Book Notes: Bill Graham, The Call of the World (part two)

In the previous post inspired by Bill Graham's memoir The Call of the World,  I was contemplating Graham's brief vivid summary (pp 76-77) of the 1980s shift from global tariff reductions (largely completed) to a global campaign against non-tariff barriers to trade.

Did the World Trade Organization's official approval of a war on non-tariff barriers (virtually all of which are governmental or quasi-governmental actions) give cover and impetus to the anti-regulation, anti-government ideological crusade we have all been plagued by in the recent half-century -- with dire consequences for everything from house prices to economic inequality to the survival of democracy.

As an international trade lawyer in the 1980s, Graham was instinctively supportive of free trade.  His whole career had concerned smoothing the international business operations of his clients, and any government policy that complicated such operations seemed worth opposing.

But in 1988, Graham was running as a Liberal candidate in that year's federal election, and his party and its leader John Turner were basing the whole Liberal campaign on opposition to Prime Minister Mulroney's free trade agreement with the United States.

Graham's explanation for why he supported the Liberal's anti-free trade campaign is instructive:  

If you are going to have economic integration, you'll need an institutional framework to oversee it. The tighter the integration, the more sophisticated that international framework has to be. [at p.105-6]

Graham had spent many years observing the range of trade courts and other impartial arbiters that the European community had established and also the long struggle to make the World Trade Organization into a kind of global trade court -- on the principle that independent tribunals were essential to preventing larger economic powers from bullying smaller ones under the guise of harmonization.

"The Americans would never agree to a similar framework in North America," Graham continues. Canada's 1989 Free Trade Agreement, with only one large economy and one small one participating:

was a North American model with inadequate institutional mechanisms to protect our interests. Given the asymmetry, the most powerful guy usually rules.

When the FTA and then NAFTA came into effect, Graham noted how the American advantage worked out.  If the US disregarded its free-trade commitments (e.g., softwood lumber), Canada's only recourse was to impose tariffs as punishment.  But the American counter-tariffs would always be more damaging.  In practice, there was no recourse.

The looser the rules and the looser the dispute-resolution mechanism to enforce those rules, the more the Americans could get away with." (p.137)  

Graham wrote this in 2015 and died in 2019. Trumpian tariffs were not on his horizon. Still, it's a more precise and succinct description of our current relationship with the United States than most of what is being written today.

Disuniting the States: Updated

The Lawyers Guns and Money blog -- a bunch of historians, but in US election years the blog is all local politics all the time, as now  -- has a note about a couple of recent novels about how the United States splits into rival states along ideological grounds.  One they mention is by Emily St. John Mandel, whom we claim as Canadian. Omar El Akkad, also Canadian, made his name with a new-civil-war novel. I think there was a modern civil-war movie too for about five minutes.

It's been my theory for years that all that really holds the United States together is ruling the world.  Absent that, what do Oregon and Texas and Minnesota and Florida and South Dakota and Maine have in common?  Some fiction writers are awakening to the possibilities.  

Instead of busily negotiating another surrender to the almighty United States, as we seem to be doing again this week, maybe we should just wait out the completion of these novelistic predictions. 

Update, August 22, 2026:  With Prime Minister Carney's government declining the surrender demands of the United States, today feels like Liberation Day, whatever hardships ensue. Molly Unger sums everything up:

                     What really holds the US together is:

a) a deep conviction that the US is the best, most powerful, most enviable, most righteous country in the world;

b) a deep conviction that the US needs no one and nothing from any country, ever;

c) a deep conviction that everyone in the world wants to live in America and be an American;

d) a deep conviction that the US must take continuous action to keep everyone out;

e) a deep conviction that organized government is greatly overrated;

f) a deep conviction that history comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Next Update, August 26, 2026:  Molly Unger reports on:  "The Only Time I've Ever Agreed With Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper""And if I was still prime minister, I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we're facing... I would accept any level of damage to preserve the independence of the country."

 

 

History of the Grimke family -- and the new book about them

Allan Levine draws my attention to a story in the New York Times about an emerging scandal in historical scholarship and publishing.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family by Tufts University historian Kerry K. Greenridge starts with the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of a slave-owning plantation family in South Carolina who became famous for their abolitionist activity in the Northern states well before the Civil War.  But she also introduces the black Grimkes, who include three black sons of Sarah's and Angelina's plantation-owner brother; the three sons' mother, the enslaved woman Nancy Weston; and other black members of the extended Grimke family down to the twentieth century.

