The Past Speaks

Rocco Rossi has dropped out of Toronto’s mayoral race, conceding his ideas are failing to gain traction in a mayoral campaign that’s become a battle between two candidates tussling over an angry, polarized electorate…. The announcement comes hours after an Ipsos-Reid poll placed him at 4 per cent – far behind frontrunners Rob Ford and George Smitherman, who appear to be in a dead heat. See here.

Rocco Rossi

Rocco Rossi’s departure from the race has implications for both Toronto and Canada as a whole. Municipal elections in Ontario are not fought on party lines: all candidates stand as independents, but people have a rough idea of where they sit on the ideological spectrum. Rossi was, if anything, somewhat to the right of front-runner Rob Ford on economic issues: both men are centre-right politicians, but Rossi proposed privatizing Toronto Hydro, something Ford opposes.

Rocco Rossi’s CV is rather more impressive than that of Rob Ford, as it includes merit scholarships to UCC, McGill, and Princeton, stints at Boston Consulting, Labatt/Inbev, and service on the board of the United Way. To date, Mr. Rossi has not had dealings with the police in Florida or elsewhere. This raises the question of why Ford was able to gain more support than Rossi.

One suspects that the major reason why Ford proved much more popular than Rossi or any of the other centre-right candidates is that he was willing to challenge the Canadian consensus in favour of open immigration. It is his stance on the issue and on no other that differentiates himself from all of the other candidates.  His views appear to have resonated with voters in a city that still attracts the lion’s share of immigrants to Canada.

Here are some of Ford’s comments on immigration:

Ford’s comments have resonated with the public for several reasons.

First, many people in Toronto have legitimate concerns about the level of immigration because of the challenges population growth imposes on infrastructure: city streets are much more crowded than they were a generation ago largely due to immigration rather than natural increase (the fertility rate among old stock Canadians is quite low). Immigration has driven up the cost of housing, which benefits existing home-owners but which also victimizes young people looking to buy.

Other Torontians oppose immigration because of simple racism.  We would like to think that there is no racism or xenophobia in Canada, but that sadly isn’t the case.  International studies have found that the level of xenophobia in Canada is lower than in other countries, but they have also demonstrated the persistence of anti-immigrant/anti-foreigner sentiment in Canada.  See this study by the Conference Board of Canada.

It is almost certain that Rob Ford’s popularity has something to do with his anti-immigration stand, since on most of other issues, Ford’s policies are identical to those of the other candidates.

Since the 1960s, when Canada developed non-racial immigration policies,  all of the major political parties at the national and provincial levels have supported the idea of a relatively open policy towards newcomers. They might have differed on other issues, but Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Bill Davis, and Bob Rae were all in favour of maintaining a high net immigration rate of roughly 1% of Canada’s population per annum.

The fact there is a consensus within the political class and the business and academic communities in favour of this immigration policy has prompted some Canadians to develop a very self-congratulatory attitude when it comes to assessing Canada’s great experiment in mass immigration.

Rob Ford’s popularity is a sobering reminder that there is indeed still a bit of xenophobia in some quarters of Canadian society, even and perhaps especially, in its largest city.

HIST 1406: Canadian History Survey

My lecture on Tuesday was called Rival Empires. It examined the Seven Years’ War.

The lecture on Friday was on the impact of the American Revolution on the territories that later became Canada. I also asked the students to look at this map related to my lecture on the American Revolution. See here.

HIST 3266: History of Western North America class

My lecture on Monday used the life story of Sir Sam Steele to explore the histories of the Canadian West and the Mounted Police.

Sam Steele

My lecture on Wednesday was on the life and times of Horace Tabor, Colorado’s Silver King. In this lecture I spoke about such themes in mining history as technological change, labour relations, and ethnicity.

HIST 4135: British North America: the Road to Confederation

The theme of this week’s seminar was religion in the Province of Canada.

