Articles / Canada's History /2011 - 2012
Canada's History
HISTORY WARS AT THE ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM
(first published in Canada's History January 2011)
Shouldn’t a historian of Canada be thrilled? On a cold January weeknight in Toronto, I was in a swirling crowd some six hundred strong, and all of us had paid $25 to cram, standing room only, into the main hall of the Royal Ontario Museum for a Canadian history debate featuring such luminaries as Jack Granatstein and Michael Bliss, both fine historians and bold speakers.
The event was doubly special because it was the Royal Ontario. For the most part, the ROM doesn’t do Canada. Its historical collections are superb when it comes to classical Greece, Ming dynasty China, or renaissance Europe. But outside natural history, its Canadian materials are skimpy. Toronto does not have a museum of Toronto, a museum of Ontario, or a museum of Canada. We have the ROM instead.
In recent years, the ROM’s charismatic director William Thorsell (now retired) fought to assert his museum’s role as a vital element on the Toronto cultural landscape. And that brought Canadian questions into his sights. In September 2009, Thorsell presided over a ROM debate to mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. His curators complemented the event with displays of such treasures as Benjamin West’s great Death of Wolfe painting. The ROM may not have much Canadiana, but what it has is some of the best.
But the ROM’s Plains of Abraham debate hardly aspired to match its Plains of Abraham painting. On one side stood Parti Québécois warhorse Bernard Landry, who leavened his ranting about humiliation and oppression with nostrums about New France he must have picked up from the nuns in 1950s schoolrooms. For the other side, Jack Granatstein fulminated about Quebeckers’ ingratitude for all Canada has done for them. The history was mostly drivel, but the evening provided the ROM with the kind of buzz Thorsell craved -- and a full house, too. This winter, the ROM has come back with more history debates: a whole season that it has lavishly promoted under the title "History Wars."
But a Torontonian who takes the country’s past seriously may regret being drafted into these "History Wars." The ROM’s history-war debates are less about history than current controversies – abolishing the monarchy, attacking multiculturalism, reviewing Trudeau’s legacy – and half the debaters are not historians but prominent polemical journalists: David Frum, John Fraser, Haroon Siddiqui. C’est manifique, mais ce n’est pas l’histoire. It is hard to find a historian on the program under retirement age. Does the ROM not know of any new research or fresh perspectives from historians of Canada?
Finding my way into the hall, I could not help remembering how the ROM accompanied it recent, brilliant exhibition, "Terracotta Warriors," with many fine presentations by leading-edge scholars and artists of China. The ROM, indeed, has always offered lively and accessible lectures and performances by first-rate speakers and experts on everything from ancient civilizations to early 20th century couture.
But when the subject is the history of Canada, the ROM, one of Canada’s leading research museums, seems to veer unerringly from seriousness and sophistication to tabloid sensation. Even wit and taste have gone AWOL from the History Wars. "Louis Riel Deserved to Hang," the most "historical" of the topics in the series, seems almost intended to offend the still-marginalized Métis minority of Canada. If the ROM so needed to be provocative, wouldn’t "John A. Macdonald should be Convicted of Genocide" have been a bolder, fresher take on the same question?
As the room filled, I wondered if the ROM might be reflecting a widely-held attitude in its disdain for taking our history seriously. In recent years, we have seen huge and laudable efforts -- and considerable spending -- in the cause of strengthening Canada by teaching more history. But most of that effort is directed at schoolchildren. "Canadian history – it is so important for the kids," I often hear. And who can disagree? But sometimes it seems many Canadians suspect Canadian history is only for kids. What future has Canadian history if even the ROM, that great repository of research and sophistication and seriousness about our human inheritance, thinks the only way to talk to Canadian adults about Canadian history is through manufactured controversy and relentless presentism on obvious questions.
The January debate -- Michael Bliss and newspaperman John Fraser on the question of abolishing the monarchy -- indeed offered a lively spectacle. Monarchist Fraser mostly stuck to sentiment and jibes, but abolitionist Bliss’s constitutional conundrum had real sting: the governor-general, our practical head of state, is "a referee appointed by the home team," he argued, and one day that reality is going to bite us. It was a stimulating debate and provoked vigorous comments and questions. We six hundred got our money worth, sure.
But I walked down the Museum subway steps afterwards dreaming of what the mighty brains and resources of the Royal Ontario Museum could create if it occurred to them to offer that hungry audience some genuinely adult discussions on some genuinely historical questions about this country.
©Christopher Moore Editorial Ltd, 2011
WHY CANADIANS DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT COALITION GOVERNMENTS
(first published in Canada's History, March 2011)
In John A. Macdonald’s day, Canadians had no fear of coalition governments.
