Other Reviews on Canadian Topics

Michael S. Cross - A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning Star of Memory

Michael S. Cross

A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning Star of Memory

Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2012

Pp. xii + 430. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-19-544954-9

Lampooning Grit dominance of Canadian historiography in 1947, Donald Creighton claimed there were no biographies of Robert Baldwin, only studies of Robert Responsible-Government. In 1985, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography essay, of which Michael S. Cross was co-author, provided a startling new identifier. Baldwin's wife, Eliza, had died in 1836, having failed to recover from giving birth by primitive Caesarean section. Mired in grief (and, perhaps, guilt), Baldwin left instructions that an identical incision should be made in his corpse. By inserting zigzag flashbacks within his chronological narrative, Cross dramatises three overlapping elements in the Baldwin story: the grisly posthumous ceremony, his humiliating confrontation with Lord Sydenham in 1841 and the consistent thread of bereavement. Each chapter begins with a motto, crafted by the author, such as "Eliza was always there, at the dinner table, in his study in the evening .... She had been dead for five years and eight months. It was September 1841." (88) Readers will judge for themselves whether this device works. Equally noteworthy was the fact that Eliza was Baldwin's cousin: marriage within his close-knit extended family deprived him of one potential escape route from the dominance of William Warren Baldwin, the original theorist of responsible government. The manipulative, confident father was the antithesis of the tormented, self-doubting son. Cross argues persuasively that Robert Baldwin was driven by a parentally inculcated sense of duty. Yet this alone cannot explain the contrast between their vision, of Canada running its local affairs through a cabinet answerable to the Assembly, and Robert Baldwin's decisions in 1836 and 1841 to join Executive Councils dominated by opponents. Even the apparent party triumph of 1842 involved coalition with holdovers and officials. The explanation may lie in the family's late eighteenth-century Irish background, which merits further exploration. Although Grattan's parliament achieved autonomy after 1782, it did not evolve a local executive: government was driven by viceroys named from London. Robert Baldwin was talking Westminster but acting College Green. Parliamentary majorities depended upon party discipline, which was best enforced by control of patronage. Yet Baldwin could not dispense jobs until he obtained office and -- as Governor Metcalfe proved -- not always then. Responsible government also required cabinet solidarity, a principle that Baldwin himself sometimes ignored even during the climacteric years of the "Great Ministry". Indeed, the Reform Party's sense of shared purpose was short-lived. The LaFontaine-Baldwin team spent 1848 settling in, unleashed blizzards of legislation in 1849 and 1850, but in 1851 the socially conservative Baldwin was driven into retirement by the radical agenda of the emerging Clear Grits. Like the Whigs in Britain after 1832, he gave the people constitutional reform without realising that there would be demands to use the new structure to achieve fundamental change. Baldwin could be ruthless, once ousting a candidate by circulating a private letter of thanks for his wise withdrawal, but he recognised the limitations of party government. His 1854 endorsement of the alliance between Hincksite Reformers and MacNab's Tories was not a private expression of opinion but an important public statement, indeed the classic defence of coalition government.
As a long-time authority on social violence in nineteenth-century in Victorian Canada, Cross deftly handles such crises as Upper Canada's 1837 uprisings, and the threat to civil society in Montreal in 1849. Cross demonstrates Baldwin's belief in the British connection as Canada's safeguard, although he passes over his well-documented protest, voiced to Elgin, against the admission by British prime minister Russell that the link might one day be broken. However, Cross gives us a remarkable statement from 1849, Baldwin's proclamation: "I have lived and -- I hope to God would die a British subject" (285, 314) -- foreshadowing and perhaps inspiring Macdonald's celebrated slogan in the 1891 election. In fact, this quotation is one of five that are repeated without apparent explanation. One of them -- a statement by Francis Hincks on class conflict -- appears three times, with minor differences in transcription. Firmer editing might also have tackled the use of the term "Québécois" twice in three pages, once anachronistically describing French-Canadian identity, the other correctly describing residents of Quebec City. By contrast, metrification has been imposed with piously inappropriate precision: indicative estimates such a mile and 150 yards become 1.6 kilometres and 137 metres. Cross rightly stresses the role of religion in Baldwin's life, but the characterisation of him as "High Church" hardly fits a seculariser who overthrew Anglican dominance of the University of Toronto. Biographers must take strategic decisions about how to refer to their subjects. A good rule is to use surnames in the public sphere (Baldwin and LaFontaine) but forenames in private life (Robert and Eliza). There is no consistency here: for instance, in a paragraph on pages 294-5, the usage is RBBBRRBRBBR. Occasionally we have "Robert and LaFontaine", "Robert and Hincks", but a couple of times he is "Mister".
It is important for historians to appreciate that politicians had private lives and inner worlds, but we need to distinguish between people like Louis Riel, whose millenarianism affected his public role, and those like Mackenzie King, whose spiritualism was a personal quirk. Baldwin's grief for Eliza humanises his memory, but did it shape his political trajectory? This biography should be saluted, but Robert Responsible-Government must not become Robert Caesarean-Section.

J.F. Bosher - Imperial Vancouver Island: Who Was Who, 1850-1950

J.F. Bosher,

Imperial Vancouver Island: Who Was Who, 1850-1950

X-Libris Corporation, 2010, pp. 839, maps, illustrations

ISBN: 978-1-4500-5963-3 (hardback); 978-1-4500-5962-6 (softcover); 978-1-4500-5964-0 (e-book)

Vancouver Island, off the west coast of Canada, was the furthest part of the Empire from Britain by sea, but the closest in spirit. With a climate like England and mountains reminiscent of Ceylon, it appealed both to decayed gentry and proconsuls as a place to settle. Visitors like Kipling, who ran out of laudatory adjectives, were enchanted by Victoria, the main town, a Home Counties fragment overlooking the Pacific. J.F. Bosher has assembled biographical sketches of 769 Island personalities, most of them with immediate roots in Britain and Ireland. He begins with a passionate essay denouncing Canada's historians for discounting the Imperial dimension of their past. It was alive on Vancouver Island. One resident criticised the local newspaper for its inadequate cricket reports, while another complained when a Canadian moved in next door. The biographies include a descendant of Jane Austen and the Irish Protestant Major John Bowen-Colthurst, who was declared insane after killing unarmed civilians during the 1916 Easter Rising. Released from Broadmoor, he fitted in perfectly to Island life. The most famous of Bosher's subjects is Arthur Currie, the real-estate agent who rose to command Canadian troops on the Western Front. There are two key facts about Currie: he embezzled regimental funds and his victory at Vimy Ridge revolutionised trench warfare. Point two meant point one was hushed up. Curiously, Bosher mentions neither. Selection is heavily weighted towards military and naval officers: the three schoolmaster founders of Victoria's elite University School do not feature. Some information is inconsequential: a colonel's army file shows he broke his arm tripping over wire, hardly a character trait. A major's prize possession was a dried flower, clipped off the Kaiser's wreath at Queen Victoria's funeral: his name was James Bond. Bosher has used UK census returns to explore British and Irish backgrounds, but the information is often poorly edited. Sevenoaks, Sherborne and Torquay can be rescued from spelling errors, but "Mayo Island" is a mystery and there is no Essex village of West Nesson. The book is a labour of love and should be assessed as such.

[Times Literary Supplement. The review drew a letter pointing out that Jane Austen never married and had no direct descendants. Facing strict demands of brevity, I omitted the word "collateral" in confidence that TLS readers were fully aware of this. The letter-writer was an Anglican clergyman.]

Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, eds. - The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature

Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, eds.

The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; xlvii + 753 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-86876-1

Jonathan F. Vance,

A History of Canadian Culture

Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2009; xi + 500 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-541909-2

