won the annual Dafoe Prize for non-fiction from Winnipeg's J.W. Dafoe Foundation.

Something every historian should do from time to time

Go talk to kids about history.

These are some of my friends from Peacock Primary School in Goose Bay, Labrador. Thanks to teacher Renée Watts, who let me use her great photo, and everyone there.

'Nother reason why anonymity on the web has to go

Phillip Henscher discovers that the Amazon.com "reviewer" called "The Historian" who praised the works of one historian of Russia, Orlando Figes, and dismissed those of his rivals... is Orlando Figes's wife. The real point, he observes, is why Amazon allows anonymity in the first place.

(I follow lots of leads, including this one, from the amazing American history blog Cliopatra and particularly Ralph Luker's posts there -- too many, it seems, to credit them every time. I'm reminded to make acknowledgment because they just h/t'ed me.)

Update, April 22: It gets nastier, and lawyers tell newspapers to shut up.

Giiwedin, a First Nations opera

Down to Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto this weekend to see a terrific piece of theatre: Native Earth Theatre's production of the opera Giiwedin, by Spy Dénommé-Welch and Catherine Magowan. A full scale opera about the struggle for aboriginal land.

Here, from the program, a theatrical moment I would not have expected to see:

"Noodin-Kwe emerges from her cabin ... and sings to her newly-conceived son about the history of the Royal Proclamation of 1763."

It sounds, well, terrible, but it surely is not. Fine operatic singing and presentation, brilliant music too. Giiwedin is playing in Toronto to April 24 -- details here. A review in Now here. See it if you can.

(Photo: Marion Newman as Noodin-Kwe and Jesse Clark as the Indian Agent, from Now.)

Historians make history: vindicating Viola Desmond

Nova Scotia's posthumous apology and pardon to Viola Desmond, a black woman convicted in 1946 for taking a white's-only seat in a movie theatre in New Glasgow, has had lots of play in the media. Good. Not much notice, however, of the historical work that helped keep the story alive and created the groundswell for Nova Scotia's apology.

The racial insult was not forgotten in the Nova Scotia black community and civil rights organizations. But the first really authoritative retelling was by Ottawa legal historian Constance Backhouse, who devoted a long and immensely detailed chapter to the event in her 1999 book Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950, published by UTP for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Backhouse's chapter helped inspire a short story, "One Down," by Dionne Brand that was published in the 2001 history/fiction anthology Story of A Nation. CBC presented a radio drama, "Living in Hope." The Beaver ran a cover story by Dean Jobb in April 2009. Gradually the story just became part of the narrative. Now comes the pardon.

New Books: Boyko on Bennett

Shelf-browsing at my local Chapters, I'm struck by the continually shrinking space the store allots to Canadian history. (Still a couple of my titles, however; somebody loves me.) Seems as if without Pierre Berton to spark the whole category, there is less buzz, fewer sales, ... and less space being allotted. The world may "need more Canada" as Chapters' slogan has it, but my local big box seems to think it doesn't need so much of it in the Canadian history section.

So I was cheered to see a substantial display of a new biography of R.B. Bennett on those otherwise shrinking shelves. R. B. Bennett wouldn't strike most people as the stuff of bestsellers. True, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams a novel about Joey Smallwood's childhood, was an international hit a few years ago, so anything is possible. But Canadian political biography, particularly of that particular unsuccessful rightwing stuffed shirt from the 1930s, still seems a hard category to sell.

John Boyko's new Bennett: the Rebel who Challenged and Changed Canada seems determined to change that image of Bennett. I haven't read it, so I'm not convinced yet, but the book has a cheeky opening: "Franklin Roosevelt was the R.B. Bennett of the United States." Boyko teaches at Lakefield school near Peterborough. His book is just out in a handsome trade book edition from Key Porter, with a foreword by John English and some impressive blurbs. Look for it.

Canada's Secret History

The Information Commissioner ranks the Department of Canadian Heritage an "F, Unsatisfactory" on access to information issues. The Mounties, Border Services, Immigration, all do a lot better than the agency tasked with Canadian history and heritage.

Donner Prize and Pulitzer Prize

The Donner Prize for books on Canadian public policy is uncompromising. Every year you've never heard of most of the nominees. And that's a good thing. This year's shortlisted titles, recently announced, are mostly books that have not been hugely noticed, but they look serious and worthwhile. Not much history this year. Three of the four are from west coast writers and publishers.

Meanwhile, at the Pulitzer Prizes in the United States, the History, Biography, and General Non-Fiction winners are all histories.

