Talk among yourselves...

... 'cause we're taking a break. Look for new postings in the week of August 9.

Andrew Smith on what history teaches

Andrew Smith launches a vigorous attack on the census-killers, in which he argues that if they had only gone to university and learned what he learned this would never had happened:

one of the things the politicians who are hysterically opposed to the mandatory census have in common is that they did not attend or complete university.

Well.... I agree with him about the foolishness of this decision -- and I love his Lincoln's census entry illustration. But Andrew should maybe apply some of the empirical testing he advocates. Stephen Harper, who pushed for the decision, has a graduate degree in the social sciences (as Andrew indeed notes). Tony Clement, who implemented it, has degrees in political science and law. Maxime Bernier, its early advocate, has degrees in commerce and law. And so on.

The argument that the only information society really needs is that provided by markets and prices is one that has thrived in universities. They don't call it the Chicago School of economics because of deep-dish pizza and electric blues. It's from the Economic Department of the University of Chicago. The policy engine of the Harper government comes from the Political Science department of the University of Calgary. The London School of Economics includes many acolytes of Friedrich Hayek. Unwise as it is, the Harper government's hostility to governmental information gathering is something its leaders largely imbibed in university, not despite university.

The idea that governments do not need to gather comprehensive statistical data is a bad one, but it's not one that universities inoculate against. And of course universities shouldn't inoculate against ideas, even unfashionable ones. When Andrew says,

I believe that attacking statistical illiteracy through education will improve society in the long run, since it will encourage people to think more rationally.

"rationally" seems to mean "as we do," and that sounds disturbingly close to a faith that universities will make students will think like their professors and that all professors think alike. Fortunately universities are not unsuccessful at the first proposition and not very successful at the second.

I do agree with Andrew that history professors are useful to society. But this ain't the reason why.

History of transportation

Automobile experts are cautious, to say the least, about the prospects of the Chevrolet Volt and other electric and hybrid cars.

We bought 16 million vehicles this past decade, and less than 100,000 hybrids,” Mr. DesRosiers said about the Canadian market..... North American consumers just aren’t that excited about efficient electric vehicles

Well, hard to argue with that.

We recently bought a hybrid. To me all cars are pretty much the same, and this one serves fine. But I notice one difference. We used to spend about $50 every couple of weeks to fill the tank on our previous car. Now, with the same driving habits, we spend about $35 every three weeks.

Seems to me the world will be a better place when gas is at $5 a litre. But I don't want to buy more of those litres than I have to. And I don't think I'm that strange for feeling that way.

(Photo: Chevrolet Volt, GM via the Globe & Mail)

Time has no beginning and history has no bounds

Jennifer Higgs considers the historical bounds to Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" -- part of a Canadian music history thing going on at HistoryWire.

(My brother had that album new!)

Cities and responsible government

One of the decisive steps in Canadian constitutional history took form as early as 1823, when William Warren Baldwin began arguing that the British colonial power, having delegated certain powers to elected legislatures representing the people of Upper Canada and the other British North American colonies, had no right to remove or alter those powers unilaterally. Powers once delegated could not be recovered, Baldwin insisted, and it would be tyrannous to try. Having given the colonies a constitution in 1791, the imperial parliament "could not alter this law without our consent, for if so, we had no constitution at all." A legislature once empowered to act could not be disempowered. One might say that the whole evolution of Canadian sovereignty flowed from the acceptance of Baldwin's principle.

This weekend in Ontario we saw the Ontario Minister of Transport telling an agency of the city of Toronto it could not design a payment system for Toronto transit systems if the province did not like some of the details.

In an interview, Kathleen Wynne issued a virtual stop order to TTC brass, saying their request-for-proposal for an “open payment” system — where riders pay with a tap or wave of a credit or debit card — is “a complete waste of precious taxpayer dollars.”