To those who approach the subject with an agnostic lack of enthusiasm, it may seem that Canada's intellectuals spent many decades agonising over the failure of their country to develop a distinctive literature, sometimes bemoaning their cultural inadequacy over several volumes. Canada, it was mournfully proclaimed, had produced no Shakespeare. Indeed, so continued the self-flagellation, this may even have been a Good Thing. Canada was so intellectually derivative, a mere branch-plant constantly apologising to overseas headquarters for its very existence, that Hamlet, Premier of New Brunswick could not possibly have represented a universalised expression of the human condition. Then, suddenly, before you could say 'Margaret Atwood' (never mind 'Gabrielle Roy'), Canadian writers were everywhere, and EngLit classrooms the world over were conjuring the streets of Winnipeg rather than the battlements of Elsinore. Even in its editorship, the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature reflects a new confidence in the integrity of its subject. Eva-Marie Kröller teaches in Vancouver, but she was born in Germany. Coral Ann Howells is a Queenslander who spent her career at the University of Reading in England. The study of Canadian literature is no longer a process confined to the contemplation of the maple leaf self-inserted into a transcontinental navel. The editors are sensible but I do not think it would be a good idea to mention to them Ko-Ko's distaste for 'that singular anomaly, the lady novelist'.
Forgive me if I warble with the surprised delight of a perpetual philistine, but the volume they have produced is quite simply a delight. Their Introduction is followed by 31 essays, grouped in five sections, four of them loosely defined by periods of time, and the last focusing on French Canada. This arrangement cleverly finesses one of the central enigmas of all such studies: nationalists are inclined to proclaim that Canada has one literature which happens to be written in two different languages. Despite its overall air of good sense, a whiff of postmodernism hangs over the editors' attitude to this all-embracing approach. 'Canadian literary history now begins to look more like a multi-plot novel with different beginnings and different narrative imperatives, as formerly marginalized voices and suppressed histories are assuming their proper place within a restructured and increasingly diversified literary tradition.' (p. 5) Got that? You pays your money and your choice takes you. So far as biculturalism is concerned, developments in French are pegged alongside those in English throughout the entire volume, with the three specific essays of Part Five (on francophone poetry drama and fiction) highlighting rather than segregating the themes. Quotations in French are translated in footnotes. I queried one of these, where F-X. Garneau's 'éloge', in reference to Montcalm's defeated army in 1759, is given 'elegy', where the context seems to suggest 'eulogy' or 'praise' (p. 110), and French poetry generally suffers when it is dragged through the vocabulary of a nation of shopkeepers. Although pre-Confederation Maritimers do not need translation, there was a time when orthodoxy insisted that nineteenth-century writers such as Thomas McCulloch and T.C. Haliburton should be regarded as Nova Scotians, since their colony had yet to join the Dominion of Canada. In an exercise of retrospective multiculturalism, they are all part of the CanLit story here.
Confronted with the reviewer's responsibility to sample the individual chapters, I can only say, like Ko-Ko but with more positive intent: it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list, for every chapter is excellent on its own terms. The collection gets off to a notably intriguing start, with Barbara Belyea's examination of the relationship between Native societies and French colonisers: if literary criticism is about the examination of written text, is it possible to discuss the cultures of pre-literate peoples? I am not going to tell you what she says because that would spoil it, but it is well worth reading for subtlety of analysis. There was a time when the words Cambridge History on a spine struck terror into mere readers, and the invocation to Abandon Hope seemed to hover over the very Contents List. One of the charms of this book is that nobody seems ready to bawl you out if you wander around the chapters, taking them out of order. Is that postmodernism, or am I thinking of deconstruction? So I mention Michael Peterman, on the popular culture of Victorian periodicals, Susan Fisher's wide-ranging essay on the Great War, Adrian Fowler on the poet E.J. Pratt (not, let me stress, the long-serving teenage bard of Private Eye), W.H. New on the short story, Robert Thacker on Atwood, Gallant, Munro and Shields, Teresa Gilbert on 'ghost stories' (anywhere else we would say 'historical fiction'), and Alfred Hornung on 'transcultural' writing, the contributions to Canadian literature by writers from distant countries and contrasting cultures. The editors both contribute a chapter: Howells on signs of cultural change after the second world war; Kröller taking 1967, the centennial year of Confederation, as an opportunity for stock-taking the role of the book in Canada. Marshall McLuhan is perhaps the Canadian intellectual who has had the greatest global impact (the index does not mention Ignatieff). In a model exercise in compressed good sense, David Staines locates McLuhan against the background of Harold A. Innis, and alongside George M. Grant and Northrop Frye, stressing that they constitute an inter-related group of four specialists in non-fiction. It is an essay that can stand as emblematic of the entire book. As a 750-page hardback, the book is weighty enough, but somehow it is a pleasure to handle, a sturdy but friendly artefact.
Jonathan Vance's A History of Canadian Culture is wide-ranging, fast-moving and great fun. Each of his seventeen chapters is split into short sub-sections, so that the bedtime reader is lured deeper into the delectable definitional mire of a national culture for Canada. Vance begins with aboriginal carving and moves back and forth through painting, writing, libraries, theatre (high and low) to architecture, the Massey Commission, television and even the future. The book is generously illustrated, although its black and white reproduction occasionally does scant justice to the originals. Naturally, being Canada, a great deal of the cultural activity has come from immigrants. Perhaps a more perplexing issue, and one that Vance tackles head on, is how to handle emigrants – painters who moved to Paris, writers who fled to New York. Often they were successful, but generally because they ceased to be particularly Canadian and won their spurs by assimilating. But it can be argued that for an artefact to be part of Canadian culture, there must be some kind of relationship with Canadian society and values, good or bad. Take the case of Paul Peel, who was probably the first Canadian artist to paint nudes. And very disturbing they can be too, for he specialised in rear views of children: Vance illustrates one unsavoury example, The Modest Model, in which a bearded painter tries to coax a shy naked boy out from behind his easel. But Peel was turning this stuff out in France around 1890. It would have been hard to persuade models to pose naked in Canada at that time, and difficult to imagine the end product on display in clerical Montreal or joyless Toronto. No wonder the Group of Seven mainly painted trees. And even the trees usually had their leaves on. Vance is to be congratulated on a mad project spectacularly executed.

Sean T. Cadigan - Newfoundland and Labrador: A History

Sean T. Cadigan,

Newfoundland and Labrador: A History

Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2009

xiv + 363 pp. ISBN 0802044654 (hardback); 0802082475 (paperback); £45 / £20

An overview history of Newfoundland (not forgetting Labrador) is much needed. Sean T. Cadigan's volume has many strengths. Cadigan is a social historian of the fishery, with a firm grasp of the role of the island's bleak environment. The book is well illustrated, with useful maps. It is splendidly written: Cadigan's calm account of the disastrous 1914 seal hunt is deeply moving, almost more so than the familiar story of the carnage at Beaumont Hamel two years later. The narrative proceeds seamlessly, drawing the reader persuasively along as it goes. Given my strong criticisms, it is only right to praise Cadigan's achievement, for some of the problems stem from the limitations of the conventional historical textbook. There are four areas of weakness: loose utilisation of the explosive concept of nationalism, failure to take account of historical demography, underplaying of Newfoundland's distinctive political culture and reluctance to highlight the turning-point of Newfoundland's absorption into Canada in 1949.
One third larger but markedly less fertile than Ireland, Newfoundland rises like a slab of rock from the continental shelf of the Grand Banks, where the collision of Arctic waters and the warm Gulf Stream stimulated one of the world's largest fish reserves. Year-round settlement developed slowly but, in 1832, a legislature was established, and local self-government was conceded in 1855. However, Newfoundland did not conform to the standard colony-to-Commonwealth pattern. Although formally included in the 1931 Statute of Westminster, it collapsed into bankruptcy two years later, and a Whitehall-appointed commission of government took control. In 1948, Newfoundlanders agreed to join Canada, but their 52 percent Yes vote fell short of full-hearted consent.
Newfoundland's history spans the entire British imperial experience, from Humphrey Gilbert's symbolic planting the English flag at St John's in 1583 to Churchill's cap-in-hand meeting with Roosevelt at Argentia in 1941. Two themes of centrality run throughout, and Cadigan handles both well, the economic and social centrality of fishing and the centrality of the island itself in the North Atlantic world. Newfoundland's linking role between two continents was underlined when Gander became the half-way refuelling point between New York and London in the early years of air travel. Newfoundlanders' strong 'British' identity was accompanied by suspicion of their larger Dominion neighbour, although they used Canadian money and affiliated with Canadian churches long before they joined its federal system. In 1927, Newfoundlanders successfully upheld their claims to the mainland enclave of Labrador. Although the full mouthful was not officially adopted until 2001, the province determinedly rebutted the expansionist dreams of Quebec by calling itself Newfoundland and Labrador, and Cadigan punctiliously calls its people Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.
Rather than simply restore self-government in 1945, the Attlee government summoned a 'National Convention'. But the ringing declaration by the chief proponent of joining Canada, J.R. Smallwood, 'We are not a nation', forms the opening words of Cadigan's text as well as the theme of his closing reflections. Yet for an author who disavows the idea of a Newfoundland nation, he seems loose in his employment of the formidable related term, 'nationalism'. It appears in the title of his Introduction, and briefly hovers over the opening pages of Chapter Seven. But nowhere is there any analysis of the word, no suggestion of the extensive academic debates on the concept, no hint that its application to Newfoundland has ever been debated.
The closest that we come to elucidating the term in Chapter Seven is the revelation that 'nationalists' were people who embraced a foundation myth around fifteenth-century explorer John Cabot and favoured 'landward economic expansion' (p. 154) which Cadigan seems to regard as a Bad Thing. Newfoundlanders were over-optimistic about the potential wealth of the interior of their island, as the ruinously expensive construction of a 547-mile trans-island railway showed. But how historians would grumble if they had made no attempts to exploit Newfoundland's forest and mineral resources! Nor does Cadigan explain his asserted antithesis. Why were politicians incapable of simultaneously developing the interior and improving the fishery? The real problem lay in the intractability of the fishery itself. William F. Coaker, the only politician who seriously contemplated radical reforms, ended as a disillusioned admirer of Mussolini. However, compared with Mussolini, nobody in Newfoundland remotely qualified as a nationalist. There was no pressure to break with the imperial power, and the so-called economic nationalists proved terrifying keen to hand over their resources, such as they were, to external exploiters. Cadigan uses the terms 'nationalism' and (post-1949) 'neo-nationalism' Emperor's-Clothes fashion to hint at profundity while papering over muddle.
Maybe I have an obsession with demography, but I believe that a general history should supply population figures. True, absolute numbers do not tell us why, for instance, China escaped imperial rule but India did not, nor do statistics about language and religion explain why spacious Canada evolved bicultural partnership while tiny Ireland was partitioned. But surely the fact that Newfoundland contained fewer people than a London Borough conveys some meaning? Cadigan relentlessly spares his readers from the demands of numeracy. Occasional statistics intrude, for wartime enlistments and job losses in the fishery. But to tell us, for instance, that a women's organisation had 7,000 members conveys nothing if we do not know whether Newfoundland was home to 70,000 people or 70 million. The sole exception ─ the information on page 288 that the population in 1986 was 576,495 ─ comes too late to provide any demographic context, especially as numbers had almost doubled since union with Canada. The population was roughly 120,000 when responsible government was introduced, around 200,000 as Newfoundland struggled to build its railway and just over a quarter of a million when it was engulfed by bankruptcy. These small numbers would not preclude the creation of a 'nation', especially as by the late nineteenth century almost all Newfoundlanders were native-born, but surely they qualify claims for 'nationalism'. Cadigan dismisses manufacturing projects because markets were so small, but he does not supply illustrative figures. He talks of 'the growth of an urban working class' in late-nineteenth century St John's, although acknowledging that the capital had a 'very small population' (p. 199). Indeed: the metropolitan area counted at most 40,000 people in 1900, one in five of the Newfoundland total. It is surely worth noting that almost half the population lived on the Avalon peninsula and that, vast though it is, Labrador has never accounted for more than two percent of the provincial total. And then there is religion. The three main denominations, Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists, made up over ninety percent of the population, not only eerily equal in numbers, but tending to cluster: in 1921, of 4,790 people in the Avalon district of St Mary's, only five were not Catholics. Very little of this, and none of it statistical, features in Cadigan, although he does devote a page to a Pentecostal revival movement which had signed up 3,757 people island-wide by 1935 ─ one third the size of the Salvation Army ─ apparently because it was 'an industrial, working-class phenomenon' (p. 218).
Cadigan devotes two sentences to a notable feature of Newfoundland political culture, the denominational compromise of 1865, but does not explore its subsequent political importance. A response to sectarian rioting in 1861, the denominational principle required governments to allocate patronage proportionately, i.e. roughly equally, among the three main groups. Usually there were twelve cabinet posts, four each for the Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists, and government jobs went by turns. Remarkably, this gave Newfoundland the combined features of two-party Liberal-versus-Conservative politics and cross-community power-sharing. The downside was it made large demands on leadership talent in a colony with less than a quarter of the population of modern-day Northern Ireland. Critics alleged that sectarian harmony was achieved at the cost of efficient government.
There are other aspects of Newfoundland political culture which merit more discussion than perhaps can be possible in a narrative textbook. Newfoundlanders are not unique in their tendency to believe that the next megaproject will make them rich, but they have been doggedly uncritical in their pursuit of economic mirages. The railway, the pulp and paper mills, industrialisation, oil, Labrador ─ the continuity is as impressive as the gullibility that has lapped them up. Thus in 1987 hydroponic cucumbers were going to make Newfoundland a power in the gherkin world: Cadigan mildly calls the project 'foolhardy' (p. 275). Another element in island politics is the enduring strain of the Newfoundland politician as the little guy who fights for ordinary people even if he sometimes cuts corners. It is difficult in a general textbook to bring every personality to life, but somehow we miss the stream that links the scoundrel Squires, whose arrest for corruption merits a passing allusion, to the ineffable Smallwood and subsequent figures such as Premier Brian Peckford who acted out a clownish heritage of battling populism, and funded the cucumber scheme. Smallwood unites the two themes. During the War, he planned to exploit the Gander air base, which was both voracious and wasteful of food, by running not just a pig farm, but a perpetual piggery. Pigs would be fattened on discarded military swill, sold as pork to the military and so on in an endless cycle. This was precisely the barmy ingenuity of an earlier generation that had fantasised of the snow-covered hills white with sheep ─ and helps explain how Smallwood ran Newfoundland as a Canadian province for two decades after 1949.
But why should outsiders grapple with the comic-cuts history of this tiny community? One episode in modern Newfoundland history, the colony's decision to join Canada, was more than a small-earthquake-in-decolonisation story. What would have happened if that narrow 52 percent vote had flipped the other way? This is no counter-factual fantasy, for if Confederation had been defeated, Britain would have been honour-bound to restore 'responsible government as it existed in 1933', as the ballot-paper alternative described it. The phrase was technically accurate, for Newfoundland had not embraced the implied independence conferred by the Statute of Westminster, but it was politically inept to remind the 1948 voters of 1933 conditions: imagine David Cameron campaigning for 'the Conservative party as led by John Major in 1997'. With smarter presentation, the anti-Confederates might indeed have won, and 320,000 Newfoundlanders (including a few Labradorians) would have re-launched themselves as a virtually independent country. What then? A stand-alone Newfoundland could hardly have provided the welfare services and economic prosperity demanded by the rising expectations of the 1950s. Even with its overlooked post-Confederation population increase, Newfoundland today is characterised by cyclical emigration which takes many of its workers off to Ontario and Alberta. In the 'fifties and 'sixties, there would have been an outflow of people, with Newfoundlanders perhaps running the London Underground, and probably targeted by Australia as a supply of people who were white, British and desperate. Newfoundland's political culture might have thrown up a leader in the Squires tradition and Smallwood mould, perhaps even Smallwood himself, who claimed a socialist pedigree. A little-guy government would probably have been anti-American, for Newfoundlanders envied the prosperity flaunted by the military bases but resented American superiority, especially their alleged coinage of the insulting nickname, goofy Newfies. It would have been tempting to insist that Churchill had handed over the bases without consulting the people, and that Newfoundland sovereignty required a hefty increase in rent ─ not a comfortable scenario to imagine on a crossroads island at the height of the Cold War. An independent Newfoundland might not have become a North Atlantic Cuba, but it could well have been a weak link in Western geopolitics.
Your genuine stick-to-the-facts historian will riposte that this never happened because, at one second to midnight on 31 March 1949, Newfoundland (and Labrador) became the tenth province of Canada ─ the timing was designed to avoid April Fools' Day. But that is precisely why Newfoundland's decision to join Confederation should be underlined as something more than a passing event in a linear history. Cadigan does indeed devote half a dozen pages to the Confederation issue, more space than is allocated to many earlier historical episodes, but his discussion of the issue conforms to the continuous narrative requirements of the conventional textbook. The constitutional future of Newfoundland emerges logically from the end of the War, and the decision to join Canada flows naturally into discussion of Newfoundland's practical adjustment to Ottawa control and Ottawa largesse. But the impression is given of a slight change of historical gear, for nothing is said to drive home to the reader that a major turning point has occurred.
Sean T. Cadigan has written narrative that evokes the Newfoundland past although it does not manage to tell us how many people were involved, how far their community could be measured against the elusive concept of nationality, how its politics were shaped by a peculiar local culture and how its context was altered forever by its union with Canada . But these deficiencies may be inherent in the standard format of the historical textbook.