Only in England

[Sleaze warning] Celebrity historian David Starkey, described as the rudest man in Britain, attacks rival historians as too pretty.

Bad History month there and here

Have you ever noticed that tourism has been the excuse for more dreadful developments in modern history than anything but Twitter?

Gail Collins in the New York Times laments outbreaks of crazy history (and some geography too) across the United States.

Meanwhile, Andrew Smith laments dubious interpretations of the First World War history of Canada and muses:

Perhaps the government should appoint an academic historian as its chief historical officer to pre-check all speeches by dignitaries for questionable interpretations of history. This office would be an extension of the educational functions of the state, much like subsidies for schools, museums, and public television.

I should not be disagreeing with Andrew, who has good points here -- and has been saying nice things about my own recent work -- but I'm not sure scholars should seek this top-down, authoritarian approach to historical truth. History should be an argument about the past, not a declaration about it. Methinks if historians can't convince people with their arguments, they won't do it with their titles.

Today in History, and in Ottawa: Vimy Ridge

April 9, 1917. The Battle of Vimy Ridge. April 9, 2010: Day of commemoration at the National War Memorial, Ottawa.

Historica-Dominion Institute, initiators of the Day of Commemoration, has related material.

The Vimy Foundation wants Canadians to wear a Vimy Pin, called "April's poppy." The poppy does not suffice?

Ancestry.ca is temporarily offering open (i.e. free) access to its searchable database of World War One names, Canadian Soldiers of the First World War. [Disclosure: I did a bit of work for Ancestry.ca this year, and currently enjoy access to its collections.]

The New Boss: A long history

As the British election begins, historian Christopher Burgess reflects on the inclination of parties and publicists to focus election campaigns on a presidential one-man-show leader. It goes back, he suggests, a very long way.

[Image: Election poster for the British Conservative Party and/or its leader David Cameron. When I looked for the poster at Google Images, most of the top choices were satirical parodies, but I think this is the real one Burgess discusses.]

When financial journalists write history

Riffing on the flight of the Canadian loonie toward parity with the greenback, the Globe's Report on Business publishes a chronology of the Canadian dollar. The piece mostly illustrates how smart people go all brainless when they turn to history, for the Globe's summary has almost no useful information on the evolution of the dollar. Here, for instance, are two of the first three items:

Early 1600s: Beaver pelts are the one universally accepted medium of exchange, though wheat and moose skins are also legal tender

...

June 8, 1685: The first issue of card money occurs, which is printed on playing cards. The practice is criticized because it's easy to counterfeit.

Except... Throughout this period Canada had a currency, the currency of France, then the colonial power. The unit of value was the livre, subdivided into twenty sols and twelve deniers (much like the old pre-decimalization British pound, shilling, pence, which indeed took their traditional abbreviations from the French terms). Sure, people traded in the standard commodities, but they denominated value in livres just as we would in dollars.

The card money, in the second example, was not money at all, but more like a cheque drawn on a government account. When hard currency was scarce in 1685, the colony's financial official did indeed distribute IOUs on playing cards, but what made them valuable was his signature for the specified amount, denominated in livres to be redeemed when the next shipment of hard currency arrived. The colony's early adoption of government paper might be considered interesting to financial journalists, if they really thought about history.

Going on, the list fails to mention either the adoption of the British pound or its replacement by the Canadian dollar. But you get the picture.

The full text of the RoB's source material, the Bank of Canada's History of the Canadian Dollar by James Powell, is considerably better than this use of it might suggest. You can download the whole text here.

[Thanx Andrew Smith]

Today in History: D'Arcy McGee assassinated

April 7, 1868: Thomas D'Arcy McGee was shot dead on Sparks Street in Ottawa, minutes after leaving a late-night session of the House of Commons.

The Canadian Encyclopedia Online currently features a well-informed summary of the murder and of the conviction of Patrick Whelan. It's by David A. Wilson, the first volume of whose biography of McGee was widely acclaimed a couple of years ago. The second volume, still awaited, may have even more about Whelan and the killing than Wilson is telling here.

A little McGee, on how the prospect of Confederation has already improved the colonies:

The provincial mind, it would seem, under the inspiration of a great question, leaped at a single bound out of mere mercenary struggles for office, and took post on the high and honorable ground from which alone this great subject can be taken in in all its dimensions -- had risen at once to the true dignity of this discussion with an elasticity that does honor to the communities that have exhibited it, and gives assurance that we have the metal, the material, out of which to construct a new and vigorous nationality. (Cheers.)