Frankly, why should Toronto (or Vancouver or Halifax or Calgary vis a vis their provincial governments) have to give a damn what the provincial cabinet thinks is or is not a waste of the Toronto taxpayers' money?

Today, any provincial official or political scientist or constitutional lawyer will blandly explain to us that cities are "creatures" of the provincial governments. Municipal government is a provincial power under the Constitution, and since the provinces created the cities, they can meddle with them all they want, is the received orthodoxy of Canadian opinion. The fact that the Ontario government has a whole province to run and surely knows and cares less about the fine details of transit management in one city means nothing, let alone the fact that it was Toronto voters, not Ontario voters, who empowered the agencies to spend or even mis-spend the tax dollars in question. When it comes to provincial-municipal relations, we have an extraordinarily primitive black-letter interpretation of constitutional relations, one that legitimizes the most extraordinary routine meddlings of one level of government into the doings of another.

Some urban advocate needs to recover William Baldwin's insight. Legislatures (even city councils) once they have received delegated powers which they apply on behalf of their own constituents, with taxes authorized and contributed by those constituents, must surely be entitled to exercise those powers without constant meddling from the level of government that previously conferred those powers upon them. In the final analysis, you cannot run municipal government on any serious adult basis if a different level of government (not accountable to the city's voters and taxpayers) can countermand civic decisions for any reason or no reason. Responsible government requires a division of powers, and divisions of powers once allocated cannot be cancelled unilaterally at the whim of one party.

The beautiful sport

Some of the fun went out of reporting here on Ryder Hesjedal's Tour de France exploits when they making headlines in all the sports media. In earlier years, this blog was the only place beyond the cycling press that dug down into the small print of www.letour.fr to find how the Tour's only Canadian was doing.

But I followed the Tour when there were zero Canadians. Because it's just the world's best spectator sport.

•  It's simple.  The Tour is about athletes on bikes pushing the limits of human endurance. Watch the Tour cyclists cruise endlessly at 45 kph as if it was easy, and then push up a 25k hill with a constant 8% grade.  Watch them do it again the next day, and the next. There's the glory of sport.
• It's complicated. Somehow a large group of cyclists is more aerodynamic than a small group or a single rider. From that little bit of physics comes all the endlessly subtle dynamics of team cycle racing. At first you just watch the peleton flow through the countryside like a school of fish. Then you begin to learn which teams are up at the front, doing the wind-breaking, setting the pace, and to learn why they are and on whose behalf they are doing it. All that individual effort turns out to be in the service of teamwork of the highest order. All that brute human endurance is disciplined to endless mental calculation and subtle communication -- it turns out to be a brain sport as well as a physical one.
• It's real. The rules are not complicated. The equipment is basic. It's not set in a elaborately created stadium or arena. The playing surface is the world. The athletes are frequently at hand's length from masses of their most passionate fans.
• It's beautiful. I started watching for the travelogue; all those spectacular paysages of France and western Europe, the backdrops of sunflower fields and ruined chateaux and spectacular mountain roads. I still love all that, but now I think the sport itself is even more beautiful.  

And in case you missed it, Ryder Hesjedal 7th overall.  That moment on the Tourmalet, Stage 19, the biggest toughest steepest longest mountain on the Tour, in rain and fog, when Schleck and Contador battled all the way to the finish line first and second, and then the cameras looked for the chase group close behind, consisting of all the rest of the race's handful of still dominant competitors, and it was smaller than ever and the commentator said, "Ryder Hesjedal must have been dropped," and then the camera cut back to the finish line at the summit, and there out of the fog loomed Hesjedal, not behind but ahead of the chase group, having relentlessly pushed ahead of them all, ahead of Denis Menchov, ahead of Vinokourov, ahead of Levi Leipheimer and Carlos Sastre and Lance Armstrong, "putting time into" all the great racers of the day and pushing his bike over the finish line on his own, consolidating himself in the top ten -- now that was a great moment in Canadian sport history.

