NatPost on Canadians among Public Intellectuals

Great to see the mainstream media catching up on May 17 to a story covered here on May 1!

Why are we in Afghanistan?

Dooney's Cafe, the always promising online magazine driven by the concerns and interests of Stan Persky, though he's not its only author and the site takes its name from a coffeeshop in Toronto's Annex, not one in Vancouver's Kitsilano, has the most damnedly interesting discussion of Canada's presence in Afghanistan. Its a conversation between Persky and the westcoast activist and environmental writer Terry Glavin. This may need an apoplexy alert for conventional progressives: they explain why they support the war. Full essay is here.

[PS. Score a point for Ivor Tossell (see below). Dooney's Cafe is a dot.com, not a dot.ca]

History of Poetry; History of Bronze

Next Tuesday, May 20, at 4.30 pm, friends of poetry and sculpture will gather at Toronto's Queen's Park, north of the legislature, for the unveiling of a bronze sculpture of poet Al Purdy. The public is invited.

Plain-spoken down-to-earth Al Purdy probably doesn't seem like a cast-in-bronze kind of guy, and portrait statuary has been out of fashion for quite a while. These days we tend to create a memorial scholarship or prize, or rename some tatty park. If there's an artistic tribute, it's likely to be "non-representational."

But I like the idea of representational statues as, literally aide-memoires, and I like including Canadians who are neither statesmen nor monarchs. One of the best statues among the long sequence that adorns the central boulevard of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue is an impressively informal one of the American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, perched on a rock as if on the bow of his sailing ketch. (That's him in the photo, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Who among Canadian historians would rate a statue? Pierre up in Kleinburg? Donald Creighton glowering over the University of Toronto?

Talking Western History

Next month, June 19 to 21, the University of Alberta and several other sponsors will host "The West and Beyond: Historians Past, Present and Future," a conference on "the writing and teaching of historians of Western Canada of the past and present," -- and some new perspectives too. There's a banquet, music, tours as well as the discussions. More info here: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~wcsc/ or contact Sarah Carter and/or Peter Fortna at wchc@ualberta.ca.

When is this blog going to get a travel budget? I'd be there.

History of Airplane Reading:

• David A Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee. Big, terrifically readable, tremendous confidence, no fear of detail. This is only Volume One, and it never actually gets McGee to Canada, so a lot of us will be waiting for Volume Two. But One is the most successful launch I've seen in years of the big two-decker authoritative biography. (Okay, David's a friend of mine, too.) What a sinkhole Irish nationalism has been for 150 years!

• Tom Holland's Persian Fire. It becomes a retelling of Marathon and Salamis and Thermopylae and the salvation of "the West" and all that. But Holland's actually interested in those Persians who provided the invading hordes, and they turn out to have a pretty interesting history too. Memo to self: read Xenophon. Tom Holland, not previously known to me, is one of these Brits who take a double first at a posh university and then become freelance historical writers like it was a respectable career choice. That kind of thing that never happens here. Not that we don't have freelance historical writers, but they are all journalists first (and, yeah, it shows). Anyone with a history degree sinks into the tenure pits.

How do you spell Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug?

The Algonkian language family includes most First Nations languages in the boreal forest region of Canada, from the Atlantic Coast pretty much to the Rockies. Speakers of these languages build compound words (like German does, say) as a basic part of their syntax.

So all those syllables in the heading above? They are just the combining of what we English-speakers would consider several words into one compound word. I understand "Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug" means "the people who live at the big lake with the trout in it." And Ontario maps would locate these people's community at "Big Trout Lake," about 650 k north of Thunder Bay, in the James Bay lowlands. Still, you can see why they get "KI" a lot.

Anyway, that's by way of introduction to my column about the KI-Platinex controversy in Law Times. You can read it in the digital edition at http://www.lawtimesnews.com/ now.

History of Parliamentary Sovereignty

In The People's House of Commons, a recent winner of the Donner Prize in public-policy books, the political scientist David E. Smith expresses his ambivalence about the rise of parliamentary officers in Canada. Part of the appeal to Canadians of the auditor-general, the ethics commissioner, the chief electoral officer, and the rest, he suggests, lies in the fact that they are not politicians. They seem impartial, non-partisan, above the fray, and we like that.

But the officers are unaccountable. They are much like civil servants (though reporting to Parliament not to the government). Smith is aware that delegating too much authority to unelected officials undermines the accountability of the democratic process.

Alarming new case in point: the ruling of the Parliamentary ethics commissioner on the implications of a libel suit launched against Liberal MP Robert Thibault by Brian Mulroney. The libel suit could take care of itself, even though one may suspect it is one of those nuisance suits (like Stephen Harper's against Stephane Dion) that is unlikely to go all the way through the courts to a verdict.

