History of the Senate from Emmett Macfarlane

On his Substack, political scientist Emmett Macfarlane offers much good sense on the Senate (as he has done before) and confrontation  being set up between a Poilievre government and a Senate full of independent senators -- who owe their seats to Justin Trudeau's new appointment process.  Macfarlane's book Constitutional Pariah is the best book available on the Senate: my notes on it are here.

Andrew Coyne, meanwhile, suggests the Charter of Rights and the notwithstanding clause may be the prime minister's last best shot as an election issue..

History of election interference: it's an inside job

I've been trying to follow the inquiries that have been in the headlines in the past year or so, about alleged interference by foreign powers in Canadian elections: the Johnson, the Hogue, etc. It's all been a bit murky, and the point is not often easy to see. The media and Question Period are full of lurid suggestions about Chinese and other foreign agents performing not-very-well specified nefarious acts to meddle in Canadian election results. The government should have done something!

Maybe it is a bad thing -- spies gonna spy, and someone's gotta counterspy. But most of the alleged interference seems to amount to nothing more than buying party "memberships" that allow the holders to vote during the selection of local party candidates and would-be party leaders. And that, of course, is exactly what all the political parties are endlessly begging anyone and everyone to do: buy a vote. Recent example: Membership in the Alberta NDP recently grew from 16,000 to perhaps 85,000. As it happens, there has a leadership "race" (a leadership market, one should perhaps say) in the party at the same time.

There are scores of Canadian political consultancies that make a good business doing little more than manufacturing voters for candidate selection races and leadership contests in all the political parties. The Chinese government and the Hell's Angels and, I don't know, the Association of Suburban Property Developers would be crazy not to avail themselves of the opportunities the political parties are desperate to offer them. The corruption is not on the part of membership buyers (though indeed we should understand it is always an unethical act to buy a party membership during candidate or leadership selection races). The corruption is coming directly from the political parties that devised these processes. 

All our parties  -- with the support of virtually all our pundits and political scientists-- are committed to party leadership contests that mean nothing but vote-buying: the candidate whose team invests the most capital in buying memberships gets to pick the winner. In that process, who actually agrees to hold and vote the membership hardly matters. Whether 14 year old kids or foreign agents, they have all been bought and sold. Once the winning candidate is installed, their membership becomes worthless, anyway.

But maybe the endless fruitless public inquiries are beginning to influence a few commentators. On Saturday Andrew Coyne pointed out where the rot really lies:

To vote in a Liberal Party nomination race, you only have to be 14 years of age. You do not have to be a citizen. You don’t even have to be a member of the party, or not of any standing: It’s enough that you signed up before the “cut-off,” typically days before the vote.

Other parties are scarcely better: The Conservatives and NDP at least require that voters in their elections be citizens, but otherwise are as lax as the Liberals. And in every party, nominations are run on the same anarchic lines, often decided by busloads of “instant members,” recruited and (it is often suspected) paid for by party power brokers, who mysteriously appear at the last minute. It’s called “stacking the meeting,” and it’s as Canadian as butter tarts.

Coyne identifies the deeper problem this corruption is designed to produce:

Canadian party leaders, federal and provincial, are elected, not by the caucus they will lead, but by a vote of the members – or rather, not the existing members, but the membership as expanded and distorted by the frantic membership sales drives the parties call leadership races.

The Globe and Mail may be awakening to this issue. Today another Globe columnist, Campbell Clark, joins the charge. But Clark, at least, is still pulling his punches. He wants the parties not to end the vote-buying orgies but only to clean them up.

The deeper point, the one Coyne is at least moving toward, is that a parliamentary system cannot function properly unless party leaders are accountable to the elected party caucus. Parliament is not a parliament if only the four or five MPs for whom leadership positions have been purchased are allowed to have opinions.  All MPs, and not just those in leadership positions, must ultimately be involved in determining what parliaments do.  They do that by determining who leads them and what caucus policy should be.  

The austere passion of the historian

Still catching up on my reading, I was delighted to find in the May 2024 Literary Review of Canada a thoughtful letter by Robert Girvan of Toronto about my Cundill books review from the Jan/Feb 2024 issue.  Reader engagement -- always appreciated!