Okay, Tour's over. And OLN-TV would rather rerun UFOHunters endlessly than cover the Vuelta d'Espana or the Tour of California or any other bike races in the world. Forty-nine weeks in which we will have to stick to Canadian history and parliamentary democracy.

(Photo: Le Tour website Stage 12: Kiryienka, Vinokourov, Hesjedal, and Kloden on the road to Mende.)

Champlain: one of "us," or maybe "them"

Now this is weird. Andrew Coyne has a piece in Maclean's explaining how the governor general to be, David Johnston, spoke of Samuel de Champlain as Canada's first governor, the start of an unbroken line from Champlain to well, him. Coyne sees this imagery as part of a clever plot by Stephen Harper to subvert or to appropriate Quebec nationalist imagery by cleverly treating Canada as a French country as well as an British one and generally by emphasizing the continuities rather than the ruptures (particularly that bloody one on the Plains of Abraham).

Coyne's idea of some cunning political calculation underlying this meme of Champlain as first of the governors general struck me as silly. The concept of an unbroken line of governors general from Champlain to the present is a familiar enough standard of Canadian historiography, or at least of a federalist/monarchist/francophile strand of it. I'm sure I imbibed the notion in Marcel Trudel's graduate seminar. I have not located words of le maitre to that effect, but looking in my own contribution to The Illustrated History of Canada, I find myself noting the title of Governor General "borne by all his [Champlain's] successors down to the present," and I did not think I was claiming anything controversial. Johnston, it seemed to me, had merely soaked up some Canadian history in Quebec.

But then Paul Wells notes that whereas ten days ago the Department of Canadian Heritage page on the governor general said,

The office of the Governor General dates back nearly 400 years to 1608, when Samuel de Champlain acted as the Governor of New France.

it now says:

The office of the Governor General dates back to 1867.

This second statement would surely surprise all the British-appointed Governors General from 1763 to 1867, let alone the French ones back to Champlain, but Wells's puzzlement concerns why the change was made. He writes,

I know of no other explanation for this change than that somebody, somewhere in the department at Heritage, or at the minister’s office, or at Langevin, did not like the attention Johnston kicked up with his remarks.

Maybe they really do care about controlling history down to this level.

In which case they are seriously batshit crazy. But maybe you had vorked that out for yourselves.

Update, April 11: Teacher and artist John Grubber notes:

Sam in fact never was awarded any honours or title, from what I've read. That's the slap in the face that he got from the powers that be repeatedly.

Helena Guergis and parliament

Helena Guergis's theory -- that she ought to get her cabinet seat back because an RCMP inquiry found no grounds for prosecution in her dealings with her husband's various enterprises, his dodgy developer friends, and various other imbroglios -- is not persuasive. Cabinet seat requirements should run quite a bit higher than "not actually convicted of anything."

But it's worth reviewing how our parliamentary democracy functioned in this situation. Helena Guergis got involved in a series of actions which embarrassed or annoyed the government. Let's run a parliamentary audit on what happened next:

