Reviews in the British Journal of Canadian Studies

Jean-Francois Mouhot - Les réfugiés acadiens en France (1758-1785): L'impossible réintégration?

Jean-Francois Mouhot

Les réfugiés acadiens en France (1758-1785): L'impossible réintégration?

Québec: Les Éditions Septentrion, 2009

448 + vii pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-2-89448-513-2.

A book examining approximately three thousand Acadians who reached France in 1758, three years after their deportation from the Maritimes, through to 1785, when about 1,600 of them moved on to Louisiana, might seem a footnote to Canadian Studies. In fact, Jean-Francois Mouhot has produced a carefully researched and closely argued monograph which has an importance that transcends its focus and time period. Central to his analysis is the contested issue of Acadian identity – when did it emerge and of what did it consist? Was there a sense of group solidarity among the refugees dumped on French shores? What did they call themselves? Mouhot insists that previous historians have assumed a specific identity prior to 1755 and labelled it "Acadian", and have attributed their failure to take root back in France to this. The problem, as he sees it, is that there are many documents about the Acadians (to use the term for convenience), but most of the few by them were petitions shaped to win concessions from the strong rather than to reveal the perceptions of the weak. On the face of it, the Acadians ought to have fitted in: they defined themselves as people who spoke French and were deeply Catholic. French officials came to call them "Acadians" but the people themselves were more often used the hardly tactful label "neutral French". As Mouhot sensibly observes, concepts such "assimilation" and "integration" reflect modern thinking largely absent in the eighteenth century. However, ancien régime French government comes out of these pages as moderately efficient, even if it did not consistently concern itself with a small-scale refugee issue. Mouhot even identifies some pre-Revolutionary sense of French cultural nationality, although in practice any policy of local assimilation would have aimed at making the Acadians into Bretons or Poitévins. Reintegration failed, he argues, because the French government never intended that it should succeed, or even be attempted. The Acadians offered a handy answer to an awkward contradiction in Mercantilist thinking: nations needed overseas colonies for strength, yet allowing their own people to emigrate meant demographic weakness. (Hence the British use of the "Foreign Protestants" to populate Nova Scotia.) The refugees were a wild card that could be played in the imperial board-game. Plans to send them to Guiana or to the Caribbean came to nothing, and even projects for block settlement within France seemed to have been aimed at keeping them warm for globalisation. But the Acadians, however they styled themselves, played their part too. They married among themselves and repeatedly sought to be sent either back home or to St Pierre and Miquelon. Eventually, and fortuitously, most were herded off to Louisiana. In 1785 it was a Spanish province, but the emigrants reinforced its francophone identity and – as the Bourbon bureaucracy duly noted – they were subjects of the king of England anyway. Appropriately, Mouhot's book was awarded the Pierre Savard Prize for 2010.

J. Andrew Ross and Andrew D. Smith, eds - Canada's Entrepreneurs From the Fur Trade to the 1929 Stock Market Crash: Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

J. Andrew Ross and Andrew D. Smith, eds

Canada's Entrepreneurs From the Fur Trade to the 1929 Stock Market Crash: Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011

xvii + 580 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-442-612860

The editors have assembled 61 entries from the first fifteen volumes of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography to illustrate the theme of entrepreneurship, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The selection includes five women, one Aboriginal, one Asian and fifteen francophones. Some essays have been edited, and the appendices identifying source materials are replaced by brief sections of further reading. Readers are referred to the original volumes and the on-line www.biographi.ca site for cross referencing and endnotes. The material is grouped into seven sections. The first begins with John Guy in Newfoundland. The second is entitled 'The Commercial Empire of the St Lawrence after 1763'. Three sections focus on regions: the Maritimes, the West and central Canada. The editors ingeniously link 'Railwaymen and Network Creators', the latter category including bankers, journalists and Sir Adam Beck of Ontario Hydro. 'Brand Names and Big Business' covers such personalities as Timothy Eaton and Rodolphe Forget. The editors sensibly avoid a precise definition of entrepreneurship, and their broad interpretation permits the inclusion of a wide range of personalities and activities. One of their motives for publication is a desire to encourage the study of business topics within Canadian history courses. To this end, they pose challenging questions in their brief Introduction. Has Canada had it too easy, its abundant natural resources rendering innovation unnecessary? Has Canadian business been over-dependent upon government support? Have some regions failed to stimulate and harness entrepreneurial talent? In global or at least continental terms, has Canadian entrepreneurship proved a story of success or failure? The volume is well illustrated and handsomely produced.

Alan F. Williams (ed. W. Gordon Handcock and Chesley W. Sanger) - John Guy of Bristol and Newfoundland: His Life, Times and Legacy

Alan F. Williams (edited by W. Gordon Handcock and Chesley W. Sanger)

John Guy of Bristol and Newfoundland: His Life, Times and Legacy

St John's Newfoundland: Flanker Press Limited, 2010

Paper. xxv + 394 pp. ISBN 978-1-897317-94-5.

