Reviews in the British Journal of Canadian Studies

Gerhard P. Bassler - Vikings to U-boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador

Gerhard P. Bassler

Vikings to U-boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador

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

x + 378 pp. Cloth. £48. ISBN 0-7735-3124-6.

When Gerhard P. Bassler arrived in St John's in 1965, he found a community that proclaimed itself British but drank lager from the local Bavarian Brewery. His search for Newfoundland's German roots, which covers anyone from a German-speaking country, has been a labour of love, pursued without research grants. He argues for a strong German tradition that has curiously slipped under islanders' traditional suspicion of outsiders. True, they were always a minority but, as he argues, in a territory the size of modern-day Germany but with a population of a few hundred thousand, their influence could be considerable. There was a German on Leif's Viking voyage, who insisted that Vinland produced grapes, and another who accompanied Gilbert and identified mineral resources. (Both seem to have been wrong.) Moravian missionaries arrived in Labrador in 1784 and maintained strong links with Germany until the 1920s. Hamburg was a major trading partner throughout the nineteenth century, most of the island's lobster catch was exported to Germany, and Germans could be sharp observers of the local scene. Why has the German element in Newfoundland been discounted? There were never many of them: Bassler identifies about seventy in the three decades prior to 1914. Their activities were concentrated on stage-German activities such as brewing, music, wrestling and maintaining complicated machinery. Some changed their names: Ritter translated to Knight, Behr switched to Bear. A few were not only German but also Jewish, which meant a double whack of prejudice. Above all, the two world wars widened the split between German heritage and Newfoundland's imperial patriotism. The island's strategic location compelled repressive measures against harmless people, although Bassler dismisses the legends of U-boat landings and subversion. This engaging study constitutes a small footnote to Canadian ethnic history, but it makes its point that Newfoundland was a tiny bit multicultural even before its terminal date of 1945.

William Kilbourn - The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada

William Kilbourn

The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, with introduction by Ronald Stagg

Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008.

326 pp. Paper. £13.99 / $24.99. ISBN 978-1-55002-800-3.

The Firebrand first published in 1956, and is here reissued in Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series, 'Books That Explore Canada'. Although this biography of 1837 rebel William Lyon Mackenzie was enjoyable to read, I never felt easy with it. This was not, I hope, simply academic snobbery towards its lively style of atmospheric but un-footnoted reconstruction, but rather because William Kilbourn portrayed Mackenzie as a loveable rogue. My reading of Mackenzie's scurrilous newspapers was that he was an unpleasant rabble-rouser, and it was only the far more Himalayan grasping nastiness of the Upper Canada elite that gave him a heroic historical niche. Certainly the rebellion that he attempted to foment in 1837 was irresponsibly conceived and incompetently led. Ronald Stagg's introduction to this new edition solves the mystery of Kilbourn's Mackenzie by focusing firmly upon Kilbourn himself. A 'flamboyant and popular teacher' (p. 10), then at McMaster University and later a pioneer of the humanities programme at York, Kilbourn identified closely with the Liberal Party of Canada. If less than a power-broker, he was more than a groupie, someone with a knack of being present when key events happened, for instance getting in on the ground floor of Trudeaumania. In the mid-fifties, the English-Canadian liberal tradition, whether small- or large-L, had to take account of Mackenzie, both chronologically and causally ─ not least because the Party's apparent status as Canada's natural government was the legacy of the Firebrand's distinctly non-fizzling grandson, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Such Mackenzie biography as existed largely re-hashed the two-volume hagiography produced by his son-in-law, Charles Lindsey, in 1862. Kilbourn had access to, and at one point even quoted, the manuscript of a mildly revisionist study by W.L. LeSueur, but that remained unpublished for sixty years (until 1971) because it was ruthlessly suppressed by Mackenzie King, who cried blasphemy and invoked copyright. It was a new form of Family Compact, just as arrogant as its Upper Canadian forerunner but now stretching across the generations. Within his ebullient limitations, Kilbourn did try to set the record straight. Mackenzie, he cautioned, was not 'a sort of grandfather of Confederation' nor 'a schoolbook cause of all our modern conveniences.' Even if the 'indirect results of his rebellion were basic to the Canadian nation', Mackenzie encountered 'abject and sometimes ludicrous failure', making him 'not the cornerstone but the chief gargoyle' of the country's history (pp. 268-69). It is a classic verdict of 'not guilty but don't do it again', and the Liberal Party of Canada had imbibed the lesson, lauding Mackenzie's memory while utterly rejecting his oppositionist posturing. This is a welcome reissue of a book that tells as much about the hubris that provoked Canadians to elect Diefenbaker in 1957 as it does about the grievances exploited by Mackenzie in 1837.

Deidre Simmons - Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

Deidre Simmons

Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.

xvi + 360. Cased. ISBN 978-0-7735-3291-5.

Occupying over 3,000 metres of shelf space in the Manitoba Archives, the records of the Hudson's Bay Company constitute one of the largest collections in Canada, and certainly the one spanning the longest period. It is important to remember, as Deidre Simmons explains, that the collection is extensive but not necessarily exhaustive. The Company established its paper trails for its own purposes, not always those of historians. In addition to keeping accounts, good records helped defend the rights conferred by its founding charter of 1670 (challenged as early as 1684) and to resist disaffected employees: even Radisson sued them in 1694. The first minute book dates from 1671, and in the early years the London records were kept in an iron chest and carted around the coffee houses where the directors met. From 1683, Company posts were instructed to keep journals (sometimes lost) which could be used to rebut charges of exploitation of Natives. The Company settled in Fenchurch Street in 1696, but no attempt was made to organise its archives until 1796. The earliest map by an employee dates from 1708, but a cartographer was not appointed until 1778. Lord Selkirk's Red River Settlement added little to the collection, but the 1821 merger with the North-West Company incorporated the written memory of the Montreal traders. The Vancouver Island colony of 1849 and the transfer of sovereignty over Rupertsland in 1869 generated documentation on land sales. By the twentieth century, the Company had become defensive about sitting on possible landmines. The venerable Lord Strathcona himself refused to allow the historian W. Stewart Wallace to conduct a 'fishing expedition' in 1913 (p. 189) and in 1921 restrictions were imposed on Frederick Merk, the historian of Manifest Destiny: the Oregon boundary dispute was still too recent for the Company. Graduate students were still having their notes vetted in the nineteen-fifties. But the Company's 250th anniversary in 1920 underlined the value of its heritage, and soon after the first archivist was hired, partly to supply material for another boundary dispute, this time between Canada and Newfoundland over Labrador. In 1925, there was even an attempt to poach A.G. Doughty from the Public Archives in Ottawa. A cramped search room was made available after the opening of Beaver House in 1926: appropriately, a smell of pelts pervaded the building. In 1974, after the official headquarters had been relocated to Canada, the entire archive was shipped to Winnipeg. Over three centuries, the Company had learned the lessons the hazards of navigation, and the cargo was split into two shiploads as a precaution against loss. Formal ownership was transferred to the Provincial Archives in 1993. The general reader will probably associate this book with the commentary on half-time at a football match, but it has been well researched and tells an important support story about Canadian scholarship.