• The prime minister dismissed her from cabinet.  This is probably acceptable from a parliamentary democracy point-of-view. Many parliamentary democracies use a collective responsibility theory of cabinet; that is, the whole cabinet wields final authority over who is in and who is out. In some countries, accountability is to caucus -- it is the parliamentary caucus that chooses cabinet ministers, and the prime minister only gets to assign them their specific posts.  But in a strong-leader culture, one can see grounds for allowing a party leader to have substantial influence over who forms his executive team.  Threat to accountability: low.
• The prime minister dismissed her from caucus. The implication is that all caucus members are accountable to the party leader, and not vice versa. Now, democracy requires accountability, and parliamentary democracy requires that the executive be accountable, minute by minute, to the majority of the people's elected representatives. In a situation of political party structures, that has to mean that the executive drawn from the governing party must be responsible to the party caucus. The prime minister and cabinet ministers must be members of the caucus -- and accountable to it.(This is routine in practically every parliamentary democracy in the world, but largely an extinct concept in Canada.) For parliamentary government to maintain accountability, parliamentary caucuses must maintain control over their membership. If the caucus finds Ms. Geurgis unacceptable as a member, that's one thing. For the prime minister unilaterally to declare her expulsion, that's quite another. Threat to accountability: high.
• The prime minister declared she will not be allowed to run again as a party candidate. In 1974 Leonard Jones, the Mayor of Moncton, NB, and a staunch opponent of the Official Languages Act and all things French and Acadian, won the Progressive Conservative nomination for the federal election of that year.  Pressed to take a stand, PC party leader Robert Stanfield employed a proviso in the party rules and refused to sign Jones's nomination papers. Denied the PC nomination, Jones ran and was elected as an independent, but Stanfield's demonstration that all party candidates require their leader's approval quickly became enshrined not only in practice but in law. In a break with the understanding that political parties should be unofficial organizations with no constitutional standing, the authority of party leaders to bestow or deny candidate status on anyone was soon written into the Elections Act. Once again, without debate and without reflection, Canada inverted accountability rules to affirm that MPs are the servants of the party leader, rather than vice versa. The party, the party membership, the constituency organization in Simcoe -- all became simply extensions of the party leader's inclinations.  Threat to accountability: substantial. 

It's an amazing double-think we maintain in our politics. On one hand, everyone decries "the friendly dictatorship," the excess power of the prime minister, and "who do you know in the PMO?" as the sole criteria for political success or for advancing policy objectives. On the other, no one ever pays attention to the practical workings of the machinery by which the prime minister (and other party leaders) are sustained in their unaccountable, anti-democratic authoritarianism.

Out of cabinet, sure. Out of caucus, should be subject to caucus vote. Out of the nomination, should be up to the constituency association.

(Photo: Globe&Mail)

From Canada by land

Today in history:

"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, 22 July 1793. Latitude 52 20 48 N."

I was hoping to use the image from Charlie Farquharson's Histr'y of Canada, which riffs on CW Jeffreys's sketch of Mackenzie at Bella Coola, with Charlie adding "Wouldn't a Dow go great now?" on the rock.  But I could not find either the Jeffreys image or the Don Harron version online. Everything digital all the time still has a ways to go....

Historian freed from jail

I don't really wish jail time on anyone, I guess, but I cannot help thinking Conrad Black's career as historian, thinker, controversialist, and commentator has never flourished so well as during the time he has been incarcerated. Being away from his other career in the business world has also been pretty good for him and for the public.


The law must apply, even as rewritten by George Bush's men on the US Supreme Court. But it seems inevitable that Black's obsession with his failed business career is now going to interfere with the work for which he really has gifts. This was my take on Black's historical work in 2004.


Update, July 22: One of Black's last prison writings, a hostile review of a new history of the Richard Nixon presidency. (Thanks, Cliopatria.)

(Photo: The Telegraph, London.)

If you patriate a second time, does that become repatriation?

You thought we "patriated" the constitution in 1982?

Former National Archivist Ian Wilson and some allies now want to bring from Britain to Canada one of the actual British North America Act documents of 1867 for permanent display here. Currently, it is alleged, it lies in a "musty storeroom" at the British public record office. (One rather doubts the musty part, but journalists are not allowed to write about archives without including either "musty" or "dusty" at least once.)

There is a sort of precedent. In 1988, as part of bicentennial commemorations, Australia borrowed a copy of its analogous constitutional document from Britain through a formal loan agreement -- and then refused to return it. Vancouver Sun has the details (h/t HNN) on the Canadian campaign

You might think if Canada took the British North America Act, 1867, so seriously, we would not have officially renamed it the Constitution Act, 1867... but that's another story.

Apparently there's a website: www.bringbacktheact.ca

University doesn't need ethics?

Happened to be linked to this news of the University of Toronto closing its Centre for Ethics from the terrific but entirely non-Canadian website Crooked Timber. I guess Canadian universities are closing things down so fast the media and blogosphere cannot keep up.

