Review: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terro, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

In early 1933, William Dodd was an overworked but politically connected history professor looking for a diplomatic sinecure that would allow him time to finish his opus, The Rise and Fall of the Old South. Instead, in July of that year, Dodd—accompanied by his wife, his son and his pretty and not at all sexually inhibited daughter Martha, 24—took up the post of U.S. ambassador to Nazi Germany. Although the Dodds stayed there until 1937, Larson concentrates on their first 12 months, the year in which Hitler transformed from chancellor to unquestioned dictator. Even as Dodd’s alarm about the regime grew, his government remained preoccupied with the Depression, not very concerned about the fate of Jews or Communists, and convinced that Germany’s new criminal rulers couldn’t last long. The State Department lectured Dodd on the importance of good relations, the better to maintain the flow of German Great War reparations to American bondholders. The increasingly despondent envoy never did finish his history book.

Martha, for her part, was at first enamoured of the new Germany and even more so of her enhanced social life. She embarked on an astonishing series of affairs, several simultaneously, with everyone from a French embassy attaché and the chief of the spy network based in the Soviet embassy to Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo. (Larson calls him “surprisingly honourable,” and with reason—Diels ended up testifying for the Allies at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.)

Larson succeeds brilliantly at keeping his historical characters anchored in the moment, trying to deal with not just a regime becoming more inexplicable and murderous by the day, but with their own disbelief at what was going on. How the Dodds coped, and what that meant to the remainder of their lives—Martha became a Soviet spy—offers a fascinating window into the year when the world began its slow slide into war.

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Mike Huckabee's Masterpiece

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 11:11 PM - 14 Comments

If this doesn’t become an internet sensation I will be very disappointed. Mike Huckabee’s latest venture is Learnourhistory.com, an attempt to make money by selling cheaply-produced videos enable parents to teach their children the real history of the U.S. without the bias they get in teacher-controlled schools:

Many of our schools and teachers today haven’t found ways to make history for kids fun.  Instead, they’re teaching with political bias that distorts facts for the sake of political correctness.  As a result, our national pride and patriotism are in jeopardy.

The site’s YouTube channel has posted some excerpts, which are almost indescribable. The best I can come up with is “Sherman and Peabody meets Jack Chick.” Here’s the story of the hellish crime-ridden CarterScape that was America before the Reagan Revolution:

And here’s a preview of their history of World War II, which includes this quote: “What we see and hear isn’t always the Continue…

Who really killed Allende?

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images

Shortly after ordering his loyalists to give up arms and surrender to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s troops in 1973, former Chilean president Salvador Allende walked alone into the Independence Salon of the La Moneda presidential palace, then under siege, and shot himself in the head with an AK-47 assault rifle gifted by Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. That, at least, is the story according to the Pinochet regime, which staged the coup against the democratically elected Allende, and ruled Chile until 1990. It’s a narrative many Chileans believe in, including Allende’s own personal physician, one of the last ones to see him alive.

But many other Chileans fervently believe in another finale: Allende was killed by soldiers’ gunshots as he fought back. Now the truth may finally be established. At the request of the former president’s family, a Chilean court investigating rights abuses during the Pinochet era has ordered Allende’s body exhumed and re-examined. It’s one more step toward writing a national history all can trust.

What if Diana had survived the crash?

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 6 Comments

STS/Wenn.com/Keystone Press; Tim Graham/Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Once it was impossible to fathom a more hideous fate for the former Princess of Wales than dying at age 36 in a dark Parisian tunnel amid the staccato pop of flashbulbs. But now there is one: being resurrected as the drab protagonist of Monica Ali’s dreadful new novel, Untold Story.

In the acclaimed British writer’s historical reimagining, Diana survives the 1997 car crash, only to stage her own presumed death by drowning a month later. Abetted by her loyal former private secretary, Diana washes up in Brazil—convenient, given her need for appearance-altering cosmetic surgery—then settles seamlessly in the North Carolina town of Kensington, which is nothing like her previous home (the palace), to escape media glare. Under the name Lydia Snaresbrook, she works at a dog rescue, has a nice but dull insurance-claims-adjuster boyfriend, and spends nights gossiping with the girls over pinot grigio.

