Veterans' Commemoration Day

Last year I was in Vancouver for a Dominion Institute event. When it ended, I headed home but the indefatigable DI warriors Marc and Jeremy jumped in a rental car for the (longer than they thought) drive to Spokane, Washington, to pay their respects to John Babcock, then the last surviving Canadian veteran of the First World War, who had been a supporter of and donor to their Memory Project initiatives. When I heard of Mr Babcock's death last week, I felt I was at one (or is that two) degrees of separation from him

John Babcock and his family having declined the proposal of a state funeral, his bereaved friends at the Historica-Dominion Institute are advocating a national day of commemoration for all who served in that war. Their Facebook campaign page is here.

The Worst Quebecker?

A couple of years ago The Beaver had a lively feature in which it asked a number of historians to identify "The Worst Canadian."

I think this guy deserves a nomination as the worst Quebecker. Even when he was at the peak of adulation leading the Yes forces in the 1995 Quebec referendum, I found myself nauseated by the spectacle of a well-connected lawyer and politician, someone who had made his way in the world on favours from powerful patrons at every turn, putting on the "Nous sommes opprimés, nous sommes humiliés" persona. A less oppressed guy than Lucien Bouchard I never saw in my life, I thought, no matter how well it seemed to go over in Quebec at the time. It was then that I decided sovereignty might still be a political force but was no longer intellectually respectable and was doomed.

The same kind of selfish, insincere, self-important air Bouchard conveyed in the 1990s comes off from his recent cruel and dismissive comments about the party and the movement that raised him so high.

"I don't know what will happen 50 years from now. But I do know that Pauline Marois is not announcing a referendum, because it's not possible to hold one," Mr. Bouchard said.

He said he jumped head first into the 1995 referendum "not even checking if there was water in the pool."

He said Quebec came out weakened in the process. "There's no referendum in sight and I don't want to suffer another defeat. In the meantime, we have a lot to do."

He argued that had Jacques Parizeau followed his strategy, the outcome would have been different in 1995.

Bouchard may well be right about all this -- except the last silly claim.

But his remarks do him no honour. A lot of people devoted their whole lives to that cause; one might think Bouchard would have the decency to think of that. The independence movement is down, but reading his remarks, it seems even I have more respect for it and what it meant for a generation of Quebeckers than their over-protected, over-privileged former leader who has now "moved on." He didn't know if there was "water in the pool"? What the hell was he doing in politics, except serving his own ego, if he did not know what the status of the sovereignty movement was in 1995?

I thought Bernard Landry sounded like a dinosaur when he spoke in Toronto last fall. But at least he believed in something.

Essential historical viewing, it says

The White Ribbon sits alongside Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) and Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) as one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of history. It is essential viewing.

The History Today blog's take on Michael Hanneke's recent film.

I, um, haven't seen any of them.

Who knew (or needed to)...

... that there was a reason beyond sheer Victorian amazingness for the enormous front wheels on those penny-farthing bicycles. In their heyday, pedals on bicycles were brand-new, and the concept of chains, sprockets, and gearing had not yet taken hold. As long as pedals were right on the wheel and to drove the wheel directly, basic physics determined that the only way to get much speed up without gearing ... was to have the largest possible circumference of wheel. Hence the enormous wheel. Once they figured out chains and sprockets and all, presto, the enormous but unstable (but very cool) penny-farthing gave way to the safety bicycle, or what we call the bicycle.

Thanks to geographer Glen Norcliffe's 2001 book The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada 1869-1900, which made this clear to me. Damn good book, actually, and the photographs are extraordinary and very well integrated into the argument.

... or that "archive" comes from the same root as "archon," the ruler or chief magistrate of a Greek city-state. The archive was the place of residence of the ruler, and hence the place he kept his documents. There's a Derridean trope to be worked here about how documents are power and the printed work is a tool of authority and control, blah blah blah. But I like the derivation anyway... and the OED confirms it, so there.

History and Relevance

Andrew Smith draws our attention to Ian Milligan's query at Active History about the relevance of historical topics -- "Do the topics that we choose, as historians or aspiring historians, help accentuate the gap between the public and the academic?" Smith offers a slew of his own suggestions.

Milligan writes, "I’ve also only met one person who explicitly thinks that their topic was useless and contributed nothing to society." I'm tempted to suggest this proves there are quite a few deluded grad students out there. But in truth, it's never seemed to me that relevance should be a high priority for all scholarly research. If trade publishing markets provided all the history we need, we would not need university history departments at all.

What we need more of from academic scholarships, I'm inclined to think, is more unorthodoxy and less of each generational cohort applying the same fashionable methods and theories to the same kinds of fashionable questions and issues. That a historical tempest-in-a-teapot from the 1990s is still remembered as a "History War" suggests how much little liveliness and debate Canadian historical scholarship actually nurtures. (Actually, Milligan misquotes the key reference in that story. It's "housemaid's" knee, not "milkmaid's knee." The whole phrase was "the history of housemaid's knee in Belleville," and since I was the first to publish the quotation, in a profile of Jack Granatstein in The Beaver in 1991, I want to have the record put straight.)

But this little exchange on historical relevance was fresh in mind when I read of another group offering to plan a program of events for "Canada150." Canada150 is the century-and-a-half anniversary of confederation in 2017. They are holding a blue-ribbon conference on the subject in Ottawa in March. And it seems from the program that historians are thin on the ground.

Blogging von Ranke

Mike Green, arguing that bad history will overwhelm good history on the internet if Good Historians don't fight the good digifight, surveys a number of recent attempts by historians to come to terms with the internet. And a blog named for von Ranke just deserves a shoutout, anyway.

(As they used to say, Ranke ranks, Nietzsche is pietzsche, and Dilte is filte.)

HIstory of International Law

This strikes me as important. If the United States cannot prosecute an admitted torturer, who will?

A light goes out in the world

The inventor of the Frisbee has died.

What country values history?

The New Republic offers a slightly cranky review of what might be an interesting book: Richard Evans [sorry, was "Ellis" at first] on why British historians study Europe and its countries, while historians in all those countries mostly only study their own countries. Is this true? It seems implausible but he claims to have statistics. The reviewer, however, thinks the United States takes history and historians more seriously than Britain does, which seems to me seriously crazy, no matter what statistics he might cobble together. Sure the Fergusons, Schamas, Starkeys, and the rest might come to the US for the money and the exposure, but their careers are made and nurtured in Britain.

Update: For the name correction, thanks to Kenneth Sheppard, who points out the book -- it's Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent -- is based on his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Cambridge. Here is a press release about the lecture.

Ancient history, modern science

Heather Pringle at Time Machine has been posting about how sequencing the genome of a Neandertal has led to proposals to clone one, an idea she condemns with some powerful historical comparisons.

Meanwhile somebody is doing a similar genetic analysis on some poor guy who died in Greenland about 4000 years ago. Some of the same ick factor that Heather is talking about is needed here too.

But that world is coming.

The head and the body in British politics

Stephen MacLean draws my attention to this latest column by Daniel Finkelstein, columnist for Times Online, who has been thinking about the conflict between strong leadership and strong MPs in Britain in ways that make most of our Canadian commentators look, as the Brits say, thick as planks. Maybe they are just slow learners; Canada's had this problem for about 90 years, it's barely a decade old in Britain.

Finkelstein, however, has come to despair, concluding Britain has to move to an American system of an independently elected executive and a separate legislature.