Mexican history moment

The rise and fall of Emperor Agustin I, with firing squads, courtesy of Executed Today, a website I continue to have a fingers-over-the-eyes fascination with.


Update, July 20: Hey, this was really Canadian history too. Mark Reynolds writes about the Ontario connection of the other executed emperor of Mexico, Maximilian I:

I don't know if you've ever been to Guelph, Ont., but the downtown is dominated by an enormous Catholic church in the Gothic style - one that is far larger than the Catholic population of the city at the time it was built really needed. My Dad (who's from Guelph) insists that the parish priest of the time was from Austria (true) and was a boyhood friend of Maximilian's (no idea).

The story is that the priest managed to convince his newly crowned friend to fund the construction of the church. The first payments arrived, and the foundations of Our Lady of Sorrows (which would have been bigger than Cologne's Cathedral, according to the original plans) were laid, but then Maximilian ended up on the wrong end of a firing squad and the river of money dried up. The current church has a footprint of about a quarter of the planned one.  

I looked into it, but never found a scrap of proof that there was anything to it.

I know Guelph and the big church, but the story is new to me. One wonders what a cleric with friends like these would have to do to get himself exiled to Canada West in the 1860s. Even Cardinal Ratzinger didn't send his problem priests that far away.

Tour 2010: Our boy in the big leagues

This is becoming a terrific Tour de France. I thought after the Alps Ryder Hesjedal's glory days were over.  Fourteenth overall and barely five minutes behind the learders, he seemed too highly placed to be allowed a breakaway on the flat stages, and though he has been very consistent in the mountains, he didn't look likely to get up them ahead of ten or so of the best climbers.

Then yesterday! He did break away with a crowd of strong riders. At one point he was "virtual third" -- that is, if the stopped the race at that moment he would be third. Problem is, you have to finish the day.  After going out ahead in a group of four and getting a ton of attention from the cameras and commentators, Hesjedal was caught by the fast-attacking peleton in the last few kilometers, and so he came in as part of the crowd, holding on to his overall standing while losing a minute or so to the overall leaders. Coulda been really something, ended up just a holding action.

A week to Paris. What's up next? If he maintains his consistent standard for the next few days in the grim, steep Pyrenees, he will stay in the top 15, even move up. He'd need some heroic above-expectations mountain days to move up more than a place or two. And of course every day there are riders who break under the strain.

Update, July 19: Did fine on Sunday, too.

Update, July 20: Moving up; tenth overall after yesterday's stage, as some leading contenders slipped back on another tough mountain stage. Two more mountain days... Meanwhile Bruce Arthur in the National Post has a lively summary of what went on between the maillot jaune contenders up on the big hill.

Schleck delivered perhaps the most interesting quote ever uttered by a Luxembourger, saying, "My stomach is full of anger. I want to take my revenge."

Coming from a fresh-faced stick insect with teenage sideburns, that was eminently enjoyable. And however he takes that revenge, you can bet he'll do it with sportsmanship, and that's why everybody should be cheering for Andy Schleck.

James T Angus 1928-2010 RIP

Once I needed to know something about a 19th century timber operation in Ontario called the Georgian Bay Lumber Company.  To my surprise, I found there was actually a book about it: A Deo Victoria, a kind of local history/business history/biography by James T. Angus, longtime education prof at Lakehead University and loyal son of the Severn River corner of Georgian Bay.  I forget why the study of a local timber enterprise was entitled "Victory from God," but it was a useful book to me at the time.

Angus, who wrote lots of other Ontario histories, died recently at 82, and The Globe and Mail gave him a pretty substantial obit.

Canadian Historical Association on the long form census controversy

CHA letter to the minister here.

Online petition in favour of the mandatory longform here.

Life and death of the digital endnote

What’s with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent?