Before the first federal election in the summer of 1867, Macdonald persuaded several of the Reform politicians who had been key to the building of Confederation to stay within his big tent. Macdonald gleefully declared his Liberal-Conservative partnership was more plausible as a government than the remaining reformers – just a disgruntled rump, he liked to suggest. The voters agreed.
Across the world, such coalition-making is a natural part of parliamentary democracy. Whenever several parties emerge to represent the diverse interests that exist in most modern electorates, they divide up popular support. Then they have to make parliament work in a situation where no party dominates. Their solution? Formal or informal, temporary or longstanding, it’s often a coalition. From Westminster to Wellington and New Delhi to Berlin, coalition politics is where voters expect their representatives truly to demonstrate the skill and judgment that justifies them a place in parliament.
Stephen Harper surely knew he was talking nonsense when he insisted that only the party that "won" the election could form a government. Commentators easily exposed his distortion of parliamentary norms. But he was in touch with something important about Canada, for his bold claim spoke to a deep-rooted Canadian idea about how politics should work. In December 2009, when Stéphane Dion’s Liberals and Jack Layton’s New Democrats proposed to replace his government with one of their own, polls suggested that dismay was widespread among voters. "Form a government without us voting on it?" many Canadians responded. "That can’t be right."
The world gapes at our lack of parliamentary sophistication. But Canada's parliamentary system is one of the oldest in the world, and coalition politics used to be a familiar part of it. Why do Canadians alone in the parliamentary world now expect that the square pegs of minority parties can be jammed into the round holes of majority government? To put us so starkly at odds with the parliamentary traditions of the whole world, let alone our own origins, something must have changed in Canadian political history.
Well, one thing has, and it changed quite a long time ago. In 1919, William Lyon Mackenzie King became leader of the Liberal Party, not by the support of elected Liberal MPs, but by the vote of party members gathered in a convention centre. That kind of leadership selection process had never been tried in any parliamentary system before, but the other Canadian political parties soon followed suit. Ever since, Canada has been virtually the only country in the world where parliamentary party leaders are selected by whoever buys a vote in a private, outside-of-parliament popularity contest -- and are not accountable to the elected parliamentarians they lead.
With his Gollum-like cunning, Mackenzie King at once grasped the magical power he had been granted. Clutching his precious leadership, he had suddenly become immune to his MPs. He told the people's elected representatives he was no longer accountable to them; they had to do what he told them. Mr. Harper’s often-deplored practice of treating backbenchers and cabinet ministers as gofers and water boys is just the blossoming of the seed Mackenzie King planted. Under Canada’s new idea of party leadership, MPs became nobodies long before Pierre Trudeau was mean enough to say so.
What has this to do with coalitions? Well, everything. In real parliamentary systems, leadership tends to be diffused. There are usually several influential leaders in any parliamentary party. They head regional or ideological factions that jockey and negotiate for influence in and out of the legislature -- and sometimes bounce a leader, even an incumbent prime minister, right out of office, as happened in Australia last summer. In that context, it is not so hard to consider coalition partnerships – they are just another faction in the endless bargaining process that defines vigorous political parties representing the diversity of their supporters in parliament. Coalitions can work when parliaments work, when parliaments are a genuine forum in which ideas and policies – and leaders – are tried and tested.
In Canada’s legislatures, leaders stand alone. They can tolerate no dissident voices within the caucus, no views and ambitions jockeying for influence, no fresh ideas bubbling up inside. A Canadian political party today is little more than a leader flanked by a bagman, a spin-doctor, and a poll-taker; everyone else is just saying aye and pounding signs. And party leaders have little but their leadership. Rein that in, expect a little give-and-take, and they look weak. They risk become nobodies like everyone else. Coalitions, of course, are by definition a sharing of leadership, a limitation on one leader’s power. No wonder our party leaders dread them: who knows where that might lead?
The public’s doubts, too, are grounded in a hard-eyed view of parliament. As long as our parties are so blindly leader-driven, there are simply too few strong voices there for our legislatures to be serious forums for negotiation. And if parliament will not decide, then elections may not offer much, but to many Canadians they seem like all we have. No wonder we resist delegating the power to make and unmake governments to MPs who have refused such responsibility for ninety years.
Effective coalitions are the product of effective parliaments. Canadians are likely to suspect the one until we experience the other. Backbenchers reasserting their authority might take us in that direction, but don’t look to the party leaders. Power corrupts, as they say, and absolute power is even better.
©Christopher Moore Editorial Ltd, 2011
NATIONAL PARKS FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS
(first published in Canada's History, October/November 2011)
When we went cruising the mighty Saguenay fiord in Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park last summer, it did not occur to me that this may be a national park for the future. In fact, if J.B. Harkin, “father of Canada’s national parks,” came back in spirit to see it, he might not recognize it as a national park at all.