President of BACS from 1988 to 1990, Alan Williams exuded impish bonhomie, unshakeable calm and a West Country accent. Bristol-born and educated, he seemed somehow destined to become a young geography professor at Memorial in 1962. Although he left after three years for the University of Birmingham, where he ultimately became Reader in American and Canadian Studies, Alan maintained his links with Newfoundland through research focused on its early Bristol connections. As a historical geographer, he was above all a practical scholar. Cabot's landfall in 1497 and John Guy's encounter with the Beothuk in 1612 were not mythic episodes, but real events that happened at actual places. With maps in his hands and boots on his feet, he set out to pinpoint those locations and recreate what happened. John Guy was a prominent Bristol merchant who speculated in Somerset real estate. Probably inspired by the founding of Virginia, in 1608 he sailed to Newfoundland to seek a site for a settlement, which took shape two years later at Cupers Cove (Cupids). Guy returned in 1612 to explore Conception Bay, where he over-wintered and nearly perished. In later years he was a spokesman for Newfoundland interests in England, and was even elected to one of James I's futile parliaments. Years of painstaking research enabled Alan Williams to argue with authority that Guy's career was essentially transatlantic in character, indeed an early example of globalisation if less well known than the dramatic story of Walter Raleigh. Despite a heart attack, Alan continued to work on his project in retirement, producing a first draft in 2001. It was publishable, but needed polishing. The sheer bulk of the research sometimes clogged the narrative, while the breadth of Guy's career meant that the text had to aim at two distinct readerships on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The agenda for revision was accepted, but Alan's death in 2003 meant that the work has been completed by two respected scholars, Gordon Handcock and Chesley Sanger, both of whom had studied and worked with the author. It is not merely pious memorialisation that prompts grateful congratulations to the editors, for they have carried the project into a fine volume. There has been some major surgery, partly to discard unsubstantiated material but also to take account of emerging archaeological discoveries at Cupids. However, anyone who has experienced the disembodied process by which a typescript becomes a book will agree that this remains Alan's achievement. Thanks to the editorial process, it is ransomed, healed, restored but with no need to be forgiven. Sally Williams, Alan's widow, has assigned the royalties to a Memorial University scholarship fund. Thus two proud sons of Bristol receive the recognition they deserve, John Guy the merchant and explorer, and Alan Williams the scholar and friend.

David A. Wilson - Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Volume 2, The Extreme Moderate 1857-1868

David A. Wilson

Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Volume 2, The Extreme Moderate 1857-1868

Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011

Cased. ISBN 978-0-7735-3903-7.

Within months of arriving in Montreal in 1857, D'Arcy McGee was elected to parliament.
This remarkable breakthrough for an Irish rebel of 1848 only recently disillusioned with American republicanism reflected the emerging importance of British North America's Irish Catholic communities, but their problem was that they constituted minorities in each province. McGee's inspirational advocacy of Confederation is rightly seen as a projection of his Young Ireland vision upon his adopted country, but he also sought to aggregate Irish Catholic political muscle: hence the significance of his clashes with T.W. Anglin, whose powerbase was the rival city of Saint John. Hence, too, McGee's insouciant demand for one of Ontario's cabinet seats in 1867. No wonder one opponent condemned him for 'coming here and telling native-born Canadians what to do' (175). As in his impressive first volume, David A. Wilson's task has been to understand a personality who seemed 'congenitally incapable of walking a straight line' (11). Regarding the Tory-supporting Orange Order as the main institutional threat to Canada's Catholics, McGee initially worked with Upper Canada's stern Protestant Reformers, In 1863, he switched parties: more might be made of Macdonald's quarrel with the Orange Order over the 1860 royal visit as the catalyst. Wilson shows that the horror of his murder in 1868 has obscured McGee's eclipse once his oratory had helped launch the Confederation movement. He also establishes that McGee argued more consistently for the union of the provinces than his published speeches might indicate. Above all, Wilson argues that Fenianism was more than an external nuisance, in fact a much stronger movement than historians have acknowledged, embracing perhaps five percent of the Irish population of Montreal and Toronto – a statistic that could be more strikingly presented as one fifth of adult males. Wilson examines the case against Edward Whelan, who was hanged for McGee's murder, concluding that he was guilty on a civil law balance of probabilities even if entitled under criminal law to discharge for lack of evidence. Whelan admitted that he was present at the killing, sufficient to make him guilty by common purpose. The unstated implication is that Whelan was a patsy, his sandy whiskers and loud mouth making him an obvious suspect whose prompt arrest covered the escape of the assassins. Critics perceived conflicts between McGee's 'fervid imaginations and his generally correct judgment' (6), a weakness for 'subordinating the facts of a case to the fancies of his mind' (33). Did he hope to unite the provinces upon an upwelling sense of British American unity, or was Confederation a device to construct national feeling? McGee rightly perceived that cultural diversity made Canada 'a difficult country to govern' (258). He was 42 when he died: how might he have responded to the Pacific Scandal and Louis Riel? This splendid biography provides material for speculation.

David A. Wilson - Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Volume 1, Passion, Reason, and Politics 1825-1857

David A. Wilson

Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Volume 1, Passion, Reason, and Politics 1825-1857

Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008

Cased. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-7735-3357-8.

The author of a two-volume biography faces a twin challenge: where to divide the story and how to unify it? The career of D'Arcy McGee pivots on 1857, when he settled in Montreal. He had packed a great deal into thirty years, with two periods in the United States, as an emigrant between 1842 and 1845 and then as a political exile from 1848. The period between had coincided with Ireland's social and political crisis, temporarily transforming him into a revolutionary. (McGee's part in the 1848 Irish insurrection was to lead an army from Scotland. This failed.) However, the more obvious the caesura, the greater the challenge of uniting the two volumes. David A. Wilson, an authority on the Irish in Canada, boldly commences with the finale, evoking the April day in 1868 that when McGee was murdered in Ottawa. By thus focusing his study upon the trajectory that led McGee to become the inspirational Father of Confederation, Wilson adds to the biographical challenge of tracing consistent motivation in a career which zigzagged at rapid intervals between extremes. In his impressive combination of narrative and analysis, Wilson resolves the problem in two ways. First, he frankly acknowledges an element of confused duality in McGee's frenetic thinking. Thus he emerged from the episode of the Irish Confederation with two intellectual blueprints, one the germ of Canadian Confederation, the other which might have led to Fenianism. McGee's split political personality explains the vehemence with which he denounced views that at other stages he would endorse. Second, identifies the 'McGee Shuffle', a tendency to exaggerate the implications of two basic personal beliefs. The first was his Catholicism, which in 1851 reacted against the sectarian madhouse of American Protestantism by embracing ultramontanism. The other was an underlying O'Connellite belief in a federal relationship between Ireland and Britain that recognised the realities of power. Both pointed him towards Canada. Arriving in 1842 via the St Lawrence, his first experience of North America had been the church towers of Quebec. His 1848 allusion to the 'the frozen swamps of Canada' (p. 188) was superficial, but he came to see the province as a haven for the Catholic way of life menaced by American nativism. Responsible government had given Canada the status Repealers had sought for Ireland: affiliate partnership within the Empire. The Union Jack flew over Canada, he wrote in 1854, 'but it casts no shadow'. (p. 331) As always, McGee was highlighting what he wanted to see, for in 1856 sectarian conflict menaced several provinces. McGee became an instant colonial politician. Within a year of arriving, he would be, briefly, a cabinet minister. But the restless travel of his American years had made him something new in Canadian politics, an instant British North American. He knew the Maritimes at first hand, and it was easy enough to project his earlier belief in United States 'Manifest Destiny' into the vision of 1867. In Ireland, Wilson concludes, McGee had been an extreme republican; in America, he turned into an extreme Catholic. Now, in Canada, he would be an extreme moderate. The second volume is eagerly awaited.