Brett Holman didn't like the idea much four years ago. Now the website in question, containing all the endnotes for a history of British-German relations, has vanished. The author is dead, so who's gonna care enough to fix it?

Holman describes this as a trend that has not taken off, but he links to suggestions to the contrary. Certainly several University of Toronto Press histories followed this procedure: Martin Friedland's University of Toronto: A History has no endnotes other than those posted to a UTP website.(Correction, July 19: Charles Levi points out the notes were also published as a separate book that could be ordered from UTP.)  Constance Backhouse's Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada has 150 pages of endnotes but refers readers seeking "extensive notes with complete details" to the UTP site. On a quick check, I could find the online notes to Friedland as advertised, but not the Backhouse notes.

Colour-Coded is from 1999 and Friedland's university history from 2002. How's this practice been doing in Canadian academic publishing since then?

As someone says in the discussion: "footnotes: the original hyperlinked metadata."

Update, July 19: This is awkward.  Misty de Meo points out that the link above is defective.  Try this one instead.  And belated credit to Cliopatria too

Adam Sisman on Hugh Trevor-Roper

Trevor-Roper was not merely a clever, but also rather a great man.

Not a common or popular view of the late English historian, but it's the case a new biography makes, according to A.N. Wilson in The Guardian Online.

Scholars on the longform census controversy

The University Affairs blog has a good round-up of academic and general criticism of Statistics Canada's decision to abandon the long-form census in favour of a voluntary survey.

Is this "a direct attack on the ability of government to make smart decisions" and "the Conservative government's latest act of gratuitous stupidity." as Dan Gardner puts it. Or just short-sighted administration at StatsCan?  Those seem to be the alternatives posed by the critics. 


Or are they responding rationally to the public's very real and every growing resistence to all kind of surveying, particularly surveying with a jail threat behind it?


Historians who recall Statistics Canada's enthusiasm a few years ago for keeping century-old census data secret forever may not be inclined to give the agency the benefit of the doubt. And its successful insistence, which seemed ill-advised and stubborn at once, on giving citizens answering the 2006 census the power to deny future citizens access to 2006 data even in 2106, further erodes confidence in this decision.

Canada Rules at the Tour de France (this time for real)

For three years (check the July postings in the blog archives for the evidence), regulars of this blog, and I do believe there are some of you, have been putting up with my fanboy effusions about the Tour de France, offered on the thin justification that the presence in the race of a Canadian, Victoria's Ryder Hesjedal, makes them all relevant to this blog's themes.

A week ago, I claimed Canada ruled at the Tour de France on the basis of two Canadian participants this year. Well, we are a week in now, we have just seen the first of the mountain stages that will separate the big dogs from the rest of the pack. And my Canadian rider Ryder is ... THIRD OVERALL.

Lance Armstrong? Back in the dust? Alberto Contador? Back in the dust. Fabien Cancellera? Fifteen minutes back in the dust.

Still a long way to Paris, and every day has risks of disaster.  But Ryder Hesjedal is the real deal. Christian Vande Velde, the leader of his team, went down to a serious injury on the second day. Suddenly Hesjedal was freed of his assignment to support CVV and able to take his own shot.  Now the other riders of the team are supporting him, and he's been able to deliver.

A few more good days in the Alps and Pyrenees and everyone will notice it is so. You read it here first.

The news sources I normally follow are not much interested... but it's getting some coverage, such as here in the hometown Victoria Times-Colonist (it's their photo too).

Update, July 14:  Hesjedal seems to be working at being what you might call the elite-level journeyman. In Stages 8 and 9, both massive mountain-climbing stages, he has not kept up with the likely winners and he has lost both time and standing (12th overall) after stage 9. But he never lost touch with the leaders, and he has not been "broken" on any climb. That is, he has not fallen into the kind of disastrous exhaustion that can swiftly drop a contender many miles and many minutes behind the pack at the front. Hesjedal rides his race day after day, staying in touch, moving past serious contenders who do crack. Wiggins, Armstrong, Cadel Evens, and Cancellara have all had such days in this Tour alone.