Patrick James and Mark Kasoff, eds. - Canadian Studies in the New Millennium

Patrick James and Mark Kasoff, eds.

Canadian Studies in the New Millennium

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

pp. viii +310, paper, ISBN 978-0-8020-9468-1

This is a useful ten-essay textbook intended for use by American college students taking introductory courses in Canadian Studies. Undergraduates will read it (or pretend so to do) on the advice of their professors, while Round Table readers seeking advice on matters Canadian will probably head for more advanced sources. So a review may be best used to explain the title phrase, 'Canadian Studies'. The concept arose as a by-product of the rapid expansion of higher education in the 1960s, which brought an influx of American academics and United States-centred textbooks to Canadian universities. With characteristic ambiguity, the demand for 'Canadian Studies' was driven both by the new-found confidence of the Trudeau dawn, and by insecurity stimulated by the rise of separatism in Quebec. A key document, the 1974 Symons Report, noted that there was also interest in Canada overseas, and the concept quickly spawned an international dimension. This was generously backed by Ottawa, on the unspoken but reasonable assumption that to learn about Canada would be to like Canada. Funding was made available to help Canadian Studies associations organise conferences and publish journals. There were competitive awards to bring academics to Canada for research or to plan teaching. Within Canada, a few overblown egos played the villain role in the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb, vocally resenting any diversion of funding that they saw as rightfully theirs (one made an eloquent comparison between lawful spouses and kept women), but the Canadian government was never the soft touch they alleged. 'External' (later the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade) expected proposals to be realistic and projects to be delivered. But by the church-mouse standards of British academics, Canada's support was both welcome and generous (although Ottawa calculations plausibly showed that local universities put in nine dollars' worth of infrastructure expenditure for every Canadian dollar priming the pump.) More to the point, it was arm's-length funding. The government gained international profile for Canada's challenges and achievements, while many citizens seemed modestly amazed that they should attract any attention at all. (I recall the wife of one prominent politician expressing surprise that anyone was interested in her 'little country'.) Perhaps most valuable of all was the assembling of a virtual community of 'Canadianists', several thousand academics around the world who could act as interpreters on those rare occasions when a Canadian issue irrupted into the media scene, as during the 1995 Quebec independence referendum.
Over thirty years, Ottawa's international Canadian Studies commitment acquired bipartisan status. The Mulroney Conservative government, elected in 1984 with a debt-busting mandate, continued, even extended, the work of their Liberal predecessors. However, in 2006 the incoming government of Stephen Harper threw the programmes into doubt, as part of large-scale cuts in public expenditure. Eventually, they were reprieved, reduced and re-branded, under a new title. For the first time, 'Understanding Canada' involved, not indeed intervention, for Ottawa still stresses the independence of its academic partners, but at least a 'steer' in favour of declared preferences. Priority will be given in conference funding to events dedicated to peace and security, Canada-US bilateral issues, economic competitiveness, democracy and human rights, management of diversity and issues relating to environment and energy. Of course, it is entirely for Canadians to determine how to spend Canadian money. Overseas 'Canadianists' like myself can comment not as stakeholders but only as well-wishers. I am grateful for the longtime support we have received and rejoice that the programmes have been saved, at least for the time being. The concerns, sympathetically heard in Ottawa, are twofold. The first is that any touch on the funding tiller may disrupt the happy relationship between donor and recipients. Academics have been proud to work with the Government of Canada. The identification of an agenda of priorities, any agenda at all, risks the implication that participants are working for the Government of Canada. The second is that the agenda, worthy as it is, does not make obvious provision for, say, Margaret Attwood or, indeed, Antonine Maillet. 'Canlit' is popular overseas, and helps the federal government to project Canada as a bilingual and bicultural nation. My fear is that the international scholarly community recruited over three decades may erode under the new dispensation, not because they are the good-time girls and rent-boys of academe, but rather because they may be discouraged by the new competitive funding procedures (there are enough of these consuming academic time already) and by unease that they are perceived to be working to somebody else's agenda. In years ahead, Canada might face some other crisis of national unity or continental hegemony. It would be sad if Ottawa went knocking on doors to find interpretive friends, only to find that they could no longer contribute.
This textbook illustrates some of these points. The ignorant insularity of American teenagers would be funny if it were not so terrifying. Most know little of the wider world, and assume that we crave to emulate every detail of their culture. This narrowness requires blinkered amnesia towards the northern neighbour. By its very existence Canada demonstrates not only that there are other countries on the planet but, more unsettlingly, proves that it is possible to pursue different strategies for being North American. Hence this textbook aims to show how Canadian culture differs from that of the United States, to highlight its healthcare and social policies, to demonstrate the strengths of its system of parliamentary government and, above all, to stress the importance of its francophone element. These themes might not all qualify for the support of 'Understanding Canada'. None of them will make much impact in American classrooms if they become labelled as the official line of the Canadian government. Canadian Studies in the New Millennium has emerged from the activities of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, whose members are certainly best qualified to judge how to get their students to understand Canada. Contributors pack in a commendable amount of information and analysis into what is conceived as an introductory text. I liked the map of Canada, smudgy though it is, especially for its copyrighting to 'Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada.'

Patrick James and Mark Kasoff, eds.

Canadian Studies in the New Millennium

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp. viii +310, paper, ISBN 978-0-8020-9468-1

Over thirty years, Ottawa's international Canadian Studies commitment acquired bipartisan status. The Mulroney Conservative government, elected in 1984 with a debt-busting mandate, continued, even extended, the work of their Liberal predecessors. However, in 2006 the incoming government of Stephen Harper threw the programmes into doubt, as part of large-scale cuts in public expenditure. Eventually, they were reprieved, reduced and re-branded, under a new title. For the first time, 'Understanding Canada' involved, not indeed intervention, for Ottawa still stresses the independence of its academic partners, but at least a 'steer' in favour of declared preferences. Priority will be given in conference funding to events dedicated to peace and security, Canada-US bilateral issues, economic competitiveness, democracy and human rights, management of diversity and issues relating to environment and energy. Of course, it is entirely for Canadians to determine how to spend Canadian money. Overseas 'Canadianists' like myself can comment not as stakeholders but only as well-wishers. I am grateful for the longtime support we have received and rejoice that the programmes have been saved, at least for the time being. The concerns, sympathetically heard in Ottawa, are twofold. The first is that any touch on the funding tiller may disrupt the happy relationship between donor and recipients. Academics have been proud to work with the Government of Canada. The identification of an agenda of priorities, any agenda at all, risks the implication that participants are working for the Government of Canada. The second is that the agenda, worthy as it is, does not make obvious provision for, say, Margaret Attwood or, indeed, Antonine Maillet. 'Canlit' is popular overseas, and helps the federal government to project Canada as a bilingual and bicultural nation. My fear is that the international scholarly community recruited over three decades may erode under the new dispensation, not because they are the good-time girls and rent-boys of academe, but rather because they may be discouraged by the new competitive funding procedures (there are enough of these consuming academic time already) and by unease that they are perceived to be working to somebody else's agenda. In years ahead, Canada might face some other crisis of national unity or continental hegemony. It would be sad if Ottawa went knocking on doors to find interpretive friends, only to find that they could no longer contribute.

