History (sort of) on film: Malone on Confederation again

New documentary film on Canadian history launching on TV? Oughta be a good thing, right?  But this one is "Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders" ("the true story of Newfoundland's Less than Constitutional Confederation with Canada')  based on a lurid conspiracy-theory book by Greg Malone of the remarkable, now long-gone Codco comedy troupe). 

"Don't Tell The Newfoundlanders" the 2012 book, argued that Newfoundland was shanghaied into confederation in 1949 by fraud, trickery, and connivance all plotted secretly by dastardly Brits and Canadians and foisted on greedy gullible outport Newfoundlanders who ensured the confederation referendum passed when they should have heeded the advice of the wiser folk in St. John's.  

Here is a let-us-say sceptical review of the book from the Literary Review of Canada by Jeff Webb, professor of history at Memorial University, a Newfoundlander who has written widely about Newfoundland history and archaeology.

Malone constantly uses words such as “subverted,” “treason,” “criminal,” “conspirators,” “plot,” “connivance,” “duplicity,” “mendacity,” “abuse” and “fraudulently.” Historians have an understanding of our past that has more nuance and sophistication than this inflammatory choice of language implies—but this book is informed by the feeling that Canada has been unfair to Newfoundland since 1949 as much as by the evidence from the 1940s.

For a history with more nuance and sophistication, you might read Raymond Blake, another Newfoundlander historian of Newfoundland, and his book Where Once They Stood, a much more serious and credible account of why Newfoundland rejected confederation in 1869 and endorsed in in 1949 (wisely in both cases, he argues). 

Blake dismisses Malone briefly in his introduction as "an actor and television personality who is convinced that the British and Canadian governments conspired to railroad Newfoundland into Confederation and that Britain fixed the vote..." Look for Malone to feature prominently in the new film series.  

Webb and Blake, maybe not so much.  

The film is showing on The Bell Fibe TV1 channel and the Fibe app.

I can't help but note that after most of a century in confederation, Newfoundland has the writers, actors, producers, and publishing and film-making infrastructure that has generated so much artistic and creative work of national statute. Does Alberta's cultural community produce conspiracy-theory documents on this scale to support its grievances against confederation?  

Update, August 20: Charles Levi comments:

How many conspiracy films does Newfoundland need? Or do they need one every generation? Your story reminded me of a fun little film from the 1990s entitled "Secret Nation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Nation

Same idea, different angle.

Meanwhile, I've yet to see any good conspiracy films about Ontario politics.

Janet Ajzenstat (1936-2025) RIP: political philosopher

Unlike most of the prominent historians of Confederation (and virtually all of the political scientists), Janet Ajzenstat grasped (and conveyed) the depth and seriousness of the political thought that underlay the constitution-making of the 1860s.  She died about a month ago, and I missed the notice of it.

I called her out of the blue at McMaster University in 1991, when I was making an Ideas radio documentary "Historians on Confederation." I was just beginning to think of constitutional history as something worth working on. She had been deeply engaged with 19th century political thought for a long time by then, but she was still on that contract/sessional/temporary pilgrimage that so many of the most original scholars seem to endure.  

She seemed at once like the someone who actually knew about the things I wanted to know about, and we kept loosely in touch. (Happily, the next time we talked she was a real professor, at McMaster.) I promoted her Canada's Founding Debates in 19998; she gave my 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal its most penetrating review.  Her book Discovering Confederation: A Canadian's Story is something unique: a memoir about confederation.  

She moved in circles much to the right of mine, but I never found her scholarship "Conservative"  -- the values she upheld were closer to the 19th century liberalism that she saw underpinning the confederation settlement. 

I think I last saw her in 2024 at a conference in Quebec City on the 1864 Quebec Conference.  She had given up posting to her blog by then (though it's still available online).  

Image: from the online obituary.

Book Notes: Livermore on William McDougall

(Continuing my series of notes on books I have been neglecting to get to.  And this one I actually have read.)

During the 150th anniversary of confederation 2017, a group of Toronto historical societies got together to commission public lectures on each of the Toronto area Fathers of Confederation. (I know. Times have changed, haven't they?) I was asked to do the one on William McDougall.  Which I did, and it was well received, but there were limits to what I could present in a brief talk.

McDougall proved fascinating, however, a real piece of work. I was struck by how little had been written about him.  Even his moment of maximum notoriety in 1869, when he tried to become Lieutenant Governor of Red River and was sent packing by Louis Riel and the Red River Council, has not produced a lot of in-depth examination of his career. An in-depth biography?  Nottachance.