Flag debate down under

New Zealand is debating whether to have a new flag to replace the one that has a) too much Union Jack and B) too much similarity to Australia's. The New Zealand Herald's coverage of the debate includes comments from me. 'Tseems they asked all the Canadian historians they could find online to comment on the Canadian flag debate, and I was the only one who replied.

And here's gratitude for you: they left out the link to this blog I specially asked for.

Update, February 12. A kiwi, a koru, a tiki?

Asked what they preferred if it did change, 53 per cent of those surveyed said they would like to see a silver fern on the design. The next favourite was the kiwi, with 18 per cent support, 13 per cent for the koru, the southern cross 12.5 per cent, and the tiki with just 1 per cent.

. And younger people are the most likely to support retaining the Union Jack. A bunch of suggested designs are available here -- and they are as weird and wonderful as you might imagine.

Anniversaries you might not have noticed.

2010 marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Pierre-Esprit Radisson and the 125th anniversary of the death of Louis Riel.

But joking aside, these people have connected the two events with a pretty imaginative conference theme: voyageurs and Metis from Radisson to Riel.

Comment on comments

I had an email chat about comments on blogs recently, and thought some of it might be worth quoting here, slightly revised:

I prefer having comments via email over a comment function on the blog. When I had Comments, I did not get many comments, I had to police a lot of spam and semispam, and when a flurry of comments did develop once in a while, it seemed they often went off on tangents that had little or nothing to do with the blog itself. Get yourself your own damn blog, I found myself thinking, don't crud up mine.

Some popular/populist blogs thrive on being reader-driven. But mostly I read blogs from an interest in the blogger and skip the comments as much less interesting. The blogs I like best post comments received by email when they seem worthwhile -- and I've imitated that process.

That's not to say I do not value or welcome comments. I greatly appreciate them. I still post all worthwhile comments (virtually all of them, since comment by email seems to have eliminated spam and crazies).

Comments welcome.

Historians in the news

Reviewing Niall Ferguson's Empire some years ago, I wrote: "If historians can be “hot,” the hottest one in the world today is Niall Ferguson." Little did I know.

Ferguson has just splashily left his wife Sue Douglas, a politically-connected journalist in Britain, for Somali-born writer and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This follows, allegedly, a string of affairs for Ferguson, whose historical income is said to run at $10 million a year, and of whom a fellow historian said, ‘He has the kind of face you want to punch.’

Hirsi Ali? A "friend" said, "She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys."

Daily Mail story here -- first time we've linked there.

The Elgin Marbles are everywhere

Heather Pringle tees off on the Vancouver Museum's mistreatment of petroglyphs. And again.

RIP The Donnelly family

. . . news of a most atrocious murder . . . perpetrated last night at Lucan 17 miles from London the victims were the Donnelly family. Father Mother two sons and one niece and then their house had been set afire to cover the crime four of the bodies were burnt to a cinder. The people in the city were terrified to hear of such a diabolical and lawless crime.

From the Dictionary of Canadian Biography's life of James Donnelly, done to death a hundred and thirty years ago, 4 February 1880.

Five years ago, I reviewed Peter Edwards's Donnelly book for Law Times, where I do a column. Since it's not online, I'm including the whole thing here.

After the Air India acquittals, we know somebody got away with murder -- and that dozens of people must know who planted the bombs. Peter Edwards’s new book, Night Justice: The True Story of the Black Donnellys, investigates another unpunished mass murder: the infamous Donnelly murders of 1880, where the identity of the killers was well known and no one was convicted.

The Donnelly family had lived since the 1840s in Biddulph township near London, Ontario. They had contributed their fair share in bringing about Biddulph’s degeneration into near-lawlessness, a place where assaults, arsons, and killings went on regularly. The Donnelly boys usually gave as good as they got, but gradually the family became scapegoats for the community’s rage. In February 1880, a lynch mob of the community’s leading citizens stormed their home and beat to death old James Donnelly, his wife, two of his sons, and a niece who had recently come to join them. Then they burned the house down around them.

But a hired boy who hid under a bed throughout the slaughter bravely identified the killers. So why was no one convicted?

Why no one was convicted for the Donnelly murders is one of the questions that interests Peter Edwards in Night Justice, surely the best and liveliest and most comprehensive account of the Donnellys yet. A Toronto Star reporter who has previously written about the wrongful conviction of David Milgaard and the shooting of Dudley George at Ipperwash, Edwards smells politics behind this failure of the justice system. Specifically, he fingers Ontario premier Oliver Mowat.

Most of the Donnellys’ neighbours were glad to see the Donnellys dead. They were either complicit in the murders or willing to shelter the killers. Local people who stood up for justice for the Donnellys risked sharing the Donnellys’ fate. A coroner’s jury drawn from local farmers and townspeople declined to point to any suspects. The first jury to try the killers deadlocked. The second jury voted for acquittal.

The acquittal frustrated London lawyer Charles Hutchinson, who prosecuted the case. But Edwards suspects acquittal was the result Premier Mowat (who was Hutchinson’s boss as attorney-general) hoped for and even connived at. South-western Ontario Catholics were important to Mowat’s electoral base. The Donnellys were Catholics, but it was also Catholics who killed them, cheered the deed, and acquitted the killers. Vigorous and successful prosecutions could only antagonize Catholic voters, Edwards suggests, so Attorney General Mowat helped prevent a change of venue to help give local Catholics the acquittals they wanted.

Actually, the evidence Edwards provides is pretty thin. Mowat was not likely to feel very threatened, no matter how the Donnelly verdicts came out. And it was federal judges, sustaining a long tradition that justice must be local, who refused the crown’s repeated petitions for a change of venue for the Donnelly trials. Edwards’ allegations about Mowat may reflect the instincts of a political reporter habituated to political conspiracy-hunting.

The true failure of state and justice in the Donnelly case seems to have been more systemic. It was little wonder that brutality, arson, and eventually mass murder took hold of the Donnellys’ neighbourhood over the decades, since local constables and magistrates were leading participants, and the larger justice system typically looked the other way. When it was only the bog-Irish brutalizing each other, Ontario didn’t much trouble to defend the rule of law and the authority of the state in Biddulph township.

Maybe the way we didn’t much trouble ourselves more recently when it seemed it was just East Asians threatening each other over Kalistan or Tamil Eelam.

Update Feb 11: Merna Forster reminds me of the Great Canadian Mysteries Donnelly material -- worth a look.

History of Drug Addiction Policy

Best, most informative, most aware coverage I have seen of Vancouver's drug-addiction treatment experiment, the place and program called Insite, is on the generally lite American online magazine Slate. It starts here, but seems to be running all week. Have any Canadian media even in Vancouver, matched this?

History of Bank regulation

History is where you find it. In the Globe and Mail letters columns, Joe Martin responds to a Globe editorial with a succinct history of banking regulation in Canada since 1817, via the Quebec conference of 1864 and the panic of 1907-8.

Update, February 4: Roderick Benns writes in:

it's so interesting that during the Great Depression, the Canadian banking system stood up well, then, too. This was before a central bank was created to regulate credit, but Prime Minister Richard Bennett was already on the task at that time. Pretty much the only people at the time who didn't like the idea were those who ran the chartered banks, since they had to give up their profitable issue of bank notes to make way for a truly national currency. (Not to mention they were forced to move their gold reserves to the Bank of Canada....)

Thanks for the post!