We discussed the following readings:

Roberto Perin, “Elaborating a Public Culture: The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Quebec” in Religion and Public Life in Canada : Historical and Comparative Perspectives edited by Marguerite Van Die (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2001), 87-105

Suzanne Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin in Canada, 1859-1909” in Disseminating Darwin: Place, Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Ron Numbers and John Stenhouse (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91-122
William Westfall, “Constructing Public Religions at Private Sites: The Anglican Church in the Shadow of Disestablishment” in Religion and Public Life in Canada, 23-49

Doug Leighton, “The Manitoulin Island Incident of 1863: An Indian-White Confrontation in the Province of Canada” Ontario History 69(1977):113-124.

We also listened to student presentations on the lives and times of Ignace Bourget,  John Strachan,  Sir John William Dawson,   Rev. Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), Rev. Robert Burns.

I’m interested how research by academic historians reaches the average person .   I’ve noticed an increasing number of media references to Lord Tweedsmuir’s role in the origins of Canadian multiculturalism.

Tweedsmuir, who had achieved fame as a novelist under his birth name John Buchan, was Canada’s Governor-General in the late 1930s. He used his largely ceremonial position to preach in favour of tolerance and the right of immigrants and First Nations to retain their cultural traditions.

Lord Tweedsmuir

In many ways, his ideas were a precursor to the policy of official multiculturalism introduced by the Trudeau government in 1971, but the context was completely different. In 1971, racism and discrimination had become anathema throughout the Western world. Thanks to the huge worldwide cultural shift that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, lunch counters in the Deep South were desegregated and laws outlawing employment discrimination were passed in most Western democracies.  The US, Canada, and Australia all shifted from racist to non-racist immigration policies. Historians have advanced competing explanations for this cultural shift: the Cold War, decolonization, revulsion at the Holocaust or a mixture of all three.

The 1930s, in contrast, were pretty much the peak of racist and ethnocentric thinking in the Western world. Racist and ethnic nationalist ideas were pretty common everywhere, even in those Western countries which remained  democracies. Eugenics laws and quasi-mystical ideas about Aryan supremacy were widespread. Even Mackenzie King, Canada’s Liberal PM, opposed Jewish immigration because he was worried about the “admixture” or “alien blood” polluting Canada’s genetic stock. (It should be noted that while King was opposed additional non-Aryan immigration, he courted the votes of Jewish people and did not advocate doing anything to reduce Canada’s then existing Jewish population).  Most Canadians in the 1930s were, at best, advocates of assimilation (e.g., residential schools for Natives and regular schools for immigrants  designed to destroy their cultures) and at worst supporters of sterilization, exclusion, and deportation.

This context is what Lord Tweedsmuir’s advocacy of tolerance so striking.

In the 1930s, Tweedsmuir told an audience in rural Manitoba, “You will all be better Canadians for being also good Ukrainians.” Tweedsmuir also encourage First Nations people to retain their cultures, which flatly contradicted the assimilation agenda that the federal government was then forcing on the Natives.  Tweedsmuir was truly a man ahead of his time.

Until a few years ago, nobody paid much attention to Tweedsmuir. Then a history professor named Peter Henshaw started published some articles about Tweedsmuir that were read and popularized by journalists. See here. Jason Kenney, the Immigration Minister, quoted Tweedsmuir in a speech in 2008. There is even a reference to Tweedsmuir in the new Canadian Citizenship Guide for immigrants. One of the problems with this guide is that while it mentions Tweedsmuir, who was a precursor of multiculturalism, but it doesn’t mention Trudeau, the Prime Minister who actually implemented the policy!  But the interesting thing is that Tweedsmuir is mentioned at all.

Today’s Globe contains an article on religious minorities that quotes Tweedsmuir’s famous advice to the Ukrainians of Manitoba. See here.

Check out Henshaw’s research in : ‘John Buchan and the British Imperial Origins of Canadian multiculturalism’, in N. Hillmer and A. Chapnick, eds, Unfinished Business: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 2007).

