News of the Day

Russell Chamberlayne shares something from the newspapers:

Canada must be incorporated with the American government. That is an event which our brethren in that quarter ardently desire. The waters of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence are assigned by Nature to the American empire. If the United States pursued the ambitious politics of European governments and waged war for territory, the possession of Canada would be a sufficient inducement for hostility. Canada is essential to the security and interests of the American people, whose sons are daily flocking to its territory.  It is not for glory; it is not even for security, that America enters into hostility. She wishes only to pursue a lawful trade.

It is from the Quebec Mercury of November 11 1811, reprinting something from "the American papers" by "Wallace" which it feels would be of interest to its readers. 

History of Quebec politics, and magazine rivalries

A few years ago Maclean's got rid of all its politics writers and plunged into seeming irrelevance. (It does still exist.) The Walrus, which long trailed in Maclean's shadow among general interest Canadian magazines (and always seemed pretty boring when I looked at it) gradually stepped into the limelight. Today it operates more like a website than a traditional magazine.

I'm a (recent) subscriber but I don't even seem to get the magazine itself.  What comes instead is almost daily bulletins from all over, contributed by a wide range of name writers.  Some of what the Walrus shares are reprints from the contributors' Substacks or other online commentary, making the Walrus a kind of all-Canadian aggregator site (not a bad idea).  Online they seem to give away most of their material for free, so I'm not sure exactly what I subscribe for. A lot of the online pieces are very timely. Some of them are quite good.

So today for instance, The Walrus offers not only a poll (that it helped commission) on the state of play in Quebec's looming provincial election, but also an article on the collapse of the Quebec Liberal Party and the resignation of its recently-chosen leader, the former Trudeau cabinet minister Pablo Rodriguez.

It's more than you would find in most English-Canadian media, but it's not a very deep story -- mostly poll summaries and comments from pollsters, the kind of people who a year ago knew why a Poilievre majority in Ottawa was inevitable. It has almost nothing insightful to say about the scandal that brought down Pablo Rodriguez.

What brought down Rodriguez was his leadership race, which led to public exposure of alleged mass buying of votes (aka memberships) -- hundred dollar bills changing hands and the like.  And of course mass buying of votes (aka memberships) has been the basis of every Canadian party leadership race in the last hundred years -- except usually the hundred dollar bills are kept out of sight.  The Quebec Liberal Party has started a new vote-buying orgy to replace the leader elected by the last one.  And the new leader of the NDP will come from whichever campaign buys up the most NDP party memberships.  And so on, ad infinitum.

Is this not the real story? All party leadership races are based on this corruption. And even when the corruption is exposed (bringing down Rodriguez who may not have known about the details), the answer is to do the same over again but trying to keep the actual cash transfers out of sight this time.

The efforts journalists take to take these leadership contests seriously versus the effort they put into exploring how they really work  -- it never fails to amaze.

 

History of the decline of Detroit Iron

 

(Table: from Adam Tooze's Chart Book, an amazing daily aggregate of data -- from a historian.)

Do we need an automotive trade deal with the United States?

It's unlikely we are going to have one much longer, given the triumph of rage politics in the United States. Also, it seems the concessions Canada will have to make just to get a negotiation going will be crippling.

Given those realities, is one worth fighting for?  Look at the declining share the United States has in world automobile production.  Down from a quarter to ten percent in 30% -- in thirty years (and that lumps in Canadian production of American cars).  Why fight to stay on the side of the losers?

If we can talk to Saab about starting the production of fighter jets, is it possible we could talk to all the serious automakers in the world about the opportunity to entirely replace Detroit iron in the Canadian market.  Hundred per cent electric, of course. Support the workforce through the transition, and eave the market for F-150s and Winnebagos to the Americans, and get with the global trend.

Just spitballin' here.  But what about some vision out of Ottawa.

 

Ged Martin explains the American pardoning power

Ged Martin, the British scholar of (mostly) Commonwealth histories, diverges a moment from his usual range of topics to provide a very detailed history of the emergence of the pardon power now being used for malign purposes by Orange Hitler. 

It's far more detailed than any such explanation I have seen in American media.  It may also be more than you actually want to read on the subject.  But it will reinforce in you the assumption that Ged Martin seems to know a great deal about practically everything. 

History of left coast art

Daniel Francis has been slowing the posting rate on his blog about (mostly) British Columbia and western history, but the online British Columbia Review has recently put up his account of the remarkable history of Vancouver's Emily Carr School of Art, which marked its centenary in 2025.   