This textbook illustrates some of these points. The ignorant insularity of American teenagers would be funny if it were not so terrifying. Most know little of the wider world, and assume that we crave to emulate every detail of their culture. This narrowness requires blinkered amnesia towards the northern neighbour. By its very existence Canada demonstrates not only that there are other countries on the planet but, more unsettlingly, proves that it is possible to pursue different strategies for being North American. Hence this textbook aims to show how Canadian culture differs from that of the United States, to highlight its healthcare and social policies, to demonstrate the strengths of its system of parliamentary government and, above all, to stress the importance of its francophone element. These themes might not all qualify for the support of 'Understanding Canada'. None of them will make much impact in American classrooms if they become labelled as the official line of the Canadian government. Canadian Studies in the New Millennium has emerged from the activities of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, whose members are certainly best qualified to judge how to get their students to understand Canada. Contributors pack in a commendable amount of information and analysis into what is conceived as an introductory text. I liked the map of Canada, smudgy though it is, especially for its copyrighting to 'Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada.'

Hans J. Michelmann, Donald C. Story and Jeffrey S. Steeves, eds. - Political Leadership and Representation in Canada: Essays in Honour of John C. Courtney

Hans J. Michelmann, Donald C. Story and Jeffrey S. Steeves, eds.

Political Leadership and Representation in Canada: Essays in Honour of John C. Courtney

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007

pp. xii + 219, hardback. ISBN 978-0-8020-9187-1.

John C. Courtney taught political science at the University of Saskatchewan for four decades until his retirement in 2004. His published work focused upon the selection of party leaders and aspects of Canada's electoral system, especially the work of boundary commissions in delimiting constituencies. The nine essays that comprise this Festschrift tribute naturally cover similar ground. R.K. Carty examines leadership conventions in twentieth-century Canada, endorsing Courtney's warning that the instability of party membership bases creates difficulties in substituting American-style primaries for the arcane practices of delegate selection. Elisabeth Gidengil and André Blais question the 'presidentialization' thesis that sees Canadian general elections largely as contests between rival wannabe prime ministers. Leaders, they conclude, have always been important in getting voters to the polls, but it is not clear that this element is getting any stronger. Cristine de Clercy measures the declining survival rate at the top: in office, leaders burn out; in opposition they are thrown out. Does this reduce the authority each incumbent can wield? F. Leslie Seidle examines innovations designed to improve citizen participation in government, exercises in 'deliberative democracy' that bring together ordinary people ─ but which ordinary people? ─ to review basic issues. Such devices may invigorate the political system, but they may also undermine the role of elected legislators, who are already marginalised. Gregory P. Marchildon advances a similar analysis of royal commissions ─ useful in exploring policy options, but they should not become a substitute either for the political responsibility to take decisions or the bureaucratic duty to provide on-going warning and advice. In 2000, the Canada Elections Act was amended to require polling organisations to publish methodological information explaining how they measured public opinion. The aim was to de-mystify the process, so that the average voter would no longer believe that boffins armed with pencils and slide-rule had pre-empted the verdict of millions of voters. Peter A. Ferguson agrees that the reform was needed, but concludes that it has not worked. George Perlin boldly points to a malaise in Canadian democracy and argues that it can only be countered by effective citizenship education in the schools. His contribution leads seamlessly to an essay by Stéphane Dion, of interest not merely for its good sense but because this former University of Montreal politics professor is now leader of the Liberal party. Dion thinks it is healthy to question institutions but he too stresses the need to stimulate the civic values that are needed to make any machine work ─ especially among young people, who fail to vote in large numbers and do not seem to be channelling their beliefs into alternative forms of political activity. In effect, Dion discerns a self-destructive paradox at the heart of our institutions. He supports the view of the American theorist, Samuel P. Huntington, that democracy is driven by an anti-establishment ethic. But when that inherent disrespect for authority transfers to the very people whom we ourselves elect, public trust in the institutions operated by those leaders will also be damaged. The foregoing essays stick close to the exploration of Courtney's own work. A final contribution, by Alan C. Cairns, offers a different form of tribute, with the author surveying his own work on the relationship between aboriginal people and the nation-state. Forever blocked from the 'natural' processes of decolonisation that have dismantled more far-flung empires, any accommodation of aboriginal demands for political self-expression within Canada will have unpredictable implications not only for its liberal-democratic institutions but, claims Cairns, for the world at large. The collection forms a worthy tribute to Courtney, and its predominantly interlocking discourse should stimulate parallel thinking among academics in other countries.

Ryan Edwardson - Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood

Ryan Edwardson

Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

viii + 360; paperback; ISBN978-0-8020-9519-0

Ryan Edwardson has written a substantial and impressive book on the evolution of Canada's official policies to support a national culture as a means of strengthening national identity ─ and the author draws a firm distinction between these two concepts. Edwardson discerns three overlapping stages in the process. The first, which he calls 'Masseyism', belongs to the two past-war decades and takes its name from Vincent Massey, the gentlemanly millionaire who headed the 1949 Royal Commission on the Arts in Canada. Edwardson see this phase as part of the country's 'colony-to-nation' transition, which defined independence in terms of parity with Britain and expressed itself in a preference for 'high culture', such as the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario. The great achievement of this phase was the establishment of the Canada Council in 1957, lubricated by windfall death duties that Ottawa received when two Canadian millionaires died in the same tax year. One member of the literary community ungraciously termed the Canada Council the cultural equivalent of Meals on Wheels. But by the nineteen-sixties, the pace was being set by the 'new nationalism', which was more concerned with mass entertainment and particularly the onslaught of American pop music and television programmes. This, in turn, led to the 'cultural industrialism' of the Trudeau years, in which the government assured taxpayers that by investing in Canadian culture they were creating jobs and prosperity. The Americans were still seen as a threat, a point that complicated 1980s negotiations for free trade, with Washington finding it hard to understand why this aspect of employment and prosperity should be exempted from continental integration. But the new menace that required a bonding Canadian culture was the rise of separatism in Quebec. Edwardson's tripartite categorisation of the drive to politicise cultural activity in Canada represents a major contribution to understanding of the country's history, and will surely be incorporated in the textbooks.
At the core of Edwardson's second and third phases lay the contested phrase that forms the title of his book: Canadian content. What made a song or a broadcast Canadian? As one questing official report put it, the presence of a Canadian television crew did not necessarily bring any distinctively Canadian values to a programme. The result was a system of scoring Canadian-ness that made European Union widget regulations seem positively straightforward. Canadian content was not popular in the industry, which simply wanted to pipe in as much American programming as possible and pocket the advertising cash: television stations found that they had to sell commercials at cheaper rates during Canadian programmes, since viewers found them less compelling. Naturally, attempts were made to circumvent or even defy the controls: a television station in Hamilton Ontario claimed that its testcard as Canadian content. In 1991, Canadian rock-star Bryan Adams was outraged when his new album was classified as non-Canadian, because of the involvement of British lyricists and American technicians. Using copulatory terminology, Adams angrily urged the bureaucrats to back off, only to have the president of the Canadian Independent Record Production Association mobilise the vocabulary of urination to dismiss his complaint. Canadian content had definitely moved away from the realm of high culture.
There were undoubtedly elements of muddle underlying the whole righteous attitude to Canadian culture. Nationalists understandably felt aggrieved over the Reader's Digest affair. The Pearson government aimed to remove tax breaks on advertising revenue raised in Canada by American periodicals, which were undercutting local publications on the news-stands thanks to their continental economies of scale. The Reader's Digest and Time demanded the exemption of their Canadian editions, even though Reader's Digest specifically admitted that its wrap-around northern edition had little to say about Canada. Washington weighed in, and the subsidiaries kept their tax breaks. On the other hand, a Canadian edition of Sesame Street was prized as an exercise in national bonding, if of a stereotypical kind ─ Native child from the prairies, fisherman's kid from the Maritimes, and so on.
This is a large and well-researched book, so it would be churlish to criticise omissions, some of them necessary to hone the framework. Edwardson rejects any notion of a distinct French-Canadian nationalism, that is, a cultural view in relation to Canada as distinct from separatist sentiment aimed at an independent Quebec. As a result, he says very little about francophone Canada, largely by-passing any issue of the shared basis of cultural identity. Georges-Henri Lévesque, co-chair of the Massey Commission, is barely mentioned, and space might have been found to discuss the views on culture of such influential figures as André Laurendeau and Claude Ryan ─ or, indeed, to explore more deeply the Montreal roots of Pierre Trudeau's ideas. The emphasis upon government programmes also inadvertently downplays the continuing importance of private patronage in the world of Canadian culture. For instance, the Group of Seven remain a key movement in defining themes in Canadian art. Anyone wishing to become immersed in their painting would be directed to four very pleasant locations: the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the McMichael at Kleinburg. Three of these institutions operate independently of government, even if with the support of public programmes. Similarly, Canada's orchestras and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet receive only passing mention. If we step back and survey the larger cultural landscape of Canada, it may be that Ottawa does not have everything its own way. Similarly, one important feature of Canadian culture in recent decades has been the global recognition of a number of the country's writers, with Margaret Atwood famously challenging Shakespeare on undergraduate syllabuses around the world. This phenomenon cannot simply be regarded as a by-product of the domestic drive to protect and privilege Canadian content.
Although this book shows traces of its origin in a doctoral dissertation, Edwardson writes well, but is occasionally led by his flamboyance into over-statement. Take the flourish that tells us that Manitoba was created 'over Louis Riel's dead body' (p. 9). Riel led two western uprisings. The first, in 1869-70, was resolved by the creation of Manitoba. The second, in 1885, occurred further west and was punished by his execution for treason. It is a disappointing glitch because the original sentiment was an unnecessary aside. Similarly, the 1949 Massey Commission is hailed as 'an upholding of the Dominion of Canada' (p. 12), although the country had formally abandoned that style and title two years earlier. Generally, as is to be expected of the University of Toronto Press, the book is handsomely presented, although I confess to particular pleasure at a rare misprint, the omission of the letter C from the word 'faculty', used as a collective noun for academics. It is no condemnation to say this is hardly a book which the general reader will seek out, but it does provide a valuable discussion of the issues involved in protecting cultural expression on the national stage as we drown in globalisation.