R.B. Fleming, ed. - The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost 1915-1919

R.B. Fleming, ed.

The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost 1915-1919 (with foreword by Thomas H.B. Symons)

Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.

xxxvi + 379pp. Cased. ISBN 978-1-55458-000-2.

His twelve years (1949-61) as premier of Canada's largest province won Leslie M. Frost the nickname of 'Old Man Ontario'. But in 1915, he was a nineteen-year old moved by idealistic imperial patriotism to volunteer for the First World War. His eighteen year-old brother Cecil soon followed. They hailed from Orillia, the model for Stephen Leacock's Mariposa: in a thoughtful foreword, T.H.B. Symons suggests that the Frost family provided models for characters in Sunshine Sketches.) Thus we might expect the 170 letters that the brothers wrote home would constitute a Siegfried Sassoon-style account of their descent from innocence to Hell. In fact, the interest (even the charm) of the collection lies in its upbeat tone of wide-eyed wonderment. Partly this was because writers wished to reassure their parents. 'Don't worry about us,' Cecil wrote as their train crossed New Brunswick, 'we are having a first rate trip at the Government's expense.' (p. 81) As the war became a reality, so the brothers became more circumspect about their experiences, with Leslie writing that he intended to 'talk about them when I get home and forget them when I am here.' (p. 218) In 1972, the ex-Premier noted in a memorandum accompanying the correspondence that half his company of 226 Orillia men were wounded and 44 killed. The brothers reached England late in 1916 and spent frustrating months in training, with Leslie protesting in July 1917 that he would be 'heart broken ... if the war ended and I had not been over [to France].' (p. 182) Cecil was more positive: 'Since I joined the army I figure I have learned more than I would have in a couple of years at University.' (pp. 130-31) They crossed to France late in 1917. In March 1918 Leslie was wounded in the leg. 'A good clean bullet wound which will heal splendidly,' an officer reassured the folks back home, but in fact his war was over. Cecil was grazed by a bullet a month before the end of fighting, but quickly returned to his unit as they marched victorious into Mons, where hostilities had begun in 1914. 'You will never realize what it felt like to know the war was over.' (p. 321) The brothers were proud of their military service, which evidently made them feel both Canadian and British. They were critical of Quebec's lack of enthusiasm for the war, condemning the nationalist Henri Bourassa as a 'traitor' (p. 106) and dismissing Laurier as a has-been. But leaving Orillia did at least enable them to meet their francophone fellow-citizens: some 'Frenchies' told Leslie in 1916 'we were damned fools to go to war.' (p. 81) R.B. Fleming contributes a comprehensive introduction and his editorial notes are supportive without being intrusive. An excellent collection, and handsomely produced.

Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor - Much To Be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries

Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor

Much To Be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries

Toronto: Natural Heritage Books / Dundurn Press, 2007.

vii + 276 + iipp. Paper. ISBN 978-1-55002-772-3.

This is the second edition and third printing of an interesting compilation first published in 1996. Hoffman and Taylor originally intended to produce a collage of material from the diaries of nineteenth-century Ontario (and Upper Canadian) women, but the project also came to embrace six male-authored records that threw light on their womenfolk. Extracts are grouped, with commentary and background material, in chapters dealing with courtship, childbirth, domestic life, cooking, servants, poverty, illness and various social rituals, from tea-drinking to funerals. As so often with diaries, it is not always clear whether they were written for posterity or as a form of dialogue with an inner or subsequent self. Belle Kittredge cried her eyes out after becoming stranded as a wallflower at a dance, either in 1891 or 1892 (the new edition might have resolved the ambiguous date). Years later she re-read the entry, adding in the margin: 'this makes me smile now but I won't tear it out.' (p. 9) The authors treat the Victorian period as a single unit, juxtaposing material from the 'fifties alongside a diary entries that refers to the telephone. Since there was indeed an underlying 'Victorian' culture in English-Canada, this works reasonably well. Occasionally it would be useful to have specific information about the locality, for Ontario is a large province and covered a multitude of sinners. It was intrigued to learn that, in 1850, the Hallen family celebrated Oak-apple Day, marking the restoration of Charles II in 1660 ─ a festival that was on the wane in England. We learn that the Hallen diary, which is much quarried, is in the Simcoe County archives but, although there is a biographical appendix, the location and antecedence of the family remain veiled. (The index omits reference to the entries in the biographical section.) Apart from a handful of quotations from the well-known diary of Agnes Macdonald, second wife of Sir John A., all relating to domestic matters, the material was entirely generated by ordinary people, living unsung but busy lives. My favourite diary snippet was an obituary for a well-loved cat. 'Could open the kitchen door, very tiresome we found that trick especially on a cold winter day.' (p. 191) The book is well illustrated, including a poignant photograph from 1871 of a dead baby, lying as if asleep in his cot. This is a work that will continue to provide charming insights into daily life in nineteenth-century Canada while also providing material for those who study diaries as a form of self-expression and analysis. The new edition notes the death of Ryan Taylor at the early age of 56.

Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger, eds. - Canada's Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau ─ Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger, eds.

Canada's Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau ─ Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Pp. xiv + 476. Cloth £48/ paper £22.50. ISBN 08-0209-1733 / 08-0209-1741.

This collection of essays about fifteen prime ministers of Canada is great fun. Seven, up to Laurier, have been published in volumes XII and XIV of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), while a further seven, down to Diefenbaker, have been available on-line (www.biographi.ca). A final article, on Trudeau, was written for this book. Several essays have undoubtedly become the starting point for the subject's career, notably the entry on John A. Macdonald by J.K. Johnson and Peter Waite. Waite is the author of three other essays, underlining his standing as Canada's pre-eminent political biographer. Canada has been strangely neglectful of its prime ministers. J.J.C. Abbott, rescued by Carman Miller, and Mackenzie Bowell, by Waite, were transient figures but there has been remarkably little biographical coverage of leaders as notable as Tupper, sympathetically handled by Phillip Buckner, or R.B. Bennett (Waite again). Often, the established modern biographer supplies the entry: Waite, yet again, on Thompson, Robert Craig Brown on Borden, Blair Neatby on Mackenzie King, John English on Pearson, Denis Smith on Diefenbaker, while Réal Bélanger (Laurier) and John English (Trudeau) represent work in progress. Elsewhere, specialists in the period provide the interpretation: Ben Forster on Mackenzie, Larry A. Glassford on Meighen, Robert Bothwell on St Laurent. Few generalisations are possible about the office of prime minister: individuals as notable as Thompson and Meighen held it only briefly, while Tupper's ten-week premiership was hardly the pivot of his career. Nor can the essays be used to write a collective biography, since each has been written creatively around its subject rather than on some formulaic basis. Abbott enjoyed playing whist and Bennett liked hot baths, but there is no systematic information about prime-ministerial attitudes to card-playing or cleanliness. But the plus side lies in the delights of detail: we learn that it is sheer legend that Tupper was a womaniser, and that St Laurent insisted on paying rent for 24 Sussex Drive. Although an easy book to read, some of the presentation seems eccentric. The lengthy bibliographies of the DCB have been helpfully cut to a brief tailpiece of Further Reading, but the DCB practices of abbreviating months ("Feb.") and citing the full names of dramatis personae are maintained. The latter can be intimidating, not least because civil servants and historians in particular seem to have accumulated fruity forenames. In a whimsical Introduction, Ramsay Cook refers to "Ward's Law", the observation by political scientist Norman Ward in 1960 that the men who presided over the Canadian national family managed to father very few children of their own. Indeed, one fifth of the subjects lacked a First Lady (Bowell was a widower, King and Bennett bachelors) and few prime-ministerial wives come to life in these essays, although nothing can repress the redoubtable Maryon Pearson. A parallel volume appears in French.