Lawrence Leduc, Jon H. Pammett, Judith I. McKenzie, André Turcotte - Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics

Lawrence Leduc, Jon H. Pammett, Judith I. McKenzie, André Turcotte

Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics

Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010

578 pp. Paper. $35.00 / £23.00. ISBN 978-1554-887965

Dynasties and Interludes is an unsuccessful attempt to fit federal elections from 1867 to 2008 into a pattern. The book effectively pivots on the 1960s, with over half the text on the later period. From 1965, post-election interviews explored how far parties lost, gained and retained support between polls, but earlier we have only speculation. The authors argue that winning parties must project effective leadership in three areas: prosperity, national unity and welfare policies. This is unexceptional for recent times but less helpful for decades before health care or Quebec assertiveness became political issues. 'Dynasties' is overblown. Macdonald's elections were hard fought and narrowly won. Trudeau behaved like Louis XIV, but only three of his five elections resulted in majority governments and he never gained 46 percent of popular votes. 'Although it was not obvious at the time,' (p. 235) the authors assert that the indecisive 1965 election marked a new 'dynasty' – but the result was almost identical to that of 1963. The weakness of pattern-making is that the significance of any election is interpreted according to the outcome of its successor: publishing in 2010, the authors had no idea whether Harper was a dynast or a diversion. Elections are momentary snapshots, not theoretical building blocks. Mackenzie in 1878 and Laurier in 1911 might have won earlier in the year; Macdonald's late-winter elections in 1887 and 1891 were desperate bids to confront an ebbing tide. While the authors recognise quirks in Canada's first-past-the-post voting system, which delivered the 'wrong' result in 1896, 1957 and 1979, they sometimes conflate seats won with votes cast. It is untrue that in 1935, 'the people opted for King': two Canadians in every five voted Liberal in a multiparty contest (p. 136). Tabulating vote shares as percentages fails to reflect a demographically booming society. The 1957 turnout in Prince Edward Island was identical to that of 1953, so the Conservative gain of 3,000 votes represented party switching within a stable electorate. In Ontario, the turnout leaped 350,000, the Tories gaining 300,000 votes; in British Columbia, there were 120,000 extra voters and the Conservative vote jumped by 126,000. These net changes represent new voters, either previous abstainers or newcomers. The Conservative upset victories of 1911, 1930 and 1957 each coincided with waves of immigration. British migrants could vote after twelve months' residence. In 1911, Tories targeted them with flag-waving. By the 1950s, the collapse of the UK's Liberal party meant that nine out of ten newcomers were Conservative or Labour – and the CCF polled well throughout the postwar decades. This intriguing wildcard merits investigation. It is unlikely that the Labour Progressive Party 'cost the CCF a number of seats' in 1945: a combined Left vote might have captured five BC ridings, but four of them by improbably narrow margins. New Brunswick did not vote against Confederation, and the 1935 Conservative platform was not called the Little New Deal.

William Cross (ed.) - Democratic Reform in New Brunswick

William Cross (ed.)

Democratic Reform in New Brunswick

Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2007

302 pp. Paper. £17.99. ISBN978-1-55130-326-0

In 2003, New Brunswick established a Commission on Legislative Democracy to improve citizen participation and the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University ran a research colloquium, at which most of papers in this collection were discussed. This volume consists of an introduction and twelve essays. The range is 'somewhat eclectic' (p. 4), and takes one hundred pages before the reader encounters much that is specific to New Brunswick. The opening papers review electoral systems, issues of voter turn-out and the life cycle of governments in a global context. Subsequent contributions weigh the respective advantages of single-member, first-past-the-post systems against proportional and multi-member alternatives. Selection of candidates for election is dominated by party insiders, but it is hard to change this. Politicians work hard at constituency level, and party-list voting systems would damage local links. The province has an effective system in place for fair revision of electoral boundaries. Fixed-date elections do not prevent incumbent governments from manipulating the electoral cycle, and may encourage them to ignore the legislature. The referendum is a risky device which may divide language communities, and the 2001 experiment harnessed only 44.5 percent participation. Declining turn-outs at elections, especially among young people, is a worldwide problem and reducing the voting age to 16 hardly inspires. Neutral observers might feel that New Brunswick has few problems to tackle. You can join the Liberal party for nothing, and membership automatically rolls over from year to year. Hence, with two percent of Canada's population, the province boasts one quarter of its card-carrying Grits. Its single-member electoral system secures an effective voice for the geographically concentrated francophone minority, while the small Aboriginal population hardly warrants guaranteed representation. However, a concluding historical chapter demonstrate that New Brunswick has long tinkered with its institutions, and this will no doubt continue. As it stands, this volume is a useful commemoration of the Commission process. But an opportunity has been missed. An overview might have introduced the non-Canadian (or even extra-Maritime) reader to the special circumstances of New Brunswick, its geographical divide between the Saint John valley and the rest and, of course, its linguistic ambiguity ─ the officially bilingual province almost split into Belgian-style language zones. Such a presentation would have enabled a wider readership to assess the relevance of the New Brunswick reform process to their own societies.