And this is not the thumbs-up/thumbs-down sort of response. Robert Girvan engages at length with my observations (find his letter at the foot of the article) about what one might call the personal turn in academic writing -- substantial scholarly books in which the personal interests and commitments of the author become an integral part of the writing, rather than something to be sussed out from their acknowledgments and endnotes. 

He offers valuable caution about "overly personal involvement with one's subject" in historical work. I resist his description of one of the reviewed books as "wondrous fiction," but his arguments against agenda-driven history deserves attention. And he provides a great quotation about "the historian, with the austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central to his [sic] vocation...." 

Prize Watch: Shaughnessy Cohen Prize to John Vaillant for Fire Weather

No disrespect to the other nominees, but I was pleased to see John Vaillant's Fire Weather being awarded the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing at the Writers' Trust annual Politics and the Pen dinner in Ottawa.  

Fire Weather was shortlisted for the American Pulitzer Prize (and for the Hilary Weston Nonfiction Prize in Canada) and has won a bunch of other awards here and internationally. 

Update, May 9:  Helen Webberley asks: 

Elizabeth Shaughnessy Cohen must have been an impressive lawyer and politician since her prize for political writing is given at the annual Writers' Trust. Is the prize highly regarded amongst writers?

She was popular more than prominent, perhaps. She was a twice-elected MP in the Canadian Parliament, until she dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage in the Commons chamber in 1998, aged just 50. Friends and colleagues sponsored the award in her name. It has added cachet from being administered by the Writers' Trust of Canada, the leading non-governmental source of literary prizes in Canada, and also from being awarded in Ottawa at a lavish event popular with the Ottawa political class: "Politics and the Pen" -- and not at their main prize-giving in November each year. It was held a few times in the rotunda and adjacent corridors of the Parliament Building  -- I attended one and was much impressed -- but it now takes place in a hotel. It should be well regarded by writers, I think: strong, independent jurors, a purse of $25,000 shortlists of books not always noticed for literary awards. Wikipedia has this.  Over the years, jurors have often taken a broad view of what constitutes Political Writing -- as they probably should.

You are Australian, Helen. Does Australia have an equivalent political-books prize?

A new museum for the Quebecois? UPDATED

Eric Bédard

La Presse has recently been covering the plan of the Quebec government of Francois Legault to create a new national museum for Quebec, one said to be "not dedicated to the history of Quebec but rather to that of the Quebec nation" ("le futur musée ne sera pas consacré à l’histoire du Québec, mais plutôt à celui de la nation québécoise").  

It is already getting pushback, notably in an opinion piece in La Presse from 36 historians and cultural figures led by historians Catherine LaRochelle and Camille Robert:  "Will the contents reflect the state of historiography or will they propose a return to the old national history centred on great events and heroes?" ("Est-ce que les contenus refléteront l’état de l’historiographie ou proposeront-ils un retour au vieux récit national centré sur les grands évènements et les héros?")

The association of Quebec First Nations has also questioned the project declaring that they are not merely the prehistory of Quebec and demanding that recognized Indigenous historians be included in the project.  But a Culture Ministry spokesperson specified, "This will not be a museum of the history of the occupation of the territory of the valley of the St. Lawrence, but a museum of the history of our nation, la nation québécoise."   

Premier Legault was pretty clear where he stood on that question: "My intention, the one I am giving myself, is that the Québécois come from here saying to themselves, 'I'm proud to be Québécois." (« Mon objectif, celui que je me donne, c’est que les Québécois sortent d’ici en se disant “je suis fier d’être québécois”»)

Eric Bédard, the notable Quebec historian who heads the comité scientifique for the museum, specified that the point is "a history of a people of French language and culture." («Le but est de proposer une histoire d’un peuple de langue et de culture françaises»). He suggested that the First Nations perhaps represent "the prehistory of Quebec."

Bédard, a noted scholar of Quebec history who now teaches in TELUQ, the distance education arm of the Universite de Quebec, is a figure without many counterparts in English Canada, a widely published scholar who also has a substantial public profile through writing, broadcasting, and commenting regularly about history in major French-language media. 