Hesjedal's biggest limitation is that he does not not have his own Hesjedals. Carmin currently lacks a corps of team members strong enough to support him the way he used to support Christian Vande Velde. Most of Hesjedal's Garmin team seems to fall way back in the mountains (as far as one can tell from the selective coverage -- neither the French cameras nor the British-American commentators take much interest in a lone Canadian!). Most days only one Garmin team rider, Johan van Summeran, has stayed up with him, and even he seems to have faded in the big hills.

But if Hesjedal can keep avoiding catastrophe and limiting his time losses, he can still rank high at the finish.  Meanwhile, who knows who else will crack? I'm hooked.

Michael Barry, the Canadian Sky Team support rider is way down th standings but still in the race.  He's also writing commentary about the race for The Times of London -- but it's paywalled.

More on heroes and prime ministers

Roderick Benns gives us one upside the head:

I was disappointed to read Professor Andrew Smith’s blog on how wrong it is for Canadian prime ministers to be considered heroes, and for your support of its content. Thanks for hearing me out on this one.

As owner of Fireside Publishing House, which is committed to the Leaders and Legacies series on Canada’s prime ministers and other Canadian leaders, we are of a decidedly different mindset.

According to Oxford, a hero is “a person distinguished by courage, noble deeds, outstanding achievements, etc.”

John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier were not heroes under this definition? It boggles the mind that anyone could say otherwise. (You will notice the definition does not cite infallibility, for Macdonald and Laurier, like the lot of us, would surely falter.)

Professor Smith’s comments are among the worst kind of tall poppy syndrome comments I have read in some time. To think that talent or achievement might distinguish one person from another!

He writes “my own preference would be to abolish the official residence, cut the salary of the Prime Minister to the average male wage, and give the guy a bus pass.”

What would this teach our young people? That political public service is not really valued? That we, as Canadians, need not have any faith or respect for our own institutions? This truly is disrespectful.

He also writes, “…naming a street after a historical figure implies that they are a hero, someone to be praised.”

Yes, we would not want any praise for our leaders, please -- we’re Canadian! Why should Macdonald be recognized for “courage, noble deeds or outstanding achievements” like, say, facilitating the birth of a nation or manifesting the longest continental railroad in the world, among a dozen other key planks.

Do the Americans take it too far? From our standpoint, of course they do. But it’s in their blood and it’s their country. If a U.S. president stopped to take a pee somewhere you can find a plaque about it. And good for them.

Our prime ministers (and other types of leaders) are people who provide living evidence of personal sacrifice, service to country, and, yes, ambition. From my standpoint, I want children to know this is possible for them. I want them to know that serving one’s country will not invite ridicule or disdain but rather respect and appreciation, assuming their intent is in the best interests of their fellow Canadians.

I don’t want to live in a country where we have ‘EveryMan Avenue.’ Give me Macdonald Blvd – or even Wellington – any day of the week.

Some years ago I wrote -- amazing where a historical career will take you -- a Guide to the Gravesites of the Prime Ministers (downloadable pdf here) for Parks Canada, which was marking each of them with a plaque and a flag.

It was a nice little project. But I was left with a certain doubt. Could we imagine ourselves, at some distant future date, visiting the gravesite of Stephen Harper or (should events run that way) Michael Ignatieff. Don't we squirm a bit?

Roderick Benns makes strong points. Of course achievement should be honoured. Still, there is much to be said for the idea that prime ministers are citizens like the rest of us, partisan and proud of it, given a position of responsibility by the elected representatives of the people but capable of being returned instantly to private life when the legislature's preferences change. If we make too much of prime ministers from the past, does it encourage an unhealthy deference to the current ones?