Paul Douglas Dickson - A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar

Paul Douglas Dickson

A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Pp. xlvi + 571. Cased. ISBN 978-0-8020-0802-2.

Crerar was born in Hamilton in 1888, served in the First World War, stayed in the 'Permanent Force', as Canada's regular soldiers were still called, and eventually commanded First Canadian Army in and after Normandy. Although much of this biography concentrates on Second World War campaigns, there is important material on Crerar's lonely career as a staff officer in the interwar years. With many institutions of Canadian government existing only in outline, Crerar was the counterpart, and counterpoise, to O.D. Skelton in External Affairs. An autonomous foreign policy dictated escape from the imperial embrace but the case for a professional army could no longer plausibly claim to provide defence against American invasion. Crerar looked to an overseas role within a Commonwealth alliance, challenging Mackenzie King's tendency to isolationism. This overlap between policy and strategy explains why Crerar's favoured sending troops to Hong Kong, and his pressure for action that led to Dieppe. Only promoted to major-general in 1940, he was essentially a thoroughly First War artillery officer. His detractor, Montgomery, jeered that Crerar believed 'all you want is a good initial fire plan, and then the Germans will run away!' (p. 307) But in his biggest battle, Operation Veritable in the Rhineland, Crerar successfully implemented Vimy tactics despite Passchendaele mud. His Canadians could fight even without heavy bomber support which was not always forthcoming or fully co-ordinated. In Normandy, Bomber Command used yellow smoke canisters to pinpoint targets: so did Canadian troops to identify themselves. Crerar survived much top-brass intrigue, notably involving McNaughton and Simonds, but kept a low profile in domestic politics. He was on sick leave during the 1944 conscription crisis. The reputation of 'Uncle Harry' suffered because he lacked colourful self-promotion, although he mobilised media contacts to re-write the lessons of Dieppe after the success of D-Day. There are hints that army life harmed his marriage, although he was right to ban his wife from following him to Europe when his men were cut off from home life. Dickson's prefatory list of army abbreviations is vital for reader sanity. Two British figures with minor roles are mis-named: Viscount Elibank and Admiral Ramsay. Crerar retired in 1946 and died in 1965. His coffin was draped with the maple-leaf flag that he had stoutly opposed.

Raymond J.A. Huel - Archbishop A,-A. Taché of St. Boniface: The "Good Fight" and the Illusive Vision

Raymond J.A. Huel,

Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2003

xxv + 429 pp. Paper. £21-99. ISBN 0-88864-406-X.

By a paradox, Archbishop Taché owes his place in the textbook narrative of Canadian history to his absence at a key moment. In 1869, as the francophone, Catholic population of the Red River boiled into revolt, he was on his way to the Vatican Council in Rome. Bereft of the natural leadership of a pastor who was the nephew of the premier who had led Canada's Great Coalition in 1864-5, so it seemed, the Métis turned instead to Louis Riel, the young man whom Taché himself had packed off to Lower Canada to train for the priesthood. Raymond J.A. Huel is well equipped to write this biography: he has edited both the collected outpourings of Riel and a series of histories of the Oblate missionary order. The result is a study which is strong on the organisational aspects of re-creating Catholic structures in the North-West. But I am left wondering whether Taché's absence in 1869 was so important after all. He had been fast-tracked into the episcopacy: coadjutor at 26, bishop (and later archbishop) at 31. The combination of personal inexperience with spiritual authority was hardly conducive to learning political skills on the job. His contribution to “solving” the Red River problem after his return was a crude attempt to bounce the Dominion government into overlooking Riel's murder (as Protestants saw it) of Thomas Scott. His mishandling of the amnesty issue left him generally distrusted in Ottawa. From then on it was all downhill, both politically and demographically. The vision of a French Manitoba, even of a serious francophone enclave, quickly disappeared, and Taché fell back on hopes that Irish immigration might at least preserve a Catholic presence. In 1885, he failed to save Riel from the gallows, but discouraged full-scale denunciation of his grisly fate for fear of an anglophone Protestant backlash. The deluge descended soon afterwards in the form of the Manitoba Schools dispute that darkened his final years. In some respects, the strength of Huel's focus on Taché as an administrator is balanced by its relative narrowness. Both the 1869 and 1885 crises receive bald treatment, while the founding of the dynamic and intolerantly anglicising city of Winnipeg in 1873 seems mentioned almost in passing. (Although Taché's missionary church claimed to depend on the offerings of the Quebec faithful, detractors alleged that his archdiocese made indecent amounts of cash from the resulting property boom.) While the failure to develop a French province in the West is a central theme, there is no mention of the work of A.I. Silver on this subject. Even Taché's initial dedication to missionary work among Aboriginal people (as a young priest he learnt to preach in Chipewyan) vanishes in the density of the subsequent narrative. Perhaps this was for the best: in 1855, he administered the last rites to a native woman who was six months pregnant, and then demanded a posthumous caesarian section so that he could baptise the dead foetus. Huel's massive and detailed prose reads easily, except where he uses “brochure” for “pamphlet”. Indeed, it is not always clear when and why the author thinks French phrases should be translated or left in the original. When Taché modestly wrote that he had been ordained “despite his indignity” (p. 17), he was almost certainly using a French word that better translates as “unworthiness”. Overall, although (or perhaps, because) Huel distinguishes his approach from that of Jean Hamelin, his book is best read in parallel with Hamelin's more economical (and nationaliste) essay in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The DCB would also confirm that Etienne-Paschal Taché, the famous uncle, was the grandson, not the son, of the founder of the family in Canada.

Terry Crowley - Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Reinventing Canada

Terry Crowley,

Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Reinventing Canada

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003

xiii + 328 pp. £40 (cloth)/ £ 20 (paper).  ISBN 0-8020-0932-8 (cloth); 0-8020-7902-4 (paper).