We could mostly ignore that, except that the ethics commissioner has now ruled that as a party to the suit, Thibault can no longer participate in House of Commons proceedings related to Mulroney or to the whole Mulroney-Schreiber affair. Thibault, of course, was front and centre in the Mulroney-Schreiber parliamentary hearings during the winter.

This has to be a misjudgment by the Ethics Commissioner. If parliamentary debate can be silenced or skewed simply by throwing down a libel writ, Parliament will be even less useful than we feared. Parliamentarians need to assert their privileges here. Free speech in the House of Commons!

Techobabble

Technology columnists are supposed to be wrong most of the time, given the uncertainty of their field. But Ivor Tossell in the Globe, who seems to be wrong about everything, was never more so than in sneering at the dot.ca registry in a column back on May 2.

Tossell thinks dot.com is the real suffix, and dot.ca is for losers. But look around the world. British sites are routinely dot.uk, Russian dot.ru, Australian dot.au, German dot.de and so on throughout the world of the WorldWideWeb. And Canadian sites are dot.ca.

The only place that doesn't understand national-domain suffixes is the place where the appropriate ending (that you never see) would be dot.us

Everyone but Tossell understands that dot.gov means American government, dot.edu means American university, and dot.com means either American business or wants-to-be-American business.

Late Update: Ivor Tossell points out that our viewpoints are not that far apart, and that he too was noting the American-wannabe flavour of dot.com. Fair enough. I was recalling, without rereading, a piece read sometime earlier (and the column had been paywalled by the time I got to commenting on it. Tech columnists tend to be digital-freedom advocates -- but somehow the newspapers that publish them always get their revenues. )

History of a non-blogging week

Travelling last week, I was both pressed for time and net-connection challenged, which is why the blog faltered unexpectedly. Howcumzit every bargain Quality Inn had free and faultless hi-speed, while an upmarket downtown hotel (I was billing someone else this trip) charges outrageous rates for the kind of wonky connection that makes you despair of even reading your email?

But in Vancouver the halibut was succulent and the rhododendrons were spectacular. The transit system is good too. When the new subway along Cambie Street is done, Vancouver will be much better provided with rapid transit than Toronto, where we have spent 50 years agreeing that subways are too expensive. (True, it's Canada paying for much of Vancouver's new lines, not something Toronto should hope for!)

The dank old main library at UBC has been reborn as the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (and universities say they are underfunded!). When a visitor wants to use the services of the "learning centre," they ask you to fill in a form for a daypass, which seems very civilized. UofT Library would charge $200 for that kind of access if they let you in at all.

On the way home to Toronto, I sat across the narrow economy-class aisle from one of Canada's leading political commentators. He's seriously smart, but I was meanly pleased to see him struggling with the Globe & Mail sudoku that I had already completed.

Historians as Public Intellectuals

Foreign Policy, the American magazine, offers its tally of the world's one hundred leading Public Intellectuals. Still a work in progress -- you can vote if you wish.

How are historians doing as public intellectuals? Not very strongly, I would say. On the FP 100, just eight of the magazine's choices are identified as historians:

• Anne Applebaum, USA, historian of post-communist Europe and Washington Post columnist
• Jared Diamond, USA, biologist and historian of the world
• Drew Gilpin Faust, USA, American Civil War historian and Harvard president
• Niall Ferguson, Britain, economic historian and commentator
• Ramachandra Guha, India, historian of India and commentator
• Tony Judt, Britain, historian of postwar Europe and essayist
• Enrique Krause, Mexico, historian of Mexico and commentator
• Bernard Lewis, Britain/US, historian of Islam

This is a list of public intellectuals, so it's no surprise historians who want to be on this list had better double as commentors or journalists. Still, these are also the authors of some pretty solid and substantial historical works, to my eye (though I confess I needed a little wikipedia/google help with Applebaum, Guha, and Krause). For what it's worth, Ferguson and Applebaum are the youngest, both born in 1964, and Applebaum and Faust the only women.

Eight historians in a hundred strikes me as low. (Political scientists and economists rule.) Four Canadians, however, might be a small country punching above its weight. Except two of them are "Canada/US."

• Malcolm Gladwell (Canada/US), pop sociologist and New Yorker writer
• Michael Ignatieff, human rights expert
• Stephen Pinder (Canada/US), scientist of the mind
• Charles Taylor, philosopher

No one, need we say, is both Canadian and historian -- though you could make a case for Ignatieff based on his education and early work at least.