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Vancouver was an artistic backwater. Residents were preoccupied with real estate flipping and resource extraction; the arts generated no interest whatsoever.

No longer so. 

Praise is where you find it

The Canadian Institute for Historical Education, referred to in a recent post below, sent out a New Year's message less combative than its Christmas one. They invited a number of recent contributors to their History Matters podcast to suggest favourite history books.  One of their guests, Sean Conway, the retired Ontario politician and sage on all things CanPoli, was kind enough to focus on my own political history writing: 

Sean Conway:  “I’m going to recommend two books by the same author, Christopher Moore; they’re not recent but they’re very, very good.  The first one was published thirty years ago: 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (1997); and the second one, Three Weeks in Quebec City: The Meeting that Made Canada (2015), deals with the really important Quebec Conference of 1864 that laid the foundation for what became the British North America Act.  

"What I like about Chris – he’s such a talented guy – is that he takes you through complicated things but you see it through the lens of the participants, and not just the menfolk, because many of the principals brought their spouses and daughters.  Donald Creighton once said that history is the record of the encounter of character and circumstance; I completely agree with him.  These two books by Christopher Moore humanise that story in a way that gives you the didactic benefit – you learn something – but you think, well, maybe we Canadians aren’t as dull and boring as everybody thinks we are.” 

Thank you, Sean!  I do note that the contributors invited by the CIHE comprised seven men and two women, and no indigenous or minority scholars (though contributor Charlotte Gray salutes one, Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii), the author of Valley of the Birdtail).  

Book Notes: O'Brien on World War II

I've been thinking of making some notes on the big, mostly Canadian, histories I came across in 2025.  But a book I had requested from my local library some time ago came in unexpectedly, and (also unexpectedly) took over my holiday reading.

I borrowed How the War Was Won, a 2015 history of the Second World War by Scottish historian Phillips Payson O'Brien, because it was praised to the skies by Paul Krugman, who is an economist but has good taste in historical literatures. With that in mind, I was not surprised that How the War Was Won does focus on economics (very much macro-economics). But I was surprised by how engagingly written it is, and even more by how much it enlarged my sense of how to write military (and other kinds of) history.

O'Brien starts with a provocative sentence: "There were no decisive battles in World War II."  Most military histories of that war, he observes, focus on Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway, and D-Day, the titanic battles that became turning points in the conflict. But he directs our attention to the numbers. 

In 1943, Germany devoted about 7% of its weapons output to armoured fighting vehicles - and its enemies did much the same.  All the combatant powers, in fact, devoted more than half, sometimes up to 70%, of their production to air and sea forces, and only the leftovers to the land forces. At the start of the war, the United States projected an army of more than 250 divisions (a division, the basic building block of land warfare, is infantry, armour, artillery, logistics, and command -- often 15,000 men in total). Manpower and materials could have been found for 250 US divisions. But quite soon the American army reduced its objective: to 100 divisions. On all sides the money went elsewhere: to ships and planes. 

Now sea power has always been a big story in military history, and much has been written about fighter combat and bombing campaigns in World War II.  What O'Brien really does is hammer home is the numbers, in ways that battle narratives rarely can, and what the numbers say about air-sea warfare in the 1940s.  

Victory in warfare comes from preventing one's enemies from assembling forces and moving them where they are needed, while at the same time maximizing and moving your own forces successfully. Despite the horrific destruction of lives and equipment at a Stalingrad or a Midway, the numbers pale into insignificance compared to what it meant and what it cost for the sea power that enabled the Allies to move their forces into place, and for the air and sea power that increasingly prevented both Germany and Japan from producing what it needed and from transporting it to the vital battlefields. Not by a little bit, but by huge orders of magnitude.

O'Brien's method confirms some familiar views about the Second World War:  defeating the U-Boat threat and successfully moving troops and materials across the Atlantic was indeed vital to victory and has long been acknowledged. But his book presents many new angles.

During the great battle in Normandy in 1944, the western allies were also engaged in something called Operation Crossbow. Crossbow was the attempt to stop the launching of thousands of V2 rockets from Germany toward Britain and the bridgehead expanding from Normandy.  It succeeded; relatively few V2s flew successfully, and Crossbow may get a few lines in standard D-Day and liberation histories.  What O'Brien shows is that Germany had spent as much developing the V2 as the US spent developing the atom bomb. And the air power the allies sent against the V2 was as large and costly as that devoted to supporting the armies in Normandy. Crossbow insured that the vast German expense on the V2 -- money that might have been spent elsewhere -- was almost entirely wasted. In terms of enemy power destroyed, it was a second Normandy at least, almost unnoticed

O'Brien has a thousand examples like this. (In the latter stages of the war, more than half, often much more, of all the fighter planes that Japan and Germany struggled to produce and send into battle were destroyed before they ever got into combat against the allies.) 

