Something you don't see very often in the country: a knight in the obits. This was a Canadian who died in Toronto recently, but one who made a good chunk of his career in Britain, including as an advisor to the Crown, and had received the customary honour that country gives for that kind of service.  It reminded me of something I noted in Ted Glenn's A Very Canadian Coup. It often seemed as if Glenn's entire cast, the Conservative Party around Mackenzie Bowell (Sir Mackenzie Bowell, KCMG, if you prefer), consisted of knights: Sir Frank Smith, Sir Auguste-Réal Angers, Sir Charles Tupper ..read more

Jared Milne writes: Your discussion of the reluctance of caucuses these days to push back against their leaders is well-put. That said, over the last couple of decades I've seen a phenomenon I call 'Pop Goes The Premier'. Multiple Alberta premiers, from Ralph Klein to Ed Stelmach to Allison Redford to Jason Kenney, have all been 'convinced' to leave by their caucuses when the MLAs started to think the public were souring on them. The funny thing is that Stelmach, Redford and Kenney had all scored decisive election wins, but they decided to resign rather than face the voters a second time ..read more

The tiger and the beaver? -- who'da thunk. The standout article in the April-May Canada's History must be Madhuparna Gupta's essay "Bonds of Empire." It considers how Canada and India "emerge... as two sides of the same coin, united by the common threads of European colonial heritage" over hundreds of years. For much of those hundreds of years, many Canadians would have ranked themselves as part of the "white Commonwealth" and co-rulers of the Empire  -- quite different from the subject peoples of India. Gupta skillfully subverts that position with surprising comparisons: from t ..read more

Next Sunday, my friend Neil Ross and the Tour Guys team are premiering their new Toronto walking tour: Canadian Heroes and Villains. "What we have found in Canada is that because we are essentially three founding cultures -- First Nations, French and British -- heroes of one cultural group are often the villains of the others – and vice versa, through successive waves of immigration." Sunday, March 26 @ 2pm. Meeting point: North east entrance, Queen's Park subway station. End point: City Hall Time: 90 min.   ..read more

Policy Options, the (free) online magazine of the Institute for Research in Public Policy, has recently been publishing a series of essays on "Making a Better Parliament." The introduction:   It starts with choosing to “do” politics in ways that don’t reinforce the masculine blueprint. Sadly, that is about the most ambitious proposal its big thinkers have come up with.  I'm sympathetic to changing the masculine blueprint, sure. Then what? When I read on and see the solutions provide by the contributors, it's hard to see any pathways to real and significant change. The cont ..read more

I have been slow in getting to Ted Glenn's A Very Canadian Coup: The Rise and Demise of Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell 1894-96. I was already grumbling about the use of the word 'coup' in his title when the book appeared in September 2022. Even before that I was intrigued by the way Bowell was becoming one of our most written-about prime ministers -- let along having his own lively twitter account. Now, thanks to publicist Heather Wood and Dundurn Press, I've caught up on the book itself. Glenn's book is the best of the recent crop of Bowelliana, if attention to detail is what matt ..read more

  I like the time change. It's going to be brighter tonight. We are blessed by changing seasons in Canada, and the time change enhances that: winter nights get dark earlier, summer nights stay bright later, the way it ought to be in our subpolar latitudes. If your circadian rhythm gets a bit off for a day or two, take a nap. I can't help thinking people who oppose time changes are likely the ones who oppose vaccination and masking and signs that warn you to be careful on the ice. They probably resist anyone setting a time mandate. If they cannot establish their own time, at least the go ..read more

The burning of Parliament -- in 1849, fortunately not in 2022 March 11: in 2020 it was the day the global pandemic was declared, same day I had the surgery that saved me from prostate cancer, just as the surgical wards began cancelling surgeries by the thousand. So for me, a good day. Also in 2023 it is the 175th anniversary of democratic government in Canada. In the Globe and Mail, John Ralston Saul has published his almost annual urging that Canada grasp the importance of the achievement of what then called responsible government.  It came first in Nova Scotia, as he notes, bu ..read more

By being a member of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, you help support the publication of legal history in Canada (and other activities) and in exchange you receive "the annual book," one from the three or four the society produces in a typical year. Last November I attended the Society's annual gathering and the launch of the History of Law in Canada Volume II by Jim Phillips, Philip Girard, and Blake Brown. But recently I realized my copy was not just delayed in the mail. It evidently was not coming at all. So I inquired. Turns out I neglected to renew my membership last year ..read more

For its twenty-fifth anniversary, Britain's Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction has launched a contest to determine the "best of the best" from a shortlist of its twenty-five winners. The six shortlisted authors include one British writer, three Americans -- and two Canadians, Margaret Macmillan for 1919 and Wade Davis for Into the Silence. On a related topic, I've updated March first's post about historians writing fiction to add a new comment ..read more