The ‘park” at Saguenay-St. Lawrence is entirely under water, for one thing, and it focuses on preserving that unique marine environment, whereas the original national parks were mostly mountain landscapes that Parks Canada had improved with new roads, big hotels, and golf courses to attract and entertain the tourists. Also, Harkin was an Ottawa man to his fingertips, whereas Parks Canada runs Saguenay-St. Lawrence National Park in partnership with Parcs Québec.
But in the end Bernard Harkin might approve of parks like this one. As a park dedicated to marine conservation, Saguenay-St. Lawrence suggests future pathways for national parks. But in the centenary year of Parks Canada, it still follows a roadmap for parks that the pioneers of our national parks helped to draw in the early twentieth century.
Like many official centennials, Parks Canada’s hundredth birthday seems slightly invented. After all, Banff National Park, created in 1885, celebrated its 125th anniversary last year. But 1911 matters too. That was the year a scattering of national parks, mostly in the Rockies, was entrusted to the Dominion Parks Branch (Parks Canada today), the world’s first agency devoted to managing an entire national parks system as a national asset. National parks were not uniquely Canadian even then. Yosemite and Yellowstone both preceded Banff, and two American parks histories proudly call national parks An American Idea and America’s Best Idea. But the idea of a central agency running a nation-wide network of protected places … well, Parks Canada is five years older than its American counterpart.
Bernard Harkin became the first head of the parks service at its birth in 1911 and he ran it until 1936. A Liberal patronage appointee, he survived the defeat of Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government just weeks after it had appointed him. Later, in 1930, he thwarted Calgary Power’s ambitions to build a power dam right in Banff National Park -- only to see the company’s owner, R. B. Bennett, become prime minister that same year. Harkin survived that too.
In its early years, the parks service might have welcomed the dam-builders. In 1885, John A. Macdonald had promised that Banff National Park would recoup its costs many times over: in his day, and in the early years of the parks, roads and recreational facilities were more important than wilderness. Parks were a national resource to be exploited like forests, wheat fields, or mineral deposits. At first Parks Canada did not oppose logging or mining in parks, and its wardens were paid to trap wolves and other predators. Some people were hardly treated better; First Nations and early settlers were driven heartlessly from their old homes in new parks.
But in 1930 the new National Parks Act declared that parks were “dedicated to the people of Canada” and must be preserved “unimpaired for future generations.” A conservationist ethos was being born in the parks service. Preservation of landscapes and animals began to rival the amusement of visitors as the goal of national parks. Harkin said at the end of his life that while a system of national parks had been successfully built, “the battle to keep them inviolate is never won.” His biographer concludes that Bernard Harkin was not just a dedicated bureaucrat; he was a great man.
The second transformative figure in Canadian parks history might just be a politician, Jean Chrétien in fact. Harkin imagined national parks in every part of Canada, but when Chrétien became Parks Canada’s minister in 1968, the parks network was hardly larger than it had been in the 1930s. Between 1968 and 1972 came eleven new parks, including the first north of 60 and the first national parks in Quebec – one of them, La Mauricie, adjoining Chrétien’s own constituency. Parks Canada was starting to deliver on its promise to preserve examples of ecological zones and heritage places in every part of Canada and for all Canadians. At the same time, the service expanded the idea of what a national park could be. Historic parks, marine parks, heritage rivers, and historic canals became a growing part of its repertoire.
The world is still drawn to Canada by its mountains, its wildlife, and its wildernesses, of course. The very image of the wild that any Canadian holds dear probably comes from an image of one of the national parks. But in some of today’s parks, like the vast and magnificent ones in the northern territories, annual visitors may total a few dozen rather than hundreds of thousands. Canadians now grasp that the national parks we may never visit are as precious to us as the ones we do. We trust those wild, untraveled landscapes are there forever, not just for us. As such, they live even more strongly in the national psyche.
Today national parks protect places that are hardly landscapes at all and may never be tourist lures. Parks Canada has been considering a proposal for a marine conservation area that would protect the seabed of Lancaster Sound, the great eastern gateway to the Northwest Passage. Such plans no longer exclude local expertise and local partnerships; Lancaster Sound would be managed in partnership with the Inuit of Nunavut, as Saguenay-St. Lawrence is with Parcs Québec. Lancaster Sound’s preservation is still not certain; some parts of the federal government want to do seabed seismic testing first, just in case there’s oil down there. As Harkin said a lifetime ago, the battle goes on forever.
They say the great Canadian question is “Where is here?” and there is no better place to ponder our place in the landscape than in a protected park. I felt that way last summer when we visited Saguenay-St. Lawrence, loafing along on a cruise boat out of Tadoussac, Qc. (when no doubt we should have been kayaking!) The soaring cliffs above the deep, cold, whale-friendly waters are everything we expect in a national park: beauty, grandeur, and the preservation of wildlife and ecology. And little else: in this park the roads, the hotels, and restaurants, even the tour boats, all operate from outside a park that truly is focused on preservation more than recreation.
