Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women's Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag's blogpost about International Women's Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag's post and commentary about the story, she had been commissioned by the Museum to write a post about IWD for their collective blog.  When she submitted the blogpost, it was initially approved, and then withdrawn when the communications department expressed concern over her comment on the current Conservative government.  As a result, historians from coast to coast have been decrying the "censorship" and "silencing" of Strong-Boag by the museum (and speculating that the current federal government might have had a hand in this).  

Shortly after the ActiveHistory piece was published, Franca Iacovetta, professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, and the current president of the International Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, published a condemnation of "the effort to silence Canada’s leading women’s historian" on the Berks website.  Since that time, PressProgress has added their voice into the mix, commenting on the irony of a human rights museum censoring a commissioned blog.  Both of these pieces have also received extensive coverage on Facebook and Twitter.

I have a somewhat different take on these events from many of my historian colleagues, and would posit a working theory.  I suspect that Prof. Strong-Boag might have known full well (or at least strongly suspected) that her blogpost for International Women's Day, which only includes one reference to Canadian governments past or present and does so to highlight the "anti-woman record" of "Canada's Conservative government", was never going to be approved by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The museum has been mired in controversies and funding crises for years - even before it has opened to the public.  The people who commissioned the post probably were hoping for a broad overview of the history of International Women's Day, or perhaps a post that included some discussion of how Canada's governments (past and present) have dealt with women's issues.  This is not what they received, and someone probably balked at the fact that the sole reference in the post to Canada's governments was a partisan attack on the current Conservative administration.  An offer to add more detail to support the assessment of the current government as "anti-woman" was probably even less welcomed. 

Here's where I think the story gets interesting. By being "censored", Strong-Boag has ensured that her message gets diffused to a much wider readership than the original blogpost itself likely would have been.  It is a fairly standard social movement tactic to try to create a situation (a "grievance" to use the social movement scholarly jargon) that will lend itself to media exposure, with the movement able to cast itself as the aggrieved party.  This helps to generate broader-based support for the movement, which is crucial to resource mobilization.  I very strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who have commented and re-posted this story have never before read the blog of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and would not have seen the post had it simply been posted there.  I had to scroll back to August 2013 to find a post on the CMHR blog that had a comment on it.  It also isn't a blog with a rich history of guest postings - only six names of guest bloggers appear on their contributors roll.  The ActiveHistory.ca website, on the other hand, has a widespread readership among Canadian historians and engenders a lot of commentary.  The Berks is the main conference on women's history in North America.  Far from being silenced, the decision by the CMHR to remove the post as written from their site has meant that Strong-Boag got a series of major platforms to attack the Harper government's record on women's rights, and along the way to damage the CMHR's reputation and cast suspicion (possibly warranted, although this is unproven) of a sinister federal hand behind the removal of the blogpost.  Meanwhile, there is no post for International Women's Day on the CMHR blog.

To be perfectly clear, I don't disagree with Strong-Boag's stance on the Harper government's policy record.  But nor am I surprised that the museum would have shied away from her post.  Strong-Boag  engaged in a direct partisan attack. A paragraph discussing past-and-present Canadian governments' decidedly mixed record on women's issues (perhaps including Trudeau-era restrictions on the National Action Committee on the Status of Women's lobbying efforts that were linked to their government funding, or the successive failures of a series of federal governments to make any meaningful progress on the childcare agenda) might possibly have made it past the communications officers at the CMHR.  At the very least, it would have been harder for a communications officer to defend the removal of a blogpost that presented a more balanced critique of the less-than-stellar record of Canada's federal governments (Liberal and Conservative) on women's issues that placed the current claw-backs in their historical context.  But to me, the section on the current government in the post as currently written reads as an isolated (if deserved) swipe at the government of the day and explicitly partisan.

If this was a deliberate strategic move on Strong-Boag's part, it has worked beautifully, so kudos to her for getting her message disseminated.  Far more people have read her account of IWD than likely would have ever seen it on the CMHR blog.  I just find it a little bit disingenuous to speak of silencing and censorship in what appears to me to be a case of a museum trying not to appear to be overtly partisan in its public communications.  Even if it could have been claimed that this was a "guest post", the museum would have been held accountable in the media, and with their various funders, for the content that appeared.

UPDATE (March 9, 3:10 PM): The story is now on the CBC website, with additional commentary from Strong-Boag, and a reply from the museum's blog editor. 

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Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government's history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada's past.  If you're an academic who reads this blog, this collection might be of interest to you.