(Once again is confirmed the maxim that there is no subject in Canadian history about which the statement "Too little has been written about X" is likely to be false.  Almost any Father of Confederation -- but one -- might be called a Forgotten Father, n'est-ce pas?)

Anyway, I recently learned that there is a novel about William McDougall: Wandering Willie: The Memoirs of William McDougall, 1822-1905: Canada's Forgotten Father of Confederation. It is not a hoax being passed off as the real thing. Daniel Livermore the author is upfront about having created a fictional memoir. He has done a lot of research, too. The novel includes a lengthy bibliography, probably the most detailed I've ever seen on McDougall, plus detailed references to archival collections of McDougall papers, which include the draft of a start to an actual McDougall memoir. Daniel Livermore is a Ph.D in history and a retiree from the Canadian foreign service. 

Livermore reports in his introduction that he wrote a novel in order to explore "the shadowy spaces of McDougall's career" and his mode of thinking, and that in other respects the book is history and biography. I have to admit that, while I admire the effort, I rather wish that since he chose the novel form, he had made it more of a novel.  McDougall, it seems to me, had massive blind confidence in his own intellect and not much respect for anyone else's and did exactly what he wanted throughout his career. He fought with everyone. And made just about everyone annoyed with and distrustful of him.

But in the novel "McDougall" and his author are trying to rehabilitate McDougall, perhaps. So the first person McDougall is constantly trying to show himself reasonable and moderate, not a troublemaker at all, and often giving a version of events around him that sounds rather like history books written long afterwards. 

Well, perhaps the real McDougall would also have striven to justify himself if he had actually completed the memoir he started. But a storming, pontificating, egomaniacal McDougall might have been a lot more fun to read.  And I wonder if that might not have been truer to his character. 

Anyway this is a valiant effort to give the public (willing or not) at least one booklength account of the guy.  I wonder how many people will neglect the author's notices and assume it really is the memoir of William McDougall. 

Peter Russell, 1932-2024 RIP, political scientist

I was sorry to read of the recent death of Peter Russell, the University of Toronto sage on many aspects of judicial, constitutional, and political history, though he identified as a political scientist.

Emmett Macfarlane has already published this tribute to him, which is well worth reading.

I knew Peter Russell slightly, and only late in his long career. We got on very well even though I had disagreed with him by name in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal over his inclination (then) to dismiss confederation as a thing made in London and imposed on helpless colonials. I'm still inclined to think I was right enough, and I found much more to admire and agree with in his more recent constitutional history, Canada's Odyssey -- not only because at one point he was kind enough to set out a viewpoint that "Christopher Moore has so forcefully argued."

One story of his instinctive kindness. On March 29, 2017, some constitutional history nerds around the University of Toronto decided to hold a breakfast to celebrated the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria's signing into law the British North America Act, 1867. I was invited. Perhaps forty people attended, and we went around the table introducing ourselves. It seemed everyone was a Dean, a Principal, a Senator, an MP, or at least an Emeritus. A certain snowflake lapel pin was much in evidence. 

I was not going to compete in those stakes, so I merely said my name and "I'm a writer about Canadian history." (Which I am, and proud to be!) Peter Russell happened to be seated next to me and, before introducing himself, he said at once, "He's much more than that. He's one of our best constitutional historians." (Update: I'm thinking he did not include the word "constitutional.") Which was a lot more than he needed to do. It probably had some impact on that audience, all of whom would have known him well. You can see I did not forget it.

[Photo from the Emmett Macfarlane Substack.]

Book Notes: Phillips, Girard, Brown, History of Law in Canada II

By being a member of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, you help support the publication of legal history in Canada (and other activities) and in exchange you receive "the annual book," one from the three or four the society produces in a typical year.

Last November I attended the Society's annual gathering and the launch of the History of Law in Canada Volume II by Jim Phillips, Philip Girard, and Blake Brown. But recently I realized my copy was not just delayed in the mail. It evidently was not coming at all. So I inquired. Turns out I neglected to renew my membership last year, so I wasn't entitled. I had to pony up forty bucks to get one.