How the War Was Won is a reminder to historians  -- and O'Brien is a historian not an economist -- that in any kind of history the dramatic moments are not necessarily the decisive moments.

What did This Guy Bring You for Christmas?

 

Over the holidays, I got a grumpy Christmas greeting in a mass emailing from the Canadian Institute for Historical Education. It had the above image at the top.  I guess you can put a Santa hat on anyone and make things all Christmassy. But in the text that followed the Grinch seemed to have taken over.  

The grumpy message was not about Christmas or about Canada's first prime minister. It's another endless defence of an 18th century British politician who never set foot in North America but has had his name plastered over towns and roads and counties and squares all over southern Ontario for centuries: Henry Melville, Lord Dundas.  

At heart, it's a cry of rage over the fact that Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto was renamed Sankofa Square last year.

The new name is Sankofa Square, because the city recognized it was long past time to have a few local places that honour, for instance, all the Afro-Canadians who have been helping to build this city for centuries. To serve this good cause, the city found it reasonable that names of long-ago foreign aristocrats who never had any significant role in the city could be dispensed with.  

But the CIHE insists it means killing history. 

Remember when Toronto's beloved and historic Maple Leaf Gardens was replaced by the Air Canada Centre, later the Scotiabank Centre.  Or when the iconic SkyDome, chosen by a mass consultation of southern Ontario residents, somehow turned into the Rogers Centre (not to be confused with the other Rogers arena in the city, or the one in Edmonton, or the one in Vancouver).  The CIHE has never been moved to defend "history" in cases like those. 

The CIHE's argument is always the same: the people who urged a name change are just wrong. They don't know history, and that disqualifies them from participation in public discussion. It all leads back to the promise in their name:  that when they take over, they are going to ram the True History of Canada (one that deifies Lord Dundas forever more, I guess) down the throats of schoolchildren.   

It reminded me of the message historians Patrice Dutil and JDM Stewart gave in the book talk I mentioned here in November : that it is unacceptable that statues of John A. Macdonald have been questioned, and the only reason it happens is because kids are not getting taught the right history. That their opponents may have different views of history -- ones well worth discussing and debating -- never comes up.

These campaigns are not unique to Canada.  On New Year's Day I happened to catch a Bluesky post (someone called [email protected]), quoting an old promise from Nigel Farage, the fascist-adjacent leader of Britain's Reform Party.

One of the first things a Reform government will do is make sure the young are taught correctly about our history.

It's always the same. History is a bag full of facts, the facts are established and true, and no questioning should be tolerated.  (Compare the Trump administration's whitening of American history at the Smithsonian and other public agencies.) And it's always about current politics more than historical ideas. It starts with defending the statue of some old white guy from the nineteenth century, but soon it's pushing residential school denialism and defending the glories of colonialism.

Happy Holidays

Blogging will be slim to none until the new year, and maybe then there will be some review of the big history reads of  the past year. Enjoy the holidays!

History of Middlemarch

Early in 2025 I reported here that I was reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, and suggested I might report in on progress from time to time.

Well, there's more than a week left in the year 2025, and I can report I did indeed finish the book. I must say I was pretty bored and may have skimmed a bit while going through those long twisting perfect sentences, but I can say this: Middlemarch is a rom-com.

Not a million laughs, but it's about young Dorothea who marries the wrong man (a historian, for God's sake, old and pedantic and controlling) and then promptly meets her true love while on her honeymoon in Rome  -- easy to do since the old bore is off doing research all the time.  Then we leave that whole plot for about 500 pages and move on to other mismatched couples from the well-to-do Middlemarch networks. Only in the last few chapters does girl meets boy again, and (inappropriate husband having finally died offstage) happiness ensures, even though the odious bore has provided in his will that when Dorothea marries her true love, she must forfeit the comfortable fortune she inherited at his death. 

People are always making modern updates of the Pride and Prejudice story. (It was Jane Austen's 250th birthday the other day.) Has anyone ever thought of Middlemarch as inspiration for a Hallmark Christmas movie? In the first ten minutes the smart young thing from the city goes back to the small town, meets and marries the Christmas-tree lot owner. Then she spends most of the movie waiting for him to die....

Update, Jan 8 2026  I read over the holidays that young readers assigned to study Middlemarch often dislike it because the protagonists all marry the wrong people and make the whole story an endless downer, while their professors, being older, appreciate being confirmed in their view that people do indeed marry the wrong people.  I'm probably older than most of the professors, but yeah, my reaction seems to match that of the kids.

