History of Canada's other Charter

The Globe and Mail this morning has a lot of detail about the future of the Charter of the Hudson Bay Company, now that the company itself is no longer around to maintain it. Mostly it seems to be good news, maybe even a story of some billionaires actually doing a not-evil thing.

Decades ago, the Hudson Bay Company donated its immense archives to the Manitoba Archives and its equally impressive artifact collection to the Manitoba Museum, while also using its tax break windfall from that to provide funds to those institutions to handle what they had been given,  About the same time they also spun off their quaint little "Beaver" magazine to become the genesis of today's Canada's History and all its history-related projects, also with a foundational grant to help it launch.

I was drawn into these matters in the 1990s, when I was asked to talk to a few people and draft a report about the conservation of the HBC Charter.  I'm ashamed to admit I cannot recall who exactly wanted the story, and I don't seem to have preserved much documentation of my small contribution, not even a draft text.  But I vividly remember being taken to the HBC corporate offices high above Queen Street in Toronto and shown the famous Charter, by then hermetically sealed inside a protective canister based on technology developed for use in space capsules. 

(I do remember being pleased at my own cleverness when I drafted a lede to the effect of: "How do you protect a 300 year old piece of sheepskin so that it will survive for another 300 years? It doesn't seem like rocket science. But in fact, it is.") 

At the time, the Company leaders had decided not to include its charter from 1670 in its disposition of its historical materials.  I guess they expected they might be in business another 300 years or so and should keep the vital document that justified their existence close to hand. That is why the Charter and its new and impermeable case sat in a corporate office space and not in the museum and the archives that had everything else.

So this year,when the Yank owners drove the Bay into insolvency in a swirl of property speculation and asset-stripping, the Charter, virtually alone among the Bay's historical treasures, ended up being part of the spoils to be auctioned off in a process mostly of interest to real estate investors.   

Fortunately, the dissolution of the Bay is being supervised by the courts of Ontario, and the judge in charge declared bluntly in September 2025 he intended to safeguard the Charter if no one else did:

“I must say I’m concerned, increasingly so, about the process,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Peter Osborne said during that Sept. 29 hearing. “And I am going to keep this on the rails.  ....  We are going to do this right, not fast.”

Move ahead a couple of months, and two parties who might have been among the competitive bidders at a highest-bidder gavelling away of the HBC Charter have gotten together to present what may be both a pre-emptive bid and a sensible solution. 

The Weston interests and the Thomson interests (ie, more money than anybody)  have proposed to put up many millions for the Charter. Their commitment is to make Manitoba its official home while confiding ownership jointly to the Manitoba Museum, the Manitoba Archives, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Canadian Museum of History. The National Council for Truth and Reconciliation, which was consulted in this process, is providing a letter supporting this solution, on the understanding that indigenous voices are and will be fully included.

Sounds better that leaving the HBC Charter buried in a corporate HQ somewhere, or shipped away to adorn some Saudi prince's private cabinet of wonders.

Image: Google Images

New look Canada's History

Jacqueline Kovacs, who took over as Editorial Director at Canada's History magazine some time ago, has been working on a redesign of the magazine, and her new look is on show with the December-January issue, now reaching subscribers.

It's thicker for one thing: a solid 122 pages this issue -- though thickened some by the annual "Great Canadian Gift Guide for History Lovers" which is mostly book ads, but a useful display of a lot of the current history releases, including many local works from small publishers not widely publicized elsewhere.  There are more feature stories in the new look:  nine of them in this issue.  And Kovacs, a veteran of the Toronto publishing scene, seems to have recruited some notable names from the southern Ontario freelancer community.

The cover story, by Toronto journalist John Lorinc, a longtime planning and heritage writer, is about "the birth of modern Canada," following the end of racial quotas in immigration in the late 1960s and the start of mass immigration of diverse peoples from the Caribbean, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Lorinc has interviewed many experts on this topic for his story, and it is heartening to see how many are themselves from the multi-cultural mosaic. 

Lorinc notes multi-ethnic immigration has always been controversial in Canada.  For a long time mass immigration was popular with all major political parties and with Canadians in general.  Yet right from the beginning, and flaring up regularly since, there have always been claims that immigrants bring crime, take jobs, and fail to "fit in."  As Ujjal Dosanjh, former premier of British Columbia, tells Lorinc, "It's hard to measure the impact of these things... But it happened, right?"  