The character is referred to as a “fictional princess” on the dust jacket, which is rot: Lydia/Diana combs through celebrity mags for glimpses of her beloved boys, for whom she selflessly plotted her disappearance, believing the palace was out to kill her and that she’d have constricted their lives. Then, in a coincidence that would make Dickens blanch, the past shows up in the form of a British paparazzo who espies Lydia’s “mesmerizing” aquamarine eyes (she carelessly ditched her brown contacts) and realizes he’s onto the scoop of a lifetime. Their final, clever cat-and-mouse standoff provides the novel’s scant dramatic tension.

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How Laurier’s stirring speech defending Riel forged his reputation

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 1 Comment

National Archives of Canada/CP

“Those who are seeking a knight in shining armour, a defender of principles against all odds, will be disappointed by Wilfrid Laurier,” writes André Pratte in his biography of Canada’s seventh prime minister, the latest in Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series (in stores March 8). “Those who know that a man of principle can govern only by showing patience and realism will find in him a model.”

He was a master of rationality, reason and the middle ground—“the most pragmatic of men,” as Pratte dubs him. And not only was he able to sustain such balance—serving in Parliament from 1874 to 1917, as prime minister for 15 of those years—but he did so passionately and at a time when the young nation was divided by questions of language, race, religion, region, war, imperialism and nationalism. “What I discovered for myself was how much he reflected what Canada is or in some cases should be,” says Pratte, the editor-in-chief of La Presse. “Canada is built on compromise and conciliation and dialogue and listening to others and trying to find common ground, and Laurier not only did that because it was imposed on him by the country’s situation, he really was someone who wanted to discuss and wanted to look for compromise.”

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What it sounded like

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 5:37 PM - 32 Comments

The recently launched Canadiana Discovery Portal—a searchable collection of various historical archives—is a treasure trove of old photographs, speeches and documents from prime ministers and governments past. The gem of my searching so far though is an audio recording of Lester B. Pearson addressing an audience at the University of British Columbia in 1965, two years after he became prime minister.

It’s a remarkable listen on a number of fronts. Continue…

TV: First the Reagans, Now the Kennedys

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 10:46 PM - 15 Comments

Well, this is some strange news. The History Channel in the U.S. put a lot of money into The Kennedys, an eight-part miniseries that shot in Toronto last year. Now they’ve announced that they won’t air it. And the reason they’re giving — that it’s a “dramatic interpretation” of history and therefore “not a fit for the History brand” — seems to raise more questions than it answers. Like, how can they order a dramatized version of history and then be surprised that it is, in fact, a dramatized version of history?

The series is one of the first big post-24 projects for that show’s creator, Joel Surnow, and it was expected that his politics would influence the way the Kennedys were portrayed. But this isn’t The Reagans, where a major media campaign helped to call negative attention to the project and scare CBS out of airing it; this one was hardly on anyone’s radar, except for a few Kennedy people like the late Ted Sorensen, who criticized the portrayal of his former boss. I heard a few things about the series, but nothing incendiary.

Of course, even though we now know things about him that Vaughn Meader didn’t tell us about, Kennedy is still a genuine cult figure in the U.S., with a following among older liberals that matches the Reagan cult among younger, more conservative Americans. These cults don’t necessarily have much relationship to accomplishment — Lyndon Johnson accomplished the most liberal goals of any U.S. President after FDR, and he’s no cult favourite — but it might explain something. You can make a nasty movie about many political figures — like George W. Bush or Tony Blair or Jimmy Carter — without huge repercussions, but the Kennedys may still be considered sacrosanct.

Since, according to the article, History TV is still scheduled to air the show in Canada on March 6, we’ll get a chance to see for ourselves what in the final version could have spooked the U.S. network out of airing it; I have to admit that for the first time, I’m genuinely interested in seeing it, just to find out what happened.

Jesus historians get an earful from Maurice Casey

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 57 Comments

The faithful may delight in Casey’s disdain for the revisionist theory that the virgin birth was cooked up to hide Jesus’s illegitimacy | Christian Heeb/laif/Redux; Sebastian Scheiner/AP

Maurice Casey is fed up. The emeritus professor of New Testament language and literature at Britain’s University of Nottingham—a scholar, that is, of the only sources we have for the life and times of Jesus Christ—knows that history is not done in his field like it is in any other. The stakes, and the passions, are simply too high, when those who study the central figure in Western history place him along a spectrum that ranges from God incarnate to mythic creation. What truly disturbs Casey, however, is the way the once vast middle ground in historical Jesus studies is being squeezed, just as it is in many aspects of the increasingly intense faceoff between religion and secularism in modern society.