Call for Abstracts – Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With the 150th anniversary of Confederation coming up in 2017, it seems appropriate to reflect on the political, social and cultural forces which have shaped Canada over the course of its history.  National holidays and commemorative events provide an intriguing window into how these processes have affected, and continue to shape nationalism, culture and identity politics.  With this in mind, we invite interested authors to submit proposals for an edited collection that we are developing.  Tentatively entitled "Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics", our objective is to pull together scholarship related to national holidays and major commemorative anniversaries in Canadian history.  While our launching point for this collection is the celebration and observance of Dominion Day / Canada Day, we are taking a broad approach to the book's theme, and would like to include contributions that deal with major anniversary years like the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, the Centennial of 1967, Canada 125 and other related – or competing! - national holidays such as Victoria Day, la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste/Fête Nationale, and Empire Day. We welcome contributions that situate Canadian holidays in a broader international context. 

We have already been in discussions with University of Toronto Press, where there is keen interest in this project. Interested authors are asked to submit proposals to Matthew Hayday [mhayday@uoguelph.ca] by 2 July 2013 (the day after the Canada Day holiday!) including a 250-500 word abstract and the author's institutional affiliation and contact information.  Our planned schedule is to contact authors regarding their proposals by the end of July, and have first completed drafts due in late spring 2014.  We are planning to apply for a SSHRC Connection Grant, with an eye to having participants come together for a workshop in the summer of 2014 to discuss each other's work.  This should provide ample time for revisions and the peer review process to allow the collection to be in print no later than 2017.

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Matthew Hayday
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Guelph
mhayday@uoguelph.ca

Raymond Blake
Professor, Department of History, University of Regina
Raymond.Blake@uregina.ca

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Canadian Queer History in the Making - Kathleen Wynne

Ontario's Liberal party - struggling on so many fronts these days - nevertheless made history yesterday in selecting Kathleen Wynne as their new leader, and by extension, the new Premier of the province.  The second woman to head the Ontario Liberals, Wynne will become the first woman to be Ontario's Premier.  And more excitingly for me, she will be the first openly gay Premier in Canadian history.  Now, whether the Ontario Liberals, who are in a fairly precarious minority situation right now, will be able to hold on to power for much longer, is an open question.  But in the short term at least, history has been made, and there will certainly be a new line in Canadian history textbooks marking this Canadian first.

Of course, many have asked in the past 14 hours why the adjective "openly" is always added into the newspaper headlines and mentions by media commentators.  This speaks to the rather interesting media culture in this country.  From all accounts, Wynne is not in fact the first gay premier in the country (for the highest-profile instance, do a quick search on New Brunswick's long-serving Progressive Conservative premier Richard Hatfield, who passed away in the early 1990s, or follow this link to a story in the Globe.).  But the media culture in Canada is loathe to out a politician who has not come out.  And so we've probably had other instances of gay premiers, and likely gay party leaders, cabinet ministers, etc. who were not openly gay.  In many of these cases, their sexual orientation was an open secret to the media, their friends, their close acquaintances.  But there is still quite the culture of privacy in Canadian reporting on this issue.

So, congratulations to Kathleen Wynne on being selected as Ontario's new premier, and to Ontario's Liberal convention delegates for selecting her as your leader.  It is a marker of how much has changed in this province over such a short period of time.

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Shared Embassies - Imperial Federation League Redux

Many people have already vociferously attacked the recent, and highly publicized, announcement by John Baird, Minister of Foreign Affairs, that Canada and the United Kingdom have brokered a deal to share embassy space in a number of countries as a cost-saving measure.  It is hard not to think that the fact that this was the subject of a press release, rather than a quiet administrative arrangement (as currently exists, for example, between Canada and Australia in a number of countries) is because this decision is part and parcel of the current Conservative government's efforts to re-Britishify Canada's identity.

I share many of my colleagues' concern with this development, at least in part because of my understanding of Canadian history, which includes national narratives about Canada's twentieth-century development largely being a story of progressive Canadian disentanglement from British control over our foreign policy, while still remaining close allies.  The decision to create separate Canadian overseas offices in the 1920s and 1930s was part and parcel of showing that Canada and Britain did not always necessarily speak with one voice and that their interests were not identical.  In many respects, Canadian foreign policy autonomy was hard-won.  And yet, now I find myself snarkilly inventing Onion-esque headlines for where this policy direction could lead, albeit taken to some absurd extremes.  To wit:

Canada to ask United Kingdom to retroactively counter-sign 1923 Pacific Halibut Fisheries treaty: "It just never felt right not having Britain's permission, official says."