Image from civilization.ca

Moore at the Literary Review

My essay "The Calamity of Caledonia," is now up at the Literary Review of Canada Online, and in the mail to subscribers, and on magazine racks, too. In it, I consider the endless unresolved confrontation at Caledonia in southern Ontario in light of several decades of developments in British Columbia, starting from the lawsuit known as Calder, which was determined by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973.

Calder’s impact was at first not very visible in British Columbia. British Columbia was then in a situation similar to Ontario today. It was hardly possible to take seriously the idea that land might actually belong to aboriginal people long marginalized on what small reserves the governments had deigned to provide them. For years, British Columbia essentially ignored Calder, and indeed it is unlikely any British Columbia government could have made a wide-ranging acknowledgement of aboriginal title and survived in office. ...
But the court decisions continued to arrive, binding the province ever more tightly and gradually acclimatizing both the government and the citizenry to the idea that aboriginal title could not be avoided. In 1984, a B.C. judicial decision affirmed that where treaties existed, they had to be considered “in the sense in which they would naturally be understood by Indians,” not simply for the convenience of government departments. In 1986, 13 years after Calder, the highest court in British Columbia had to explain to the provincial government that Calder really was the law and it was “a fallacy” for the province to believe it could go on ignoring it. In that same year came a further wake-up call: another British Columbia judgement found that in the absence of treaties, the province could not assume it was free to authorize mining, logging and other economic activities.

Gradually, all the decisions since Calder began to be reflected in land and treaty policy in British Columbia. ...

Also in the April LRC, Pamela Palmater on Tom Flanagan's newest book on aboriginal title issues.

History of hyperlinking

If a blogger links to an online source that is challenged as defamatory, is the blogger then also liable for the defamation?

The BC Court of Appeal recently said no, at least not in the particular case it was studying, though it did not rule out the possibility in other circumstances. It was a 2-1 decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada had decided to hear an appeal.

The internet is not a responsibility-free zone. These issues are complicated.

National Geographic on The Hudson River and Henry H

Douglas Hunter points out that National Geographic has a pretty terrific website on the history and geography of the Hudson River, with video material of Douglas Hunter discussing Henry Hudson among its attractions.javascript:void(0)

(Site has a terrific opening photo by Nick Zungoli ... that I could not copy)

Drivel watch: The Globe on rep-by-pop

Nice to see that many of the blogs I follow also observed the Easter holiday. Okay,Torontoist/Historicist had good stuff on how the city observed Easter in 1910, but in general, it was: To hell with the 24-hour blogging cycle. Even the relentless Daily Dish now takes weekends off.

And if we can take weekends, we should be able to take up leftover news.

I'm still puzzling over the incoherent weirdness of the Globe & Mail's editorial position on changes to the House and Senate last Friday. The paper saluted the revised seat allocations in the House of Commons as being in keeping with George Brown's commitment to the principle of representation by population. Then it noted the inconsistencies that have survived, and declared:

Such disproportions as this ought to become easier to correct, if and when the Senate becomes an elected chamber.

Now, no one has to believe in rep-by-pop. But one would think you either believe in it or you don't. The whole point of an upper house is to countermand the representative lower house. Creating a powerful upper house is a way to confound one person/one vote principles and representation by population, not to reinforce them.

George Brown and the confederation-makers of the 1860s were seriously committed to rep-by-pop principles for the Canadian federation, and therefore they ensured that the upper house would be weak. The Globe and Mail of 2010 seems to think it can endorse rep-by-pop and a powerful, unrepresentative Senate at the same time.

The Globe imagines there could be an upper house in Ottawa in which provinces can "directly elect senators with a mandate to represent their specific concerns." Actually, that's what provincial legislatures exist for. If you give the Senate power to countermand the House, you don't get empowered provinces. You just get a weakened House and a less representative Parliament.

PS. Quite indepedently, Vancouver's Tyee notes an American who gets it.

Geist becomes The Beaver

Geist Magazine announced this morning that it would save a vital piece of Canadian magazine history ... by changing its name to The Beaver.

Spring Book Notes

UTPress has a hot new title: The Canadian Who's Who 1910 [title has been corrected]. Funny thing: I can totally see the appeal.

McClelland & Stewart has Bryan Prince's out-of-slavery family historyShadow on the Household. Prince's own website is here.

Dundurn publishes my friend and former volunteer board colleague Doreen Pendgracs's Before You Say Yes, a book on advice about serving on volunteer boards.

Can't help thinking a good website for a book publisher ought to make it easy to find "New and Forthcoming" or, say, "History" or "Canadiana" without scanning through a thousand backlist titles or downloading the whole catalogue. Just sayin'.