José E. Igartua - The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71

José E. Igartua

The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71

Vancouver, UBC Press, 2006

pp. viii + 277, ISBN 978-0-7748-1088-3 (hardback), 978-0-7748-1091-3 (paperback)

In 1945, English-speaking Canadians were in little doubt that their identity was, in some sense, British and those who wanted to distance the country from its imperial heritage were often denounced as adolescents with an inferiority complex. As late as 1952, the decision by the St Laurent Liberal government to shift Empire Day ('Victoria Day' in Canada) from May 24 on the nearest Monday before the 25th aroused widespread fury. Yet Igartua's survey of newspaper opinion finds that anglophone editorialists changed their perceptions of national identity dramatically and rapidly in the period from 1956 to 1962. It seems almost as if the Suez debacle and Britain's attempt to join the European Common Market provided welcome opportunities for detachment from a transferred patriotism that no longer made sense. The important aspect of Igartua's central finding is that this shift in perception of national identity occurred before the notorious Flag Debate of 1964-65, which saw some Canadian Tories prepared to drown in the last cliché in defence of the Union Jack ─ and before, too, English Canada had caught up with the full impact of modernisation in Quebec, the phenomenon usually known by the 'Quiet Revolution' tag. True, there were throwbacks: in 1959 the CBC theatrically fired a journalist who confessed to a lack of enthusiasm for Queen Elizabeth II's visit to open the Seaway. But the central thesis remains impressive, so much so that the study's terminal date of 1971, the year that Canada declared itself to be multicultural, seems almost a postscript.
Identifying 'opinion' is always a historical conundrum, and Igartua's methodology merits discussion. A team of research assistants assembled editorials from leading English-language newspapers, and these form the main basis of the study. The question to be asked is: how many people read these leaders? It seems more likely that opinion was shaped, or provoked, by big-name columnists, but Bruce Hutchison is mentioned only twice, and Peter C. Newman just once. Moreover, leading articles have a curious dual quality of their own. Their anonymity gives them ex cathedra authority (if anybody reads them) but they also reflect the thoughts and prejudices of a very small number of individuals ─ perhaps just a proprietor or an editor. With such major newspapers in such recent times, it ought to be possible to identify at least some of these personalities and measure their preaching against their principles. True, public opinion polling was not yet sufficiently consistent to trace attitudinal changes in any detail, while Igartua reasonably pleads that television programmes were usually too ephemeral to be pinned down. A second major source of material comes from analysis of Ontario school textbooks, which form two often-hilarious chapters. It is certainly amazing to note just how much patronising and even racist rubbish was unleashed
upon innocent children, especially about Aboriginal people, while it is a compliment to average English-Canadians that so many of them were capable of adjusting at all to the emergence of a modern society out of a French Canada that, as Igartua notes, had often been portrayed in their school texts as a theme park. Overall, however, the newspaper material and the textbook evidence co-exist uneasily, as two monographs wearying within the bosom of a single book. The quarter-century time period covered also prompts a depressing thought: people do die. Citizens in their sixties in the final years of Mackenzie King would largely have formed their world views in the Edwardian period, when the Empire loomed large. Young Canadians entering the political community in the Pearson-Trudeau era would have had less reason to define themselves by a British yardstick. To put it bluntly, Canadians who were in their late forties in 1945 were dead by 1971. The impact, if not the pivotal importance, of Suez suggests that sentient beings did indeed modify their outlook during their own lifetimes but ─ even without the diluting effects of immigration ─ English-Canadian opinion changed because there were new guys with new ideas.
Perhaps the most poignant example of the decline of British influence is to be found in a rare factual error. It was not the two year-old Prince Charles who speechified about Canadian identity in 1951, but his father, Philip.

Max and Monique Nemni, translated by William Johnson - Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944

Max and Monique Nemni, translated by William Johnson

Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2006, pp. 343, paper, $Cn27.99 / $US20.95, ISBN 978-0-7710-6749-6

Ramsay Cook

The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliot Trudeau

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006, pp. xii + 224, hardback, $Cn29.95, ISBN 978-0-7735-3149-9

Pierre Elliot Trudeau died in September 2000, sixteen years after ceasing to be prime minister of Canada. He continues to fascinate Canadians and, indeed, he remains virtually their only twentieth-century prime minister generally remembered in the wider world. The two books reviewed here are very different, but in nice apposition. Both deal with the intellectual Trudeau, appropriate because Trudeau was above all a thinker, although no mere desiccated brain. The study by Max and Monique Nemni, translated from French, explores the early Trudeau mind through his revealing private papers. The second, by the distinguished English-Canadian historian Ramsay Cook, chronicles a friendship of shared ideas that spanned the later decades of his life ─ the period that Canadians still call the 'Trudeau years'.
Pierre Trudeau crashed into Canadian politics by accident. Facing a federal election in 1965, and needing fresh faces in Quebec, the federal Liberals sought to enlist the popular trade union leader, Jean Marchand. Marchand would not go to Ottawa without the reflective Gérard Pelletier, and Pelletier insisted on bringing along the playboy-socialist and law professor Trudeau. The Liberals gulped, but the loose cannon was soon a reforming Minister of Justice, with a constitutional philosophy which opposed concessions to his own province. When Lester Pearson retired in 1968, Canada's fractious bicultural partnership pointed to a federalist successor from Quebec, a role that Marchand and Pelletier persuaded Trudeau to take on. Thus, three years after sliding sideways into national politics, Pierre Trudeau became prime minister of Canada, a job that he retained, with one short break, for almost sixteen years.
By the time Canada was swept by 'Trudeaumania' in 1968, a disturbing clamour was coming out of Quebec. But English Canada had little comprehension of the internal turmoil behind the cacophony. A biographical construct of the formation of Trudeau helped make sense of events. Like most biographical constructs, it avoided outright inaccuracy but subtly distorted its emphases. For instance, Trudeau had not ridden into Ottawa as a complete outsider in 1965 but had worked as a federal civil servant from 1949 to 1951, an era when its Whitehall-West bureaucracy barely even attempted to understand French Canada.
The Trudeau biographical construct stressed his parentage: a millionaire French-Canadian father and an English-speaking mother gave him material advantages and an independent world view transcending the narrowness of clerical Quebec. The boy's education included a European tour that took him to Germany as the Nazis seized power, and intellectual schooling by the Jesuits at Montreal's elite Brébeuf College. Later he would study at Harvard and Paris and take classes with Laski at the London School of Economics. His defiance of the conservative-nationaliste regime of provincial premier Maurice Duplessis began with his support for strikers at the romantically named town of Asbestos, and led to his participation in the radical magazine, Cité Libre. The strike brought him into contact with Marchand; Cité Libre was Pelletier's project. Mainstream Quebec radicals despised Duplessis for claiming to defend French Canada while keeping its people in subjection. They argued for a left-leaning alternative strategy that would put the people first. Trudeau disagreed. Remembering Hitler's storm-troopers and his own maternal heritage, so the construct had it, Trudeau insisted that nationalism might start by sounding benign but you never knew where it would end. Hence in 1968 the new leader was not some wildcat wildcard but the man of destiny who had appeared at just the moment when Canada most needed him.
The original Cité Libre ceased publication in 1966. Max and Monique Nemni supported its revival in 1991 and came to know the now-retired Trudeau. In 1995, they secured his permission to write an intellectual biography, and he gave them access to his early personal papers ─ in effect, his class notes. The authors were shocked by what they found.
Pierre Trudeau, it transpired, had not always been a radical anti-nationalist. At Brébeuf he may have seemed offbeat ─ remember he was a moneyed teenager at an elite school ─ but intellectually he was deeply conformist. (Even as a graduate student at Harvard he sought formal permission from the Church to read banned books.) The extensive notes that he made on books he read, along with his articles for student magazines and sketches for satirical reviews, suggest that he took unpleasant ideas in his stride. Quebec society was shot through with anti-semitism, partly because Canada's most traditional province contained Montreal, the country's largest city, with its notable Jewish business community. Trudeau reflected this prejudice.
The second world war was a grey area in the Trudeau biographical construct, a distraction that this brilliantly aware young man somehow failed to notice. It was known that he had opposed conscription for overseas service. It is now clear that he went beyond isolationism to partisan admiration for Marshal Pétain. Defeated in 1940, France was rebuilding itself on its Catholic roots, just as Quebec had regrouped around the Church after the Conquest of 1759. It was a world view that equated the British empire with Hitler's Germany. Those Nazi jackboots had not made such an impression on the Montreal teenager after all.
At this point, two caveats seem appropriate, one biographical and the other methodological. The first pleads that we need not answer for the extreme views of early life. Comic sketches in which prison guards shout 'Heil Mackenzie King!' may be tasteless, but for most of us being young is not very heaven but downright embarrassing. Second, allowance should be made for Trudeau's intellectual formation. A Jesuit education is formidable because it trains students in the minute analysis, unlike the modern-day social sciences approach which yells 'fascist' and 'racist' each time it encounters an unfamiliar idea. Trudeau took detailed notes of arguments he encountered because that was the necessary preliminary either to reasoned refutation or informed concurrence. The fact that he transcribed some unpleasant theories does not in itself mean that he endorsed them.
But one episode clearly shows him as something more than the detached intellectual. By 1942, when he was 22, Trudeau was a committed separatist. Again, this is not entirely news: Trudeau had guardedly acknowledged his past replying to a parliamentary question in 1977, and it was rumoured that his name appeared on an RCMP list of subversives used to round up suspects during the October Crisis of 1970. He was not simply a member but probably the key theorist in a shadowy group called either 'X' or 'L.X' (curiously, the authors do not consider the possibility of 'Les X'). Its manifesto, which he helped to draft, called for an independent state (in those days, not 'Québec' but 'Laurentie') in which the people of 'la patrie' would be sovereign. The French and Catholic nature of this polity did not leave much room for Grace Elliott or Mordecai Richler. Surviving membership numbers (which may have been issued at random) suggest that several hundred people could have been involved. A few embarrassed reminiscences make it sound like the World Domination League of Peter Cook's sad satire. Its organisation was not so much cellular as paper-chain, with each member knowing only two others, one from whom he received orders and the other to whom he transmitted them. Potentially it was dangerous, and happily it fizzled out.
Young Trudeau is volume one of the planned intellectual biography. We shall probably discover that Trudeau's involvement with separatism resembled Tony Blair's fling with socialism, since he not only bought the T-shirt but became a fervently reformed sinner. All the same, the book closes, with Trudeau planning in 1944 to move on to Harvard, like an episode in a silent movie, with the hero bound to the nationalist track as the engine of modernity bears down upon him. It will need more than a bound to free Pierre in Volume Two.
Academic discourse in French tends to be more excitable than its English equivalent, and the authors certainly make remarkable revelations. Thanks to the excellent translation by William Johnson (himself a product of Brébeuf), the sense of challenge has made the transition without too much of the 'sacré bleu!' of Gallic astonishment. An index would have been useful.
The Teeth of Time is Ramsay's Cook account of what he calls an 'intellectual friendship' with Pierre Trudeau. He does not claim membership of the inner circle of life-sharers (all of whom, it seems, were from Quebec) but something more than an associate or acquaintance. Their friendship, which spanned forty years, was cerebral and it was also cyclical, with lengthy periods in which the Toronto-based professor and the orbiting Montreal-Ottawa comet saw little of one another.
A book about a friendship offers insights into two people, and this memoir cannot be understood independently of its author. Ramsay Cook is not simply one of Canada's most distinguished historians. He also belongs to that category with which British political culture remains uncomfortable, the public intellectual. Outsiders may find Cook's account of his conscience wrestling with New Democratic Party definitions of the constitutional status of Quebec reminiscent of Cardinal Newman explaining his theological beliefs, but Cook-on-Canada is itself a worthwhile study, and the more so as it tells us not only how the author became part of the Trudeau camp, but how he helped to ensure that the tents were erected at all. It is no denigration to liken an author's mental processes to those of Newman, and Cook himself urged Trudeau to model his own memoirs on the Apologia.
Cook's memoir is important because it illustrates just how small is a hyphen that links Canada's two founding peoples, even after decades of positive effort. Surely, if a country has to be bilingual, it could hardly make a better choice of official languages than English and French, which share so many features that they are almost two dialects of a common European speech? Yet the number of Canadians who fully comprehend the two cultures could probably be counted in hundreds, and maybe even handfuls. English is a sledgehammer tongue which often ignores nuances (a concept we had to borrow from French) of meaning. A classic example of a slovenly noun is 'nation': Nigeria is a nation, so is Wales. When, in the nineteen-sixties, Quebecers tried to conceptualise the country as 'deux nations', fellow citizens in the other nine provinces rushed to denounce the threat of Canada breaking into two sovereign states. Misunderstanding is magnified by the fact that French Canadians employ a universal language for their own minority discourse. Metropolitan France is about political power and cultural assertion; in Quebec, the priorities are adaptation and survival. (Even Ramsay Cook occasionally found Trudeau's prose hard to translate precisely.) School French may get you around Quebec but it will not get you inside Quebec. Even bilingual parentage is no guarantee of a bicultural personality: Trudeau himself played down his maternal heritage. Worse still, those happy few who possess real linguistic competence are not always blessed with concomitant skills of analysis. The most superbly bilingual Canadian I have ever met was a charming person who was unfortunately incapable of articulating a profound thought in either official language.
Hence the importance of Ramsay Cook. He was born in small-town Manitoba, the kind of place where people's views on language policy may be shaped by the belief that Jesus spoke English in the Bible. He went to university in Winnipeg. The city, it is true, is the only place in western city with a sizeable francophone community, but most Anglo-Winnipeggers manage to ignore St Boniface, and it is no disparagement of Franco-Manitobans to suggest that they do not speak the French of Molière. Remarkably, the student who did not set foot in eastern Canada until he was 20, became that precious but rare phenomenon, the interpreter of Quebec to English-speaking Canadians, through his translated anthology, French-Canadian Nationalism, and by frequent newspaper articles and energetic contributions to the conference circuit. It was there that he encountered the pre-political Trudeau, the Montreal professor who questioned the emerging nationalist agenda. They were very different personalities. Trudeau drove a Mercedes, Cook a second-hand Morris Minor (long ago, there were British cars on Canadian roads). Their intellectual friendship grew out of cerebral telepathy, a shared view of their country as both bicultural and united, which saw no contradiction between duality and strength.
English Canada's worthy quest to understand what Quebec tended to provide platforms for the most extreme demands. Cook fought to ensure that this francophone federalist voice was heard too. When, in 1968, Trudeau was pressed to run for the Liberal leadership, Cook is credited as one of a small group of Toronto-based counsellors who persuaded him that he could win outside his own province. It followed that he had to turn his back upon his prairie socialist roots (his heart was slow to follow) and join the Liberals himself. Anyone pondering the failure of Bolshevik revolution in Canada should note that the cash-poor New Democrats sportingly refunded his subscription.
The integrity of the relationship was probably supported by the fact that the two were not in constant contact during Trudeau's years in power. Like many thoughtful people, Cook was uneasy at the government's handling of the 1970 terrorist crisis although, having written a graduate thesis on civil liberties, he knew that there was no alternative to using the draconian War Measures Act. He hosted a private meeting at his Toronto home between Trudeau and some of his critics: the discussion was formal, frank but fruitless. The two continued to meet but collaborated in one only one further major campaign, against Brian Mulroney's 1987 attempt to declare Quebec a 'distinct society'.
Back in 1916, an organisation called Bonne Entente attempted to provide social space for French- and English-speaking Canadians to span the divisions caused by wartime pressures. It failed, and quickly, since each side regarded it as a platform for their own prejudices. Cook has written about the episode, and perhaps had it in mind in this chronicle. The Cook-Trudeau entente was long-lasting and based on shared ideas. Like all good relationships, it success depended on the observance of boundaries. With punctilious courtesy, Trudeau always enquired after Cook's family. With commendable tact, Cook never probed Trudeau's private life, even when Barbra Streisand seemed set to become Canada's proto-Carla Bruni. 'Friendship has one more than one meaning,' Cook sagely observes (p. 8) This friendship ran deep, and the memoir began as Cook's response to bereavement. As he says, he might simply have photocopied it for private circulation, but he was right to publish ─ not least for his acerbic asides and the witty self-deprecation with which he portrays an innocent academic skirting the real world of power. Believing himself to be too close for objectivity, Cook declined to become Trudeau's biographer, but it would be trite to categorise him as a mere Boswell.
Conventionally, explorations of Trudeau conclude by remarking that Canada's fifteenth prime minister remains an enigma. No doubt, but the real mystery enwraps the country that he led. How else could the footloose student who had once fantasised about destroying the federation become the iconic expression of political unity through cultural duality?