Conny Steenman-Marcuse and Aritha van Herk, eds - Building Liberty: Canada and World peace, 1945-2005

Conny Steenman-Marcuse and Aritha van Herk, eds

Building Liberty: Canada and World peace, 1945-2005

Groningen, Netherlands: Barkhuis Publishing, Canada Cahiers no. 11 of the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, 2005

Pp. xi + 339. Paper. ISBN 90-77922-059.

Congratulations to the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands on the production of this interesting volume, which has grown out of a conference marking the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A prefatory letter from H.R.H. Princess Margriet is testimony to the strength of Dutch-Canadian links from that period. The opening paper, by Tobias van Gent, re-examines the Allied assault on Walcheren in 1944. Aritha van Herk asks whether it is possible to be a Dutch-Canadian. Christl Verdun writes about Kryn Taconis, the photojournalist who survived the famine winter of 1944-45 and emigrated to Canada. Ko Colijn asks what a middle-power can do about weapons of mass destruction. Houchang Hassan-Yiri, Hugh B. McCullough and Massimo Robboli consider various aspects of defence and external policy. The collection then doubles back with Doeko Bosscher's analysis of Dutch attitudes to Canadians as wartime liberators. Constantine E. Passaris sees Canadian multiculturalism as a potential economic asset in a global world. An outspoken paper by George Elliott Clarke infuses a Canadian patriotism into a denunciation of violent elements in Canadian writing. Frank Davey provides an account of Earle Birney's wartime service in the Netherlands, and Danielle Schaub discusses wartime trauma in Alan Cumyn's The Sojourn. Janice Kulyk Keefer links the writing of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew, murdered in Auschwitz, with the work of Naomi Klein. Etty Hillesum's life inspired a series of drawings by Clare Weissman Wilks which illustrate a final section of verse by Keefer, Clarke, Davey and Verdun. This addition to the ACSN Canada Cahiers series constitutes a fine monument to the Canada-Netherlands connection.

David Staines, ed. with Barbara Nimmo - The Letters of Stephen Leacock

David Staines, ed. with Barbara Nimmo

The Letters of Stephen Leacock

Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2006

xii + 564 pp. Cloth. ISBN 0-19-540869-1.

Stephen Leacock's niece, the late Barbara Nimmo, passed her collection of her uncle's letters to the distinguished Leacock scholar, David Staines, who has now published a generous selection. For Leacock, correspondence seems to have been a tiresome half-way house between conversation, at which he excelled, and humorous writing, for which he became famous. Only rarely did he produce an ironic set-piece, such as his missive to a governor of McGill University in 1935 defending a professor who was in hot water for believing in socialism: Leacock gently pointed out that even the imperial cabinet had sometimes included such dangerous people. Since Leacock was not a great letter-writer, long periods of his life are only sketchily covered. In those blessed days, academics did not yearn to retire, and Leacock was devastated when McGill told him to go at 65, but only two short missives attest to his humiliation. Equally predictable is the fact that much of the surviving material relates either to family gossip or dealings with publishers. David Staines has opted for a light editorial touch, principally identifying contacts and episodes relating to the literary world, and the collection will certainly be of primary value for anybody interested in CanLit networks during a formative era. But Leacock's correspondence throws light on his times more generally. In 1907-8 he toured the Empire to argue for a permanent imperial integration. The paradoxical result was that he came to dislike many of its component parts, and his homesickness for Canada is palpable. Voyaging through the punishing heat of the Red Sea, he mocked the affected accents of the British sahibs on their way to India ─ for whom lunch in one hour became 'lench' in 'an ah' ─ and equally found the Australians alien and brash. His comments on the Empire's subject peoples are best left unreported. Other figures from the wider world make brief appearances in his correspondence. Australian prime minister Alfred Deakin appears in 1907, while Winston Churchill is hailed in 1941 as the greatest Englishman since King Alfred. As the results of the 1942 referendum rolled in, Leacock was quick to see that Mackenzie King had effectively blocked conscription for overseas service by revealing the depth of Quebec hostility. There are unidentified allusions, too, to F.H. Underhill writing in Canadian Forum in 1935, and in 1941 to the work of historian Hugh L. Keenleyside. Few of these asides will ignite anybody's PhD thesis, but it seems a pity that they do not feature in the index. But these are minor reservations, typical reviewer's grumbles. Overall, this is a welcome and useful publication, and researchers who have to delve within its pages for their own topics will be rewarded by the repeated glimpses of Leacock's crackling and crusty personality.

Frederick Vaughan - Viscount Haldane: 'The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution'

Frederick Vaughan

Viscount Haldane: 'The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution'

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2010

Pp. xix + 307. Cased. £42. ISBN 978-1-4426-4237-9.