John Baird issues formal apology to United Kingdom for Canada's failure to enthusiastically volunteer troops for 1922 Chanak Crisis: "Do you have any brewing concerns in Turkey today that we can send the Royal Canadian Air Force to help you out with?" foreign affairs minister asks.

Canadian government asks to have signature removed from the Treaty of Versailles, and membership in the League of Nations stricken from the historical record - Canadian government admits it was being uppity in 1919. 

I've got more where those come from, but this gives you a pretty good sense of my mood this afternoon!
 

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What's wrong with this sentence?

The following sentence appears in a recently-published book about Canadian history:

"After Ontario, Québec, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick became provinces within the new Dominion of Canada in 1867, after the federal government purchased Rupert's Land in 1869, and after British Columbia became a Canadian province in 1871, Canada became a coast-to-coast political entity encompassing a vast array of geographies and cultures."

This book was short-listed for a number of awards, so it will likely attract a reasonable-sized readership among the academic community.  I'm not sure who should be most embarrassed by this rather glaring error - the scholarly press, the copy editor, the peer reviewers, or the author - all of whom should have had at least a passing familiarity with the Confederation-era development of Canada.

I started off by reading the introduction and conclusion, and so I have yet to make my way through the main chapters of the book to get into its main subject matter (which is not about Canada's political development, thank goodness), but this has left a rather bad first impression.

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Canadian Political History Prizes / Prix en histoire politique canadienne

A few years ago, I helped organize and launch a Political History Group within the Canadian Historical Association. One of the group's initial objectives was to promote the recognition of excellent scholarship in Canadian political history, and so last year we launched a series of three prizes - best book, best English-language article, and best French-language article. We were short of nominations for the French-language article prize, but had numerous submissions for the other two prizes, which were won by Ivana Caccia for her book Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939-1945, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and Bradley Miller, for his article “‘A carnival of crime on our border’: International Law, Imperial Power, and Extradition in Canada, 1865-1883,” which appeared in the Canadian Historical Review.

I'm pleased to announce the competitions for the 2012 prizes. Details may be found at the Political History Group's website in English and French.

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John A.: Birth of a Country

Last night, the CBC aired John A.: The Birth of a Country, a dramatization of the eight years of Canadian political history leading up to the formation of the Great Coalition government of 1864 - the government which ultimately drove the Confederation process. Based on Richard Gwyn's recent biography of Sir John A. Macdonald (and with historical insights provided by my friend, historian Andrew Smith), the film is clearly an effort to reinvigorate the interest that Canadians have for their past. Twitter today has been filled with glowing reviews from the Historica-Dominion institute and Canada's History magazine.

Would that I could share this enthusiasm. I'll admit that even though I love and teach Canadian political history, I've never been a huge fan of historical films, and I don't read nearly as many biographies as perhaps I should. But I'm always on the lookout for a new film to show in the Practicing Historian course that I teach to my second year students (much as The Valour and the Horror illustrates a lot of very useful points about film and public history, I don't particularly enjoy watching it year after year), and so I decided to settle in and watch John A. last night. Having done so, I don't understand the accolades being heaped on it by people such as Andrew Coyne and Peter Mansbridge.

The acting by the two leads, Shawn Doyle and Peter Outerbridge, as John A. Macdonald and George Brown, was solid, given the script and the material that they had to work with. Brown, in particular, came across as a complex character who had strong ideas about democracy and the failures of the United Province. Macdonald, on the other hand, was largely depicted as a charismatic showman and a crafty political operator. Having watched the film, though, I got the sense that the filmmakers got to a certain point and decided that they really wanted to make this a film about George Brown. This doesn't surprise me, as most of the accounts that I've read of Confederation give Brown most of the credit for compromising and coming up with the idea for a constitutional committee and the Great Coalition. Of the three major leaders (along with George-Etienne Cartier, who only plays a bit part in the film), Conservative leader Macdonald controlled the smallest number of followers in the legislative assembly. Nevertheless, the result is that "John A." felt like a misnomer of a film that could just as easily have been called "George". Had the film continued into the Confederation negotiations of 1864-67, Macdonald's central place in the narrative might have seemed more justified.