Stephen Clarkson - Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State.

Stephen Clarkson

Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002.

viii + 534 pp. ISBN 0-8020-3758-5 (hardback) and 0-8020-8539-3 (paperback)

Stephen Clarkson has written an impressive book deploring the subordination of contemporary Canada to the United States. Fittingly, he holds a Chair with the splendid title of 'Political Economy', for only somebody with a grasp of both democracy and dollars could have achieved such an analysis. Yet this is no bloodless parade of trends and figures. As Clarkson points out, social science methodology elevates precision at the cost of significance. The statistic that Canada exports goods worth $360 billion to the United States has no meaning, even though that represents forty percent of the country's gross domestic product. 'Grasping the significance of a fact involves making a judgment, and making a judgment invokes one's core values.' (9) An activist for Canadian national causes for forty years, his book was triggered by the simple query posed by a friend, 'Stephen, will Canada survive?' (407). Canada, he was sure, would continue to fill its space on the map, but what sort of country it would be? The result is a prolonged cry of pain, a combination of post-mortem and rallying cry.
A passionate book, inherent but constructed around a social sciences definitional framework. Ottawa is located at the mid-point of five levels of governance, staggering beneath the emerging global and continental tiers above and dumping its responsibilities on the existing provincial and municipal spheres below. In 1971, Nixon refused to exempt his northern neighbour from an emergency import surcharge, so shaking Canadians in their comfortable Keynesian paradox that used the profits from cross-border trade to combine State support for industry with the provision of welfare services for the citizenry. Canadians now faced a clear choice, and being Canadians they adopted both policies, although not simultaneously. Down to 1984, Trudeau sought a more autonomous Canada, through diversified trade and multilateral diplomacy. This approach was already in the doldrums when the Conservatives swept into office. According to Clarkson, Brian Mulroney brought no fresh ideas and, consequently, he was temperamentally vulnerable to embracing the free trade panacea argued in the 1985 MacDonald Report. Thus Canada bounced headlong from insulated independence to the barely considered Plan B of continental integration.
At this point, enter globalization. In principle, the phenomenon goes back to Edison, if not to Columbus. Its terrifying modern form brings rapid and intrusive change: trans-national corporations, unsleeping stock markets, computerisation of cash and information, the imposition of hegemonic cultural norms. But Clarkson also discerns two accompanying concepts, global governance and globalism. For corporations to operate on a world stage, rule-making is required. By tackling this issue with regulations in phone-book bulk, the European Union flies in the face of globalism, which fights the very notion of regulation by governments. It would be flippant to dismiss Clarkson as yet another Canadian nationalist intellectual crying 'we was robbed' by the victory of free trade with the United States (CUFTA) in 1988. He is right to identify the novel feature of the Canada-US agreement as the opening of cross-border movement to services. Once locked into CUFTA, Canadians found, as they had been warned in 1891 and 1911, that they must follow Washington wherever it led. When the Americans opened trade talks with Mexico, CUFTA soon became NAFTA, and Canada was sucked into a new philosophy of continental governance. Investment is a service, and investors must be protected from expropriation by excitable Latins. Under NAFTA's Chapter 11, any investor, actual or even potential, can sue a sovereign government for obstructing trans-national corporations as they gouge environments and customers. Two years after NAFTA, in 1994, came the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and neoconservative corporate governance went global. (Ottawa, incidentally, has taken a WTO case against France for using health regulations to block imports of asbestos that are banned within Canada.)
Chapter after chapter chronicles the damage that Clarkson blames upon neoconservatism. Some of his arguments may be probed. Clarkson is a Torontonian, proud of a great city that faces environmental and economic problems, including loss of control over its powerful pan-Canadian banking sector. He argues that neoconservatives have hypocritically downloaded key public functions to the municipal level to weaken the role of government, as symbolised by the lethal epidemic caused by polluted drinking water in Walkerton, Ontari. But it does not follow that creation of a single municipality for Metro-Toronto fits part of the pattern, for all that Clarkson briefly labels the behemoth as 'glocalization'. The parallels with Margaret Thatcher are far-fetched: she hand-bagged big-city regimes. Nor is it cricket to cite Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman's demand for provincial status without noting that most Metro intellectuals regard Lastman's election as a sad loss to his previous calling of furniture retailing.
It is striking to note the virtual omission of concern about the Quebec issue. A decade ago, it was 'whither Canada?' that agonised such tomes. Now secession is silently dismissed, as the neoconservative challenge to the State prompts the question 'wither Canada?' Sometimes there is a tension between Clarkson proving that the State has been castrated and Clarkson hoping that it might be revived to protect Canadian values. To a Britain facing the challenge of the Euro, the Bank of Canada's autonomy, however constrained, and the country's ever-sinking dollar, may seem potent symbols of old-fashioned sovereignty. His suggestion that the dollar should 'float up to what is thought to be its true value' (thought by whom?) in order to 'raise the wealth of all Canadians' (416) sounds like the greatest piece of Voodoo economics since Harold Wilson reassured us about the pound in our pockets. (A stronger dollar would, as Clarkson says, make imports cheaper. It would also flood the country with American and Mexican goods, while increased export prices would force Canada back to a mere staple producer.)
Clarkson was unlucky, too, in his timing. His massive analysis has only marginally responded to the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Optimistically, he suggests that the American response proves the resilience of the national State, but it is not clear that the war on terrorism is going to do much for the autonomy of any national State other than the USA. Lastly, it is in the nature of the beast that the final breathless chapter on democratic remedies is a gallop through tried nostrum, less persuasive than the preceding indictment. More participation, better paid civil servants, richer universities — but also new political techniques to operate within the globalized framework, such as Canadian environmentalists lobbying Congress direct. This is an important book, and deeply alarming too.