Richard Burdon Haldane was a British barrister-politician who between 1911 and 1928 shaped the Canadian decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, until 1949 the country's ultimate court of constitutional appeal. Haldane strengthened provincial powers, so earning him Eugene Forsey's sub-titled condemnation. Vaughan believes Haldane's judgements were shaped by his Hegelian philosophy. However, this does not imply a dialectical confrontation, in which Haldane postulated a federalist antithesis to Macdonaldian centralisation, even though Vaughan believes he would have welcomed the post-1982 constitutional synthesis of the Charter Court. Rather, Vaughan stresses Haldane's search for Sittlichkeit, the values system underlying the British North America Act. The problem here is that Hegel is usually seen as glorifying the Prussian State, while Haldane consistently ruled against Ottawa, but Hegel may also be read as rooting political authority in broader social institutions. Although not susceptible of proof, this material might have made a useful journal article. The structure of the book is not easy to grasp, not least because of Vaughan's zigzag chronology. He is weak on British politics, for instance misdating the 1886 Irish Home crisis, bizarrely linking Haldane's 1906 Army reforms to the purchase of officer commissions, a practice he soon notes had been abolished 35 years earlier, and largely missing the significance of Haldane's Liberal Imperialism. Vaughan likes "must have" argumentation. Thus, it would be "passing strange" (p. 144) if an earlier judge, the Scot Watson, had not been influenced by the Scottish home rule movement, a blip that hardly features in textbooks. Haldane "must have known" that Nova Scotia had resisted Confederation although there is "no evidence" that he ever consulted Bluenose tribune Joseph Howe (p. 144). Indeed: Howe died when Haldane was sixteen. Haldane's audience at the 1913 American Bar Association meeting in Montreal "must have" been puzzled by his address (p. 160): the New York Times praised its clarity and it still reads well. A plea for unity of Anglo-Saxon legal thought, Haldane called it "Higher Nationality", a title uncomprehendingly dismissed as "curious" (p. 153). The argument was based not on Hegel but on Rousseau's General Will. Challenged by journalists to defend Canadian appeals to London, Haldane cited its recent umpiring role in "the marriage question". Vaughan scoffs: "why would one expect that a marriage or divorce question could not be heard fairly in the home country ...[?]".(p. 156) It takes him twenty-seven pages to realise that Haldane was talking of a major reference case of 1912 when the Judicial Committee had determined that the Parliament of Canada could not use its section 91 power over marriage or divorce to override Section 92 provincial control of the solemnisation of marriage and so force Quebec to recognise the validity of non-Catholic ceremonies in other provinces. Most unhelpful of all is Vaughan's statement that it is "often forgotten ... that a majority of francophone members" of the Canadian legislature "voted against" Confederation in 1865. Often forgotten because incorrect: the francophone vote was 27-21 in favour.

Julia Roberts - In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada

Julia Roberts

In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), x + 228pp

Cloth. $85.00. ISBN 9780774815758. Paperback. $32.95. ISBN 9780774815765.

Julia Roberts has written an impressive book about an important aspect of Upper Canadian social history. Her achievement is remarkable because there are few comprehensive sources for her study: courts and municipalities have left licensing records, but the fat, subject-specific archival files that historians generally devour for major monographs do not exist. Rather, the tavern permeated public life so that its historical traces must be sought everywhere, and encyclopaedic research is required to track them down. (One measure of this may be found in the book's imaginative and amusing illustrations.) Taverns were a cut above beer shops. They provided food, sometimes surprisingly well cooked, and accommodation, although beds often had to be shared and floors used as dormitories. Seeing them as vital infrastructure, Governor Simcoe built the first taverns in the 1790s. An elite minority, mainly in the cities, called themselves hotels. Others were termed inns and, occasionally, coffee houses. Roberts explores their layout, their regulation and their social and even administrative functions. Even though Upper Canada's population burgeoned, a rough ratio of three such establishments per thousand people was maintained, suggesting that they played a recognised and stable role in colonial society. Roberts shows that they provided social space, even if sometimes segregated, for women, Native people and Blacks. The statistic that 96 percent of licences were awarded to men masks the importance of the tavern as an outlet for female, usually wifely, entrepreneurship. We are introduced to vivid personalities, notably two revealing diarists, Ely Playter, who kept a York (Toronto) tavern in 1801-2, and civil servant Harry Jones, man-about-town in the Kingston forty years later. The sole conceptual fuzziness is the open-ended time period of the study. Effectively, we are left to assume that the tavern era ended when the railways linked the main cities in the mid-1850s, replacing long-distance stagecoach routes. But secondary centres were still hustling for branch lines twenty years later, and their taverns probably continued to operate on established patterns. As Roberts acknowledges, the new railway-inspired luxury hotels, like the Rossin House in Toronto and the Russell House in Ottawa, evolved from the coaching-era tavern. Roberts writes with infectious verve, even if there is a little too much of it in her preface. I first heard her speak on this subject at an Edinburgh Canadian Studies conference in 1999, the year she completed her doctoral thesis. Perhaps the productivity kommissars who infest modern universities have muttered about the decade it has taken for this book to emerge, but its breadth, its vigour, its cogency and its impressively referenced research – much of it evidently fine-honed in classroom dialogue – more than justify the investment of time.

Raymond B. Blake, ed. - Transforming the Nation: Canada and Brian Mulroney

Raymond B. Blake, ed.

Transforming the Nation: Canada and Brian Mulroney

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007

Pp. xix + 456. Cased. $85. ISBN 978-0-7735-3214-4. Paper. $29.50. ISBN 978-0-7735-3215-1.

This fine volume comprises an editor's introduction, a foreword, sixteen essays by academics and commentators, plus tributes from John Crosbie and Bob Rae. Mulroney's government was elected in a landslide in 1984, his party destroyed by an avalanche in 2003. It was always likely that his record would be more kindly assessed in retrospect, especially among academics, if only because most of them hated him when he was in office. As L. Ian Macdonald puts it: 'In his first term, he took the centre and held it. In the second, he set the agenda and dominated it. In both, he made history.' (p. 432) Contributors offer a balanced appraisal of the Mulroney record. He was superb at electioneering. In economic policy, his government struggled to curb debt, but its deregulatory policies created a surplus. Free trade was not initially the driving force, but quickly became the symbolic centrepiece. In social policy, he was never a red-blooded Thatcherite. Formal advances in women's rights probably stemmed from the 1982 Charter of Rights. Contributors regret rather than condemn the Mulroney legacy on national unity. Alienating both Quebec and the West complicated intergovernmental relations, while the failure of his constitutional project limited what could be done for Aboriginal people. Mulroney rates surprisingly well on environmental issues and gets credit for stressing human rights in external policy, although overall defence and international relations seem unimpressive. Northern development is a perennial fantasy and the Archangel Gabriel could not have satisfied Canada's cultural community. Overall, these essays throw useful light on the question of political leadership in Canada. Decisive leadership from the front ─ Borden in 1917, Trudeau in 1981 ─ can split the country. But the alternative, cautious, 'Old Tomorrow' approach of Macdonald and Mackenzie King requires the prime minister to know when to pounce. Mulroney's unhappy allusion during the 1990 constitutional talks to rolling the dice referred not to gambling but to timing. Public trust was dented by issues such as patronage, but Mulroney's fundamental weakness was that he talked like a consensual leader while sucker-punching Canadians into terrifying change. Like him or not, Mulroney carried free trade, imposed the GST and almost re-wrote the constitution. Raymond Blake rightly calls him 'clearly one of the most significant and important prime ministers Canada has ever had.' (p. 14)

Cecilia Morgan - 'A Happy Holiday': English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism 1870-1930

Cecilia Morgan

'A Happy Holiday': English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870-1930

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

Cased / Paper. xxiii + 461 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9758-3 / 978-0-8020-9518-3.