Much more:  museums, a new series on heritage buildings, Saskatchewan musicians, Charles Dickens in Canada. You should subscribe.  

Prize Watch: Cundill Prize to Lyndal Roper

Lyndal Roper's Summer of Fire and Blood: the German Peasants' War was announced recently as the 2025 winner of the Montreal-based Cundill Prize for the best history book published in English.

Summer of Fire and Blood is the very model of a Cundill winner.  That is, it is a big, widely-acclaimed narrative history on a topic both substantial and relatively neglected (at least in English), readable but deeply researched, from a distinguished professor at a leading university (Roper, an Australian, is Regius Professor at Oxford, and the first woman ever to hold that chair -- Hugh Trevor-Roper may be rolling in his grave), and published by a major press  -- though in this case not actually an academic press by Basic Books).

Roper makes much of the simultaneous explosion of the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt in Germany,  both of which were at fever pitch in the early 1520s.  It's not quite that the reformation inspired the peasants or that the peasants inspired the reformation, but how they overlapped and influenced each other.  Luther's demand that Christians be allowed to think for themselves, keep their pastors accountable, and read and pray in their own language definitely resonated with the peasants, in ways Luther, a mine owner's son and friend to many German princes, came to loathe and denounce).  The peasants had issues and crises of their own that made them receptive to religious reform as well as social revolution.

Spoiler alert (and I haven't got to the end yet myself):  it doesn't end well for the peasants, as pretty much always in peasant revolts.

Book notes: the Osgoode Society histories

Downtown last night to attend the annual book launch of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, "the most successful legal history society in the common law world," as Editor-in-Chief Jim Phillips never misses a chance to say.  Pretty good evidence he has, too:  130+ books in Canadian legal history published in not quite fifty years.  Four more this year, and a big crowd of lawyers, judges, law profs, and historians to salute the society's four new books and their authors.  I'm just copying a big slab from the society's website below.

• 

  Robert Sharpe, My Life in the Law: Lawyer, Scholar, Judge 

  University of Toronto Press. As the title suggests, this book is a personal reflection on Robert Sharpe’s long, varied and influential career as a lawyer, scholar and judge, which incudes a decade as the President of the Osgoode Society.  

• 

  Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross, Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution

  University of British Columbia Press. Eric Adams is Professor of Law at the University of Alberta, Jordan Stanger-Ross is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.  

• 

  Carolyn Strange, Fatal Confession: A Girl’s Murder, a Man’s Execution, and the Fitton Case

  University of British Columbia Press. Carolyn Strange is Professor of History at the Australian National University. In the mid-1950s most Canadians still believed that murder merited the death penalty.  

• 

  Jim Phillips, I Did Not Commit Adultery: Marital Conflict and the Law in Ontario in the 1870s 

  University of Toronto Press. Jim Phillips is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of History and the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies.  

Book Notes: Levine on Dollar-a-Year Men

A friend told me he has been enjoying Allan Levine's new The Dollar A Year Men.  I haven't seen it myself but here's a bit from the publisher's summary:

When Canada went to war in 1939, the goal was to provide the British with the ships, planes, and weapons that it desperately needed to defend their island against Nazi Germany. But at the time, Canada had little to offer in terms of military hardware. That was when Canada recruited top business leaders to take charge. In six years, they turned Canada into one of the greatest military powers in the world. They helped to win the war, and in the process they turned Canada’s economy into a modern industrial one. What’s more, they served the country for a dollar a year, or even nothing. This is an inspiring and patriotic story for Canadians in a time of crisis.

Same friend tells me Allan even cited a long-ago piece of my ephemeral journalism for something I said long ago about one of his people. I don't think I have a copy of it anymore.  

Book Notes: History of Adultery and the Canadian Senate

Some of you Canadianists may be aware that in 19th century Canada, the usual way to get a divorce was to go to the Senate of Canada and ask it to become a divorce court. But how did that happen? How did it work? Maybe it's another of those constitutional history details that make historians say "It's too picky and complicated, let's just handwave and skip across it."

Now historian and law prof Jim Phillips has put a catchy title on the whole thing. In I Did Not Commit Adultery, he's found a way to sort out the workings of the law of marital conflict through a deep dive into the unhappy marriage of Robert and Eliza Campbell, whose wrangles kept the courts and the Senate busy -- and the neighbours in Whitby, Ontario, talking -- for years and years.