At the launch (at which I guess I was technically a gatecrasher), I was thanked as one of the anonymous pre-publication reviewers. The authors had managed to guess who we were, and both Douglas Harris and I had agreed to be outed. So after all the work involved in reviewing a book so authoritative about everything in its vast field of study, I feel I did a lot for a book I ended up having to buy. (On the other hand, I saved on the membership dues.)

Nevertheless. I now have got a copy of Volume II, and I am very happy to have it. In their printed acknowledgments, the authors thank the (then still-anonymous) reviewers for "just what authors want -- half a page of generous and enthusiastic praise and many further pages of corrections and perceptive suggestions." Reading it now in handsome hardcover rather than messy pages, I want to deliver some more of that enthusiastic praise. This is a very good book. And important far beyond the cloisters of legal history. 

Volume II covers the years 1867-1914, and an important theme is how much the founding of the Canadian state involved the imposing of Canadian law (or the making of new law and institutions) to replace previous ones throughout the "dominion." These innovations mostly remain in being, and no political historian and no general historian of Canada should be unaware of this history of law as state-making. The fifty-page summary of the constitutional history in Chapter Two is a remarkably clear, vivid, and thought-provoking overview. This and the succeeding chapters, which give the legal framework of practically any question you can imagine asking about Canadian history in that period, ought to make the volume an indispensable reference.

Volume II is also groundbreaking among survey histories and reference works for how completely it has integrated indigenous history and law into the narrative, not as some woke acknowledgment but as fundamental grounding. In a hundred and fifty pages, Part Two, "Indigenous Peoples and the New Dominion" focusses a legal lens on treaty-making, the prairie resistance, the Indian Act, the reserve system, the criminalization of culture, education and assimilation, and a host of conflicts between enduring indigenous law and the new system.

And much more.  There are many short summaries that will tell any historian what they need to know on, say, the legal background of corporate power, of labour rights, of property law, of family law, of civil rights....

Philips, Girard, and Brown have another big volume in the works to complete this history. And since the 800 pages of Volume II appear just four years after the 900 pages of Volume I, it probably won't be too long a wait for III. But II may prove to be the essential, and ground-breaking, one of the three, the one you keep on your short, close-at-hand shelf. Somebody should give this book a prize.   

History of who divided the powers (wonkish, maybe?)

McGill-Queen's UP kindly sent me a review copy of a thick volume called Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History.  It's a festschrift -- Essays in Honour of G. Blaine Baker -- one of those volumes where it is usual to have a mix of contributions on various topics. In Quebec they call this sort of volume Mélanges. I want to come back to the book as a whole another day. 

But today: one of its essays in particular. This one makes a significant contribution to confederation and constitutional history and, as the only essay here on those topics, might be missed.  It's "The Colonial Origins of The Division of Powers in the British North America Act," by Jim Phillips and Tom Collins, at pp. 212-49.

Phillips and Collins, law professor and law student, were looking into what are called Consolidations.  Every so often, commissions of lawyers review all the laws recently passed in a given jurisdiction and "consolidate" them into one thick volume, in which all the repealed laws and sections of laws are jettisoned, and all the new ones are organized by topic and field of law  It's a sort of jurisprudential housekeeping, enabling courts and lawyers to keep up conveniently on current law, and the whole thing is given legislative sanction and published in a thick tome. 

There have been various refinements to the art of consolidation over time, and Phillips and Collins were reviewing how that history had worked out in the Province of Canada, 1841-67. The first thing they noticed was that the consolidators of the day had produced not one but three consolidations. There is one for the Province of Canada in general, and one each specifically for Canada West/Upper Canada/Ontario and for Canada East/Lower Canada/Quebec. The province of Canada was not a federation; it had one legislature and one legislature only. But during its quarter-century of existence, differing legal codes, family laws, property-holding systems, and such meant the two "sides" of the province still operated rather differently. So the ostensibly united province made some laws for the province as a whole, some for Upper Canada exclusively, and some for Lower Canada exclusively.

Turn away from these minutiae for a moment, and consider the division of powers, those long lists in Section 91 and 92 of the Canadian Constitution that put every power the constitution makers could think of into either the federal realm or the provincial realm.  Read confederation history, and it seems that between June and September 1864, the cabinet of the Province of Canada somehow sorted out that whole list and all its detailed distinctions of what would be federal and what provincial, in time to present the whole thing at the confederation conferences of Charlottetown and Quebec, pretty much as a fait accompli.

This has always been one of the magic boxes of confederation history. If you read the major histories (mine included) or the textbook surveys, the elaborate and highly political listings of powers may seem almost to have been pulled out of a hat, as if it just ... happened. 