The unthinkable idea is beginning to be thunk

Political scientist Nelson Wiseman, at HistoryWire (which has too much politics and too little history, but never mind) considers "how to empower MPs":

let party caucuses determine once again their leader. Leaders would have to court and listen to their MPs rather than vice-versa. Having popularly elected MPs select their leader is arguably more democratic, accountable, and transparent than having “instant” party members elect delegate slates at manipulated constituency meetings.

When the caucus of a major political party adopts and enacts this program, I promise to write a memoir called "How I Saved the Country." But it may be a while yet.

Afua Cooper for Black History Month

Multitalented Afua Cooper -- Ph.D scholar, GG-winning popular historian, much-published poet -- has a couple of children's historical novels out too, exploring the lives of notable African-Americans: My Name is Henry Bibb and My Name is Phyllis Wheatley.

History and Haiti

Active History, now growing into a must-read, has a roundup of what historical perspectives suggest about efforts to help Haiti. And as if it were not sad enough, here's historian David Landes in The New Republic on Haiti's potential future. It was published in 1986.

History of Marriage

Who said we have not been getting many big interesting histories by Canadians lately? Well, me actually.

But here's Elizabeth Abbott's new book A History of Marriage, reviewed last weekend in the Globe and Mail. And noted in the Toronto Star. And The Women's Post on her earlier History of Mistresses.

History of laughing out loud while procrastinating

Go here and scroll down. Trust me

Ajzenstat's Browne's Documents on Confederation

I missed the publication dates last fall, but McGill-Queen's Press has released a new edition of Documents on the Confederation of British North America, which is the ur-text on the subject and really ought to be consulted by pundits before they pronounce on whether confederation was a democratic process or what the Senate was intended to be or suchlike.

The work has a pedigree. It was compiled in the 1960s by historian G.P. Browne, who built on an early publication by Joseph Pope, who built on John A. Macdonald's personal collection of manuscript materials on the subject. The new edition was the inspiration of Janet Ajzenstat, who took pity on everyone who has been struggling with the nasty little Carleton Library edition of Browne's work that has been steadily crumbling in readers' hands since 1969. Ajzenstat wrote a new introduction, and it also comes with a blurb from, ah, me.

The Documents covers mostly the official documents which record the process by which the BNA Act of 1867 was negotiated, endorsed and finally legislated into effect. It takes its place beside Ajzenstat, ed, Canada's Founding Debates, which focuses on the debates in all the British North American legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia as to whether they should endorse the deal. Then you can read all the 'sixties historians of confederation or, blush, this book.

Does this look like the guy on the $10 bill?

It sez here, in what may be some kind of leak in a story about something else entirely, that actor Shawn Doyle, currently in the cable series Big Love, is "returning to Toronto to play Sir John A. Macdonald in a TV movie for the CBC."

Based on Richard Gwyn's ongoing biography? Random House and Gwyn's own website don't seem to be saying.

Canadians talking about parliament everywhere

Impressive, to see a large crowd spend its Saturday afternoon crammed into a basement pub room to discuss Canadian democratic issues. This was the gathering of the Macdonald-Cartier Society I spoke to on the weekend. The Society is a curious mix of a non-partisan educational society dedicated to Canadian political institutions and processes ... and also an alliance of hard-edge young movement conservatives. This, I suspect, is a consequence of a world run by Facebook-based networks.

I couldn't help mentioning how heartening it was that we were not the only Canadians giving up that afternoon to a concern for Canadian parliamentary democracy. I noted that just a few blocks from us at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto (and in other places across the country), thousands had rallied (through another Facebook grouping) to protest the proroguing of Parliament by Prime Minister Harper. Most of my audience wanted absolutely nothing to do with that kind of democracy, but they took my teasing in good spirit, and we had a lively session. (If you follow this blog and my occasional notes on parliamentary issues, you know pretty well what I talked about). Thanks to Immanuel and the rest of his team for their invitation.

History is where you find it:

* Something cryptically called the Smiths Falls EMC has a pretty terrific piece on the intriguing life of "the father of the Canadian navy," (the navy being 100 years old this year 2010), Admiral Charles Edmund Kingsmill. It's called "remembering the father of the..." but I had never heard of him. (Thanks to Buzz of local history site www.portlandontario.ca for the link.)

* The Beaver was once again a magazine of the week in the Globe and Mail on Saturday. The Globe also made a flashy lifestyle feature by asking a bunch of glamourous people at a party I did not get asked to what they thought of the name change of The Beaver to Canada's History. Ouch.

Update: The Economist takes note of the magazine's "Scunthorpe problem."

* History of agriculture: "Even though I consider poetry one of the highest callings, I think there's something bizarrely wrong with our economy when writing poetry helps sustain traditional farming." Poet and farmer Brian Brett, in Trauma Farm: A Rebel History, which I'm currently enjoying (Brian's a friend of mine, but it's still a terrific book.)

* Is it okay to be heartened by news that the National Library, the National library and the National Museum of Haiti mostly survived the earthquake. I think so. Historian Sidney Mintz reflects on historical mistreatments of Haiti here. Links via the indispensable Cliopatra.

This month in The Beaver

The new issue of The Beaver -- the magazine soon to be known as the magazine formerly known as The Beaver -- is reaching subscribers and magazine stands this week. My column looks this month at Gordon Freeman's 2009 book Canada's Stonehenge, his story of his very much non-in-the-mainstream effort to interpret Omakh, the magnificent stone circle near Majorville in southeastern Alberta.

What China heard of Canada, 1602

In Kanata, “inhabitants are kindly and hospitable to strangers,” but “the people living in the mountains kill one another all year round and spend their time in fighting and robbery.”

“They feed exclusively on snakes, ants, spiders, and other creeping things,” he continues.

Commentary on Canada on the remarkable Sino-centric world map created in Beijing for the Chinese Emperor by the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, and currently on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Queen's has a model parliament. So does New Brunswick.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the Queen's Model Parliament is sitting in Ottawa. This is a student-run model parliamentary program at Queen's University in Kingston that, through the courtesy of Peter Millican, Kingston MP and Speaker of the House of Commons, gets to hold its three-day model parliamentary debates in the actual House of Commons chamber.

Three hundred and eight bright and promising young Canadians learning and practising parliamentary skills in the actual parliamentary chamber, with the support and participation of senior parliamentary officials -- what a great experience. The impact on the students is probably only slightly reduced by the realization that this year QMP could sit for six weeks and not impede in the slightest the official parliament of the country.

Meanwhile parliamentary democracy seems to be breaking out in a strikingly unCanadian fashion in New Brunswick.

Liberal premier Shawn Graham had worked out a deal to sell publicly-owned NB Hydro to Hydro Quebec -- until his cabinet and caucus told him they would not support the plan. Enough cabinet ministers and backbenchers to defeat the government told Graham they would vote against the plan in the New Brunswick legislature. The deal is now being substantially revamped to caucus's specifications.

Leave aside the matter of whether selling NB Hydro is a good idea. New Brunswick Liberals are revolting against ninety years of Canadian parliamentary practice, in which legislators have presumed they have no role in the parliamentary process and must do whatever they are told to by party leaders imposed by an extra-parliamentary process. The New Brunswick members have, of course, the most practical of motives: they are pretty certain they could never be re-elected if they voted for Graham's plan. That is just as it should be: the voters tell their representatives their wishes, and the representatives tell the executives their wishes, and the executive, being accountable to the parliamentary majority, actually bends to the will of the public.