I just received my copy and may have more to say about it when I have actually read it. Members of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History can restart Campbell family gossip and celebrate my friend Jim and its other 2025 authors when it launches its new books next Monday.

History of how not to reconcile

 

Charlie Angus's Ring of Fire Youtube ad --  cause you may be sick of Ontario's one.

Okay, Donald Trump hates the Reagan ad.  The widely circulating Ontario ad that makes me mad is the one endlessly proclaiming that the Ring of Fire is going to save us all: Give us $22 billion, give us 77,000 jobs. Rebuild the Canadian economy by digging up more minerals for the USA. 

The Reagan ad was legal, honest, and fair. The Ring of Fire ad is fake news all the way.

Happily, the antidote is found in Riley Yesno's article in the Toronto Star this weekend "The Truth about Ontario's Ring of Fire ads."  Here's the essential takedown of this miracle project in two sentences:

"So why hasn’t this project started already?

"The biggest problem: The province doesn’t have the right to the land."

That's the truth we need to start with. Treaty 9, which covers the so-called Ring of Fire  (a marketing slogan, recently coined; Yesno prefers "Mammamattawa") and most of northern Ontario, was an agreement to share the land.  The chiefs consistently refused to make treaty until they were told "the land will always be yours," "you may hunt and fish forever," "reserves are only places no white man can disturb up" over and over again.  

It is true Ottawa's official text of Treaty 9 uses words like "cede, yield, release, and surrender" and "the Crown may "take up" Treaty 9 where and when it choses to.  But the treaty text was written and printed up in Ottawa before the treaty commissioners ever set out for the Severn River. No commissioner dared to say these words aloud or allow them to be translated for the chief.  The real Treaty 9, the one actually negotiated on the land by the authorized parties on both side, was absolutely an agreement to share the land.

This reality behind Treaty 9 is unusually well documented, perhaps because it was one of the last made (in 1905). But the basis on which all the Canadian treaties were made and ratified is the same: an agreement to share the land.   There really is no legal basis for Ontario to develop extractive projects in Mammamattawa unless and until the two sides negotiate agreements as to how the wealth will be shared.  Ontario really has not even started bargaining.

Harold Johnson, the Cree lawyer and writer, used to say the settlers of Canada have an absolute right to be here. That absolute right comes with the treaties they made with First Nations. 

And to validate that right, he would then say, all the settlers have to do is to live up to the commitments made in the treaties.

Maybe there has to be one BIG court case.  The Supreme Court has been begging Canada and the provinces to negotiate treaty rights and land claims , and not to force all the decisions into the courts.  But there is a lot of jurisprudence to suggest which way the courts will find if pushed to it.  

Why do so many people find it hard to articulate these realities.   As they say, it's hard to see the truth if your livelihood depends on not seeing it.

Vital Reading:  John Long: Treaty 9: The Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario (McGill-Queen's UP).

Cheater version:  "George McMartin's Big Canoe Trip" from CBC Radio Ideas .Online

Like French press coffee, our idea is filtering through. Slowwwwwly.

 

In this brief YouTube (above), Ottawa journalist Dale Smith goes in wholeheartedly on why MPs (and MLA, MMPs and the others in the provinces) have and always have had the right and the power to remove a party leader, even one picked by a mass party vote (particularly one picked by zombie voters with last-minute memberships supplied).  He doesn't emphasize the MPs parallel (and equally vital) right to choose the fired leader's replacement. But that will come.  

Here's examples of me making the case from, yeesh, the 1990s on. And in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, too, of course.  And this blog, passim.  

The idea remains well outside the Overton window however.  The standard understanding of political scientists and journalists was on show recently at Paul Wells's Substack, where Alex Marland discusses his theories of why party discipline is so strong in Canadian politics and never gets around to the leadership selection/deselection process.

New podcast at the CIHE

 

The Toronto organization called the Canadian Institute for Historical Education has drawn my attention to its new podcast History Matters, interviewing historians and commentators about the subjects that interest the institute. Indeed, it invited me to appear.  But for the moment I have declined.

The CIHE is a well-funded little organization founded a few years ago at a meeting at a private Toronto club. Who would not be in favour of historical education? But its concept of education concern me, frankly. 