What Phillips and Collins noticed in those old Consolidated Statutes is that the matters regarding which the unified Province of Canada was legislating separately for Upper and Lower Canada are close to identical to the list of provincial powers in the BNA Act. The matters for which it was legislating for the whole province are, you guessed it, very similar to the list of federal powers. In other words, the constitutional division of powers we still live with was not produced in some whirlwind of inspiration in mid-1864. Phillips and Collins want to tell us it had been developed by trial and error over twenty-five years of lived experience in the united, but really "quasi-federal," Province of Canada, ready to be adopted with some tweaks when the new federal Canadian state needed to allocate powers and responsibilities.

Apart from the thought that the Phillips and Collins conclusion is pretty much irrefutable, what really strikes me from all this is how fairly basic documentary research can still be done, and needs to be done, on a subject as fundamental as the shaping of the confederation settlement. Practically every history professor in Canada has to give a confederation lecture from time to time. Too often they seem content with some 'fifties historiography they picked up in high school, with some current ideological or political preferences stirred in. Who goes back to sources and comes back with new insights as Phillips and Collins have done? 

Podcasting confederation

Have to say I continue to be impressed and intrigued by Christopher Dummitt's blog, 1867 and All That, now in its second season and getting right to the confederation negotiations of 1864. 

I'm biased, no doubt, by the nice things he says about my own work, as here, and by the sense I get that at least some of my takes on confederation have become mainstream. But Chris D definitely has his own approach to the topic, and delves into many stories and situations beyond my coverage.

Separated before birth?

In the movie of Confederation that will never be made, it may be that Leonard Tilley... 

will be played by Bill Hader

and that Charles Tupper 

will be played by Hugh Bonneville.  (Photo research by Christopher Dummitt, whose podcast 1867 and all That is into season Two).

1867 podcast returns

"1867 and All That," the podcast deep-dive into mid-nineteenth-century Canadian politics by Trent U historian Christopher Dummitt, returns with a second season starting today. The first season covered political events from the late 1830s to the early 1850s. This one looks to proceed into the confederation period.

Dummitt calls it "a narrative audio history of Canada from the 1830s to 1885." Apart from being earbud-feed for insomniac historians, it looks like both material for Prof. Dummitt's online courses, and eventually much of the draft for a big new book about the period. Smart.

Since it is just him creating it and not one of the major online course creation factories, he is happy to accept support for his historical podcasting here 

History of Confederation at the Confederation Centre for the Arts

Robert Harris, "Local Stars"

Stopped briefly in Charlottetown on Thursday during our brief visit to Prince Edward Island, and we visited the replica at the Confederation Centre of the room where the Confederation Conference was held . I had not realized the Confederation Conference chamber in Province House (the legislative building in Charlottetown) is closed along with the rest of the building for a major renovation. Rumour has it the building's sandstone materials from the 1840s have been more-or-less turning to sand.  The is replacing it for the time being.

Anyway, the replica and presentation at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown is charming, interesting, and forward-facing in acknowledging the failings of the confederation makers and incorporating reference to women, Indigenous nations, and others excluded from the process. Historians may be in conflict, but the heritage industry is moving forward.

Travel note:  the inspection and paperwork required at entry to Prince Edward Island is both extensive and very efficient. It included a mandatory fast-result covid test, which we took at the bridge, having driven in from Moncton airport.  And since PEI has had zero Covid deaths and maintains vigorous contact tracing for every case, being in PEI feels like being on Covid holiday: some mask-wearing by store clerks, very little by anyone else beyond Ontarians and others totally habituated to it.  More places are closed because its the post-Labour Day slow season than due to covid issues. 

Also:  it is very beautiful in Prince Edward Island.  Also, I swam in the ocean.  Also we liked the Robert Harris exhibit currently on at the Confederation Centre. 

Book Notes: Janigan on equalization and federalism

Several years ago, the journalist Mary Janigan began to take an interest in the historical background to some big questions about how the Canadian federation actually functions.  In Canada's History, back in 2013, I profiled her and a book of hers with the provocative title Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark. It's about regional alienation and federal-provincial power struggles, and her analysis goes way back before the recent decades of conflict over Alberta's oil. It emphasizes early twentieth-century attempts to accommodate the rise of western Canada to a full(er) share in Confederation. It was a daunting topic -- she joked that her agent and publisher said, more or less, "a book about whaaat?..." -- handled in bold, vigorous and confident fashion.