I hope that was a glimpse of the future for our national parks.
©Christopher Moore Editorial Ltd, 2011
WHODUNIT: THE KILLING OF D'ARCY McGEE
(first published in Canada's History, December 2011/January 2012)
Late one night in 1868, someone put a bullet into D’Arcy McGee’s head on Sparks Street in Ottawa, steps from the House of Commons where he had just finished a rousing speech. In no time at all, Patrick James Whelan, an Irish Catholic tailor, was arrested, sentenced, and sent to the gallows. “They got to find me guilty yet,” said Whelan defiantly.
McGee’s murder was the new nation’s first political assassination. But was “Jim” Whelan the first of Canada’s wrongly convicted? Most of what I had always heard about his trial suggested he was. The witnesses were said to be liars. The evidence against him was circumstantial at best. McGee’s friend the prime minister came and sat beside the judge on the trial bench. Fierce anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices ruled, and the defendant’s own lawyer was a prominent Protestant Orangeman. The idea that Whelan was a victim of a show trial and a judicial lynching has always been a big part of the McGee murder story.
Looks like time that story got a makeover.
David A. Wilson, a Toronto professor of Celtic Studies, has just completed a ten-year project to write the life of D’Arcy McGee, “the greatest Irishman in Canadian history,” and his two-volume life has been called “one of the great historical biographies of our time.” This fall Wilson wrapped up his story with what must be the authoritative account of the murder and the trial.
Whelan? Well, Whelan does not come out so well.
McGee’s great campaigns in his last years were for confederation and against Fenianism. He promised his Irish-Canadian compatriots that peaceful progress and confederation would give them a full and fair place in Canadian society. But Fenians stood for “physical force” nationalism – a terrorist campaign against British rule in Ireland and British institutions in Canada. McGee insisted nothing could be worse for Irish Canadians.
That fight made McGee unpopular among some of his own constituency and eroded his political capital; he had a hard time getting elected in the first election after confederation. For a long time his stand put him on the wrong side of history too. Irish fighters against the British oppressor have often had a glow of romance cast over them, with all those rousing songs about the wearing of the green. Legends of the “wild geese” and the Easter martyrs helped sell the Fenians and even their heirs in the IRA and the Provos as heroic resisters, not lethal killers. And who says Whelan was a Fenian, went the story, just because he despised the British as a loyal Irishman should?
“He was deep in those circles,” David Wilson told me recently. Wilson demolishes Whelan’s claim that he was a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, leaving little doubt that Whelan was intimately involved in Canadian networks dedicated to armed violence. Whelan’s brother in Ireland was a convicted Fenian. All his Montreal and Ottawa companions were Fenians too, and he himself had been committed to the cause for years. And the Fenian threat, says Wilson, was not just from American Irish soldiers fresh from the American Civil War, for domestic Canadian Fenianism was no comic-opera farce. “Fenianism within Canada is a great untold story,” Wilson says, “and there is a goldmine of information on it.” Indeed, he’s planning his next book on that subject.
What about the murder trial of Patrick James Whelan? “I loved writing that part,” says Wilson. “If this witness was lying, what does that say about this other witness’s evidence? It was like three-dimensional chess.” Wilson concludes it was “a hard-fought trial,” well short of today’s courtroom standards, but not the bigoted railroading that legend has made it to be. Whelan got a vigorous and professional defence, and at the time no one found it odd that when a prime minister visited a courtroom, he was given a place of honour. One of Whelan’s defenders considered John A Macdonald’s presence a moderating influence.
Clearly there was dubious testimony from both sides, but the evidence of Whelan and his friends in Montreal and Ottawa stalking McGee, guns barely concealed, is compelling. Then there’s the pistol and the bullet.
Wilson explores in fascinating detail modern forensic studies of the bullet that killed McGee and the pistol found on Whelan. The bullet is a good match for the gun, the gun had been freshly fired, Whelan had the gun, and …. It’s not final or ironclad, but Wilson makes clear that Whelan had the weapon, the motive, the means, and the opportunity. If he was not the assassin, he must have been standing right beside him. The case for Whelan’s innocence seems as dead as D’Arcy McGee.
Wilson compares McGee to Canadian Sikhs and Muslims of recent times who, sometimes at the risk of their lives, have stood up for tolerance and legal political action against extremist tendencies in their own communities. In recent years, Ireland seems finally to have rejected decisively the cult of political violence associated with the Fenians and the IRA. And it seems fair to conclude that when Canada executed Patrick James Whelan early in 1869, no innocent man went to the gallows. Case closed.
D’Arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate 1857-1868, the second volume of David A. Wilson’s biography, was published by McGill Queen’s Press in the fall of 2011.
©Christopher Moore Editorial Ltd, 2011