Book Notes: Richard Stursberg, Lament for a Literature

Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing hit me with a shock of recognition. I’m not in it, but it sounds like the story of my life and career.

When I left the historic sites service of Parks Canada in the mid-1970s, there were lots of books being published, lots of publishers, lots of independent newspapers, magazines, radio stations, bookstores, and libraries to welcome writers and promote their books. I figured Pierre Berton alone could not fill the demand he had created for Canadian historical nonfiction. Why shouldn’t I seize a share?

So I did. At the end of the 1970s I became a freelance writer about Canadian history. My first book  was published in 1982 with the contract for a second already signed, and I had no other career until I decided it was time to let others to take up the torch.  If people ask if I am a famous writer, I usually say “Well, I am if you have heard of me.” But books I wrote got published and noticed and promoted and sometimes awarded. And the books led to a host of ancillary work in historical journalism and broadcasting and to historical consulting projects large and small in forms I could never have predicted. It was a living.

Richard Stursberg’s slim hundred pages are a explanation of how that world came to an end. By the time I was ready to let other aspirants take over, that writing and publishing world had largely faded away. If I had potential heirs, their path are harder or at least very different than mine.  

And boy, does Richard Stursberg show why. In true Canadian spirit, he divides the rise and fall of Canadian writing and publishing into Canada’s five seasons:  Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Even More Winter. 

Stursberg is not always persuasive as a cultural critic – he calls Marian Engel’s Bear “a book about bestiality,” cites Solomon Gursky Was Here as Mordechai Richler’s best novel, and thinks Canadian writers should be obliged to set all their stories in Canada. He seems to miss a lot of the sort-of-samizdat by which Canadian writers endure and distribute their works despite the collapse of all the big institutional supports. He even believes ‘wokeism’ and DEI have helped cause the downfall of Canadian nonfiction writing when in reality the reassessment of figures like John A Macdonald is our best hope, not just for reconciliation, but for a new and livelier writing of Canadian history.

But mostly Stursberg has found the causes of Canadian publishing's collapse – and lays them out with copious tables and charts.  

Canada fought hard to place a “cultural exemption” in the 1988 free trade agreement.  But -- surprise! -- it never took. As soon as it was signed, all the major Canadian publishers were turned into branch plant operations.  Soon Amazon and Kindle were given a free hand to undermine Canadian bookselling, tax free. The Carney government’s recent surrender on the Digital Services Tax and its cutbacks to federal cultural agencies suggests the tide has not turned. Significantly, Stursberg notes that where film and broadcasting are governed by an independent commission required to publicize its decisions, decisions to support or undermine Canadian publishing have always been made by secretive bureaucracies.

As he writes, “For over fifty years, the government has failed to abide by its signature and most basic policy: ensuring that the Canadian book business, both publishing and retail , is owned and controlled by Canadians." 

If Richard Stursberg’s little book can help stem the ongoing assault on Canadian writing and publishing, he will have done the country a service. Can a book still make a difference in Canada?

Cuts at the War Museum and Canadian History museum

Maybe this is what the Carney government really thinks about the importance of historical and cultural matters in our current situation. The CBC reports:

The Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum will be cutting permanent staff levels by 18 per cent over the next three years due to cuts announced in the federal budget.

Avra ​​Gibbs-Lamey, a spokesperson for the history museum — which also manages the war museum — told Radio-Canada that permanent staff will drop from 371 to 304.

Mark Carney's take on Canadian history

From the media, I got the impression that Prime Minister Carney made a faux pas when he gave a speech about Canadian solidarity on the Plains of Abraham last week.  In fact, his staff started to say he made the speech at the Citadel of Quebec, as if the Plains of Abraham was maybe the wrong place to praise Canada. 

The whole thing rather played into my concern that the prime minister, a banker by trade, is big on economic development (and mostly by the private sector) but not much oriented to other important elements of national identity, including history.  

But then I read the speech. I think he got a bad rap, too much of it influenced by the Quebec nationalist trope that the one thing to know about the history of the Québécois is that they have always been oppressed. To my surprise, Carney's take on the long sweep of Canadian history seemed to be a pretty fair and sophisticated one.  

I wondered if John Ralston Saul had been at the prime minister's elbow recently: the reference to Charles Taylor, the emphasis on three founding people, "the fundamental insight that unity does not require uniformity."

The speech surely goes off track when it says, "The Plains of Abraham mark a battlefield, and also the place where Canada began to make its founding choice of accommodation over assimilation." No, the Plains were and remain a battlefield. Better perhaps to have said, "The City of Quebec marks a battlefield and also the place ....."

But broadly, I find that Carney's speech is alive to the reality of conflicts, of disagreements, of conflicting identities that have always existed within Canada, while still insisting that accommodation and tolerance have also been vital to Canadian progress.  

I thought he was justified in quoting Georges-Etienne Cartier saying Canadians were "of different races, not for the purpose of warring against each other, but in order to compete and emulate for the general welfare."  It's a claim that I have quoted in print myself, but no doubt he and his speechwriters would have found it elsewhere.  

Carney might had alluded to George Brown's observation that a century after the conquest, "here today sit the descendants of the victors and the vanquished ... seeking amicably to find a remedy for constitutional evils complained of not by the vanquished but by the victors," with "the representatives of the French population discussing in the French tongue whether we shall have it."  That was pretty on the nose when he said it in 1865; maybe it still is.

We have not seen the Carney government give much suggestion that it thinks cultural or historical aspects of Canada should be significant in our current crisis. It would be nice to hope this speech leads to a change in that.

In any case, it's better than just calling for more Macdonald statues, which seems to be widespread in Canadian historical chatter these days.

New reasons to close the 49th Parallel

 

“We’ve never needed them [NATO] … They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines.”

What's the difference between Donald Trump and Nato, somebody said on Bluesky.  "Donald Trump would never put on a uniform to defend the United States." 

Part of what's troubling about this stupid cruel insult is that vast numbers of Americans will presume it is true. Canadian historian Marc Milner's recent book Second Front is a close examination of how most American historians have tended to downplay non-American contributions to the D-Day landings and pretty much the whole of World War II. 

Even now, many Americans cling to their bizarre faith that  America alone represents freedom and democracy and remains a lonely beacon to the world.  

Canada's Historic Places to be Deregistered

 

Here's a strange one.

The National Trust of Canada reports that Parks Canada will shut down the Canadian Register of Historic Places, "an online searchable database of historic places in Canada which have been formally recognized for their heritage value by federal, provincial, municipal or territorial authorities."  It records more than 13,000 such places across the country.  It will cease to function in the spring of 2026, according to Parks Canada.

For the time being you can search the Registry yourself at historicplaces.ca.  The National Trust report includes a list of federal and provincial ministers and agencies you can complain to.

Who knew Greenland was going to make history?

Wesley Wark, former historian of security and intelligence history at the University of Toronto turned independent security consultant, has a Substack. I've started reading it. 

I hesitate about recommending Substacks because anything more than the barest mention of that platform seems to bring floods of unwanted subscriptions and offers -- the corporate monetizing of blogging triumphant.

But Wark is posting frequently and perceptively, and seemingly with better info sources than most, on the new reality that Canada's longtime leading security ally has become our greatest security threat and Europe's too. (Canadian forces to Greenland? Yes, he says.)  The Walrus reprints some of them.

Wark bio from his Substack:    National security and intelligence expert. Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Professor emeritus, University of Toronto.  

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 ottoenglish@bluesky.com), 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.