It has been vociferous in opposing any suggestion that John A Macdonald bears any responsibility for the disasters that befell indigenous people, particularly on the plains, during his time. It strongly opposed changing the name of the former Ryerson University or renaming a Toronto public square to commemorate Afro-Canadian contributions to Canada rather than the British statesman Lord Dundas. It invited David Frum from the United States to minimize the horrors of the residential schools and Nigel Biggar, author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, from Scotland to explain that colonized people all over the world should be more grateful to the British, who are moral pretty much by definition. 

I believe it has never had an Indigenous scholar to speak about treaties or residential schools or reconciliation. No minority speaker has made the case to them for the name changes or for the importance of recognizing and honouring diversity and inclusion in Canada and in Canadian history. As far as I can tell, in fact, the CIHE has never featured a person of colour speaking on any historical subject. 

I'm not in the habit in turning down invitations to talk about Canadian history. Anyone who sets up a podcast series can invite whom they choose.  But until the CIHE is more welcoming to a diversity of viewpoints in historical education and to many fine writers, speakers, and historians who represent that diversity, I will remain reluctant to be part of its programming.  

  

It's Just a Movie!

The makers of the entertaining British film "The Lost King," which dramatized the discovery of the remains of King Richard III, have paid a substantial settlement to a British academic who was set up as the stuffy, snobbish pukka-academic who derides the plucky amateur Philippa Longley and her dream  -- eventually successful -- of finding the king's grave beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England.

Henceforth the film, featuring Sally Hawkins as the amateur, will begin with a disclaimer

Whilst in this film there is a character called Richard Taylor who is shown to be an employee of the University of Leicester, the portrayal of him is fictional and does not represent the actions of the real Mr Taylor, who was employed by the University of Leicester as its deputy registrar, and acted with integrity during the events portrayed.

Ouch!

I'm in two minds about this. I can see the point of the university guy unfairly typecast as, well, as the university guy. But, you know, it's a movie.  If you want to know the truth of history, you need to read and study history.  The job of a movie is to tell a story, and you are crazy to take it for an accurate account of anything.  Same with novels, for that matter. History doesn't tell the truth, but it searches for it. Movies and fiction, they imagine a truth. Totally different thing.

A moment in the history of blogging

Here's a little moment in blogging history. At the American politics/history blog  blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, historian Erik Loomis has been posting entries in a series called "Erik Visits An American Grave" since August 2013, when he had a few hours to spare in Pittsburgh and went to visit the grave of industrialist Henry Frick, "arguably the most cartoonishly super-evil villain in American history."

He has kept at it, let us say. Today he posted the 2000th in his graveside biography series. Two thousand posts in little more than a decade, in his spare time.  

You can find the list of 2000 American (and some other) biographies here (the first 1200 or so) and here.  He says about it today:

I generally hate navel gazing, but the grave series hitting 2,000 posts is kind of a moment to think about this project. ... I started this as what I considered the dumbest idea I ever had. And then it became a massive part of my career. A few things about it. First, there is nothing like this in the history of the internet.  

Loomis welcomes financial support for his project.  See practically any of his posts at LGM for details.  Congratulations, Erik Loomis.  (Maybe all blogs start with a dumb idea.)  

Tim Cook (1971-2025) RIP, historian

I never intended this blog to become an obituary column, and I certainly didn't expect to write this obit. Tim Cook, the extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily productive historian of Canada's wars and Canada's soldiers, has died at the age of just fifty-four. 

In a publishing career of barely twenty-five years, he came close to a book-a-year pace, many of them very substantial titles, while holding down a big job as Chief Historian at the Canadian War Museum. 

I saw a piece today that explained he had suffered from, and apparently survived, Hodgkin's over a decade ago.  In that interview he also explained how he evolved from academic scholarship to trade-market historical writing.

I’m an academic-trained historian . . . but part of this is having the pleasure of working at the Canadian War Museum. Our job is to present history for all Canadians.

It's good to be reminded from time to time of the central importance of the historians in museums, in historic sites work, in all those fields.

I was emailing briefly with Tim Cook last month. I didn't know him well, but I'd talked to him for my article in the current Canada's History, for which he put me in touch with a vital interviewee -- also at the War Museum -- and he responded to my note of thanks/link to the story.  

I hadn't expect it to be a final contact. 

Photo credit: Adrian Wyld Canadian Press, via CBC News