Published in 2024, The Grimkes became a much praised and widely read new study of slavery and freedom. Until lots of scholars of slavery began questioning the source notes for the book -- many of which they said could not be found in the cited archives -- and for uncredited borrowings from other historians.  Book and author are in trouble, the author is fighting back, and her university and publishers are distancing themselves from her. 

Full story in the New York Times: if I have done this right, non-subscribers to the Times should be able to access this gift link. 

Read of the day: Wesley Wark on leaving NORAD

Historian and security analyst Wesley Wark has an (admittedly) provocative article up at The Walrus online today, setting out why Canada should be planning for the end of NORAD and for a new NATO-based security alliance for the North American and European north.  (Wark's childhood experiences, we discover, include some years spent at a NORAD base in Montana.)

Image: Stanley Kubrick, "Dr Strangelove."

Book Notes: Jill Lepore on constitutional amendments.

 "It is intended to be amended," is the epigraph that starts Jill Lepore's We The People, a history of the U.S. constitution .  She actually takes the quoted line from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but it is no joke. 

She means it absolutely seriously, and much of the argument of her book is how the eighteenth century aspirations of the American constitution has hardened into stone, into bone, and how it has in recent decades become pretty much unamendable.

Now the US constitution is well over 200 years old, and showing its age. Many of its fundamentals  -- the Electoral College, the Senate -- were intended to prevent and negate popular (and even representative) government, and have succeeded very well even as popular sovereignty -- "We the People" -- has become the nearly universal expectation. How does the United States move forward when so much amendment is needed and so little is possible?

In general, the mid-nineteenth Canadian constitution is much more flexible and much less in need of fundamental amendment, in my opinion, but the problem is there.  The Canadian amending formula is not yet fifty, but our constitution is also pretty much unamendable. Who in Canada is writing a big popular book about that? 

New Map of North America -- (Greg Curnoe 1972)

 

History of voting, of accountability, of the conventions of the parliamentary system

This op-ed about electoral corruption in Alberta, by Rachel Notley, former NDP premier of Alberta, is worth reading (gift link) and very discouraging too. 

...the UCP proposed a plan for Trump-style gerrymandering. They rejected the independent boundaries commission report, silencing the voices of the thousands of Albertans who participated in a fair, transparent and democratic process. Instead, an advisory panel will propose a new electoral map for Alberta, overseen by a committee of politicians dominated by UCP members. They will not be required to consult with the public. It seems likely that the final say on the map will rest with the politicians.

Blatant corruption of the electoral process is troubling enough. What's worse is the sense that this kind of majoritarian autocracy is gaining ground across Canada. 

Today political parties are almost entirely run by professional managers and strategists instead of elected caucuses  and volunteer members. The faith that there are conventions of appropriate behaviour in politics is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Governance really is all about winning and getting one's way, and not only in Alberta. (Compare: Quebec, and examples don't lack in Ontario, either.) Political processes where customary behaviour is expected but not protected are widely endangered.  

It has long been shocking how deeply electoral gerrymandering has been routine and normal for both parties in American politics. Though the Democratic Party has long been prepared to ban the practice, the Republican Party defends it to the last ditch.  So it becomes more extreme  and more accepted --even necessary -- with each electoral cycle. 

(Add to that the constitutional gerrymanders of American Senate representation, the Electoral College, etc. US electoral problems do not start or end with the Trump regime.)

In Canada, the profoundly corrupt wartime election of 1917 persuaded even the winner of that election to support the Dominion Elections Act, which led to the establishment of the independent Chief Electoral Officer for Canada. Partisan influences in election processes, and eventually in constituency boundary-setting, were gradually replaced. 

Details of how electoral processes were gradually corruption-proofed -- and then corrupted again -- in the provinces are less well documented. But some provinces are demonstrating how easily independent commissions are easily bypassed by majoritarian interference of the kind Rachel Notley exposes in the article cited above.

Unlike the United States, we do have courts in Canada that will consider ruling against electoral corruption.  A 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision sets out "effective representation" rights that courts can enforce.  Quebec has already run up against these, and Alberta now seems likely to. In both those provinces, setbacks in the courts tend to lead to "notwithstanding" legislation and/or separatist agitation.  

Judicial review is something. But look how easy it is to corrupt the process for appointing judges!   

George Brown on talking to Americans

Previously posted on this site in 2018, but some things never get old. This is newspaperman and statesman of confederation George Brown on talking to Americans... in 1852: 

...when you get hold of a Yankee, drive it home to him; tell him his country is disgraced; wound his pride; tell him his pure institutions are a grand sham; send him home thoroughly ashamed of the black blot on his country's escutcheon. In steamboat, or railroad, or wherever you are, hunt up a Yankee and speak to him faithfully; there is no other man so sensitive as to what others think of him.