Any chance legislators in the rest of the country could hear of what has gone on in Frederickton? Geez, next they will have the idea that caucuses should be able to review the leadership of leaders who get their parties into this kind of trouble.

They thought it worked with universities, so...

It's not about cultural policy any more, it seems. Canadian Heritage is not functioning like a cultural body. The policy is bums in seats. How do you grow a culture that way?

Malahat Review editor John Barton skewers the new Canadian Periodical Fund policy on support for magazines. Full story in the Globe & Mail begins, "Canadian literary, arts and scholarly magazines are likely going to die."

Toronto: from 'Meeting place' to 'sticks in the mud'

Via Heritage Toronto, southern Ontario archaeologist extraordinaire Ron Williamson considers the origins of the name Toronto, the evidence of age-old communication networks across southern Ontario, and the pre-contact geo-politics of the region.

(Image: Archaeological Services Inc.)

Canadian Historical Review wants you

We were reflecting that 2009 seemed a little, well, slow, in Canadian history writing and publishing and scholarship. Is the Canadian Historical Review feeling the same way? The venerable journal has put out a call for contributions:

Both the CHR editors and editorial board welcome academics at any stage of their career, from Canada and beyond, to explore any aspect or period of Canadian history. We invite a broad range of topics, perspectives, and interpretive frameworks to be examined, and encourage imagination and innovation along with the more traditional approaches used in historical research and writing. Comparative and transnational approaches to understanding Canada's past are also welcome.

Info on the CHR and about online access here.

History of Music: Kate McGarrigle 1946-2010...

... died of cancer last night. Performed at Royal Albert Hall barely a month ago, according to the band/family website.

History of the university

Slate offers a pretty interesting review of what sounds like a pretty interesting book on the history of the university.

Front Line Historians

George Chauncey, professor of history at Yale University, and Nancy Cott, professor of history at Harvard, have been expert witnesses this week in the California trial testing the constitutionality of California's referendum-based ban on same-sex marriage. Background on the case: Margaret Talbot's New Yorker story, "A Risky Proposal," which explores how the case came to be launched by George Bush's former Solicitor General against the advice of most of the leading gay-rights advocacy organizations.

It's never easy being a historian witness in a big public policy trial, as UofT's Michael Marrus has said many times about holocaust-denial trials. Good luck to Professor Chauncey and Cott, who are tasked with demonstrating that the rationales given for excluding gay couples from marriage are groundless given (in Chauncey's case) the history of anti-gay prejudice and (in Cott's) the historical evolution of the nature of marriage in American society.

To my knowledge, no historians were involved in Barbeau v. British Columbia, one of the key legal cases that established same-sex marriage in Canada, but if you are up for reading a legal judgment (very readable, if you can get through the judicial framing), the historical evolution of marriage is very lucidly outlined in Madame Justice Jo-Ann Prowse's reasons for judgment. American courts rarely consider foreign jurisprudence, but they could benefit.

Forty years on...

.. and there is still a remarkable dearth of good books on the October Crisis of 1970. But Carleton university School of Canadian Studies is planning a conference on the subject for, yes, next October. At least certain aspects of it, anyway.

Although we acknowledge that the FLQ was forged from a widely shared post-colonial perspective (at its beginning), the conference also seeks to highlight the influence/impact of the left, unions and universities, and gay and feminist liberation groups in Quebec.

Famine history

Ireland seems almost oversupplied with terrific historians. One of them, economic historian Cormac O'Grada, has moved on from revisionist analyses of the Irish Famine of the 1840s and written what looks like a terrific history of famine itself.

Douglas Hunter, historian of discoveries (and much else), draws our attention to his new newsblog, Age of Discovery News, "dedicated to scholarship, publishing, museology, archaeology, and all things exploration related."

[Just to keep things straight, Douglas Hunter is not Hunter Douglas, the blinds company.]

Wierd history watch: Who was the man who never was?

The Man Who Never Was" was a memorable British book and film from the 1950s, part of that ongoing thread that implies the Second World War was won by the clever stunts of intelligence boffins rather than by the application of large quantities of lethal weaponry. Story was that British intelligence floated a dead body onto an enemy held beach. Enemy found body, body carried (phony) plans of a massive Allied landing, enemy shifted its defences, genuine landing succeeded, Allies won war.

This summer University of Toronto historian Denis Smyth will launch a book exploring who the body was, that is, who was the poor dead guy whose corpse got the phony plans planted on it. Already he has been injected into what is apparently an ongoing minor controversy in Britain, with various dead guys vying for the credit of being the poor stiff. Smyth's Operation Mincemeat/Deathly Deception is offered as the final word.

[Just to keep things straight, Denis Smyth, intelligence historian noted here, is not Denis Smith, political scientist quoted a couple of posts below.]

Professor Weinstock asks Mr Harper to be nicer

Daniel Weinstock, who launched the letter signed by 200 academics to protest against the proroguing of parliament, was interviewed on As it Happens last night, and he alarmed me almost as much as Mr Harper does. Now this is a professor of political philosophy, a Trudeau Fellow, an Oxford Ph.D, and so on, and he has the support of most of the constitutional lawyers and political scientists in the country. But his ideas struck me as terrifyingly blinkered, derived entirely from what happens in Ottawa today rather than from any understanding of parliamentary democracy and its principles.

In a parliamentary democracy, he explained [podcast available here], there are no checks and balances as in the American system. So the working of our system of government depends on the executive being nice, on prime ministers who restrain themselves and do not use all the powers parliamentary democracy confers on him. This is Stephen Harper's failing, he told the interviewer: he's not playing nicely with the powers he has, and we need 200 professors to ask him to put some of his powers back in the desk drawer. Be friendly, Mr. Dictator.

But if that's parliamentary democracy, why would Professor Weinstock, or anyone, give it credence? If the only restraint it offers against the abuse of executive power is the executive's modesty and self-restraint? Weinstock might as well argue that communism or fascism would have been fine except that those mean guys Stalin and Mussolini failed to restrain themselves. What kind of political philosophy accepts that you can have a lousy system of government and rely on the niceness of leaders to make it acceptable?

The check and balance in parliamentary democracy is parliament itself. In parliamentary democracies all over the world, leaders who become arrogant, or who underperform, or become policy-challenged, or get caught in scandals, or just lose their charm, are regularly, routinely, and promptly reined in or redirected, or when necessary removed. Leaders are always ambitious and rarely nice, but they are surrounded by other people who are equally ambitious and perfectly able to apply their own ruthlessness against each other.

I know it is not happening in Ottawa -- but that's the problem, Professor. Don't ask Stephen Harper to be nicer, encourage this parliament to unleash its own ambitions.

(The Weinstock letter itself, now widely published in newspaper op-ed pages, is available here.)

Update, January 13: Political scientist and writer Denis Smith comments wisely:

You're quite right to point out that the Weinstock article misses the main point about where power (potentially) lies in the parliamentary system. In both this and the last parliament, the House failed to use its power most of the time: the prime minister only acts the way he does because 307 other MPs let him get away with it. But in one crucial vote in December, the House voted 145 to 143 to order release of unredacted documents to the Afghanistan committee, and the opposition indicated that it would pursue the application of that order when the House reconvenes. The government indicated that it would not obey the order. In effect, it gave notice that it would defy the House's demand. It seems to me that it is this defiance, plus the prorogation, that turned the affair into a parliamentary crisis. The House's way to resolve the crisis, obviously, is to defeat the government in a confidence vote, and it will be in a position to do so on March 3 or 4. Hardly anyone except you, in all the recent commentary, has mentioned this elementary point.