Janigan, now with a Ph.D. in hand, is back with a second book, The Art of Sharing. This one is on another potentially daunting subject: the history of  financial tensions within the Canadian confederation. She goes back to the 1920s again, but the book highlights the history of equalization payments since their beginnings under John Diefenbaker in 1957. I still have not read it, but it gets a very positive review in the current Canadian Historical Review (requires subscription) from Douglas Brown.  Equalization, Brown notes:

was to proceed with a relatively generous program of funding by the federal government alone, drawn from tax revenues collected by the federal government in all of Canada, made to those provinces with a below average fiscal capacity. It did not require any formal agreement by any province, and the funds would be without condition. These principles continue to be applied today, despite the misinterpretations of political leaders such as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. As Janigan so nicely puts it at the end of her book, in 1957, it amounted to an “unnoticed revolution”; providing no-strings cash to the poorer provinces enabled all provinces to afford national social programs, including health care.

If I understand Brown's summary correctly, Janigan demonstrates that Australia (and the United States), faced with regional disparities of their own, opted for centralization, placing health care and other fundamental social programs under federal jurisdiction. Equalization (and other joint-spending programs) enabled Canada to retain broad provincial jurisdictions, through federal funding rather than full federal control. 

History of paying the Governor General

A propos of protests in the media about a pension to be paid to the outgoing governor general:   

When I was explaining to my constituents the terms of Confederation and the various reasons that had brought it about, my people accepted my explanations in a very excellent spirit and appeared perfectly disposed to give me a free hand in all points but one, and that point on which they struck was the Governor General’s salary. The proposal to raise the salary of the Governor General of Canada from £7000 to £10,000 met with the warmest disapprobation and I was heckled remorselessly for supporting it…. I can assure you it told very seriously on the result of the elections. I refused point blank to pledge myself to vote for a reduction of His Excellency’s salary, and it cost me hundreds of votes and very nearly lost my election.

That's Richard Cartwright, confederation-era politician, recalling in his memoirs the one element of confederation his constituents just could not stomach. 

I don't begrudge the money. I do regret that we still haven't make the GG our head of state, with appropriate standing and respect, and started getting what we are entitled to.

February 2:  Helen Webberley comments from Auz:

I don’t begrudge the money either.

The Governor General is the head of state, there to represent the country overseas and to receive overseas dignitaries who arrive in our country; dissolving Parliament and issuing writs for Federal elections; setting out the government's programme by reading the 
opening speech etc. He or she is not a politician and cannot replace or overrule duly elected parliamentarians.

Be very very grateful Canada has a proper head of state, not a politically powerful President like the USA had, or Belarus, Poland, Russia, Chad, Congo, Uganda and half the other countries on earth.

Of course this is all irrelevant to the debate about keeping the Queen as head of state, but that is a discussion for another time.

History of western alienation

Two detailed contributions, both from westerners, have been added to the election-aftermath "Wexit" (or is it "Rednexit"?) discussion. I find Dale Smith's key point ("the world price of oil is the bigger problem for [Western Canada] right now than any amount of environmental regulation could ever be") much more persuasive than Jen Gerson's "Confederation is hopelessly broken."

But the western-alienation point that doesn't seem to get any detailed analysis in all these discussions is her offhand reference to Bill C-69 -- she writes "the latter dubbed the 'no more pipelines' bill for its byzantine restructuring of the country’s regulatory process."

It's not just that complaints against C-69 fail to note it was less some deliberate attack on the west than a revision made necessary by the Supreme Court's rejection of the inadequate consultation processes put in place by a previous federal government.  

More important is that "byzantine" is a euphemism for "respectful of treaty obligations." 

And that topic is going to be one of the toughest in all the discussions of western alienation. Pipelines (or other major resource projects anywhere in Canada, whether it is diamonds in the Territories, rare earths in northern Ontario, or LNQ in British Columbia) must now include genuine, substantial First Nations buy-in if they have any hope of proceeding. The First Nations are establishing themselves as co-owners of the resources. They can no long be ignored in the decision-making processes concerning those resources.

Boy, is that ever going to be unpopular as it sinks in. Maybe "byzantine"is not so much a euphemism as a way to paper over something few Canadians, west or east, are yet willing to face.