H/T Russ Chamberlayne, who first drew this to my attention.

New reasons to close the 49th Parallel

 

“We’ve never needed them [NATO] … They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines.”

What's the difference between Donald Trump and Nato, somebody said on Bluesky.  "Donald Trump would never put on a uniform to defend the United States." 

Part of what's troubling about this stupid cruel insult is that vast numbers of Americans will presume it is true. Canadian historian Marc Milner's recent book Second Front is a close examination of how most American historians have tended to downplay non-American contributions to the D-Day landings and pretty much the whole of World War II. 

Even now, many Americans cling to their bizarre faith that  America alone represents freedom and democracy and remains a lonely beacon to the world.  

News of the Day

Russell Chamberlayne shares something from the newspapers:

Canada must be incorporated with the American government. That is an event which our brethren in that quarter ardently desire. The waters of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence are assigned by Nature to the American empire. If the United States pursued the ambitious politics of European governments and waged war for territory, the possession of Canada would be a sufficient inducement for hostility. Canada is essential to the security and interests of the American people, whose sons are daily flocking to its territory. It is not for glory; it is not even for security, that America enters into hostility. She wishes only to pursue a lawful trade.

It is from the Quebec Mercury of November 11 1811, reprinting something from "the American papers" by "Wallace" which it feels would be of interest to its readers. 

History of the decline of Detroit Iron

 

(Table: from Adam Tooze's Chart Book, an amazing daily aggregate of data -- from a historian.)

Do we need an automotive trade deal with the United States?

It's unlikely we are going to have one much longer, given the triumph of rage politics in the United States. Also, it seems the concessions Canada will have to make just to get a negotiation going will be crippling.

Given those realities, is one worth fighting for?  Look at the declining share the United States has in world automobile production.  Down from a quarter to ten percent in 30% -- in thirty years (and that lumps in Canadian production of American cars).  Why fight to stay on the side of the losers?

If we can talk to Saab about starting the production of fighter jets, is it possible we could talk to all the serious automakers in the world about the opportunity to entirely replace Detroit iron in the Canadian market.  Hundred per cent electric, of course. Support the workforce through the transition, and eave the market for F-150s and Winnebagos to the Americans, and get with the global trend.

Just spitballin' here.  But what about some vision out of Ottawa.

 

Ged Martin explains the American pardoning power

Ged Martin, the British scholar of (mostly) Commonwealth histories, diverges a moment from his usual range of topics to provide a very detailed history of the emergence of the pardon power, now being used for malign purposes by Orange Hitler. 

It's far more detailed than any such explanation I have seen in American media.  It may also be more than you actually want to read on the subject.  But it will reinforce in you the assumption that Ged Martin seems to know a great deal about practically everything. 

History of Free Speech

Like many Canadians, I'd barely heard of Charlie Kirk.  I try not to get very deep in the weeds of Trumpazoidal America. 

But given how it's becoming the American Right's opportunity to silence just about anybody, it seems worth saying something.  

Coverage of Kirk's death is a Canadian issue too.  I saw Kara Swisher noting today that the appropriate headline for any serious media is not "ABC cancels Jimmy Kimmel over Kirk comments"  but '"ABC cancels Jimmy Kimmel after threats from Trump." Sadly, both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail failed this test this morning, both going for the first of the two headline options above -- and regurgitating American wire copy rather than considering a Canadian point of view.

I still don't know that much about Charlie Kirk, except that he apparently once said  

"It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment."

The Second Amendment is the one about gun rights. The First Amendment is the free speech one, now seemingly in abeyance. 

Someone who does know about Kirk and what he represents is the American writer Ta-Nahesi Coates. I haven't heard if Vanity Fair has been ordered to cancel him but just in case, here's the link.

 

History of Decline and Fall?

  Paul Krugman states what the vital American issue is:

The question is what happens if investors change their minds — if they decide that we’re an unserious country in which the governing party believes in voodoo economics and the president is an authoritarian ruler who spends much of his time rage-tweeting about popular musicians.

And what may happen: 

Right now I’m worried that the U.S. might be facing an emerging-market-type crisis: A “sudden stop,” an abrupt cutoff of inflows of foreign capital. If we have a crisis like that it could, in particular, cause a severe housing crash.

And reminds us of  something called Dornbusch's law:

"The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you could have thought."