But surely Weinstock is right to insist that the system also involves conventions of mutual restraint which the prime minister has ignored. He's done that repeatedly. He should not have asked for prorogation in December 2008; he should not have asked for it in December 2009. It's important for commentators to remind him of those conventions of restraint.

And then, as you say, the House must assure that the conventions are backed up with its sanction. Maybe the commentators don't mention this because the opposition parties have been strangely silent about the House's power as well. They need to threaten defeat in a confidence vote, and carry through with the threat in March. If they want to do it without a virtually automatic request for dissolution after that vote, they need to talk to each other about an alternative government drawn from the present House (as they did in 2008).

To restore the power of the House that you encourage, there are a whole lot of steps the parties must take. It would certainly be helpful if they could begin to speak honestly about how difficult that really will be.

It's official: your job rocks

It's just as you always thought: "Historian" ranks in the top five among all possible careers in a new survey of the best and worst jobs in the world.

Two caveats: this comes from io9.com, a science fiction website. And numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 are actuary, engineer, computer systems analyst, and biologist, while author is 74. (Lumberjack? 199 of 200.)

Cliopatria Awards for historyblogs

... are announced. It's an American prize, but with a global interest, and with various categories for blog forms.

Oh well, it might have been History Canada, I guess

My friends at Canada's National History Society have decided that after 90 years as The Beaver, their magazine is going to be rebranded as "Canada's History." Canadian Magazines has the story.

(I just freelance a column for The Beaver, and glad to do so. I don't make these decisions. You would have to talk to them about this.)

Drivel watch: Ibbitson on parliament

John Ibbitson gets it right:

Canadian MPs cower at the hands of the party whips

and then thuddingly wrong:

Australian MPs and senators enjoy an ultimate weapon not practically available to their Canadian counterparts: They can replace the party leader any time they like. Last month, they did just that.

Actually the only thing preventing Canadian MPs from exercising their authority/fulfilling their obligations is the endless chorus from our journalists and commentators telling them, as here, that they cannot.

Meanwhile, more examples of how these things work in every functioning parliamentary democracy in the world. British Labour MPs last week declined to act on a call to remove and replace their leader, Prime Minister Brown. But the reminder that the power is always there convinced Brown to negotiate with his cabinet and caucus over the forthcoming budget. As The Times reported:

ministers used Mr Brown’s temporary weakness on Wednesday afternoon to warn him that he had to be more collegiate to retain their support....

Why don't Canadian party leaders find themselves negotiating policy with the people's elected representatives? Because Canadian MPs don't insist on it. And they don't because a thousand John Ibbitsons tell them they are not entitled to.

(Thanks Stephen.)

Update, January 12: Clevi comments:

"Many British MPs know that they will never make it into the cabinet, and so feel much freer to take on their own party leader."

That is what Ibbitson, means, I think, by saying Canadian MP's do not have the "practical" option of dumping their party leaders. MPs who defy the whip get the reputation of not being team players, and hence shut themselves out of possible cabinet positions and other patronage perks.

That's certainly been the go-to explanation of Canadian political scientists, back at least to C.S Franks, The Parliament of Canada. But just saying it over and over hardly proves it. In Britain and Australia and Japan and throughout the parliamentary world, it is nearly always ambitious cabinet members who lead caucus initiatives -- including removing the incumbent leader -- and they can offer perks, promotions, and policy changes at least as credibly as the incumbent can.

The real difference, I'm sure, is that in Canada the leader, not having been chosen by caucus, is understood not to be accountable to caucus, while it is accountable to him/her. That's the message we Canadians deliver constantly to MPs, and it's the reverse of how functional parliaments operate.

John A. Macdonald's birthday...

195 years ago today, in Glasgow, Scotland. At least that's the day he celebrated; some question has been raised about whether it actually was the day he was born. Anyway you still are not getting a holiday for it.

But various John A. Macdonald events were held around the country yesterday and today. Hats off to, for instance, the John A. Macdonald Society of Hamilton, Ontario, which held an event yesterday at Macdonald's statue at King and John in the heart of the city.

As long as it's friendly....?

"Canada's democracy should not be conducted solely on the basis of convenience for the governing party." Globe and Mail editorial December 31, 2009.

To its credit, the Globe despises Prime Minister Harper's thuggish, anti-parliamentary decision to prorogue the legislature out of pure political calculation. But Mr. Harper's actions have always been based on his judgment that between elections a prime minister can do what he wants and is accountable to no one. (He's not the only prime minister to make that calculation, shall we say.)

In practice, the control that is needed to prevent prime ministerial autocracy is a lively and assertive parliament. And on that subject, the Globe ain't exactly a stalwart. A couple of years ago, when Mr Harper, with thuggishness to match his current behaviour, was allowed to have MP Bill Casey removed from the Conservative caucus for doing what MPs are elected to do -- vote -- the Globe was unconcerned:

It was legitimate for Mr Casey to vote his conscience; it was legitimate for Mr Harper to kick him out of caucus for voting no-confidence in the budget. Globe and Mail editorial, October 22, 2007.

It was a Globe columnist, Jeffrey Simpson, who popularized the phrase "friendly dictatorship" to characterize prime ministerial autocracy. But sometimes it seems it is the "friendly" part and not the "dictator" part to which Canadians give importance. Like the Globe editorialists, we only object to prime ministers running roughshod over parliamentary accountability when it seems, you know, really unfriendly.

In Britain, Prime Minister Brown seems to have survived a challenge to his leadership. But as this essay illustrates, in functioning parliamentary system it is taken for granted -- even when a challenge fails -- that the party leader is always and constantly accountable to the caucus. Parliament becomes the locus of accountability, and the prime minister is never beyond control.

When Canadians are routinely complicit in autocratic leadership practices, we are unlikely to be very persuasive if we raise our hand in horror when the autocrat takes the principle to its logical, unfriendly consequences.

(Janet Ajzenstat took note of our earlier note on this subject. (Memo to Janet: don't worry about quotation - link! Links are the only literary device unique to blogs. Try 'em.)

MacDougall on Ralston Saul on William Lyon Mackenzie

Rob MacDougall at Old is the New New ponders John Ralston Saul's arguments in last year's bestselling A Fair Country -- and finds himself explicating the political thought of William Lyon Mackenzie in interesting ways.

A hundred years at the BC Court of Appeal

Today in Victoria, B.C., Chief Justice of British Columbia Lance Finch will open the 2010 sittings of the British Columbia Court of Appeal -- and will mark the one hundredth such opening, the centenary of the court.

I will not be there today, but I take a certain interest, since the Court of Appeal of British Columbia is the subject of a forthcoming book of mine, to be published by UBC Press in April. (Details in UBC Press's Spring 2010 scholarly catalogue, downloadable here.)

At the first sitting of the court, Tuesday, January 4, 1910, the Daily Colonist reported that the Supreme Court room at the Victoria court house was “crowded with members of the bar and interested citizens when their lordships entered.” After remarks by Chief Justice James A. Macdonald, there arose “the last of the old gladiators… straight as an arrow and belying his white hair by his easy carriage”: the Treasurer of the Law Society of British Columbia, Charles Edward Pooley, who had been practising in Victoria for forty-seven years. Pooley brought the congratulations of the bar and offered some reminiscences about courts and judges of the province’s frontier days. “His brother members,” he said, “looked forward to a transaction of court business without delay of justice.”