New history podcast

Eugene Forsey

Christopher Dummitt, historian at Trent University in Peterborough, announces he's launching a podcast.  It's going to be "1867 and All That," an audio-history of Canada 1837 to 1885, produced wit the support of Trent. Chris says:

The goal is to do some pretty fun storytelling about some of the most important parts of our political history. And it’s aimed at people who like history but aren’t professional historians (though my guess is that some historians who like political history will find it fun too).

The program doesn't actually launch until January 2020, but there's a teaser up. (That's the Apple App Store)

Chris also has an article in the current Canadian Historical Review on Eugene Forsey and the fall of the term "Dominion" from Canadian usage.  In it, he returns to Carl Berger's 1970 book The Sense of Power and endorses its argument that in 19th century Canada, "Imperialism was a form of nationalism."  Funny, I went back to that book some time ago and concluded (again) that it is a good, important book but no, imperialism really was a form of colonialism.

Book Notes: Dann on Brown

When this blog seemed to be one of the very few places actually noting the George Brown bicentennial in 2018, we were a bit wistful about the need for new attention to the Reform leader in the confederation process.

So it's good to see Moira Dann has in progress a new "correspondence-based biography" of the man.  I understand the modifier immediately: Brown's correspondence is constantly lively and opinionated and personal, and deserves to be more widely quoted.

Her Canada Day piece for the Globe & Mail highlights Brown's progressive attitude in many fields.

When I started to look into this man for a documentary I did about the Mothers of Confederation, I initially didn’t like him much because of some things he said about Quebec (my birthplace) and Catholics (my birth faith), but now he’s one of my favourite fathers: Further study revealed Brown hated that the church told people in Quebec how to vote.

(And people in Ontario too, for that matter, The Catholic hierarchy worked to turn the Irish Ontario population against Brown too, and also felt the lash of his tongue).

Image Source:  Brown sketch by Dominic Bugatto, from the Globe & Mail.

Book Notes: Where Newfoundlanders Stood

University of Regina Press kindly sent me a copy of Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland's Rocky Road towards Confederation. by Raymond Blake and Melvin Baker.  Well, I guess they oughta: there's my blurb on the back cover, starting with "A lively history..."

It's actually both confederations they deal with. Blake and Baker are equally concerned with 1869 and 1949. In neither case, they argue, were Newfoundlanders ill-informed, illiterate dupes swayed by demagoguery, as has often been alleged. (The authors offers some pungent examples in their introduction.)

Blake and Baker's case is that Newfoundlanders gave confederation appropriate consideration in 1869 and quite reasonably concluded it was not right for them.  Equally, they insist, confederation got a fair trial in 1949, and Newfoundlanders had good reason to vote for, rather than against, confederation that time.

Part of their case, all massively documented, involves an argument about "political" and "social" citizenship. In 1869 voting was largely concerned with political and national identity, and there was no identity of interest between the fish-exporting and eastward-oriented Newfoundland and the new Canada. By 1949, what the authors call social citizenship had developed, and the social benefits of confederation were understood by Newfoundlanders to far outweigh the possible political satisfactions of independence.

This week Blake and Baker are doing a number of promotional events in Newfoundland, it says here.

Book Notes: Quebec Conference of 1864

McGill-Queen's recently sent me a copy of its handsome new essay collection The Quebec Conference of 1864, edited by Eugénie Brouillet, Alain-C Gagnon and Guy Laforest, which includes my essay "A Big Group in a Small Room: Parties and Coalitions at the Quebec Conference." The book is the English-language equivalent of La Conference de Québec de 1864: 150 Ans Plus Tard, published in 2016 by Presses de l'Université Laval. Both are the fruits of an impressive conference held in Quebec City in the fall of 2014, with a large attendance of  francophone and anglophone scholars of confederation, of which I was happy to be one.

Does this happen much: conference papers published in both English- and French-language editions, with all the papers translated for one or the other? Anyway, the papers reflect an impressive diversity of views among the participants: including Confederation as "the completion of a conquest," as the project of London financiers, or as virtually "an imperial fiat," to assertions of and attacks upon the Macdonald/Creighton centralizing vision, to assertions of Canadian autonomy vis-a-vis London, of provincial autonomy vis-a-vis Ottawa, and of confederation of a multicultural "union without fusion."