[Round Table]

J. Vowles, P. Aimer, S. Banducci, J. Karp, R. Miller, eds. - Voters' Veto

Jonathan Boston, Stephen Church, Stephen Levine, Elizabeth McLeay and Nigel S. Roberts, eds.

New Zealand Votes: The General Election of 2002,

Victoria University Press (Wellington), 2003,

$49.95, 424 pp., illus., ISBN 0 86473 468 9 (paper).

Jack Vowles, Peter Aimer, Susan Banducci, Jeffrey Karp and Raymond Miller, eds.

Voters’ Veto; The 2002 Election in New Zealand and the Consolidation of Minority Government

Auckland University Press (Auckland), 2004

xii + 265 pp., ISBN 1 86940 309 6 (paper).

The 2002 general election was New Zealand’s third experience of MMP, and political scientists wonder whether the system has yet ‘settled down’. The result suggests that the old Labour-versus-National dichotomy continues, even within coalitionist guise ─ despite Labour spin-scares of a Green breakthrough. The background to the poll raised unresolved issues: Labour’s Alliance partner disintegrated but its party-list MHRs did not resign from parliament. The prime minister’s early election call seems to confirm that the governor-general has little say over dissolutions. Turn-out fell: in percentage terms, for every eight citizens who participated in the brave new MMP dawn of 1996, only seven bothered to vote six years later. The campaign did not go entirely the way Labour had hoped, and Helen Clark’s called one interviewer as ‘a sanctimonious little creep’. But voters seem to have known what they were doing. Labour won the party vote in 65 of the 69 electorates, including twenty which fell to rivals in local contests. New Zealanders wanted Labour to lead the next government, but not to control it. One surprise was the performance of United Future, a merger of two small socially conservative parties. Although not part of the new government, its eight members promised it general support.

Both volumes under the review are the fifth in their series. New Zealand Votes is the product of the Victoria election series, Voters’ Veto of the New Zealand Election Study. New Zealand Votes retains some echoes of the early Nuffield election surveys in Britain, organising 28 contributions into five sections: Overview, Party Perspectives, Candidates, Media Coverage and Results. Many of the thirty contributors were activists themselves: it was pleasant to see an echo from the Norman Kirk era in Margaret Hayward’s account of flying the red flag (or, at any rate, running for Labour) in Rangitikei, while Eamon Daly’s experience (as Labour’s list candidate number 53) of campaigning in a wheelchair makes the point that it is not only the winners who help to shape politics. Of course, political actors do not necessarily know what is going on around them. ‘It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what we did that was so right for this election (p. 132)’, writes the United Future campaign organiser. New Zealand Votes continues the Victoria series’ splendid idea of including a colour section of party posters, and adds a CD of nineteen clips from advertisements and interviews. (There is also an erratum slip for one of the tables.)

If the presentation of New Zealand Votes implies that democracy is fun, Voters’ Veto is serious both in appearance and content. The twelve chapters deal with shifts in support since 1999, the outcome of the election, the impact of campaigning, the role of television, strategic voting, candidate motivation, voter mobilisation and public opinion. Concluding chapters investigate voter attitudes to coalition government, seek to place New Zealand democracy in an international comparative context and examine the role of leadership and trust in the system. Both volumes have appendices, with Voters’ Veto giving extensive information about the New Zealand Election Survey. New Zealand Votes, on the other hand, supplies notes on contributors, whereas it only incidentally emerges that one chapter in Voters’ Veto is the work of three specialists from Canada. Two comments are applicable to both volumes. They would benefit from a list of tables and diagrams: the analysis in Voters’ Veto is particularly dependent upon such apparatus. And it is puzzling that so many as five editors are required for each volume. Why have more than an executive team of two? One running head in Voters’ Veto renders ‘election’ with two Cs: is this a case of too many cooks?

[British Review of New Zealand Studies]

Gordon Robertson - Memoirs of a Very Civil Servant

Gordon Robertson

Memoirs of a Very Civil Servant: Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau

Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2000,

pp. xvi + 408, £25 hb).

By the standards of political memoirs, this is an unusual book, and the reviewer's grouping of themes differs a little from those adopted by the author. Its first part is mainstream autobiography, dealing with youth, Saskatchewan, Oxford, marriage. This leads into career, and the first decade in Ottawa. Gordon Robertson joined the Canadian civil service during the Second World War. In 1945, he moved to the Prime Minister's Office, to become right-hand bureaucrat first to Mackenzie King and then to Louis St Laurent. Although Robertson admired King and ostensibly defends him against his detractors, he also subtly paints a negative picture of petty petulance, in contrast to his unrestrained admiration for St Laurent. The book's third narrative focuses upon the Canadian North, which Robertson ran during the decade from 1953. Section four sees Robertson at the heart of government, the innocuous title of Clerk to the Privy Council cloaking a classic Sir Humphrey role, first for Pearson and then, until 1979, with Trudeau. Finally, we see Robertson as a concerned private citizen, campaigning for the Meech Lake Accord and working to safeguard Canada's future. The combined result is an amalgam of several different books, itself a reflection of an influential life. One consistent theme is that difficulty of distancing administrative decision-making from raw politics. It is striking to learn that Robertson was present, and even commented, during a discussion of the 1968 election date ("even public servants are entitled to opinions") and that he counselled Pierre Trudeau not to revoke is announced retirement from politics in 1979 - although in this case, Robertson was within days of clearing his own desk for the last time. Trudeau emerges as the central figure of the second half of the book. Robertson confirms the importance of Trudeau's brief experience as an Ottawa civil servant from 1949 to 1951 as a foundation for later relationships. He conveys something of the excitement of Trudeaumania of the late sixties, with more than a hint of the problems that his philosopher-king style caused for the bureaucracy. It is possible to suspect that the flower-power Trudeau is so favourably portrayed partly to point up Robertson's disillusionment with the way his one-time subordinate and eventual boss monstered the attempt to change his 1982 constitution through the Meech Lake amendments. Yet although roundly condemned, Trudeau remains the lost leader. The books closes with a poignant expression of hope that "in spite of all that has passed, Pierre Trudeau, the statesman" might make "a supreme final act of leadership" to solve Canada's regional and cultural tensions through constitutional change. Alas, Trudeau was already gravely ill and died soon afterwards.

Francis M. Carroll - A Good and Wise Measure

Francis M. Carroll

A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001.

xxiii, 462 pp. Hardback ISBN 0 8020 4829 3, $US75.00; paperback ISBN 0 8020 8358 7, $US29.95. Maps.

As a graduate student, I wrote a paper about the disputed Maine-New Brunswick boundary. A kindly supervisor urged me to move on. It was not, he remarked, the most interesting border in the world. This was an example of a historian judging the significance of an issue in terms of the body count. Thus the frontier between Russia and German is hugely fascinating because it has caused millions of deaths. By comparison, the Aroostook 'War' of 1839 is amusingly unimpressive: State and colonial militia forces defiantly avoided each other, and the worst violence was a fist-fight between fraternising troops in a Houlton bar. Francis M. Carroll was initially drawn to the Canadian-American boundary by the realisation that his birthplace in northern Minnesota almost became part of the British empire. He too put aside early research on the subject in 1977 when Howard Jones published his study of the Ashburton-Webster treaty of 1842, which largely resolved the eastern half of the transcontinental boundary. Happily, Carroll later returned to the subject, to examine the subject in a much longer time frame. The rose-tinted spectacles of hindsight would expect us to find a story with a happy ending. Of course, the world's longest undefended border ought to have been the product of uncontested negotiation. After all, at one point, William Pitt Preble was an American negotiator while William Pitt Adams was a member of the British delegation. Children of a common mother, as Vancouver's Peace Arch proclaims astride the 49^th parallel, how could the two countries have quarrelled over a line in the trees? Yet, as Carroll points out, the significance of the story lies in precisely the fact that the question perennially triggered disagreement, sometimes provoked talk of open conflict, and might well have led to war. Rather, the boundary between the United States and Canada was determined by innovation in modern international relations, the use of arbitration. Moreover, it was not simply once-off invocation of a single form of arbitration. Britain and America experimented with joint commissions, mixed commissions and a neutral umpire. The world is, just marginally, a safer place today as a result of forty years of dogged perseverance in pursuit of an equitable solution. That makes the Canadian-American boundary a very interesting border indeed, the more so as Carroll's book often combines atmosphere of a travelogue with the elements of a detective story.

The negotiators of 1783 defined some highly precise but unluckily often imaginary boundaries. They probably worked from an inaccurate map, but did not append a marked copy to the treaty. What probably began as a convenient blurring of issues generated a host of problems. Where was the St Croix River? Which of a myriad of streams constituted the headwaters of the Connecticut? Did Mars Hill exist? Was there a 'north-west angle' to Nova Scotia? Even where lines had been marked out, there was scope for error. The boundary of New York ran along the 45^th parallel, but a survey in the 1770s had drawn the line about a kilometre too far to the north. In all innocence, the United States had built a fort to guard Lake Champlain inside British territory. Between 1816 and 1827, a series of commissions settled much of the boundary from the Atlantic to the head of Lake Superior. Their achievement was remarkable. They worked in virgin territory, carrying out highly technical operations despite sickness, death and perennial difficulties with supplies. Despite mutual suspicion and cultural clashes, the survey teams worked together remarkably well, not least in engaging in low-level diplomacy so that the Americans gained islands safeguarding access to the Detroit River, while the British held on to Campobello and Grand Manan, to which Maine arguably had a stronger claim, and secured Wolfe Island as a screen for Kingston.