This is a portrait of a marriage and of the two individuals yoked within it. O.D. Skelton is a name known to students of the evolution of Canadian external policy, but the link is not always made with Isabel Skelton, biographer of D'Arcy McGee and one of the first social historians to attempt to highlight the role of women in the Canadian past. They met at Queen's University, and it was there that Oscar made his early career as an academic, both in History and Political Science. His book on socialism was praised in identical terms, as the best book on the subject by a non-believer, by both Lenin and Sidney Webb. The Skeltons' subsequent move to Ottawa, where he became senior civil servant in External Affairs, was less matrimonially catastrophic than in the parallel case of Marion and Lester Pearson, but it did cause some estrangement between them. This took the form of a row over buying a house: it is ominous when two historians call their home “Edgehill”, the opening battle of the English Civil War. Crowley's thoughtful study is valuable in suggesting that Skelton was much less of a grey eminence than some have assumed: it was the politicians, notably Mackenzie King, who made the key policy decisions. Occasionally his analytical framework can be a little oppressive: Foucault makes two appearances, and the vapid term “colonialism'” pops up from time to time. Too much theory can obscure the values of the time, as when Crowley finds it “puzzling” that Oscar expected his wife to take the main burden of parenting while he earned the money. This was an entirely standard attitude until very recently, and who can say that it may not become so again? More intriguing, surely, is the fact that Skelton, so suspicious of British diplomacy, sent his elder son to boarding school in England. Both boys turned out to be wild youngsters, and it is not clear whether this was the result of heredity or upbringing. A few errors have crept through the editing process. Almonte in eastern Ontario gains an extra letter, the British historian David Cannadine appears as 'Carradine', and a London department store becomes 'Herrod's'. I was delighted to learn that Isabella once called the historian Donald Creighton “a shallow, pompous imperialist” (p. 258), and everything must be forgiven the author who so memorably characterises the young Professor Skelton as “vigorous in print, rigorous in class” (p. 87).

Jean-Pierre Wallot, ed. - Le débat qui n'a pas eu lieu

Jean-Pierre Wallot, ed.,

Ottawa: Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa: Collection Amérique francaise, no. 9

148 pp. Paper. $22.95. ISBN 2-7603-0550-3

In 1977, reeling from the shock of the election of a separatist government in Quebec, the federal government established the Pepin-Robartes Commission, headed by two distinguished provincial politicians, to examine ways forward for the country. Their report, two years later, generally recommended decentralisation, a strategy that did not appeal to Trudeau. As a result, so insisted the participants at a University of Ottawa colloquium in 2001, Canada has still to have the debate that the Commission's ideas merit. The collection includes an introductory overview and eight papers, with the expected strong focus on issues of language and nationality. Gérald-A. Beaudoin, who contributed to the Commission, provides a useful overview of its thinking, along with an update assessing its relevance today. Alain-G. Gagnon warns of the dangers of a constitution that is virtually incapable of amendment. The other contributors are André Burelle, Fernand Harvey, Linda Cardinal with Marie-Eve Hudon, Bernard Bonin, John Richards and Gilles Paquet. These are names to be conjured with, and there is surely a case for an English translation.

John Griffith Armstrong - The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue

John Griffith Armstrong,

The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue

UBC Press, Vancouver, 2002

x + 246 pp. Cloth. ISBN 0 7748 0890 X.

On a winter morning in 1917, two small merchant ships collided in Halifax harbour. One, the Mont Blanc, blew up, devastating the city centre and killing 1,600 people. The Halifax explosion is a well-known tragedy, but curiously this is the first scholarly study. The author's interest was aroused by the letters of his grandfather, who constitutes a constant presence in the book. This is a meticulous study of harrowing tale: High MacLennan fans will be reassured to know that the barometer was indeed rising. Some heroic myths are shattered, but many people emerge from the episode with credit. While Canada's navy was still struggling with its “tinpot” origins, Armstrong argues that the strong presence in Halifax of the army helped contain the disaster. Significantly, it was not necessary to proclaim martial law. The disaster occurred just ten days before the divisive conscription election, yet the prime minister, Borden, broke off his campaign and made no attempt to capitalise on rumours of a German plot. (The Halifax Herald was less scrupulous, drawing a parallel between Quebec's opposition to the War and the speed with which the French crew of the Mont Blanc took off into the depths of  Dartmouth, failing to warn that their abandoned vessel was a bomb.) Inevitably, people demanded why a munitions ship was allowed to proceed unescorted through a busy port. The truth was that, in wartime, most ships in Halifax were full of explosives. An attempt was made to blame a middle-ranking officer for failing to implement procedures that those censuring him had omitted to provide, but happily this failed. Armstrong draws a brief and unpersuasive link between1917 and the Halifax “riots” (so-called) of May 1945. Readers are more likely to muse on December the Sixth through the filter of September the Eleventh: the sacrifice of emergency crews rushing to the disaster is a poignant parallel. It is chilling to reflect that a tramp steamer of just 3121 tons, packed with standard chemicals, could trigger an explosion equal to 2.4 million kilograms of high explosives, and felt even in Charlottetown. Armstrong's book successfully launches a series of Studies in Military History from the Canadian War Museum.

R. Kenneth Carty, William Cross and Lisa Young - Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics

R. Kenneth Carty, William Cross and Lisa Young,

Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics

UBC Press, Vancouver, 2000

x + 265pp.  Cloth. ISBN 0 7748 0777 6.