According to the Colonist, “their lordships created a very favourable impression indeed,” particularly the chief justice. “His keen logical mind, his finely-marked face, and the clearness and decision he evinced in getting at the meat of things all drew the attention of the visitors and the counsel he heard.”

BC filmmaker Meghna Haldar has made a rather terrific film about the Court and some of its memorable cases, recently shown on BC's Knowledge Network, and coming again on January 13. Info here.

Youtube Video History

I don't embed lots of video in this blog. It's a matter of browsing speed, I think. I find pictures too tedious. In the time it takes to load and begin, let alone watch all of a video link, I can scan vast reams of prose to see if it's anything I'm interested in. "Jeez, talk faster," seems to be my reaction to most Youtube links.

But billions of Youtube viewers cannot be wrong. If you are with them, The Canadian Tourism Commission has uploaded many short videos of Canadian historic places you might enjoy here.

For instance, Toronto's Distillery District, Klondike Gold, Vancouver's Chinatown, Battle Harbour, Newfoundland, and L'Anse aux Meadows.

Thanks for the links, Cameron Reed at Radar DDB (the agency that created the films).

Charles Taylor Prize

History and historians are well represented on the shortlist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Historical biographies by John English, Daniel Poliquin, and Kenneth Whyte are listed along with Ian Brown's memoir The Boy in the Moon. Nice to see a list of just four -- a blow against shortlist inflation.

The jury is Andrew Cohen, Sheila Fischmann and last year's winner Tim Cook. Long ago I observed that the Taylor seemed to weight its juries with fiction writers and give most of the prizes to book by novelists and books that looked like fiction. Well, the prize outgrew that stage years ago -- enough that some nonfiction writers now complain that history and "information books" now dominate the list each year, to the detriment of more "literary" forms of nonfiction. The nature of the genre is contested, let us say (as is its spelling: non-fiction or nonfiction?). But this seems to me a strong jury; I'll wait on their verdict February 8.

Just to confirm that prizes matter, I've been reading Brian Brett's wise and gracefully written memoir Trauma Farm since it won the Writers' Trust nonfiction prize in November. And also Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the historical novel that won last fall's Booker Prize -- a huge book with such narrative drive that everyone seems to devour it in a few days, me included.

Update, January 7: An example of the criticism I alluded to above, from writer and blogger Susan Olding. And here's a proposal that what book juries need is ... more profs. (Both links from David Leach at the Creative Nonfiction Writers Collective.)

Update, Jan 11. I think I missed the other big non-fiction prize shortlist. The British Columbia National Prize for Canadian Non-Fiction will be announced this Friday, January 15. Two of the four (again with the four) nominees are also on the Taylor list, two others were on the G-G list, and at least one was on the Writers' Trust shortlist, so there's some convergence among 2009/10 juries.

I bear a small reservation about the BC prize because it is presented each year by the premier, and I'm not keen on that kind of politicization of book prizes. Public support for the arts, yes, but arm's length, B.C., take it seriously.

Update, January 19: And congratulations to Ian Brown, winner for The Boy in the Moon.

Active History

... gives some love to our Quebec siege liveblog of last summer.

Neatby Award nominations

The Hilda Neatby Prize for "scholarly articles on women's history and gender history as it relates to women, in Canadian journals and books and, in the case of the French-language article, in international journals and books as well," is open for nominations until February 1, 2010. Info from the Canadian Committee for Women's History.

Who's Hilda Neatby? The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan knows, and now you can too.

Careers in history

I've always regretted how so many history students seem to accept that unless they acquire a tenure-stream position in a history department, they must put aside historical interests and attitudes. Outside of university promotional materials on "Careers in the Humanities," few of us genuinely seem able to imagine a historical education as a sound basis for being a film-maker, say, or a community developer, or (to get personal about it) a freelance writer. I have met many film-makers working on historical subjects, but never one who took an interest in history into film rather than the other way around.

Here, however, is an American prof thinking grim thoughts about career and life prospects for graduate students in the humanities, and even suggesting freelance writing is a reasonable alternative.

They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late.

Update: Bloggendipity: when two blogs coincidentally take up the same subject. For example, see Andrew Smith's take on the job market. (Less than 60 applicants for a position is about the best it gets)

Update, January 6: Alasdair Cheng offers an important comment and corrective:

I wondered whether Benton was actually suggesting that freelance writing was a viable alternative to academia: my reading was that he thought academia should realistically be considered just as implausible as making a living as a freelancer – i.e. just like it’s irresponsible to have “professional athlete” as a career plan without some more hard-headed backup. I think that your own success at freelancing would probably be taken as the sort of exception that proves the rule, like a secure, well-endowed research chair’s position…

Yes, I think Benton meant these choices may be about equally risky, and I don't disagree.

"No information may remain classified indefinitely"

President Obama recently established a National Declassification Centre at the American National Archives to speed and simplify the declassification of historical sources. More detail here, but imagine the Canadian government pursuing this sort of initiative...

Natalie Zemon Davis in Toronto

Natalie Zemon Davis, the terrific American (and sometimes Torontonian) historian of most everything (but usually involving the history of women and gender-relations in some fashion) will deliver the John Edwards Lecture at the University of Toronto's Centre of Criminology on January 25, 2010 at 4.30.

Her topic (see, she is interested in everything) is "Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves' Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname." Not a subject high on my priority list of topics, probably. Except I once interviewed NZD, and I have never met an historian who so truly enjoyed history and seemed to bring that zest to whatever she studied.

More info and contacts here, except it seriously needs updating.

The prorogation

This isn't where you will find an outbreak of fury about Prime Minister Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament in order to hamstring the parliamentary dissection of his government's dishonest and abusive responses to the allegations about Canadian complicity in torture.

There is lots of fury available if that's your taste. Susan Riley and Michael Behiels in the Ottawa Citizen, and the editorialists in the Globe and Mail, can give you your fill, and that's without even going to the Toronto Star. As Behiels puts it:

Harper's continued use of such bold, provocative and intimidating tactics proves that he is morally convinced that the end -- unfettered power for his Conservative party and government and the wholesale destruction of the centrist Liberal party -- justifies the means.

Behiels is absolutely right. But I can't help thinking that all prime ministers pursue their ends and are not too squeamish about the means. Politics is tough, and politicians have always pushed to see what they can get away with. The problem is not in this prime minister's perhaps-uniquely cynical and contemptuous behaviour, but in the failure of our parliament to provide the counterweights and accountability the parliamentary system usually provides more-or-less automatically. It's no good raving about Mr. Harper's meanness; good government should not depend on one politician's self-restraint.

Behiels says:

If the legislative branch is rendered powerless by Harper's executive branch, Canadians have no choice but to defend their Constitution by taking their struggle to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Behiels looks to the courts for protection. (Good luck with that one!) Advocates of electoral reform panaceas will declare that PR would solve the problem. Senate reform zealots will explain why Triple-E would save us. Direct-democracy types will call for some kind of referendum or initiative.

The problem is always in the House of Commons, and we insist on looking for solutions everywhere else. But functioning parliamentary systems are full of checks and balances. In a functioning parliamentary system, even government-side backbenchers have good reason to want parliament to be in session, for it's the one place they can attract attention and serve their own ambitions. For their own ends, they will resist and undermine a leader who seeks to marginalize their forum as part of marginalizing them.