By 1827, it was no longer possible to pretend that the two governments were simply searching for a boundary that already existed. The basis for a deal had been sketched by John Quincy Adams five years earlier: American concessions to give the British a military road from New Brunswick to the St Lawrence (a route they well knew they could cut in wartime) in exchange for flexibility elsewhere. In 1828, it was agreed to refer the dispute to the King of the Netherlands. The arbitration came unstuck. In 1828, William I ruled the whole of the Low Countries. By the time he reported, in 1831, Belgium had broken free. Was he the same monarch? Had he fallen into the pocket of the British, who pulled some Dutch chestnuts out of the European fire, without in fact earning themselves much gratitude in the process? Had he been asked to determine the line of 1783, or given the authority to split the difference? Political discourse in Maine held that the state's claims were indisputable and hence Washington could not surrender any part of its sovereignty. Political abuse in Maine invited the Dutch king to confine his activities to dykes and polders and abstain from pronouncing upon mountain ridges. As Maine and New Brunswick confronted each other, an element of farce was injected by a comic duo of British surveyors, Featherstonhaugh and Mudge, who persuaded the belligerent foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, that previous imperial claims had been, if anything, too modest. In the circumstances, it is remarkable that a settlement was reached in 1842 between Palmerston's peaceable successor, Lord Aberdeen, and a politically isolated President John Tyler, through Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, and the British negotiator, Lord Ashburton. It is Ashburton's description of his 'capitulation' that forms the title of the book.

A study of this kind can never have too many maps. Fifteen have been scattered through the text. They might have better confined to a separate section, and they would have been more useful had the scale been added. Endnotes and (a rare feature nowadays) bibliography take up 120 pages, more than a quarter of the book. The references are comprehensive. Many supply supplementary information, but they are not discursive. Their very excellence prompts the reflection: should we re-think the role of referencing in scholarly publication? Perhaps Endnotes should be confined to hardback editions and library shelves. Maybe they could be mounted on publishers' websites? It is as easy to compare text and screen as it is to leaf through a couple of hundred pages on the minority of occasions where the diligent reader wishes to check a source or follow up a reflection.

In October 2002, a citizen of Pohngamook, Quebec, Michel Jalbert, fell foul of American law when he crossed into the doppelganger village of Estcourt Station, Maine. Somehow the main drag, Border Street, had become detached from the international boundary, so that the local gas station sits on American soil (and charges US prices) but can only be accessed from Canada. Jalbert was arrested as an illegal immigrant, and his problems worsened when federal prosecutors found he was threatening the American way of life by carrying a gun. He would surely agree with Francis M. Carroll that the story of Canadian-American border is worth telling once again.

[Canadian Journal of History]

Jenni Calder - Scots In Canada

Jenni Calder

Scots In Canada

Edinburgh:Luath Press Limited, 2003,

183 pp, pb, £7.99, ISBN 1842820389

In 2003, the National Museums of Scotland organised an exhibition called 'Trailblazers - the Scots in Canada'. Jenni Calder, a well-kent figure on the Edinburgh cultural scene, was one of the organisers, and Scots In Canada is a lively spin-off. It has two great strengths, a love of things Scottish and a feeling for Scots literature, both domestic and diaspora. The result is a historical evocation enriched by the creativity of imagination. (From a fact-grinding historian, this is of course double-edged praise.) The structure of Jenni Calder's book takes us on a journey, which begins with the voyage, then introduces us to the initial Scottish engagement with the land of eastern Canada. A chapter called 'Men Fare Well Enough' moves the story forward through the nineteenth century, portraying the Scots as successful pioneers. (The implied gender comparison in the title is not emphasised.) Then come two chapters on the West. Chapter Six, 'The Right Sort for Canada', doubles back a little to highlight Scots who made an impact in spheres such as politics and railway-building. Chapter Seven, 'True Canadians', probes the fundamental conundrum of national identity. This compact volume also includes illustrations, some well-drawn maps, a bibliography and a list of museums. It is an excellent souvenir volume. Jenni Calder's fast-moving and consistently upbeat text tends to telescope points so that, no doubt inadvertently, the Scottish role and achievement are exaggerated. Take the passage dealing with the influx of Loyalist refugees following the independence of the United States: '… the majority of Highland settlers in the [Thirteen] Colonies, along with those Scots who supported the status quo, supported the king. With British defeat, the Loyalists became refugees and most made their way to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec. There were about 40,000 of them. … [They were given land.] The Loyalists were a special case; many had not chosen to leave Scotland in the first place, and none had chosen Canada as their destination.' The resulting impression, that the Loyalists were all Scots, is far from the case. The eighth earl of Elgin, the governor-general who presided over the introduction of responsible government in 1847-8, is credited with having 'initiated a change of attitude' towards local autonomy: in fact, he was carrying out orders from a colonial minister in London who, whisper it not, was an Englishman. 'Lord Elgin's first task was to bring into being a Canadian parliament, which he did in 1848.' There had been elected assemblies in Canada since 1791.

A more fundamental problem is the broad net that trawls many disparate people under a single national heading. In fairness, it would take considerable self-denial to write about pioneer life in Ontario without quoting the heart-rending accounts of Susanna Moodie and her sister Catherine Parr Traill. Both were married to Scots, but only a passing reference notes that the two women were born and raised in Suffolk. Many of Scotland's children did indeed remain faithful to the land of their birth. Accent alone was enough for freshman MP Alexander Mackenzie, later Canada's second prime minister, to reduce parliament to hysterics when he interjected 'Who told you I was a Scotchman?' in response to a member who made an unflattering allusion to his desire for economy. But when we come to the far more notable figure of John A. Macdonald, the founder of the Dominion, national identity is less certain. His family emigrated when he was five. True, he grew up in an emigrant community, with associates such as Mackenzie (from Dingwall), Mowat (locally born) and Campbell (a Yorkshireman). But he was Canadian in accent (even ending his sentences with the quintessential 'eh?'), and he only once revisited his native land (and then briefly, to buy a kilt in Edinburgh's George Street). At the age of 60, he joined the Anglican Church. Macdonald remarked that though he had the misfortune to be born in Scotland he had been 'caught young' and brought to Canada. True Scots do not parody the jibes of Doctor Johnson.

If to be Scottish-born but Canadian-reared creates ambiguity in identity, what are we to make of those of Scottish descent? Jenni Calder's ethnic big tent includes the Harvard economist, J.K.Galbraith, whose hilarious memoir of his Ontario childhood has appeared under various titles, such as The Non-Potable Scotch. Galbraith was writing of the early twentieth-century rural world of the McPhails, McLeods, Morrisons and McCallums almost a century after emigration. The ethnographer Margaret Bennett has shown that exiled communities sometimes preserved memories and customs that had died out in the homeland itself. But this is not to claim that an entire and identical national identity was preserved in aspic, as even Galbraith's title reveals. 'We referred to ourselves as Scotch and not Scots. When, years later, I learned that the usage in Scotland was different it seemed to me rather an affectation.' So, what qualities had the Ontario 'Scotch' inherited from their homeland? 'His description of these communities demonstrates that their Scottish - or Scotch, the designation he prefers - nature was expressed in much more than names', Jenni Calder remarks. Indeed he does. Galbraith portrayed his neighbours as tight with money, wary of sex, short on personal hygiene - shall I go on? If you like your racism with a smile and a quip, it is all good fun. His Ontario 'Scotch' did not even conform to the benign stereotypes: they were suspicious of education and resistant to innovation.

No surprise, then, that the diaspora did not always like the real thing. Jenni Calder refers to Hugh MacLennan's essay, 'Scotchman's Return', on his 1958 visit, but not to the lesson MacLennan drew from his pilgrimage - that he was a Canadian and not a Scot. Lucy Maud Montgomery, creator of Anne of Green Gables (who, surprisingly, does not feature in the book), first saw Edinburgh in her mid-thirties, and was disappointed with Princes Street: 'it isn't the Princes St. of my dreams - the fairy avenue of gardens and statuary and palaces'. The non-potable Scotch were hard to please.

We need to examine the Canada-Scotland link through a different lens. The first Dominion census, in 1871, measured ethnicity through the 'first male ancestor' question. (It was scrapped after 1961, at the behest of kilt-wearing prime minister John Diefenbaker, who valued his maternal Bannerman clan connections and objected to entering himself as a German-Canadian on the strength of a forebear who had arrived in 1803.) In 1871,15.7 percent of Canadians hyphenated themselves as Scottish. Since Scots counted as 12.9 percent of the population of Great Britain in 1871 and 10.7 percent of the UK total, we would expect them to seem more prominent in Canada. Moreover, with 31.1 percent of Canadians of French descent, the Scottish weighting among anglophones represented about double the numerical clout it carried at home.

But the 1871 census had other stories to tell. The English clocked in at 20.3 percent and, remarkably, the Irish registered 24.3 percent. Why don't we associate Canada with the shamrock? The answer, as always, was sectarianism. The Canadian Irish were split, and not just statistically, between Catholic and Protestant. Ethnic diversity gave the Scots an exotic fringe of tartan identifiers, but the importation of ancient feuds undermined the national impact of the Irish. With their English or Ulster-Scots surnames, Protestants conveniently forgot their embarrassing origins over a few generations. By 1961, ten percent of Canadians were still ticking the Scotland box, but barely three percent owned up to bogtrotting and blarney. Even Irish Catholics got in on the act (if they did not head for the more congenial environment of Boston). In Sir Arthur Currie, Canada produced one of the few 1914 War generals who twigged that there as more to trench warfare than rushing at the old barbed wire. Currie's paternal grandfather had shrewdly changed his name from Corrigan. Thus from running third in the census league, the Scots managed to engross Canada's bicultural partnership as the Auld Alliance writ new.

It suited both Canada and Scotland to assume a special relationship. The standing threat to Canada's distinctiveness came from the United States, a kindred people ten times as numerous living to the south of an open border. Scotland's parallel relationship with England, not to mention its shared quality of gritty 'nordicity' (a Canadian-coined word), made it the ideal analogue. There were also spin-offs in the promotion of Canadian tourism. In Nova Scotia, where about a quarter of the population ticked the Scotland box (i.e., three-quarters did not), the provincial government energetically embraced the tartan from the 1950s, even threatening to station a piper on the New Brunswick border to welcome visitors. Indeed, Canada was tartan, and no political rally was complete without its pipers. For Scots, Canada operated as a symbol of benign imperialism. Within the cocoon of the Union of 1707, Scotland was still a nation, the equivalent of France and England and Holland, all of them imperial powers. Scots, it seemed, had been programmed to head for cold countries (a myth not borne out by migration statistics) like Canada and New Zealand's Otago. Cold countries had relatively sparse native populations. The embarrassment that Canada's indigenous people had still been badly treated was brushed aside: at least few had been massacred. So it was that Scotland could claim in Canada not merely its own empire, but an exact reproduction of itself, projected on to a majestic canvas. Nobody did more to mythologise this notion than John Buchan. Having turned himself into an Oxford Englishman, he further metamorphosed into Lord Tweedsmuir, became governor-general of Canada and wove all the strands into one romantic Canada-Scotland conflation. Essentially and enjoyably, Jenni Calder celebrates that conflation. Perhaps it is time to interrogate it instead.

[Scottish Affairs]