A resurgence of conservative scholarship on one side, including historians (like Paul Johnson) who accept what Casey considers unbelievable miracles detailed in untrustworthy sources, and revisionism that stretches to outright denial of Jesus’s existence on the other, have led him to pen his own take, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching. It’s less a full-blown biography than a vigorous defence of historical methodology—of the moral necessity of applying the same historical standards to the study of Jesus as we apply to, say, Julius Caesar. Casey’s magnum opus offers, for those who accept his reasoning, an impressive array of facts about Jesus Christ, and a slashing attack on almost everyone to the left or right of him.

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Absolutely everything under the sun

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

Billions of years from now, the sun will cool to ‘a dark cinder,’ but before that, it will get ‘hot enough to start melting our planet,’ writes Richard Cohen | EPA/Keystone Press

CHASING THE SUN: THE EPIC STORY OF THE STAR THAT GIVES US LIFE
Richard Cohen

When he set out to write about the sun, Richard Cohen had to learn nearly all the science from scratch, “as my high school was run by Benedictine monks who had little time for such disciplines.” In over seven years of exhaustive research, he did his homework—but Chasing the Sun goes way beyond solar science to explore the myths, the art, and the scientific discoveries that have helped us understand “the star that gives us life.”

Early societies personified the sun: in a fable from Aesop, the sun plans to marry, causing the animal kingdom to fret that “half a dozen little suns” could scorch the land. (This teaches us that “one can have too much of a good thing.”) By 1952, when the hydrogen bomb went off, “for a split second,” Cohen writes, “an energy that had existed only at the center of the Sun was unleashed by man on Earth.” Today, the brightest sustained light on our planet is the Sky Beam at the Luxor Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

As he discusses subjects like sunbathing, timekeeping, and the endless solar references in art, literature, music and politics, one begins to wonder when Cohen will run out of topics—so much is touched by the sun. Or not: some creatures, the so-called “dark biosphere,” manage to eke out a living deep under the ocean. For example, the angler fish, which hunts for food up to 5,000 feet below, makes its own “sunlight,” attracting prey with a bioluminescent glow.

One day, the sun will die—but not before getting “hot enough to start melting our planet,” Cohen writes. The sun will then cool to “a dark cinder of degenerate matter.” But that’s billions of years away. Maybe we will have some good spaceships by then.
- KATE LUNAU

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Crash goes the Colosseum

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments

Ciro De Luca/Reuters; Andrew Medichini/AP

Italy’s cultural heritage is under threat like never before. In November, two collapses at the archaeological site of Pompeii sent off alarm bells among experts, who see the endangered wonder, a UNESCO world heritage site, as a symbol for the decay eating away at virtually every historic piece of Italy. The 2,000-year-old frescoed House of Gladiators was the first to collapse, followed weeks later by a 12-m wall protecting the House of the Moralist.

While Culture Minister Sandro Bondi cautioned against “useless alarmism,” experts worry their worst fears are coming true. “Negligence and a lack of the most basic maintenance is causing irreversible damage to our architectural patrimony,” explains Tsao Cevoli, head of the National Archaeological Association. A culture ministry official confirmed there hasn’t been any systemic maintenance at Pompeii in the last half-century.

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High praise for low-life horse racing

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Jaimy Gordon’s novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award, makes poetry out of the low life at a seedy racetrack | Jamie Squire/Getty Images

LORD OF MISRULE
Jaimy Gordon

Last month’s National Book Award winner for fiction provoked as much surprise in the American literary world as Joanna Skibsrud’s Giller Prize win for The Sentimentalists. Like Skibsrud’s novel, Gordon’s was published by a small press originally planning a tiny print run. Scant few had actually read the book, published just days before the Awards. But the prize win for Lord of Misrule, a multi-viewpoint narrative of low-level horse racing, was not just well deserved, but a welcome validation of literary fiction’s greatest ambitions.