Cecilia Morgan's book is based on a harvesting of diaries, letters and published articles in which we follow Canadians around Britain and Ireland, across continental Europe and even to Algiers. At its best, Morgan's book brings to life the Victorian streets of London, recapturing vivid snatches of speech. However, overall, it reads like a composite travelogue, the archival equivalent of other people's holiday slides. Although Morgan links the material to concepts such as modernity and gender, we learn little about the interaction between the visitors and the places they toured. The description of a Glasgow hotel as a 'very swell place' (p. 63) points to a cultural clash, and some tourists felt they were Britishers but definitely not English. They accepted Canada's low visibility overseas in comparison with the United States but resented being subsumed as Americans. One concluded that Canadians were '[a] kind of hobbledehoy nation!' (p. 315) We learn little about ethnicity: how many Canadian visitors saw Scotland as their homeland? Even Goldwin Smith, the ultra-English expatriate, is treated as a Canadian observer. Material is sometimes quoted without discussing its accuracy. Mary Leslie saw a play in London in 1867, starring 'a Mr Henry N (a scion of the aristocracy who has been cut by his family for becoming an actor)'. (p. xxi) The thespian was Henry Neville. He had indeed defied his family to go on the stage, but his father was a theatre manager, not a lord. There are regrettable errors. We are told that two Canadians in Edinburgh in the 1890s visited the Scottish Parliament. There was no Scottish Parliament between 1707 and 1999: probably they saw Parliament House, Scotland's law courts. One observed 'the Lord Provost of Scotland' ─ in fact, the city's mayor. Another refused in 1897 to ride on Edinburgh's malodorous subway. Edinburgh has no subway, but Glasgow's opened in 1896. There is no 'Shandon Cathedral' in Cork (p. 135) nor is there a 'St Nicholas Cathedral' in York (p. 353). Seaton Delaval and Youghal are mis-spelled, Portadown acquires pat-a-cake hyphens and London's 'Mile Lane' (p. 329) makes sense as Mile End. There is no 'Lake Killarney' (p. 146) and the Phoenix Park murders were stabbings not shootings. The painter 'Rathburn' (p. 191) must be Raeburn, while the Methodist preacher 'Spungeon' (p. 232) was probably the Baptist minister C.H. Spurgeon. Morgan does not seem to know that '/' indicated shillings and pence (p. 340). But I sympathised with the bemused tourist who emerged from the Tower of London unsure whether it was Lady Jane Grey or Lady Hamilton who had lost her head, and I was glad to learn that the Vatican had a cat, although the index is so sparse that I could not subsequently trace the reference. Overall, I kept thinking of a slogan from a later decade: is your journey really necessary?

Naomi E.S. Griffiths - The Golden Age of Liberalism: A Portrait of Roméo Leblanc

Naomi E.S. Griffiths

The Golden Age of Liberalism: A Portrait of Roméo Leblanc

Toronto, James Lorimer & Company, 2011

Cased. Xiii + 360 pp. ISBN 9-781552-778968.

In 1995, Roméo Leblanc became the first Acadian – indeed, the first Maritimer – to be named Governor General of Canada. Born in 1928, the youngest surviving child of a poor farming family in the Memramcook valley, Leblanc received an academic education thanks to the support of two sisters working in the States. Two periods teaching in New Brunswick kept him in touch with his Acadian roots. As a young man, he was moved and angered by the Acadian deportation of 1755 but, over time, he drew inspiration from the community's dogged survival and its intricate, internalised networks. When he ran for the Liberal nomination in Westmorland-Kent, his rival was also called Roméo Leblanc. He had learned English because the provincial elementary school system was unilingual. To survive grammar school, he had to upgrade to mainstream French: he would reply to the offer to go to Rideau Hall by saying he already had 'un bon job' as Speaker of the Senate (273). Yet his career took him to the key places at challenging moments. Catholic social movements shaped his thinking and placed him in Montreal at the time of the Asbestos strike. His studies at the Sorbonne coincided with Dien Bien Phu and the Algerian War. He was a journalist in Diefenbaker's Ottawa and covered Washington as the United States sank into its Vietnam quagmire. In 1967 he became Lester Pearson's press secretary, transferring to his successor through the heady years of Trudeaumania. In 1972 Leblanc entered parliament, quickly becoming fisheries minister, and was one of Trudeau's farewell appointments to the Senate in 1984. The distinguished historian of the Acadians, and their interpreter to English Canada, Naomi Griffiths was a lifelong friend, one of three tribute speakers at Leblanc's funeral in 2009. This is an affectionate biography, in which the subject is 'Roméo'. There are occasional hints of criticism, but sensitive handling of the collapse of Leblanc's first marriage. As Governor General, Leblanc encountered no major constitutional issues, but his appointment, on the eve of the 1995 Quebec referendum, symbolised the importance of the French fact across the whole of Canada. 'I have never net an enemy of Roméo Leblanc,' writes Jean Chrétien in a brief foreword (xii). This biography is an appropriate tribute to a true Canadian.

Brooke Jeffrey - Divided Loyalties: The Liberal Party of Canada, 1984-2008

Brooke Jeffrey

Divided Loyalties: The Liberal Party of Canada, 1984-2008

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010

xvi +689 pp. Cloth. ISBN 978-0-8020-3848-7. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-4426-1065-1.

Hired in 1985 to run a Liberal research bureau, Brooke Jeffrey found herself at the heart of a
Party pole-axed by its biggest election defeat in 26 years. Her massive book chronicles the internal tensions of the next quarter century, in a fast-moving, well-researched style reminiscent of Peter C. Newman at his most atmospheric. Interviews with around seventy activists supplement the author's own memories and record-keeping. Jeffrey's ability to transcend her own role is impressive: over the years she was not only a key insider, but also a candidate and a supporter of leadership aspirants. Her personal links were to politicians such as Charles Caccia and Sheila Copps, and her views on the Paul Martin camp are politely negative. Indeed, one theme of the book is that the Martin-Chrétien split was a continuation of the Turner-Chrétien stand-off. Jeffrey's message is that the party must reassert the Trudeau vision of national unity, with the sub-text that a return to the principle of loyalty to the leader would help. In a longer and wider context, it is not so simple. Post-1960, it was never going to be easy to combine a Quebec power base with a centralising philosophy. Trudeau managed the illusion for sixteen years; Chrétien could still just touch the buttons in 1995. But even without Meech Lake, Quebec would have challenged Ottawa hegemony. As a national unity party, the Liberals needed an electoral base outside Quebec and this they failed to find. A burgeoning welfare state not only fuelled provincial ambitions to deliver services, but widened the split between social and business Liberals. It was no longer a matter of paying taxes for the baby bonus, but rather of wrestling with a blossoming deficit. (To their credit, the Chrétien-Martin 1990s armed truce dealt with the Mulroney debt burden.) Then there was the 'democratic deficit'. If this meant wider participation, it opened up riding associations to special-interest subversion. MPs found themselves fighting for their careers and, with convention delegates at stake, grass-roots battles stoked leadership rivalries. But if the imperative was to bring in women and ethnic minorities, then headquarters dictation was required. At a time when other campaigns were mobilising the Internet, Liberal recruiters were restricted to one paper membership form at a time to guard against packing. Three candidates spent over $5 million on the 1990 leadership campaign, when the party itself had a $2 million debt. Once feared as Canada's most ruthless machine, headquarters lacked even a reliable national membership list. One disadvantage of Jeffrey's 'insider' account is over-reliance on jargonistic abbreviations. Many campaign bit-players are dutifully listed in the text, but few make it to the index: some of them may be running Canada ten years from now. Divided Loyalties reminds us that Canada is not an easy country to govern. National unity strategies are inspirational, but maybe they start at the wrong end.