Call ourselves an institute

What's most striking about the tempest in a teapot over the possible renaming of Ottawa's Wellington Street "Macdonald Avenue" -- is how much the discussion relies on non-academic historians. In coverage I've seen, the debate is led, quite ably, by writer Rob Plamondon (yes, make the change), the Macdonald-Cartier Institute Society(no, don't), Andrew Cohen of Historica-Dominion (yes), and Rudyard Griffiths of the former Dominion Institute (no). Here's a well-sourced story on a matter of historical meaning, and the press doesn't see the need to consult a single professor of history, not even the regular quotables (I'm thinking of you, Des).

I find this a good thing, mostly. We benefit from an engaged, informed historical "public sector" drawing the links between historical meaning and public policy choices. 

But it also reflects what we might call "the silence of the academy" these days. Among the army of Canadianists in our university history departments, there are many busy, dedicated and hardworking scholars, but vanishingly few, it seems, who are writing big books or otherwise disseminating ideas that resonate with broader ideas about Canadian history.  I try to cover the waterfront, looking for big, serious, important contributions about the history of this country... and some days the gleanings seem pretty thin, compared to the historical resources we have.

So I'm starting to read In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (by Ian McKay and Robin Bates) with added interest. At first glance, it seems to be a professorial attack on history done by people who are not professors. I'm eager to know more, but I wonder if the simple fact that so much history is done by people who are not history professors is going to be a subtext here. 

As for the controversy itself, I like the point of view of Professor Andrew. particularly on the problems in the trend to pedestalizing our prime ministers.

Update, July 13: Petition to save the Wellington Street name is here.

Queen's Plate History

In 1939, when the king and queen of the day visited Canada, the treasurer (i.e., the elected head) of the Law Society of Upper Canada (i.e., Ontario), D. Lally McCarthy, was determined that their majesties must visit Osgoode Hall and be received by the bench and bar of the province.


Unfortunately Osgoode Hall had been left off the schedule. One of the royal aides-de-camp, seemingly well informed about Toronto society, unkindly remarked,

"I wonder if McCarthy has not forgotten that Their Majesties are in Toronto on the day that the King's Plate is run at the Woodbine races. My recollection is that on that particular day, the bench and bar of Toronto were to be found almost to a man, at Woodbine rather than at Osgoode Hall!"

McCarthy was not consoled.

I fear that nowadays that neither the members of the bench nor the bar are sufficiently well off to pay the entrance fee to the Ontario Jockey Club.... We will have to take our place on the curb to welcome their Majesties.

Canadians rule at the Tour de France

Okay, not rule, not yet, but there are two Canadian riders in this year's TdF, starting in Rotterdam today and televised on the Outdoor Life network. That's two more Canadians than the entire World Cup. And now that the Black Stars of Ghana are out, who you gonna cheer for anyway?

Victoria's Ryder Hesjedal (at right, from last year's tour), who I interviewed for a recent Canada's History piece about cycling history, is up for his third consecutive Tour with the Garmin team -- and coming off stage wins in the tours of Italy Spain and California earlier this year.

Michael Barry of Toronto, a veteran of all the great road races except le Tour, finally gets his chance. He's been picked up by Britain's Team Sky to help pull Bradley Wiggins up to the front of the race.

Evidently Barry's new memoir Le Métier, is a terrific inside look at the world of professional cycling, not excluding for once the drugs. Maybe some Canadian publisher will pick up the Canadian rights if Barry does well, but there's a blog too -- though one suspects he won't be updating it much in the next 21 days.

She's nice but she's foreign.

There's no doubt the Canadian monarchy still has legs. Queen Elizabeth evidently drew the largest crowd to the Canada Day events on Parliament Hill since, well, since the last time she came. And she has been inspiring several of my friends and constant reads to share defences of the monarchical principle.

I ain't convinced. We can't go on with this rent-a-queen system. As Michael Bliss said during the prorogation crisis last winter:

The whole mess of that crisis ought to underline how ill suited Canada’s monarchical government has become for a 21st-century democracy.

My own republican thoughts republished here.