 

 

Book Notes: Alan Taylor on (North) American Civil Wars

What's so civil about a civil war?  Only that "civil" can mean of or pertaining to citizens or communities of citizens. Hence civil wars are wars within communities, within states.

It's a term the American historian Alan Taylor uses repeatedly and cleverly. In 2010 he published The Civil War of 1812. That's a civil war in his story because many Canadians fought on the American side, New Englanders who opposed the war struggled with western Americans who promoted it, Indigenous nations were pulled into both sides, and groups like the Irish tried to make it an aspect of their own national struggles.  It's probably the best book inspired by the War of 1812 bicentennial, offering a detailed history of the war while constantly alive to local details and discordant themes that rewrite the dominant narrative.

More recently Taylor has published American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873. It is obviously dominated by the American Civil War (indeed, it's part of a multi-book "continental history of the United States" he has been writing).  But Taylor emphasizes that at this time Mexico was also engaged in a civil war, one that included both American and French invasions, as well as a violent struggle between Mexico's conservative aristocracy and its burgeoning liberal underclass asserting the rights of poorer and even mixed race Mexicans. He is determined to bring in Canada too. There was no war over Canada, so he makes the most of Canada's need to prevent "violent division" between Francophones and Anglophones (plus the American military threat) in order to incorporate the national- building struggle of Canada into the continental story of civil strife in all three societies.

It's all very well done. Taylor is as good at seizing the broad lines and big socio-economic themes as at summarizing campaigns and battles. And he shapes it all with remarkable mini-biographies, like those of Jane McManus and Jane Cannon, two mid-century American women to whom he devotes the opening pages of this book  -- and, later in the story, Mary Ann Shadd Cary. He also takes pleasure at more than one point in pointing out repeated disproofs of the eternal American faith that Canadians are forever begging to be given "freedom" through annexation to the American colossus.

I'm well disposed to his Canadian coverage not only because he footnotes me often enough for some of his vivid details. His spotting of continent-wide themes is valuable and fresh. But really, his Canadian coverage is brief in comparison to the Mexican material, let along the American material. The bulk of his Canadian material draws on the mid-20th century histories of Creighton, Morton, and Careless, plus Richard Gwyn's Nation Maker, a well made book but one that draws most of its interpretative framework from the earlier consensus. 

I can't help but lament the thinness of the Canadian historical work compared to recent American and Mexican materials, which keeps him from giving a richer account of the issues being struggled over here. There just is not that much new political/diplomatic/military scholarship about mid-nineteenth century Canada from which he can draw. His brief notes on indigeneous policies and resistance are perceptive but very brief. On political matters, Macdonald comes out well without being hero-worshipped.   

The world’s leading liar on restoring truth

 

The New Yorker observes that American vice-president J.D Vance now sits on the board of the Smithsonian Institution, that country's premier collection of museums, with the assignment to remove "improper ideology" from it and particularly from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”  A recent tribute to baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson recently avoided mentioning his skin colour or just what he pioneered that earned the tribute

"Truth" will apparently include mandating the removal of references to slavery from the African American museum.

In Canada the Museums Act, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board Act, and similar laws give a broad autonomy to public cultural institutions, such that the government of Canada does not give direction to its museums "on cultural matters." But no doubt American legislation gives similar guarantees to the Smithsonian.

In Toronto groups such as the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and ABC Toronto fulminate against the "rewriting of history" every time someone suggests that white males from the 19th century are not the only ones for whom schools, streets, and public buildings can be named or statues raised.  (ABC hates bike lanes too -- being mostly a local politics pressure group.)  And Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre promises in the current election campaign to "defund woke nonsense" and punish universities that engage in it. So there is that.   

Three Things that won't help us against Trump #1 Interprovincial Trade Reform UPDATED

So the Trump tariffs are on. And so is the Canadian resistance. Here are three things not to be too reliant on in the struggle: Ending interprovincial "trade barriers." The King. Europe.

1.  Interprovincial trade barriers.

I was heartened the other day to read the economist Mark Lee casting doubt on interprovincial trade-barrier reductions as a easy source of Canadian economic strength. 

In response to the threat of Trump tariffs, an old narrative about interprovincial trade barriers has risen from the dead. The idea that eliminating supposedly massive internal trade barriers would lead to thousands of dollars per year in gains for ordinary Canadians makes for great soundbites, but should we really believe that there is a free lunch to be had?

While politicians have claimed that Canada’s GDP could grow by up to $240 billion, those numbers simply don’t make sense based on what we know about interprovincial trade.