This book investigates the consequences for Canadian politics of the 1993 Conservative electoral massacre. Examining the 1997 election, it explores how party organisations responded to new technologies and challenges. The analysis is predicated upon Carty's theory that Canada has experienced three party systems, each destabilised by Conservative landslides in 1917, 1958 and 1984. In 1993, the third 'pan-Canadian' system 'reached the end of its natural life' and must be rebuilt. The book is thoughtful and informative, but the theory is limited use. The three landmarks are not identical: 1917 was a wartime Anglo-Saxon upsurge, a revolt of Liberal politicians who quickly regrouped. 1993 may be placed in a longer perspective. Because of its complexity, post-Confederation Canada has sustained only one party of government at any time, first the Macdonald Conservatives, and in the twentieth century the Liberals. This party has been concerned with power rather than issues. A second party, in the twentieth century usually the Tories, has offered a skeletal alternative, but repeated electoral failure condemned it an oppositionist attitude. Other parties were movements of witness and protest, sustained by idealism and anger. The absence of interest in electoral reform or coalition government illustrates that such parties are not seriously interested in achieving power. In a sense, Canada does not possess a party 'system' at all. Why did Laurier's party manage to replace Macdonald's, when the Conservatives failed to consolidate their bridgeheads after 1930, 1958 and 1984? Quebec provides some of the answer, but only as part of successful inter-regional brokerage, in which there is continuity from Laurier to Mackenzie King and Trudeau. Only in 1930 and 1988 did the Tories win seats in Quebec in issues-based campaigns. They owed their victories in 1911 and 1958 to support from nationaliste elements, but found even these culturally conservative allies hard to assimilate. When nationalism turned secessionist, the strategy of embracing the enemy's enemy became even more precarious. At one level, what has happened since 1993 is nothing new: the Liberals once again proved that Canada can only sustain one nationwide party. The novelty lies in the bankruptcy of parliamentary oppositionism. Opposition has two roles in a democracy, informational and institutional. One exposes the government's faults, the other seeks to curb its power. Nowadays, the first function is discharged by the media, the second by the provinces. There may well be no quick way back for the Tories in Ottawa, but the party can hardly be written off when it has formed governments in seven provinces (and in two others, Quebec and British Columbia, it has no local presence) since the day Kim Campbell rejoiced that she had not sold her car. This study has little to say about the provinces, and hence probably misses the real nature of the Canadian party mosaic today. There is no justification in a scholarly monograph for the use of the contractions “hadn't” and “couldn't”. The typesetting has too often omitted spacing after full-stops, giving the text a home-made appearance.

Martin L. Friedland - The University of Toronto: A History

Martin L. Friedland,

The University of Toronto: A History

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002

xiii + 764 pp. Cloth. £45. ISBN 0-8020-4429-8.

Marlene Shore, ed. - The Contested Past: Reading Canada's History. Selections from the Canadian Hist

Marlene Shore (ed.),

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002

xv + 353pp. Cloth /  Paper. £35 / £15. ISBN 0-8020-4305-4 / 0-8020-8133-9.

Invited in 1977 to comment on the state of Canadian historical writing, H.J. Hanham, the New Zealand-born specialist in Victorian Britain, confessed that he read Acadiensis 'just for fun', but that he was repelled by an invisible injunction on the cover of the Canadian Historical Review that said 'it is your duty to read this journal - every word of it'. Marlene Shore's thoughtful mini-history of the CHR mentions the conceptual challenges implicit in the foundation of such publications as the Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique francaise, Social History/ Histoire Sociale and Labour / Le Travail, but she does not take much account of the regionally-focused journals, nor of the fact that the Journal of Canadian Studies has carried innovative articles on the country's past. Following her essay there are reprints or extracts from about seventy CHR articles, some of them very truncated: Hanham appears, but in two and a half pages, minus the jibe quoted above. The material is organised into four Parts, three of them both thematic and defined by time, and all prefaced by a Commentary. The four Parts are further sub-divided into coherent sections. It is good that a journal should examine itself in this way, but the intending reader should note that this is a volume of selections from selections, not one that provides full reprints of key articles.

Gerald Friesen - Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada

Gerald Friesen,

Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000

x + 307 pp. Cloth ISBN 0 8020 4709 2. Paper ISBN 0 8020 8283 1.

Gerald Friesen is one of Canada's most admired historians. This book began as a series of lectures in the Canadian Studies programme of the University of Messina. Friesen has taken a series of personal narratives to weave together the life histories of a group of Canadians, including aboriginal people and migrants. The aim is to reinterpret the shared history of Canada and Canadians within a four-phase framework of time and space, starting with the oral tradition of native peoples and coming up to the present day communications system of screen-capitalism. The study is based upon a formidable base of theoretical reference. It concludes with a powerful evocation of the parameters of the national identity, in a series of powerful sentences each beginning: "To be a Canadian…". It is thus with a sense of personal inadequacy that this reviewer must report his own inability to understand the argument. Perhaps the problem lies in the fundamental duality behind the study of history, that we seek both to identify the formative influences of the past upon the present and to help the latter break free from the constraints of the former. But perhaps it is a book that no outsider can fully comprehend.

Gordon L. Barnhart - "Peace, Progress and Prosperity"

Gordon L. Barnhart,

"Peace, Progress and Prosperity": A biography of Saskatchewan's first premier, T. Walter Scott

Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2000

viii + 188 pp. Paper. ISBN 0 88977 142 1.

Walter Scott was born in Ontario in 1867. He moved west as a young man and served from 1905 to 1912 as first premier of Saskatchewan. He helped build the newly created province, and was largely responsible for giving it a university and fine legislative buildings. Barnhart has woven a careful tale of Scott's adaptation to internal migration. "I longed for Ontario the whole nine years from the time I went out in 1885 until I got back home the first time in 1894." Sadly, in later life he suffered a mental breakdown, attributed here to the strain of his illegitimate (but carefully disguised) birth. The author also gives an account of the origins of Saskatchewan politics. For instance, it is striking to note that Scott's three cabinet colleagues in the original mini-ministry were all parachuted to run in doubtful ridings, which throws curious light on our usual assumptions of the bottom-up nature of prairie politics. If the book disappoints in any way, it is in its decision not to take the story back beyond Ontario. Barnhart refers to research on the culture of ex-nuptial births in rural Scotland, but it might have filled out the broader picture to know a little more about the background of the Scotts and Robsons and McDonalds of his early years. On the plus side, the biography is well illustrated and its generous use of quotation makes it both useful and interesting.