History of (gimme a break) "regicide"

In an opinion piece about political leadership in the Toronto Star, columnist Martin Regg Cohn twice refers to the Ontario Liberal Party's recent review of the leadership of its provincial leader as a "regicide."  

You know, the leader of a provincial party is not an absolute monarch. And this leader is even dead. Actually she remains the leader.  The same constituency that chose Bonnie Crombie leader a few years ago recently gave weak support to her continued leadership, and she declared she would resign at a date to be chosen later. That's the extent of it.

Where does this insanely violent language about political party leadership in Canada come from? Every time a political leader faces some challenge to their authority, our pundits and political scientists pull words like "regicide," "coup," and "overthrow" from their bag of tired cliches. What so terrifies them about the concept of accountability?

What they should be calling for is real accountability. There's another story  today about how Quebec's Liberal party leadership may have been won by the handing out of hundred dollar bills to anyone who would put their name to a party "membership" application.  The article points out that such behaviour by political parties is not illegal, just sort of frowned upon. Why don't columnists inquire when will we ever have legitimate leadership selection processes?

It's not a matter of legislation to end the legal corruption in the political parties. We just need to understand that discipline has to be a power of the party caucus, not the leader, with the leader being subject to discipline like any other member of caucus. 

You cannot have a functioning parliament without parliamentarians. And they are not really parliamentarians unless they have authority, including the authority to remove and replace their leaders if necessary.  

And it still would not be regicide, no matter what they would tell you.

Update, 22 December.  The scandal in Quebec forced the leader of the Quebec Liberal party to resign -- i guess it's okay when the agent of regicide in the media-- but all that will happen is that the party will have a new leadership race run by the same corrupt orgy of vote-buying, perhaps with the hundred dollar bills more effectively concealed this time

History of the world crisis

I'm not a reader of the National Post, but one of its frequent contributors, the British Columbia writer Terry Glavin, recently had some blunt and uncomplimentary things to say about the United States and its place in the world and on this continent. It came via his Substack, which was linked to by an American commentator I follow -- such are the ways of information flow these days. -- no, in fact it was Paul Wells's Substack. 

The Trump regime is not on Europe's side, or Ukraine's, or Canada's. You don't have to guess whose side the White House is on anymore.

Book Notes: Dutil and Stewart talk prime ministers.

Dropped by the U of T Bookstore in Toronto last night to hear Patrice Dutil and J.D.M. Stewart talk about their recent books, Dutil's on John A. Macdonald, Stewart's on the prime ministers of Canada.

I was happy to be there with a small but interested audience simply because book launches on Canadian historical topics seem to have become scarce and precious lately.  The discussion was lively, engaging, and often enlightening.

I think both authors would acknowledge being defenders and admirers of John A. Macdonald, but I was sorry to hear them suggest last night, as they also do in their books, that those who criticise Macdonald and even support the removal of many of his statues around Canada are simply misinformed and are a symptom of how badly history is taught in Canada.  

I believe in their sincerity, but they do contribute to that attitude that stifles the discussions we need by presuming that indigenous scholars, and minority historians, and historians less celebratory of our first prime minister, are simply wrong and therefore do not need places on platforms like this one. 

And though I don't teach and they do or did, I think by and large our history teachers do a much better job than they acknowledge.  And that young people's views on history are hardly so dismissible.

A previous post on related thoughts

 

  

Donald Graves 1949-2025 RIP military historian

Military historian and prolific author Donald E Graves died on November 11.  His major works cover the War of 1812, which probably no one else has covered so completely, but he also produced regimental histories, biographies, and studies of the Second World War.  Wikipedia has a good accounting of his work.  The obituary is here.

Graves began his historical career in the public service, working for Parks Canada's Historic Sites Service, Library and Archives Canada, and the Department of National Defence before launching a lengthy career as a consultant on military history and a freelance writer on historical topics. 

I did not know him but I once fulfilled my title as contributing editor to Canada's History by recommending him to the magazine during the planning of its War of 1812 bicentennial coverage, which may have led to his article there on the Battle of Lundy's Lane. Recently he was doing a series of military history talks for the History Symposium, some of which are yet to be podcasted. 

Image: History Symposium

History of fighter jet purchases

Wesley Wark, historian and national security/ intelligence consultant has thoughts on the F-35 and Saab Gripen fighter jets choice. TLDR: buy a few F-35s and base them in Norway as our contribution to European security. Defend Canada with the Saab Gripens.