Gordon’s setting is Indian Mound Downs, a West Virginia racetrack that’s gone to seed in the already grim and economically depressed 1970s. Broken-down, aging horses are raced for scant winnings by jockeys and trainers looking for a quick score rather than for glory and riches. In a more commercially minded writer’s hands, the motivations of characters like horseman Tommy Hansel, groomsman Medicine Ed and menacing trainer Joe Dale Bigg would be mere props for race outcomes and suspense over whether criminal enterprise will pay off or trigger senseless violence.

All of these events happen, more or less, though Gordon seems to wink at standard storytelling conventions. “I can’t be playing around with gangsters,” says Maggie, a horseman’s girlfriend and the novel’s emotional centre. “I keep thinking I’m in a movie and then I realize I could get killed.” Instead, Lord of Misrule makes poetry out of low life through passages of gorgeous, idiosyncratic prose. A female jockey is described as “not ugly but like something born between mud and river water, like something out of a creek swamp.” Faces are “draggyfied” and featherbeds have “sweat-damp canyons.”

“Horse racing is not no science . . . ma’fact it’s more like religion,” says Medicine Ed in pungent country dialect, and as Gordon masterfully renders this world in Lord of Misrule, a prosaic sport becomes a higher power to believe in.
- SARAH WEINMAN

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No more the forgotten king

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

George VI gives one of his first broadcasts as king in 1937. Bertie’s childhood was one of neglect and fear. | Courtesy of Quercus Books

King George VI reigned for 15 years, saw his nation and empire through the Second World War, witnessed the end of the imperial might of Britain, and had his face all over one of the world’s pre-eminent currencies. Yet, since his death in 1952, the diffident monarch, made all the more retiring by a debilitating speech impediment, has largely been confined to the footnotes of history. George has been overshadowed by his predecessor and brother, the feckless Edward VIII, and by his daughter and successor Elizabeth II; even his wife’s charm and warmth pushed his shy personality into the background. If that weren’t enough, his prime ministers—Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Atlee—had dominating personalities of their own.

But the forgotten king is emerging from the shadows, thanks in no small part to the film The King’s Speech (opening Dec. 10) and the book of the same name by Peter Conradi and Mark Logue, grandson of the monarch’s speech therapist, Lionel Logue. George VI’s struggle to tame his stammer, and his dutiful acceptance of a throne for which he was woefully unprepared, won him the loyalty of a generation scarred by the Depression and the abdication crisis. He now appeals to their descendants and historians alike.

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PHOTOS: The pageantry of the past

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

Remembrance Day special

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 1 Comment

Below is a sampling of testimonials by WWII veterans collected by The Memory Project. Some 1100 such interviews are available here. Canadian veterans interested in sharing their WWII stories should call 1-866-701-1867 or visit the thememoryproject.com

Aiming to save history How the Memory Project keeps alive the stories of Canada’s war veterans	Maurice White – On the front line Why Maurice White, an infantryman with the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, will never forget the Christmas of 1943	Burton Harper – Battle of the Bulge Burton Harper was on loan to the British army when he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge
Paul Dumaine – Love Between getting engaged and his marriage, Paul Dumaine survived on the beach in Dieppe	Elizabeth (Betty) Dimock – Treating the wounded Betty Dimock first saw service in 1942 treating the wounded in North Africa	Allan Smith – Survival Allan Smith, a bomb aimer, found himself drifting toward occupied France in 1944
Donald Stewart – Homecoming Donald Stewart, a naval gunner from Kelowna, B.C., on coming home after the war	Glenn Price – In battle In 1945, Glenn Price joined the Canadian Army’s Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in the Netherlands	Bob Farquharson – Supplying the front Bob Farquharson, a Canadian Air Force pilot, contended with the Japanese military, monsoons, and heavy cumulonimbus clouds
David Dickson – How tobacco saved a life David Dickson recalls how a tin of tobacco may have saved his life

The Memory Project – Bob Farquharson, Supplying the front

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Bob Farquharson (left) and Corporal White, with a Japanese fighter | Courtesy of The Memory Project

Click play to hear Bob Farquharson’s complete audio story

Bob Farquharson, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot born in Gleichen, Alta., dropped supplies into mountain-locked Burma, where he contended with the Japanese military, monsoons, and heavy cumulonimbus clouds.