I'm not a historian of 19th century Canada. My own research interests lie in more recent decades, so I'm not particularly well placed to pick apart where the filmmakers might have taken some liberties with the historical past. My bigger concern is with the film itself as a piece of entertainment. It is primarily on this score that I found it to be a failure. I was not gripped by the drama, nor drawn in by the characterizations of these politicians. Quite the contrary. I found the script to be leaden in its earnest desire to educate its audience. In an effort to communicate historical facts, the characters frequently engaged in dialogue that sounded like they were reading aloud from historical monographs. It reminded me of a great scene from "The Great Muppet Caper", where Lady Holiday (played by Diana Rigg) delivers a long monologue explaining all about her relationship with her brother, the family business, etc, and then Miss Piggy turns to her and asks "Why are you telling me all of this?" Holiday airily replies, "It's plot exposition, it has to go somewhere. Anyways..." Almost all of the dialogue of John A. felt like this to me. The characters kept telling each other things in a completely artificial way, providing historical exposition for the audience, but snapping the viewer out of the moment, and making him/her very much aware that they were being educated about Canada's history.

Overall, the film felt like a two hour version of on of Historica's Canadian History minutes. And while that method of communicating tidbits of Canadian history can work in a one-minute commercial, it becomes tiresome in the format of a feature-length film. Caught between a desire to educate Canadians about their past and a desire to provide good entertainment, the filmmakers appear to have been unable to make up their minds, and thus fell flat with their final product. Mind you, I don't know that I could have done a much better job myself with the source material. I don't really understand what led to a decision to end this film with the start of the more interesting story about how the Confederation deal was brokered. When I lecture on this material to my undergraduates, I take less time to address the issue of the deadlocked legislative assembly of the 1850s and 1860s than this film did. It might well have been better to simply admit that some aspects of Canada's political past are not the best source material for a movie. But that's another debate...

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Canada Day 144

As long-time readers of this blog may know, I spent many years researching the history of Canada Day celebrations, especially the ones funded by the federal government and those hosted in Ottawa. The project is pretty much wrapped up now, having yielded three published articles and book chapters, a number of public lectures, a podcast, a series of interviews and another article that is still working its way through the publication chain.

For a capsule version of some of the findings of this research, feel free to take a look at this article from the University of Guelph alumni magazine slightly reworked to incorporate this weekend's events, which hits on a few of the major highlights.

And no, I didn't get to pick the backdrop!

ETA: I couldn't resist posting this image from the mid-80s - Because nothing says Canada like Bert the Raccoon and a Kazoo band! :

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In Memoriam: John T. (Jack) Saywell, 1929-2011

I was saddened this morning to learn that Jack Saywell, the widely-acknowledged founder of York University's history department and an emininent legal and constitutional historian, passed away last week. Saywell has been a hugely influential presence in Canadian political and legal history circles over the past six decades. His most recent major monograph, The Lawmakers, is essential reading for understanding the role of the courts, particularly the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in the evolution of Canadian federalism. A recent tribute to his influence, Framing Canadian Federalism, was recently co-edited by Penny Bryden and Dimitry Anastakis.

Our understanding of Canadian history is richer for the contributions of Jack Saywell. He will be sorely missed.

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In Memoriam: Olive Dickason (1920-2011)

This blog isn't going to become a chronicle of the passing of people who have played roles in my career as a historian, (political blogging will likely resume when the writ is dropped, if not sooner) but it nevertheless came as a bit of a shock for me to learn that path-breaking Métis historian Olive Dickason had passed away last weekend. History blogger Christopher Moore has a nice tribute to her at his site, and there are many other aboriginal and governmental groups who have posted similarly glowing assessments of her life and career.

My own contact with Professor Dickason was rather fleeting, but still important to me. She was an emeritus professor at the University of Ottawa when I was a graduate student in the late-90s, and although she wasn't offering any courses at the time, a friend of mine was starting her PhD work with her. I met her and we had a few brief conversations at various departmental socials. My research does not usually head too far into aboriginal history, but Professor Dickason nevertheless played an important role in my career. Twice in my early teaching career - once at Concordia, and once at Mount Allison - I was asked to teach courses on Canadian First Nations History. Olive Dickason's textbook Canada's First Nations, which is still widely used and now in its fourth printing, was a lifesaver to a young post-doc who was wildly out of his depth. She had a huge impact in the field of Canadian history, especially on aboriginal and Métis history, and will be greatly missed.