But in Canada, where we insist that party leaders are not accountable to parliamentarians, parliament is a waste of time for government backbenchers; it is merely a place to emphasize their docile dependence and slavish obedience. They would just as soon be at home. And so the unaccountable leader gets to do what he or she wants.

There is no simple fix to this parliamentary crisis. It's a cultural one. Canadian parliamentarians are actually not as dumb and sheeplike as the Canadian legislatures makes them seem to be. They just act that way. They believe it's their duty. They ar conditioned to believe it. They act that way because we tell them constantly we want them to.

When MPs hear that they are supposed to be powerful, they are supposed to be able to represent the people, they have the right and the duty to make policy, to fire party leaders who impede their policy inclinations, and to hire better ones, they'll seize the power eagerly. They will get rid of authoritarian bullies more or less automatically, simply in the process of pursuing their own agendas.

But who will tell them to go ahead? Who ever looks to parliamentarians for solutions to the parliamentary problem?

Update: Andrew Coyne is sound and compelling on this.

Happy new year 2010

... and it's good to be back. Good to see several of my go-to history blogs kept up posting over the holidays, giving you all much to read if you were so inclined. Good also to see that several did not, making me feel not uniquely delinquent.

It's not last minute until Christmas Eve... and even then really only after lunch

If you are still in the market, The Beaver's interactive holiday history gift shop is open for business.

Canada Reads (Fiction)

Quillblog points to Douglas Hunter's earlier Globe & Mail piece on non-fiction at Canada Reads:

Canada Reads has not once in nine years included a non-fiction title. Were a celebrity participant to defend Ken McGoogan’s Lady Franklin’s Revenge or Ken Dryden’s The Game, I’d keel over in a dead faint.

Hunter seems to have uncovered a mystery about the competition's selection process. On December 14, the Canada Reads blog said Hunter just doesn't understand: CR is a "fiction contest." But on December 18 the same blog described the selection process this way:

"Here's the short answer: the panelists select the books.... Distilled to its essence, Canada Reads is really a competition for readers by readers.... The only criteria: they have to love the books they suggest and they have to feel convinced that those choices stand a chance of winning over the most hearts and minds."

The only criteria? Some 'splaining required, CR.

Wolfe versus Crerar: who would win?

Well, both, actually. The C.P. Stacey Award in Canadian military history this year is shared by biographies of the two generals.

The Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War and the Canadian Commission of Military History are pleased to announce two winners for the 2008 C.P. Stacey Award. From a substantial list of Canadian military history titles published in 2006 or 2007, the judges chose for the prize Paul Douglas Dickson’s A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar (2007), published by University of Toronto Press and Stephen Brumwell’s Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (2006), from McGill-Queen’s Press. The judges, Norman Hillmer, Serge Bernier and Doug Delaney concluded that both authors made noteworthy contributions to the field – Dickson for his mass of research on a little-known, yet critical, figure of Canada’s Second World War, and Brumwell for the eloquence of his prose and his convincing re-interpretation of the controversial James Wolfe.

But on the whole, I'd put my money on Crerar. Crerar had tanks (not that he could have got them up the Anse au Foulon).

Wolfe would have less patience than Crerar, I think, for the cautious, methodical plan of attack this award has been following. Brumwell's book appeared in 2006! Good to hear that the committee hopes to announce the 2010 Award (for books published 2008 or 2009) soon. And after that it will become an annual award.

Speaking of the DCB...

As a minor contributor to and major fan of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, I've lately received the annual fundraising appeal from its General Editor, the same John English. The DCB began with a generous private donation, then blossomed with SSHRC funding, and now struggles to continue with much reduced grants. So donations are a vital part of keeping this keystone work of Canadian historical scholarship going. If you are feeling seasonal and historical, it's a worthy recipient for your giving. The DCB's very modest note about how to donate to it is here.

John English leaves CIGI

Recent note here of the travails of historians who become university presidents now has a sequel of sorts. According to a Globe and Mail story, historian John English has abruptly parted company with CIGI, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, the think-tank in Waterloo, Ontario, that he was running for benefactor Jim Balsillie.

English's reputation as a historian rests on his fine biographies of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and other works in political history. But his public policy credentials are impressive too. He was a Liberal MP, then an advisor on cultural policy and foreign policy, chair of the board of the Museum of Civ and the War Museum, and a Canadian representative on United Nations and landmines matters. Lately he has also been General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

CIGI, the largest public-policy think tank in the country, was a big mandate, and the Globe reports English left the University of Waterloo to devote himself to it. If English doesn't have what CIGI wants, well, what does CIGI want?

Regrettably the Globe story has little but speculation about causes for English's departure because most of those in the know are acting more like logrolling bureaucrats than scholars and intellectuals. As the Globe puts it:

Mr. English's departure shocked many in the academic and public service foreign policy communities, none of whom would comment on the record - and one of whom refused to comment even off the record - because their institutions either receive or are eligible to receive funds from CIGI and CIC.

Canada 150.... it's coming

There's a civil-culture organization aforming to consider how to mark the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation in 2017. They have some plans and ideas, but they seem to be open to would-be participants.

The website of the Canada150 Project is here. Paul Jones, who chaired one of the recent meetings, has been blogging about them here.

Is Geography the new History?

More Intelligent Life picks up Robert Butler's argument that all the important questions these days are geophysical ones.

I studied English as a student and could never have imagined wanting to switch to geography.... To the schoolchildren of the 1970s, geography seemed safe and slightly dull.... But that has changed.

Best and Worst

The History Today blog has been doing such a lively series on the best of British history in 2009 that we should be ashamed to be Canadians. But trust the Brits, they've also delivered a list of the worst books of the decade. Not history books, actually, but well worth your time if you have a misanthropic touch of Scrooge in you.

Robert Keyserlingk, RIP

Robert Keyserlingk, longtime Europeanist at the University of Ottawa, died recently. His widow recently reported the cause was asbestos, a product still mined and exported in Canada. In lieu of an obit, some of his works from Alibris.

Spare a thought for museum workers

Staff at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa-Hull, on strike since September 21, are calling for arbitration in their dispute with the museum. A key demand is secure employment; the union reports some of its members have been contract employees at the museum, without benefits or security of tenure, for twenty years. A union statement is here.

Historians running universities

The Globe and Mail profiles Daniel Woolf, historian turned principal of Queen's University, and the difficult situation he faces. Woolf has a pretty impressive resume as a historian of Britain and of historical writing, and I confess I've never understood why anyone who had a situation like that would voluntarily become a university administrator. But it seems to happen all the time.

How do historians do as university presidents and principals? Is there any data on that? I recall some awkward situations with historians running Canadian universities. On the other hand, Drew Gilpin Faust is an American Civil War historian and president of Harvard. (The other theory, of course, is that it doesn't really matter who runs universities, since they are ungovernable anyway.)

Update, September 15: Charles Levi, who knows university history, offers wisdom:

Do we have any criteria to evaluate how well a university president does? For anyone? What are your limits: lack of disruption of daily activities? Awards received from outside agencies during tenure as president? Honorary degrees received from other universities? Ability to get other jobs after leaving the presidency?