Update, May 13:  I was amused to see these exact same quotations (from the same couple of online La Presse articles, no doubt) being the basis of a Saturday Globe and  Mail column by Konrad Yakabuski. Today the Toronto Star has some new sources, notable historians Stephen High and Ronald Rudin, commenting on the same subject.

Prize Watch: Kobzar Prize for Myrna Kostash

Happy to read that my friend Myrna Kostash has won the 2024 Kobzar Book Award, given biennially by the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation "for outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts by authors who write on a topic with a tangible connection to Ukrainian Canadians" for her family history Ghosts in the Photograph. The Kobzar ($25,000) does not sort among genres. Nice to see a history and a nonfiction win this year.

Myrna's book started from a box full of family photographs and grew into a deep dive into her forebears both in Alberta and in Ukraine. Having always assumed that her Ukrainian connections had all been beaten down peasants liberated by the the opportunity to immigrate to Canada's Golden West at the start of the 20th century, she instead found Ukrainian Kostashes who were poets, journalists, radicals and much else, and deeply involved in centuries of Ukrainian events. 

She also revises the history of her Alberta Kostashes, having become aware that all that fertile land east of Edmonton that they took up and farmed had been home and land to Cree people, who had been concentrated on reserves barely fifteen years earlier. It is, that is, a more political, more thoughtful, and less entirely celebratory work than most family history turns out to be.

When she published the book, Myrna left out the photos that inspired it, concerned they would "compete" with her prose images.  Faced with a chorus of "Where are the pix????" she has made them available on a website.  

I wrote a bit about Ghosts in a Photograph previously on this site.  

History of ... I can't even

The recently founded Canadian Institute for Historical Education wants us to pay $125 a seat at the Badminton and Racquet Club in Toronto to hear its experts tell us why we should celebrate Canadian heroes like Henry Dundas, a British cabinet minister who never came within a thousand kilometres of Canada in his life.

Our colloquium a year ago on Henry Dundas was powerful and I think really caused the City of Toronto to reverse its decision on renaming Dundas Street. And our series on Macdonald in the fall brought together some of Canada’s leading historians who, each in their own way, showed that our colourful first prime minister was instrumental, indeed essential, in building the country we have today. [i.e., -- trigger alert -- "Macdonald Saved more Indigenous Lives than any other Prime Minister"]

Now we will turn our attention to Egerton Ryerson, as well as looking again at Macdonald’s role in the crisis faced by Canada’s Indigenous Peoples in the 1880s.

Recently I've been writing a piece on the historic sites work of Parks Canada. I'm more and more struck by the wisdom of the mantra "commemoration not celebration" that gradually came to direct its efforts at sites across Canada. And I'm ever more profoundly out of sympathy with the determination that Historical Education means insisting that history is celebrating winners and dismissing all others.

There is, indeed, a case for saying that Henry Dundas's opinions on slavery were more ambiguous than has been claimed by those who would change the name of Dundas Street. And that Egerton Ryerson was not in fact the father of residential schools.  And, yes, that John A. Macdonald was instrumental, even essential.

But to leap from that to insist that any name-changing, any review of our civic iconographies, is the killing and cancelling of the past -- I find that hard to grasp. There is something else at work here.

We used to have an iconic building in Toronto, rich in associations for millions of people, part of our history. And then the Leafs moved from Maple Leaf Gardens, and their new home became the "Air Canada Centre." And then was rebranded "the Scotiabank Arena" (not to be mistaken for the Scotiabank Theatre nearby, or the Scotiabank bank tower between them). We used to have the iconic Skydome, named by a public competition that involved thousands of votes to commemorate the world's first retractable-roof stadium. Then somebody made it merely one of a number of Rogers Centres across Canada, no doubt to be abruptly renamed at the next corporate reshuffle. Who will kill the late Ted Rogers?

When will the Canadian Institute protest these killings of history?

Names change as culture changes. Mr Dundas has his street (and town, and even an inlet in Nunavut) because he was one of the patrons of a British colonial official eager to put a British imprint on a new colonial creation in the 1790s. He's had a good run. It's not his Toronto anymore, and today we have different traditions to imprint on our cities. Just as Iqaliut surely seems more appropriate than "Frobisher Bay," (as it was called for about 45 years), and just as Boulevard Rene-Levesque is more natural to modern Montreal than Dorchester Street could be, why cannot we choose names for our streets and institutions that reflect modern Toronto and modern Canada? 