Sidney Allinson - Jeremy Kane: A Canadian Historical Adventure Novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion

Sidney Allinson,

Jeremy Kane: A Canadian Historical Adventure Novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion, and its Brutal Aftermath in the Australian Penal Colonies,

Princeton NJ, Xlibris Corporation, 1998,

366 pp. Paper. ISBN 0 7388 0101 1

This is a lively yarn about a young man who gets caught up in the Mackenzie rebellion of 1837. When Jeremy Kane is sentenced to the gallows, his virgin girl friend goes to a Family Compact official to plead for his life. He rapes her and then sneeringly reveals that her sacrifice was in vain: Jeremy had already been reprieved to be transported to the hellish convict colonies of Australia. At this point the plot has artistically linked hero and heroine, with both suffering a Fate Worse Than Death. Allinson claims that his "main aim is to simply entertain", and split infinitives do indeed punctuate the hanging, caning and flogging of the narrative. He also claims that much of his tale "actually happened" and that wherever possible his characters "speak in their own recorded words". Here we come to the core issue of any historical novel: how far is it a documentary and to what extent an imaginative reconstruction? Allinson creates a parliamentary clash between Mackenzie and Archdeacon Strachan - impossible, because they sat in different houses of the legislature. Even less plausible is the Speaker's invitation to the lieutenant-governor to speak in the debate. Indeed, Sir Francis Bond Head receives caricature treatment. He was not hastily knighted by Queen Victoria to be sent out to govern Upper Canada (or "Ontario" as Allinson anachronistically calls it). He was not worried about losing his pension: in his time, there was no gubernatorial pension scheme. He did not insist on dragging his wife through official functions when she was heavily pregnant with her sixth child. Lady Head's health did indeed suffer after she gave birth a fourth time within six years of their marriage in 1816, but thereafter the pregnancies ceased. We must all draw our own conclusions. Mine is that Head was a caring husband who depended upon a close and mutually loving relationship. Allinson appears to assume that because the Compact were bad guys politically, it is fair to demonise them generally. As for using their own words, I doubt whether "blighter", "squirt", "schnozzle" and "okay" were in contemporary use and I have yet to find a Jeremy in nineteenth-century Canada. The story ends happily.

Ian Radforth - Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United State

Ian Radforth,

Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States

Toronto: University of Toronto Press

xii + 469 pp. Cloth.  ISBN 0-8020-4835-8. Paper.  ISBN 0-8020-8665-9.

The visit of the future Edward VII to British North America in 1860 was the first overseas royal tour. Celebratory accounts followed his entourage from St John’s to Detroit and on through the United States. More usefully, Ian Radforth treats the episode as a series of overlapping snapshots. He shows how communities planned to receive their visitor, and how they were portrayed by those who accompanied him. Blacks and women were excluded from the public sphere although the octogenarian Laura Secord signed one address of welcome. Aboriginal people were presented as caricatures. Excitement was intense: one Montrealer was trampled to death, a French journalist had to apologise for revealing that the Prince was physically unimpressive and even the ageing Papineau fired a salute for the royal party. Groups calling themselves Calithumpians and Physiogs parodied the ceremonies with charivari. In French Canada, as yet lacking a secular civic identity, priests were prominent participants. But, unlike George VI in 1939, the Prince travelled in a British, not a Canadian capacity. Since Orange processions were banned in Ireland, the Prince’s adviser, the Duke of Newcastle, refused to countenance the Order’s manifestations in Upper Canada, and a stand-off at Kingston severely embarrassed John A. Macdonald. One curious feature of the provincial self-portrayal is the virtual absence of allusion to intercolonial union. The sole politician quoted on the subject, David Reesor, later opposed Confederation. Radforth’s approach should form a model for similar studies. It is therefore a pity that there are so many editorial blemishes. The Prince’s minder, the Earl of St Germans, is consistently misnamed. There are slips in the spelling of such prominent figures as Sandford Fleming, Casimir Gzowski, Allan MacNab, Samuel Tilley and Philip Vankoughnet, while the Canadian cabinet minister Sidney Smith is both misspelled and incorrectly knighted. Handkerchiefs are twice ‘waived’, and a quick body check disproves the statement that one mayor wore a robe trimmed with ‘martin fur’ (p. 5). A racist cartoon shows the Irish as ‘Simeon-faced’ (p. 347): perhaps ‘simian’ is intended? The Canadian tour was a dry run for a state visit to Ireland, where well-wishers arranged for the Prince to lose his virginity to an actress. Queen Victoria insisted the episode hurried her shocked husband to his early grave. Perhaps Canada was not so exotic after all.

James V. Wright and Jean-Luc Pilon eds. - A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pende

James V. Wright and Jean-Luc Pilon (eds),

A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast

Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization Mercury Series, Archaeology Paper 164, 2004

xix + 465 pp. Paper. $       . ISBN 0-660-19106-7.

James F. Pendergast, who died in 2000, was a retired army officer who, according to a graceful editorial tribute, made contributions to Canadian archaeology that transcended the boundaries between the amateur and the professional. Most of the 22 papers in this collection deal with the St Lawrence Iroquoian cultures that he studied, with the archaeology appropriately taking aboard perspectives from related disciplines such as anthropology and cosmology. Several authors consider the Wendat, others discuss the role of the river system and the extent to which Iroquoian cultures extended into what is now the northern United States. The collection also draws attention to the work of an earlier self-trained archaeologist, T. W. Edwin Sowter, and includes Sowter’s previously unpublished diatribe of 1909 against relic hunters. Most contributions are prefaced byh abstracts in both official languages. Selection is invidious, but mention may be made of a thoughtful discussion, by Stephen Chrisomalis and Bruce G. Trigger, of the problems of identifying prehistoric ethnicity. They doubt the value of conflating the concepts of race, language and culture, warning that ‘to project ethnicity into the distant past is to risk playing into the hands of nationalist and other political forces’ (p. 430). The ‘insight and contagious enthusiasm’ of Jim Pendergast (p. 47) shines through the entire volume.