That is the title of a great new blog post on ActiveHistory.ca

David Zylberberg’s comparison of the histories of coal mining and South Yorkshire and nickel mining in Ontario is interesting. However, he makes an observation that is perhaps not quite accurate. He says:

the two situations are not identical as the exact government role varies and geological differences matter in mining regions. However, there are a number of lessons from South Yorkshire that could apply to the current situation. The most important one is to be aware of the regional implications of macroeconomic policy. When the coal mines closed, there were not new jobs to replace them and the national growth that has occurred since was heavily concentrated in London and south-east England. This meant that those who immediately suffered from policy changes were not the later beneficiaries, helping to create a political culture of regional hostility and poverty. Sudbury’s mines will not close in the near future but jobs are being lost in reorganization. And while Sudbury’s mining service sector has the potential to benefit from new operations around the country, what benefits occur from Harper and Clement’s liberalization of ownership are likely to be concentrated in the financial and corporate centres of Toronto and Calgary.

See here.

I think that this misses the point about hollowing-out and the loss of corporate HQs from Canada. One of the perceived problems with foreign ownership of Canadian mining companies is that the “high-quality” head office jobs are generally moved from Canada to the home country of the multinational. The blue-collar mining jobs stay where the minerals are. These jobs can’t be outsourced,because the principle of globalization does not apply to manual workers in the mining sector.  (Because of immigration laws, Vale can’t bring in Brazilian miners to work a Canadian ore deposit and pay them Brazilian wages, whereas Canadian Tire can outsource all of its manufacturing needs to China).

Vale is essentially a creature of the Brazilian government. It was formed in 1942, when the United States, Britain, and the other industrialized countries were pre-occupied with fighting Hitler and thus too busy to protest about the Brazilian government’s actions. (It helped that Brazil had declared war on Germany and the US  had something called the Good Neighbor policy, which involved tolerating economic nationalism in Latin America).

Vale was privatized in 1997 but it still retains strong links to the Brazilian state. Brazil created Vale because it wanted the country to be home of a mining multinational rather than simply a place where mining multinationals based in the First World did business.

Arguably, it may not make much difference to the actual miners whether they are administered by a corporate bureaucracy based in Toronto or by a corporate bureaucracy headquartered in Brazil or Switzerland or the City of London. Similarly, the elimination of corporate head office jobs in Toronto may not affect restaurants, real estate agents, etc, in a mining town like Sudbury.

However, the elimination of head offices in Toronto could have a major impact on that city and on all the people who sell services to Bay Street workers. One of the reasons Toronto has been able to escape the fate of most of the other Great Lakes cities (e.g., Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo) was because it is the financial capital of a separate country  rather than simply a regional service centre.  Without the border, Toronto would simply be another fifth-rate American rustbelt town.  The existence of a separate currency in Canada and regulations limiting foreign ownership have helped to make Toronto necessary.

The major beneficiaries of restricting foreign ownership in mining would likely be white-collar workers in Toronto rather than people in the mining communities themselves.

I’m reminded of the distinction Ed Broadbent drew at the time of the 1988 Free Trade election. He said that Mulroney was on the side of Wall Street (US capital), the Liberals were in the pocket of Bay Street (Canadian capital), and he was on the side of Main Street (the common man).

Perhaps Canadian nationalists should support a Bay Street first strategy?

There are some great works on Canadian mining history, including a recent book chapter by Jeremy Moaut, “Whitaker Wright, Speculative Finance and the 1890s Mining Boom in the City of London,”
in Raymond E. Dumett, ed., Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870– 1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics and Territorial Expansion.

I’m a big fan of comparative history,which I why I have done a bit of reading on Australian mining history (Blainey’s The RushThat Never Ended). Some historian really needs to write a book explaining why Australia has produced BHP, a global mining giant, whereas Canada has not been able to do likewise.

If you will pardon the mineral metaphor, such a book would be worth its weight in gold.