Cost you $125 to be told why we can't, I guess.     

  

History of views counted.

I don't give a lot of respect to the view counter over on the right hand side of this page. I presume that quite a bit of whatever it reports there is inflated by flybys from Russian scammers and robot spiders and all the other weird phenomena of the internet.  

But still, when I noticed that recently the counter ticked over to two million views since 2010, I did think, "Not bad for the longest running unsubsidized Canadian history blog on the 'net." Also: 2010 is the date I installed the view counter -- the blog itself dates back to 2004.  October 8, 2004 I see on checking back.  A twentieth anniversary looms. 

Arrivederci à Roma

A

Me and my fellow traveller at Piazza Navona in Rome

Air Canada takes us back to Toronto this afternoon, so this wraps up these sketchy travel notes, which have amused me and I hope you too. 

The extent of the Roman ruins in the city of Rome are truly amazing but they rather overwhelmed me, even with a very hardworking guide one day. The city of Rome, however, is a delight to stroll around in. 

Even in April the number of visitors in Rome -- and also in Naples and Venice -- is overwhelming. I don't know how the locals stand us all the time, but even the waiters and the street vendors are friendly, in my experience.

And, Toronto civic leaders take note, yesterday one of Rome's major boulevards was closed to vehicles from Piazza Venezia to beyond the Colosseo, for walkers and later a concert. Visitors and locals alike made abundant use.

Back to history blogging soon.

On the train to Rome, still thinking Pompeii

Russ Chamberlayne checks in to ask 'enviously': "Did your tour of Pompeii leave you wondering if costumed guides in a 'living museum' setting would enhance the experience?"

Yes, sort of. I did sense at Pompeii that immersive feeling that can happen at a well-run  reconstruction or preservation site. (And there has been a fair amount of undisguised stabilization and reconstruction work where required at Pompeii.) 

But costumed re-enactnent is difficult to bring off well, and proportionately harder as the time and culture gap grows.  Would they speak Latin? The theatre at Pompeii is preserved-reconstructed.  I wonder if costumed actors could (or do) produce Pompeian scenes there sometimes.

We did the "second part" of Pompeii yesterday. That is, we went to MANN, the Museo Archaeologicio Nazionale Napoli. It is where most of the 'moveables' of Pompeii ended up: silver, bronze, iron, ceramics, glass, and also scores of mosaics and frescoes removed from walls and floors over the centuries of excavation there.  We were told there is two hundred more years of excavation possible -- a newly opened house was presented to the media just the other day.

Today: Another fast train back to Rome. Home on Sunday.

A Historian visits Pompeii

I sorta knew better, but before going there I still tended to think of Pompeii based on a lot of other archeological sites: basically  a hole in the ground where you look down at some uncovered stones in lines.

Pompeii with its streets, sidewalks, piping and drains, and endless blocks of houses where you walk from room to room and experience the whole architectural plan -- it's on another scale from my stubborn preconception.  And we happened to be there in perfect weather, sunny but only in the high teens C, so with light sweaters and some sunscreen we could roam about for hours.

It's been said before, but Pompeii really does create conditions for thinking about human experiences in the distant past.

There is an excavated site called the Villa of the Mysteries, a large once-luxurious property just outside the town walls. The name "mysteries" comes from the murals in one room, which lay out the steps in the secret Dionysian cult. The artists of the murals had terrific talents -- this room is a sort of Roman Sistine Chapel (yeah, saw those last week) -- except the theme here is centered on adoration of the phallus.With just a bit of woke consciousness it's pretty easy to see the Dionysian mysteries are about what you might expect from a profoundly male-dominated society -- which our guide made clear this certainly was, and not just in the decor.

That was Monday. Tuesday we took a tour of the Sorrento-Amalfi peninsula. Let me just say the sights are breath-taking and I say that as someone who grew up in British Columbia, where  we know about roads carved out of vertiginous slopes above fabulous views.  One added thing here is the way people have been laboriously terracing the slopes for a thousand years to built towns and lay out narrow fields and orchards of lemons and olives