If anything, Mark Lee is too polite. A decade or so ago, for a research project I was associated with, I found myself reading background papers for "Tear Down These Walls," a Canadian Senate report on interprovincial trade barriers and the need to reduce them.  Some reliable economists, to be sure, argued there were gains to be made. But there were also claims that eliminating internal trade barriers could be worth "from $1 billion to $35 billion," which suggested the numbers were simply being pulled out of thin air -- much like today's $240 billion. 

Things that were being claimed as "trade barriers" back then included: provincial retirement funding programs, provincial pension regimes, provincial securities regulation, provincial minimum wage standards, provincial environmental and health regulations, and many more (virtually all?) aspects of provincial policy, even provincial subsidies to First Nations communities.

Province A required trucking companies to spend more on truck safety compliance than Province B did? Trade barrier! Province C required businesses to pay a more generous minimum wage than Province D? Trade barrier! Province X's climate change actions might cost a business more than Province Y's? Trade barrier.  

No doubt there are some provincial regulatory regimes that could be harmonized for greater mutual convenience. But it was pretty clear that the intention of many of those appearing before the Senate hearings was not to create national prosperity out of thin air so much to launch a full-frontal assault on the rights of provinces to use their legitimate authority to regulate business activities in the best interests of their citizens.  

There never have been tariffs on interprovincial trade in Canada, none since 1867. Indeed even our international free trade agreements in recent decades have been more about reducing regulation rather than reducing cross-border tariffs, which were vanishing by the 1960s. Trump's enthusiasm for tariffs is truly weird, and the American people need to give him a firm whack upside the head for inflicting them.

But the people who promise that granting your right to have your local beer supplier stock some obscure craft beer from the other side of the country will lead to national economic salvation? They have another agenda entirely. As a way of responding to the Trump tariffs, I suspect this interprovincial trade furor is a meaningless distraction. 

I'll get to 2) The King and 3) Europe in the next couple of days.

Update, March 5: CBC News recently offered an inept and cheerleaderish analysis of the interprovincial trade issue. One would think the CBC News might ponder why a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada not long ago dismissed the outlandish claims that populate this piece. But no. (Sometimes I see the point of Pierre Poilievre's animus against the CBC. What a bushleague news operation it has become!)

Update, March 6:  Linda McQuaig takes up the interprovincial trade issue. 

Today, our business leaders seem, above all, determined to use the Trump crisis to win concessions they’ve long sought from Ottawa, like more tax breaks and deregulation.

Indeed, deregulation appears to be the main impetus for removing interprovincial trade barriers. 

And here's economist Marjorie Griffin Cohen interjecting a little common sense: 

The main reason businesses do not have more interprovincial trade is primarily because of the structure of the Canadian economy and its geography. ... Mostly those businesses that find significant barriers to trade cite issues related to geography – mainly the cost of transportation. 

In many cases, they [interprovincial "free trade" lobbyists] will focus on removal of crucial regulations that either protect people or allow provincial governments to promote their own economic and social policy objectives. Removing the policy tools of government undermines democratic control and makes it much harder to counteract the negative impacts of what Trump is now doing.

When they came for the archivist

 (from Bluesky)

Rules for living (with the USA)

• Remember the 19th century statesman (or maybe it was Machiavelli, or de Gaulle, views differ) who said: Great nations do not have friends, only interests. Applied to Canada-US relations, it might better be phrased, Great nations think they have friends, but first of all they have interests. Events like the tariff threat have happened before in Canadian-American relations and will happen again. 
• Remember the argument that for small nations, "the decisive causes of their politics lie outside their boundaries." (Barrington Moore Jr, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966.) We can boycott the orange juice but we are not actually going to close the 49th Parallel.
• Remember that the tariff question is very important to us, and somewhat important to the United States. But we and the US could survive a tariff war. The current threat that the US Constitution may not continue to operate in the United States is fundamental, and Gaza and Greenland and the 51st State hoo-hah are not. 

Update February 7:  Not that he got it from me, but Paul Krugman makes the same point in the Substack that has replaced his New York Times column: it's the coup d'etat, not the crazy stuff, that is fundamental:

No, Trump isn’t going to take over Gaza, annex Canada, try to retake the Panama Canal or seize Greenland. But Trump’s bizarre announcements are a feature, not a bug: they distract from the ongoing autogolpe. 

 [Autogolpe: Spanish for self-coup, an elected leader overthrowing the constitution under which they were elected.]

History of Trade

I once wrote a column that started, "The American inclination to sign trade agreements and then resist being bound by them is longstanding."  

I was writing about a fishing agreement signed in 1871. But the point holds.