HIST 1406: Canadian History Survey

My lecture on Tuesday was called, “The Children of Aataentsic: the Rise and Fall of the Huron Confederacy”. It provided students with a detailed overview of the political system, trade, and social customs of the Huron Confederacy and an explanation of why they were defeated by the Iroquois.  Drawing on the research of Bruce Trigger and others, I spoke about a wide range of matters, including Huron attitudes to pets, the political role of women, and sexuality.

Sainte Marie Among the Hurons

My lecture on Friday was about the evolution of social institutions such as the seigneurial system in New France.

A survey I ran through SurveyMonkey indicated that the material presented on Tuesday was the most interesting lecture to date in the class.

HIST 3266: History of the North American West

James Douglas

On Monday, I gave a lecture comparing and contrasting the careers and values of two important figures from British Columbia history, Sir James Douglas and Amor De Cosmos. This lecture dealt with such themes as the evolution of whiteness in gold rush societies, Native-White relations in BC, the role of the Royal Navy, the suppression of slavery in British Columbia, BC’s entry into Confederation, the construction of the CPR, and the campaign for restriction on Chinese immigration. In the lecture I stressed the influence of naval power on the history of Native-White relations in British Columbia.

On Wednesday, our focus shifted to the Prairies with a lecture on Poundmaker, a Plains Cree leader who was imprisoned for his supposed role in the 1885 rising.

Poundmaker

HIST 4135

In my fourth-year seminar on North America in the 1860s, our focus was on economic development in British North America. The students discussed the following secondary sources:

Douglas McCalla, “Upper Canadians and Their Guns: an Exploration via Country Store Accounts, 1808-1861” Ontario History 97 (2005): 121-37.

Peter George and Philip Sworden, “The Courts and the Development of Trade in Upper Canada, 1830-1860” Business History Review 60 (1986): 258-280.

Lawrence H. Officer and Lawrence B. Smith, “The Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty of 1855 to 1866” The Journal of Economic History 28 (1968): 598-623

Peter Baskerville, “Americans in Britain’s Backyard: The Railway Era in Upper Canada, 1850-1880” Business History Review 55 (1981): 314-336

We also discussed this primary source:

Charles John Brydges, Letter from Mr. Brydges in Regard to Trade Between Canada and the Lower Provinces Montreal : [s.n.], 1866.  In this pamphlet, Brydges discussed some of the economic benefits that would result from Confederation and the construction of the Intercolonial Railway.

In addition, we listened to student presentations on the Lives and Times of the following individuals: Isaac Buchanan;  Sir Samuel Cunard;  Charles John Brydges; Walter Shanly.

Honours Thesis Supervision

I also met the fourth-year student whose thesis I am supervising. Her thesis is on George Taylor Denison III (1839 –1925), a Canadian soldier, judge, and Confederate sympathizer.  Denison was one of Toronto’s strongest supporters of the Southern cause during the American Civil War. Denison was later involved in the repelling the Fenian Raids and the suppression of the North-West Rebellion. As a police magistrate in Toronto, Denison was noted for extreme bias in handling of cases: retired British soldiers and wealthy people were treated leniently, but Irish Catholics and Blacks were given harsh sentences. In his old age, Denison became  staunch supporter of Imperial Federation– the idea of giving Canada and other colonies of white settlement representation in the British parliament.

Denison’s colourful career had many aspects any one of which could be the subject of an honours thesis. In the interest of narrowing the research remit down to a manageable topic, the student has decided to focus on Denison’s role in assisting Confederate agents in Canada to raid communities on the other side of the border. During the Civil War, Denison’s farm home, Heydon Villa, on his father’s estate in west Toronto, became a haven for Confederate agents, exiles, and sympathizers and a clearing house for smuggled documents. Denison and his friends attempted to purchase a steamship called the Georgian for use as a Confederate privateer on the Great Lakes.

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Update:

Folks may be interested in leightonmanitoulin, darwin4165, and mclarensegregation.