I don't think we have a good set of rules to evaluate this stuff. For one example, James Loudon of U of T is continually criticized as being a bad president of his University -- but in the context in which he administered, he did a pretty good job. The problem was that the context was toxic, and this did him in. Falconer, who succeeded him, gets most of the credit for initiatives Loudon began. Wilson, who preceded him, gets none of the blame for the events which he set in motion and Loudon had to clean up after.

It's a good question whether the physicist Loudon was a better president that the anthropologist Wilson or the theologian Falconer -- but without any good set of criteria for those three, judging historians in comparision just isn't possible.

Last Canadian execution

Two years ago, the inexhaustible Executed Today noted the forty-fifth anniversary of the last capital punishment sentences carried out in Canada, December 11, 1962

Memories of Paris -- no, the other Paris

Misty De Meo reports that the County of Brant Public Library in southwestern Ontario has a digital history and wiki initiative, "like an oral history project, but in a format that empowers people to contribute on their own initiative." Contributions would be welcome, if that's your corner of history, on the wiki.

The image is a lithograph view of Paris, Ontario in 1855, from their online collection -- where it is larger, I promise.

How's 100 Photos doing?

Editor Mark Reid reports:

Well, I'm very, very pleased to announce to you all today that 100 Photos that Changed Canada is currently:

• the #1 "History" book in Canada on amazon.ca
• The #5 book in the category "Literature and Fiction"
• and the #6 book on the overall Bestsellers list

Passing for Canadian

Recently we noted with approval how the Australian official opposition removed and replaced its leader by vote of the parliamentary caucus, as is proper in parliamentary democracies.

Now the same parliamentary process has made Kristina Keneally premier of Australia's largest state, New South Wales. The premier was removed from the state's Labor Party leadership by his caucus, which then chose Keneally, a cabinet minister, to replace him as party leader. She was thereupon sworn in as premier on December 4. Accountability of governments to parliamentarians is rarely a problem in parliamentary democracies -- except in ours.

Some of the buzz about Keneally has a slight "birther" tinge, based on the fact that she was born and raised in the United States. She immigrated to Australia about 1995 and only became an Australian citizen (and eligible for elective office in NSW) in 2000. She is also the niece by marriage of the writer Thomas Keneally.

Some comments on her American background has made note of another immigrant Australian politician, the flamboyant King O'Malley (1858-1953), a member of the founding national parliament of the country. O'Malley successfully claimed he was eligible for election because, having been born in Canada, he was a British subject with the same rights throughout the empire (there being no separate Canadian or Australian citizenship at the time). It was widely suspected, however, that O'Malley was actually an American (one Australian biography of him is entitled O'Malley: The American Bounder). There is no record of him in census or birth records in either Canada or the United States, so he may not even have been King O'Malley before he arrived in Auz in 1888.

One piece of evidence suggesting he was American: though Australians, like us, generally use the "ou" spelling in words like "favour" and "labour," King O'Malley established that the Australian Labor Party would drop the "u" - as it still does today.

(Thanks for Fruits and Votes's Australian thread for launching me on this.)

A shot in the arm for confederation

Journalist Chantal Hébert got her H1N1 shot in Montreal the other day. The process was easy and fast, she reports in a post on her blogue entitled "the flu, the vaccine, and the Fathers of Confederation." She muses that if the province can deliver the service, there is little basis for complaints that the confederation-makers got it all wrong when they made healthcare a provincial responsibility.

Selon une école de pensée particulièrement répandue dans le reste du Canada, les pères de la Confédération se sont trompés en attribuant aux provinces la maîtrise-d’oeuvre en matière de politique sociale.

Les uns argumentent qu’en 1867, on ne pouvait pas prévoir combien ce secteur deviendrait névralgique au Canada. D’autres encore affirment que le partage actuel des pouvoirs suscite conflits et dédoublements.

L’expérience actuelle ne va pas dans le sens de ces arguments, ni d’une plus grande centralisation des pouvoirs au niveau fédéral.

I also got a fast, easy, well-organized flu shot recently in Toronto. I hadn't thought to constutionalize the experience, but I see her point. (Chantal Hébert, whom most of us see so much at ease in English, writes just as much in what seems a rather sophisticated French, full of images and idioms that I have to guess at or look up.)

The worst of all possible senates

The Ottawa Citizen blog "The Gargoyle" reports on a Manitoba consultation that has proposed an elected senate. The Gargoyle calls it a recipe for absolute chaos, which looks about right. What Manitoba has come up seems to be almost precisely what Gordon Gibson, the BC activist who was one of the original proponents of an elected senate, has warned against as pure folly.

Stephen MacLean is already on the case in the Gargoyle's comments section.

Dock that prolixity

This is a dead-on review of a new edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage. The new edition is actually a republication of the original 1926 edition, turning its back on two revisions, one with small changes in 1965 and a substantial rewriting in 1996.

I would not say I rely on Fowler -- his is, after all, the English language of 1926, and things do change -- but he's surely my favourite read among usage texts. And I particularly admire the first words in the book, which express a thought all authors must have about their books (though who else would say it so precisely?): "I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened...."

Exactly. I rarely dock a prolixity without thinking of him.

"This is how a Westminster model is supposed to work"

A leading political commentator, Andrew Coyne in Macleans', takes note of the leadership change in Australia.

Scroll down and you will see I confidently predicted this would be entirely ignored in Canada. I stand corrected -- and amazed. (In fairness, Coyne has made gestures at least in this direction in the past, though I can't actually find any in a quick search of past columns on his now inactive website.

Thanks, Dave Snow.

World War II and War of 1812

In Toronto, the Churchill Society presents the prolific British historian Andrew Roberts discussing his new book Masters and Commanders, on high command in the Second World War. Tuesday, December 8 at Trinity College, and it's free. Details here.

Also in Toronto, the Friends of Fort York (www.fortyork.ca seems to be down) note that architectural plans for a proposed new visitor centre at the city's Fort York are on view this weekend at City Hall's Members' Lounge, December 4 to 6, noon to 6 pm. Participation and comments welcomed. Mayor David Miller will speak at the opening, noon Friday.

What to read

This week the Globe & Mail's weekly feature on the best in magazines featured The Beaver and its new issue on Olympic history. Bruce Kidd, Bruce Dowbiggin, Lawrence Martin... a stellar array of contributors. So go and get one.

My own column for the issue is on First Nations athletes and their complex relationship with mainstream sports and the Olympics and all.

Parliamentary leadership in a representative democracy

In Australia as in Canada, conservative politicians are reluctant to act vigorously on climate change issues. Today, willingness to consider a climate change project cost the leader of the opposition his job.

Malcolm Turnbull, the incumbent leader of the Liberals (ie, the conservatives), was seen as being insufficiently hostile to the emissions trading scheme the Labour government is proposing. They had a leadership battle on the issue, and his caucus rival Tony Abbott is now leader.

The vote was 42-41. The battle, that is, was fought within the elected caucus of Liberal MPs. It took a couple of days, it cost nothing, and -- imagine this, Canada -- it was fought over a matter of principle and policy, not over who "looked like a leader" or which contenders could fund their supporters to buy the most votes (or "memberships," as we call them).

The Liberals now promise party unity. But having just confirmed that party leaders in Australia are accountable to MPs and not vice versa, some of the backbenchers who had followed Turnbull may decide to support the Labour government's ETS project.

Parliamentary democracy: I still think it is a great idea, worth trying in Canada.

(Amount of analysis of these events you will read in the Canadian media, popular and scholarly? Zipnada. Update, Dec 3: Except here!)