Cornelius J. Jaenen - Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers: The Course and Context of Belgian Settlement in Western Canada

Cornelius J. Jaenen

Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers: The Course and Context of Belgian Settlement in Western Canada

Calgary, University of Calgary Press, 2011

ix + 348 pp. Paper. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-55238-258-5

One of Canada's most senior scholars has successfully discharged a long-planned obligation to chronicle the Belgian community on the prairies. The Canadian son of a Flemish father and a Walloon mother, Cornelius J. Jaenen insists that the Belgian settler experience must be traced back to the homeland. Perhaps the only omission from this comprehensive study is the absence of a page of basic Belgian facts about an intriguing country of which outsiders know little, stressing its linguistic division, intense Catholicism, population density and early industrialisation. In the 1961 census, 61,000 Canadians traced paternal ancestry to Belgium, with 28,000 born there. They came in three waves, 16,000 in 1900-14, 15,000 in the interwar years and 19,000 in 1946-60. Jaenen confirms the general impression of a concentration in Winnipeg's francophone enclave, St Boniface, although a surprisingly high proportion of the few thousand Belgians there were Flemings. Belgian institutions were few: Scheppers College, a rural Manitoba boarding school for Flemings, opened in 1920 and lasted just twelve years. The most enduring organisation, Le Club Belge, took shape in St Boniface between 1905 and 1914, just survived the War and later spawned communal projects such as a credit union. Language lay at the heart of assimilation challenges: the Church sought francophone Walloons when Quebecers would not move west, while Flemings (like Dutch immigrants) easily made the transition to English. Belgian groups generally evaded internal language issues, although problems arose when francophone priests were sometimes sent to areas of Flemish settlement. Le Club Belge maintained a library, and there was obvious pressure to favour purchase of Flemish titles, since books in French and English were widely available. Jaenen argues that multicultural Saskatchewan was the most likely province for the maintenance of minority identities, but the Belgian label does not seem to have stuck anywhere. As cultural traits, enthusiasm for pigeon racing and cycling hardly offer colourful ingredients for folkloric commemoration. Indeed, the significance of the Belgian experience in Canada may lie largely in its negatives. Unlike the Finns and the Irish, they do not seem to have imported homeland issues. Jaenen gives no indication of controversy over the role of Leopold III in the second world war, although by then specifically Belgian publications were few. This stands in obvious contrast with the wartime story of the Dutch monarchy, and its exile in Canada. Conversely, the apparent lack of sympathetic Quebec interest in a small, part-francophone and often-threatened country seems striking. Perhaps this was because the Catholic Church in Belgium seems to have directed its outreach towards the Congo. This publication surely makes Cornelius J. Jaenen the country's most eminent Belgian-Canadian.

George Emery - Elections in Oxford County, 1837-1875: A Case Study of Democracy in Canada West and Early Ontario

George Emery

Elections in Oxford County, 1837-1875: A Case Study of Democracy in Canada West and Early Ontario

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012

Cased. xvii + 235 pp. ISBN 978-1-4426-4404-5.

George Emery demonstrates that studying politics from the bottom up can shake textbook generalisations. Located midway between Hamilton and London, Oxford County was settled by 1861, when 69 percent of the adult male population were immigrants. By 1871, there were 48,000 people, and two towns of around 4,000 – administrative Woodstock and industrial Ingersoll. Oxford was divided into two ridings in 1854, its representation doubling again with the creation of the Ontario provincial legislature in 1867 – enough to generate 38 contests for study. Backed by mathematical analysis supplied by J.C. Herbert Emery, the author demonstrates that ethnicity and religion were the crucial determinants of voting behaviour. Oxford was 'unusual' (131) in regularly electing outsiders, such as Francis Hincks, George Brown, William McDougall and Oliver Mowat. Candidates attempting to run on a local ticket usually performed poorly, probably because the diverse ethnic pattern cut across down-home loyalties: as late as 1874, rivalry between two Ingersoll businessmen opened the way for a Toronto carpetbagger. The 1837 rebellions only briefly impacted on Oxford politics. Emery traces how participation rates mysteriously increased independently of franchise qualifications. He persuasively dismisses social class as an explanatory tool. Paradoxically, because Oxford had few Catholics, the Orange Order exercised little influence: in 1851, one lodge backed the Conservative candidate but gave him a net gain of just eight votes. Particularly striking is unimportance of railway projects as election issues: voters apparently grasped that the Great Western would pass through Oxford anyway because it was heading somewhere else. Few local newspapers survive, but they probably shaped their politics to suit their readers – although with Oxford falling within the circulation of the Toronto Globe, press influence cannot be dismissed. Riding associations were ad hoc, and grassroots political movements were reactive, forming in response to parliamentary coalitions, as with the delayed Hincksite-Conservative fusion in 1858. Nominating conventions, often seen as the basis of the Upper Canada Reform movement, were intermittent phenomena which did not always resolve local splits: in 1857, two Hincksites and three Brownites ran in South Oxford, while Brown ignored an inconvenient nomination to invade the riding in 1863. Dirty tricks abounded. Polling could be slowed by irrelevant cross-examination of hostile voters: one Black elector was asked how much he would fetch in a New Orleans slave auction. Some of Emery's contextual assumptions may be challenged. The Hincks-Morin administration was a continuation, not a replacement of the LaFontaine-Baldwin ministry. Alexander Mackenzie became prime minister in 1873. Emery cautiously discusses his use of 'democracy', a term which perhaps unnecessarily complicates the overall analysis. But the moral of this useful book is that we need more such local studies. Emery has certainly supplied both the methodology and the basic information on the rules of the game upon which others can build.

Xavier Gélinas and Lucia Ferretti, eds - Duplessis: Son Milieu, Son Époque

Xavier Gélinas and Lucia Ferretti, eds

Duplessis: Son Milieu, Son Époque

Quebec: Septentrione, 2010

iv + 513 pp. Paper. $39.95. ISBN 978-2-89448-625-2.