Jackson W. Armstrong ed. - Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong 1859 and 1869

Jackson W. Armstrong (ed.),

Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong 1859 and 1869

Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004

xvi + 228 pp. Cloth. ISBN 0 88920 440 3.

Mary Armstrong was an English immigrant. Her husband was a butcher and her son became a doctor. The Armstrongs lived on a small block up Yonge Street just beyond the expanding Toronto suburbs, where they ran cows and hens, thus providing Mary with a small line of business and this volume with its title. Her surviving diaries cover five months of 1859 and seven months of 1869. This might seem a slender foundation to carry the formidable Introduction of genealogy, sociological analysis and diary theory, but both text and commentary are a worthwhile contribution to the publisher’s Life Writing Series. Paradoxically, as a witness of contemporary affairs, Mary Armstrong is perhaps most valuable in reminding us just how little the public sphere intruded on daily life. In a rare aside, she dismissed the unease of Torontonians when the provincial seat of government departed for Quebec in 1859: ‘I expect there will always be people enough, to buy all the eggs and butter I have to spare, and … the fields will look as green, the birds will sing as sweetly as ever and I shall not miss the passing of the Governor’s Carriage.’ (p. 102) The editor is a fifth-generation descendant of the diarist who began his project as an undergraduate at Queen’s University. His comprehensive Endnotes confirm a scholar in the making.

William Johnston - A War of Patrols: Canadian Army Operations in Korea

William Johnston,

A War of Patrols: Canadian Army Operations in Korea

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003

xx + 426 pp. Cloth.                  ISBN 0 780774 810081.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Canada contributed a Special Force, variously known as 25^th Brigade, the Second Battalions or Rocky’s Army. This initial contribution to the American-led United Nations Forces was speedily raised from men who had served in the Second World War: as Johnston points out, it was the only occasion in the country’s history when Canada entered an overseas conflict with a large pool of ready trained recruits who had recent battle experience. Subsequently, the Special Force troops were replaced by regulars, who were critical of their forerunners. Not much has been written about the Canadians in Korea. 309 deaths in action represented an appreciable loss for the peaceable kingdom, but hardly the basis for a miniature publishing industry. Johnston’s comprehensive study forms part of the Canadian War Museum’s series, Studies in Military History. While it provides a detailed chronicle of operations, this is no bland ‘official history’. Johnston contests ad indeed inverts the denigration of the Special Force troops, and is scathing about the leadership and fighting qualities of many regular officers ─ a criticism of some wider import, since it was Korea veterans who would run the army until the 1970s. The hero of the book is unquestionably Brigadier John M. Rockingham, known and trusted by the soldiers from his courageous and resourceful service in the Normandy campaign, and who once confided that he was ‘not particularly keen about soldiering when there is no fighting involved’. (p. 206) As in all war histories, there are intriguing cameos: in December 1952, two Canadians patrolling in thick snow reached to within 200 yards of Chinese positions and, on open ground, stamped out the message, ‘Merry Christmas from C Company’. It was a thoughtful gesture, the more so as the men were from the Van Doos and courteously assumed that the enemy knew no French. In 1951, the Canadian brigade joined British, Australian and New Zealand troops to form the 1^st Commonwealth Division. Officers felt more at ease under British than American command, for instance preferring the precision of British battle orders to the John-Wayne-gung-ho style and content of American directions. This was to be the last time that troops from the four countries fought side-by-side under joint command. There are seventeen maps and a profusion of contemporary photographs that have reproduced unusually well as text illustrations.

J.I. Little - Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852

J.I. Little

Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004

xv + 386 pp. Cloth.        ISBN 0-8020-8916-X.

 
Ostensibly, this book is a history of organised (and some disorganised) religion in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. But in its implications, it is far more than a local study. Little argues strongly for the integration of religious history with the perceived ‘mainstream’ political and social story. He challenges the recent fashion for studying the Townships as part of an international ‘borderlands’. True, the Townships were largely settled by Americans, not all of them Loyalists. They retained New England habits, ignored customs posts and even counterfeited US currency. But Little argues that the region was also shaped by influences from the imperial centre, calling his approach ‘borderline’ by comparison. The Townships were largely Protestant, and considers the major churches in turn, tracing how those of American origin diverged from their origins. The War of 1812 forced some choices as did, to a lesser degree, the 1837-38 rebellions, so that the annexation movement of 1849 proved short-lived. The core of Little’s argument is about organisation backed by external support. Congregationalists and Baptists were largely abandoned by their republican neighbours. Americans could never decide whether Canada was tax-free paradise or a monarchical despotism. Either way, it did not seem a promising field for outreach activity. New England Protestantism was so deeply imbued with Calvinism that missionary work seemed pointless anyway. Left to their own fragile structures, Protestant churches in the Townships were more likely to be destabilised than strengthened by religious revivals: a Justice of the Peace was brought in to police a Methodist ‘love feast’ in 1829. In the early 1840s, they were ravaged by messianic movements which predicted the end of the world, a mystical seven years from the rebellions.

By contrast, the British-oriented churches, especially the Anglicans, could call upon external support, from missionary societies and well-wishers. (They also had valuable cash from the clergy reserves, a point which Little does not emphasise.) As a result, many Township people became census Anglicans, an identity which Little sees as fertilised from without. He calls the result ‘a distinctly Canadian hybrid or synthesis’ (89) although he later acknowledges it to have been ‘somewhat lumpy’ (285). These downloaded Yankee Anglicans were an odd crew. Since they had joined a wealthy church, they declined to pay their clergy: one congregation even refused to buy a stove. They also refused to join in responses, demanded baptism by total immersion and ignored ritualistic attempts to encourage chanting and (of all things) churching.