Publishing note: each press sent me the usual academic press contract, which I would paraphrase as "the contributor surrenders all conceivable rights in perpetuity throughout the universe, in exchange for which the press promises to do whatever it pleases with the work." In each case, I sent back a note stating that I declined those terms, but was glad to permit the press to publish this work in this specific edition.

Neither press responded, but both included my essay -- carefully edited, and with Laval going to the trouble of having it skillfully translated, for which I am most grateful. I have long been puzzled by the willingness of scholars to surrender their works on almost any terms, and mention my experience here only to hint how it suggests that academics could transform the terms of academic publication any time they chose to.

George Brown Days, 2

I think we will make what remains of November into George Brown Days around here.  Not that other coverage will cease but we'll try to have a little something, praising or critical, pretty regularly in the run up to his 200th birthday November 29.

Let's start with Andrew Coyne's tribute to Brown from the spring of 2017:

It was Brown who first championed, in the pages of the Globe, the idea of a federation of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, conjoined since 1841 as the single, though decidedly not united, province of Canada, as the solution to the impasse and instability that had enveloped its politics. He it was who committed the reborn Reform party, cobbled together out of various political factions — moderate Reformers, Clear Grit radicals and Lower Canadian Rouges — to the same proposal, and it was his motion, and the report of the all-party committee he chaired, that led to the idea being adopted by Parliament in 1864.

George Brown bicentennial: I

Birthday boy

Don Smith of Calgary reminds me: George Brown, journalist, controversialist, statesman, confederation-maker, is approaching his two-hundredth birthday, November 29, 2018.

Brown does not have the press-agent John A. had for his 200th in 2015 -- but then John A has his own troubles these days.

How to mark Brown's bicentennial?

If you have a George Brown achievement, anecdote, quotation or image to share, I'd be glad to receive your suggestions.

I'll try to add a few of my own between now and then.

Confederation at the CHR

Canadian Delegates in London, 1867: yeah, still these guys

As someone who takes an interest in 19th century political history despite its unfashionable standing, I was happy to see a major article on that most traditional topic, the making of the British North America Act, 1867, in the recent issue of the Canadian Historical Review: "The Silent Framers of British North American Union: The Colonial Office and Canadian Confederation, 1851–67" by Ben Gilding.

It's Gilding's thesis here that historians -- Christopher Moore listed prominently among them -- have downplayed the role of the British Colonial Office and "generally favoured a distinctly 'made-in-Canada' perspective on the Confederation story." I cheerfully assent to that characterization. It still seems to me incontrovertible that the British government nicely summed up who was in the driver's seat in 1864 when it accepted the Quebec Resolutions, made without its participation or foreknowledge, as "the deliberate judgment of those best qualified to decide on the subject," and again in 1867 when it declared that changes to the draft of the British North America Act could be made "only with the acquiescence of the [British North American]delegates" then in London.

But hey, give Gilding a read, and consider the case he constructs for shifting much of the credit for confederation to politicians and civil servants in Britain. I ain't persuaded by a made-in-Britain-by-Brits Canadian constitution, but then I've made my case elsewhere.

Update, October 29:  I have been meaning to note that while Boralia, the hip Toronto restaurant that features all-Canadian ingredients and recipes, is going out of business, Borealia the history blog, is going from strength to strength. As if to prove it, Denis McKim of Borealia takes me to task for declaring 19th Century Canadian political history "unfashionable"

While that statement may well have been true in the later twentieth century, I'd say that that sub-field (expansively defined) has been one of the more vibrant within Canadian historiography going back (arguably) to the 90s and the publication of Colonial Leviathan and Tina Loo's Making Law, Order, and Authority, and (inarguably, I'd say) since the turn of the millennium, with talented scholars working in an array of germane areas, including the history of the state (Heaman, Curtis); intellectual history (Ducharme, McNairn); and legal history (Bannister, Miller).

Admittedly, top-notch scholarship and "fashionable" are not necessarily synonymous; but, if prizes are any indication of the latter status having been achieved, I'd say historians working on nineteenth-century politics -- including Heaman, Ducharme, and Bannister, who've all won the CHA's best book award, and McNairn, who won the Bullen prize for best thesis -- are punching above their weight, as it were, in the fashionability department.

I'm verging on using-a-sledgehammer-to-kill-a-gnat territory at this point, but figured I'd weigh in on these matters since (like yourself) I'm fond of this particular area, and think it would be a shame if the excellent work being done within it ended up being dismissed as passé (not that you're angling for such an outcome!).

Mea culpa!