Beginning with a preface by Denis Vaugeois, who in 1976 captured Maurice Duplessis's former riding for the Parti Québécois, this collection of 23 essays discusses aspects of the right-wing nationaliste politician who dominated Quebec for a quarter century before his death in 1959. The volume rounds off with a round table discussion at a fiftieth anniversary conference in 2009, plus research notes on library and archive material. The prevailing theme is that Duplessis was not as bad as his opponents alleged: how could a government that backed rural electrification be dismissed as La Grande Noirceur? Charles-Philippe Courtois blames Cité Libre, the mouthpiece of Pierre Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, for creating the myth that Duplessis was anti-democratic (but dragging in Ceausescu surely distorts Trudeau's invective?), an exponent of an immobile nationalism that was rooted in a backward clerical culture. Paradoxically, much of this has been adopted as gospel by separatists, thereby ignoring intellectuals like André Laurendeau whose leftist nationalism reconciled state intervention with Catholic social thinking. True, there are intellectual ambiguities in the labelling of the successor period. Did the Quiet Revolution cause the election of Jean Lesage in 1960, or was it created by reforms introduced by his Liberal government? Either way, as several contributors point out, its roots must lie in the Duplessis years; hence, it is a short step to arguing that his Union Nationale administration paved the way for change. A rare exception is Yves Lever's bleak summary of film censorship: one imported Nouvelle Vague film sacrificed 86 of its 185 minutes to be screened in Quebec. This volume contains many interesting essays, such as the statistical analysis by Denis Monière and Dominique Labbé of the vocabulary of Duplessis speeches (which, of course, did not contain the word 'Québécois'). Michael Sarra-Bournet's review of the Quebec's alliance with the Tory provincial government of Ontario places Duplessis in a more conventional context of federal-provincial relations. Politicians should be studied from the bottom up, and the attempt by Lucia Ferretti and Maélie Richard to reconstruct the relationship between Duplessis and the voters of Trois Rivières is useful. (Only three of the thirty contributors are women.) John-Charles Panneton's essay on Pierre Laporte, murdered in 1970, rescues a neglected figure, but where is Paul Sauvé, the long-time dauphin, whose famous first word on inheriting power in 1959, "Désormais", is barely mentioned? Sauvé's death, just four months after taking office, opened the way for Lesage. Until we determine whether Sauvé represented continuity or fundamental change, we cannot truly assess his predecessor. Both in its timing, just as the Bloc Québécois has run its course and separatism has lost its drive, and in its avoidance of extended discussion of such topics as the family and the Church, this volume looks like Quebec intellectuals trying to stop worrying and learning to love Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis – an interesting exercise but not entirely persuasive.

A.A. den Otter - Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert's Land

A.A. den Otter

Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert's Land

Edmonton, The University of Alberta Press, 2012

xxxiv + 438 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-88864-546-3

A.A. den Otter demonstrates how a volume of linked essays on aspects of a theme can subtly broaden and subversively revise pervasive interpretations. His Introduction explores the inter-related concepts of civilization and wilderness in the nineteenth-century British North American mind, tracing their classical and religious origins. Chapter One examines the imperative to exploit apparently empty western territories, described by M.H. Synge in 1852 as 'sinfully waste and wasted' (11). Yet, as den Otter shows in an essay on two English-born missionaries, individual perceptions of wilderness were variable. William Mason hated the landscape and sought to organise Native people into settled villages, while William Rundle celebrated the open plains as evidence of a glorious Creator. The irony was that Mason struggled with Shield country, while Rundle travelled the potentially fertile Saskatchewan valley. They are contrasted with two assimilated Native mission workers, with the Europeanised names Henry Budd and Henry Steinhauer, who pragmatically coped with the challenges of spanning two worlds. Den Otter moves on to David Anderson, the Anglican bishop, who supplied a theological dimension to the key themes. Anderson was at the Red River from 1849 to 1865, a time of flux that made him aware that change might not equal betterment: he feared that 'the rapid influx of strangers' might damage 'the simple piety of our people' (133). However, at this point, den Otter has another card to play. The 1849 Sayer trial is seen as a social and political landmark in Métis history. Den Otter reinterprets it as an economic and intellectual turning point, the moment when the community adopted the European view of wilderness 'as a place laden with valuable resources' (162). Next he traces George Simpson's intellectual long march from defending the fur trade to accepting the inevitability of settlement on the southern prairies. Simpson influenced the 1857 Westminster parliamentary committee, which produced the important shift in British elite attitudes that designated 'the great colony of Canada' as the inheritor of the West. Implicit in this view was the assumption that Aboriginal culture and identity would be blanketed by the incomers. Cue here a re-examination of Peter Jones and the Upper Canada Mississauga, to argue that Aboriginal peoples could have been encouraged to adopt aspects of modernisation on their own terms. A ninth essay argues that twentieth-century historians long recycled the Victorian view of the Métis as 'primitive, if not savage' (272), failing to appreciate that they were a dynamic community that did not need to be civilized from without. A succinct Conclusion emphasises the convoluted intellectual baggage that Canada imposed upon the West from 1870. As a straightforward collection of essays, we might have expected a different grouping -- Anderson and Simpson paired as voices of authority, Budd and Steinhauer placed alongside Peter Jones, the Sayer trial leading into den Otter's historiographical discussion. The contributions would still have read well, but they are linked here through chronology and the inherent overlap of themes. The result is a quiet, cumulative and thought-provoking exercise in revisionism.

Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds - Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory

Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds

Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012

viii + 280 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-1-4426-1242-6.

Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds

Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012

viii + 317 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-1-4426-1251-8.