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Adventures in Copyright - A Plea for Assistance

Over the past few years, a number of publishing projects have made me keenly aware of how complicated Canadian (and international) copyright law can be. Right now, I'm working on a textbook module on gay and lesbian activism in 1970s Canada for Nelson publishing. I'm proposing to include three book chapters and scholarly articles, plus a selection of material that was originally published in Toronto's The Body Politic periodical. Sounds simple, right? Alas, when it comes to securing copyright, it is anything but, and this seems to be the case for much material published in periodicals prior to the 1990s. While Pink Triangle Press, who published TBP, is keen to allow us permission to use this material, they aren't certain who legally holds the copyright, and so we have to track down the original authors/photographers/cartoonists. But what does one do if they don't know who the photographer was, or if the author is deceased. That, my gentle readers, calls for careful detective work.

So, on the off chance that this post is seen by some friendly readers familiar with gay and lesbian activists of the 1970s, I'd greatly appreciate any leads that can help me track down someone who might know about the estates of Chris Bearchell or Michael Lynch, or who knows who was leading Toronto Gay Action in 1971 and could authorize the reprinting of the "We Demand" manifesto. My email contact information is listed in my profile.

Many thanks!

ETA: Thanks to the various people who have provided me with helpfor this query! I think I now have all the information I could hope to have found.

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Peter C. Newman and Political Biography

The annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities wrapped up today. On the whole I had a good time, meeting up with a mix of eminent scholars, new grad students and old friends and also hearing some good papers. This was the first year that the Political History Group, a group that I helped found, was able to sponsor some sessions. Although I was quite happy with the roundtable that I organized on the current state of the field of political history, my real excitement was for a roundtable on political biography. We'd brought together a mix of new scholars (Cara Spittal & Adam Chapnick) and very well-known biographers (John English, Peter C. Newman) to speak about the challenges and developments in their field.

This was not the only session on biography that was held at the CHA, and indeed just before heading into our session, I'd attended another session dealing with issues of gender, historiographical theory and biography. During that session, panelists and the session attendees wrestled with questions of performativity, of private lives, and of reinjecting emotional and affective ties into history, particularly when it touched on political issues.

What I found particularly striking about attending these two panels back-to-back was the extent to which the "old school" political biographers were explicit about the fact that the issues which were so important to the social and gender historians in the prior panel were also issues that they had long incorporated into their own work. Indeed, Peter C. Newman spoke at length about how as a political journalist, he always paid more attention to body language and to the emotional content of what was being said, than to the words themselves. He spoke passionately of the need to tap into human feelings to make biographies appeal to readers. It was quite refreshing, and perhaps a bit ironic, to discover that the political biographers were already well in-tune with the issues of such great importance to the academic social historians, albeit perhaps in a less theoreticized mode. And of course, it was delightful to hear Newman's anecdotes from his encounters with our past Prime Ministers!

Clearly the field has a great deal of vitality. As John English, currently co-editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, pointed out, the DCB gets 280,000 hits a month, a far cry from the 20,000 that were predicted when its internet site was launched in 2003. The most hits, he noted, were for political leaders of the past. It would seem that interest in political history is indeed alive and well, which is very gratifying for those of us working in the field.

I would have liked to hear the panelists speak more about the new developments in their field, such as Cara Spittal reflections about the impact of microhistory on her work on the Diefenbaker era. It's clear from reading English's biographies of Trudeau that his work has been influenced by women's history, gender history and even new understandings of political history. However, I believe that political historians would benefit from being more explicit about the new influences on their work, which is often casually derided by some social historians, despite the increased sophistication and theoretical models which increasingly underpin their work. That qualifier aside, I think this panel went well, and perhaps might help spark some increased activity in this under-populated field of Canadian history.

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Maybe the Dominion Institute is right after all

I usually take the dire warnings of the Dominion Institute about the declining state of knowledge of Canadian history with a pound of salt. Although I consider myself to be a political historian, I generally do not subscribe to the "sky is falling" mantra that knowledge of my country's political history has all but disappeared.

But every so often, I wonder. I'm in the midst of reading a book for possible teaching purposes. I'm not going to name the author, because it's someone I consider a colleague, and it's not my purpose to engage in ridicule. But I am flabbergasted not only that someone with a PhD in Canadian history could not know that it was the Conservatives, not the Liberals, who formed the federal government at the outset of the First World War, but that this egregious error somehow made it past two expert reviewers and the copy editors at a reputable academic press!

Clearly, some people haven't been subjected to marking dozens of papers on the 1911 federal election - considered by many to be one of the most significant of this country's history!

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