It is unusual for an academic conference to produce even one coherent collection of challenging papers. A 2009 conference on the Conquest of 1759 has triumphantly generated two. The event was held in London, sponsored by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas, jointly with the Gorsebrook Research Institute at St Mary's University, Halifax. Sensibly, the editors qualify the landmark date with the reservation that Wolfe's capture of Quebec City was neither inevitable nor conclusive, but rather formed part of a British-French struggle for northern North America from the 1755 Acadian deportation to the 1763 peace treaty. However, Revisiting 1759 begins with Stephen Brunwell's re-evaluation of Wolfe's military tactics: risky, no doubt, but failure to attack Quebec would have represented a setback. Matthew C. Ward recognises the brutality of Wolfe's tactics, but explains them as a response to French and Aboriginal warfare. Francois-Joseph Riggiu attributes French indifference to Canada through the two decades after 1763 to a lack of interest in territorial empire as distinct from overseas economic footholds. Jack P. Greene sees an inverse process taking place in the British empire, with the loss of the Thirteen Colonies and the imposition of direct rule in India creating a very different post-1783 empire from the assumptions that underlay the Seven Years War. For the Huron-Wendat, Thomas Peace argues, 1759 was merely part of a longer process of subjugation to European control. Stephen Conway finds new themes in the much-debated origins of the Quebec Act of 1774. British politicians hoped to run Quebec like Ireland, but the required settler garrison did not materialise and they turned to the model of Minorca instead. Emphasising economic motives behind the Quebec Act, Heather Welland argues that prosperity and not Protestantism was the driving force. Memorably rejecting both 'simplistic miserabilist and jovialist interpretations' (209) of the impact of Conquest, Donald Fyson interprets 1759-1775 as a period of mutual adaptation between habitants and newcomers. Barry M. Moody challenges the hindsight assumption that Nova Scotia was bound to become British, although he sees the fall of Quebec, rather than the capture of Louisbourg, as the key event. Paradoxically, the elimination of the French threat reduced the colony's importance, with Halifax only re-emerging as an imperial cornerstone after 1783. A final paper by Matthew P. Dzennik shifts the focus to Scotland, to argue that the Conquest formed less a romantic change in loyalties in the Highlands, but rather a reaffirmation of elements of self-interest in Gaelic thought and culture.
Remembering 1759 covers a broader range of time and topics although, paradoxically, there is much overlap in material. Indeed, an impressive opening essay by the editors identifies many of the themes. Joan Coutu and John McAleer argue that, while Wolfe is entombed in marble statues, the changing intentions behind their creation demonstrate the 'malleable' (51) nature of interpretation. Alan Gordon perceives meaning in tourist perceptions of Quebec City, while J.I. Little traces the failure of nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian attempts to romanticise the conflict in national unity terms. The Plains of Abraham became a national park in 1910, but the battlefield remains undefined as a symbolic space. Jean-Francois Lozier provides a reminder of the importance of Aboriginal memory. Michel Ducharme interweaves the rehabilitation of the reputation of Montcalm with attempts by nineteenth-century French Canadian intellectuals to seek meaning in the Conquest that would compensate for the failures of 1837-8, a discussion extended by Michel Bock to a specific analysis of the work of Lionel Groulx. David Meren re-examines the Gaullist campaign of the 1960s in the light of the Quebec viewpoint, politely articulated by Mayor Drapeau, that French support for their identity was welcome, but two hundred years late. Alexis Lachaine sees the Conquest as a 'nightmare' (221) for separatist intellectuals, which they can only escape by creating their own future-history. Maybe this argument needs the context of the discrediting of the FLQ, with its crude invocations of the imagery of 1837. Brian Young explores how the nationalist interpretation of Denis Vaugeois has shaped popular perceptions of the Conquest, despite reservations by battalions of scholars. Nicole Neatby ponders whether commemoration of 1759 is 'Mission Impossible' (251: could Canadians emulate the Americans, who unite to honour symbols of a Civil War that killed half a million soldiers? Finally, in a major contribution, Jocelyn Létourneau sketches strategies that might permit a more nuanced observation of the 275th anniversary, in 2034. I doubt that attitudinal change will come so rapidly, but suspect that his essay will be a basic text for 2059. It is noteworthy that Ducharme praises nineteenth-century intellectuals for achieving 'one thing that contemporary Quebecers seem unable to do: use the Conquest to foster hope for the future' (152-3). Neatby believes that a re-evaluation of the Conquest will come 'only when Quebec's political status fosters a collective optimistic view of the future' (270), whereas Létourneau inverts the argument, seeing intellectual revision as vital to enable the people of Quebec 'to move forward into the future' (296). From the perspective of Ireland, many of these themes run parallel to politicised communal memories of the 1845-9 Famine, and comparative studies may offer ways forward here.
Congratulations are due to editors, publisher and contributors on two handsomely produced and thought-provoking volumes. Quotations in the text have been translated into English, with the French originals supplied in the Endnotes.

Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds - Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective

Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds

Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012

viii + 280 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-1-4426-1242-6.

Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds

Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012

viii + 317 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-1-4426-1251-8.

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

Jean-Francois Mouhot

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

Québec: Les Éditions Septentrion, 2009

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

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

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

J. Andrew Ross and Andrew D. Smith, eds

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

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

St John's Newfoundland: Flanker Press Limited, 2010

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

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

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

David A. Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

David A. Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics

Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010

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

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

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

William Cross (ed.)

Democratic Reform in New Brunswick

Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2007

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

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

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

Paul Douglas Dickson

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

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

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

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

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

Raymond J.A. Huel,

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

Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2003

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

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

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

Terry Crowley,

Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Reinventing Canada

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003

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

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

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

Jean-Pierre Wallot, ed.,

Le débat qui n'a pas eu lieu: La Commission Pepin-Robartes quelque vingt ans après

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

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

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

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

John Griffith Armstrong,

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

UBC Press, Vancouver, 2002

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

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

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

R. Kenneth Carty, William Cross and Lisa Young,

Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics

UBC Press, Vancouver, 2000

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

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

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

Martin L. Friedland,

The University of Toronto: A History

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002

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

Institutional histories are a problem, but as academic problems go, a nice one. Nostalgic alumni may wish for a commemorative volume full of cameo portraits of notable eccentrics in a catalogue of buildings and bequests. Educational historians will look for analysis of curriculum, social scientists for measurements of inclusivity, minority groups for recognition of prejudice - and so on. Authors from outside rarely get the 'feel' of an institution; insiders often know far too much scandal that they hardly dare write about the recent past at all. Here, author and publisher are to be congratulated on a civilised text that is handsomely produced and attractively illustrated. Martin L. Friedland is an emeritus professor of Law who has lived some of what he has written about it. He also has the advantage over many of us from British higher education in obviously having loved the culture and values of the place. (In the 1995 budgetary crisis, academic salaries were frozen but administrators actually got a pay cut: can anyone imagine that happening in a British university?) Friedland handles the many issues in the university's history deftly and with economy: see, for example, his discussion of the appointment of Jews and the founding of suburban colleges. Some will be disappointed that he does not pillory Premier Mike Harris but, one suspects, to a true insider, in the long sweep of the U of T, the Common Sense Revolution will prove just a minor blip. The book ends with Friedland guiding us on a walk around the campus on Millennium Eve 1999, before catching a taxi home at four o'clock in the morning. I was sorry to see him depart.

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

Marlene Shore (ed.),

The Contested Past: Reading Canada's History. Selections from the Canadian Historical Review

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002

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

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

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

Gerald Friesen,

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

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000

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

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

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

Gordon L. Barnhart,

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

Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2000

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

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

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

Sidney Allinson,

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

Princeton NJ, Xlibris Corporation, 1998,

366 pp. Paper. ISBN 0 7388 0101 1

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

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

Ian Radforth,

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

Toronto: University of Toronto Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson W. Armstrong (ed.),

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

Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004

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

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

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

William Johnston,

A War of Patrols: Canadian Army Operations in Korea

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003

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

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

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

J.I. Little

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

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004

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

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

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

This is an important book, but perhaps it claims too much. The Townships provide an important strand in the anglophone Quebec identity: perhaps their Anglicanism explains why the region often elected Quebec’s only Conservative MPs, in contrast to solidly Liberal Anglo-Montreal. But are the Eastern Townships more than an intriguing but isolated footnote to English-Canadian identity as a whole? I winced at ‘was comprised of’ on page 233.