There was no way to get supplies to the Allied army except to fly them to them. To make a drop, you have to fly around, the aircraft “low and slow,” maybe 300 feet above the ground. The kickers in the back piled the doorway with as many sacks of rice, or whatever we were dropping. And we dropped absolutely everything. I even dropped a crate of eggs packed in straw in a wicker basket, a big wicker basket. Now mind you, we always dropped eggs with a parachute. And the gasoline we dropped with a parachute. But rice was free-dropped, called “slack packed-double sacked.” It was packed slack, in a big hessian sack, and another sack over that, so that it didn’t burst immediately when it hit. In fact it bounced and skipped along quite a ways before it came to rest. We flew in everything: ammunition, clothing, rations. If somebody at the front lost his eyeglasses or false teeth, we flew in false teeth and eyeglasses.

Was Louis Riel insane?

By Julia Belluz - Sunday, September 26, 2010 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

O.B. Buell/CP/ National Archives of Canada/CP

When Joseph Boyden read a National Post op-ed in July entitled “Louis Riel Deserves No Pardon,” the author of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, the latest in Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series, fired off a letter (it was never published) to the newspaper about what he says were “untrue and blatantly false” statements in the piece.

One of those falsehoods, says the Giller Prize-winning author of Through Black Spruce, is that Riel—Metis leader and father of Manitoba—tried to take land from the Indians and put it in the hands of his people. “Riel is one who very much believed in inclusion,” says Boyden, a regular contributor to Maclean’s. “He knew that the northwest was big enough for all the races living there.” In fact, the writer feels that Riel’s forward-thinking notions about a cohesive society should define his legacy: “He was one of the first to push for inclusion.”

Boyden is less resolute about another topic of the Post’s op-ed: Riel’s alleged insanity. Boyden thinks he was “somewhere between” sanity and madness. “One day he’d feel in control, the next day he was questioning himself down to his core,” he says. “This fragility mixed with absolute hubris is what’s so interesting about Riel, and part of why many people say he was crazy.”

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

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Der Führer's secret past

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Imagno/Getty Images

Saliva samples taken from Adolf Hitler’s relatives show that the Nazi leader may have biological links to Africans and Jews. Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulder and historian Marc Vermeeren tracked down 39 of Hitler’s relatives earlier this year, among them Hitler’s cousin, an Austrian farmer identified only as Norbert H., and grand-nephew Alexander Stuart-Houston, a social worker from Long Island, N.Y. Results of their DNA tests found a chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1, which is rare in Western Europe but most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Mulder said. The chromosome appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population, and accounts for 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes. Their results, published in the Belgian magazine Knack, conclude that Hitler “was related to people whom he despised,” Mulder wrote.

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Le memory hole de Champlain

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 11:53 AM - 0 Comments

This is damned strange.

Spurred on by Colleague Coyne’s recent column about David Johnston’s evocation of Samuel de Champlain as the predecessor of all Governors General, I’ve been doing some research. The moderately interesting stuff will follow below. The really interesting stuff is on the Heritage Canada website. Was on the Heritage Canada website. Is and was. Was and is no longer. Perhaps I should explain.

Here’s what the website looked like on Tuesday, July 12, on the page where the history of the Governor General’s office is (was) discussed (emphases added):

Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The Queen is our head of state. The Queen in Canada is represented at the national level by the Governor General and at the provincial level by a Lieutenant Governor.

The office of the Governor General dates back nearly 400 years to 1608, when Samuel de Champlain acted as the Governor of New France. Until 1952, Governors General were British. The 1952 installation of Vincent Massey, the first Canadian to hold the office, reflected Canada’s new sense of autonomy and identity in the post-war era.

And here’s what it looked like last night, when I tried to call up the page as Google showed it.

Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The Queen is our head of state. The Queen in Canada is represented at the national level by the Governor General and at the provincial level by a Lieutenant Governor.

‘A Governor in all but name, Samuel de Champlain fulfilled 400 years ago several duties and responsibilities that would later be carried out by the Governors of New France and after Confederation, by the Governors General of Canada.’

The office of the Governor General dates back to 1867. Until 1952, Governors General were British. The 1952 installation of Vincent Massey, the first Canadian to hold the office, reflected Canada’s new sense of autonomy and identity in the post-war era.

I know of no other explanation for this change than that somebody, somewhere in the department at Heritage, or at the minister’s office, or at Langevin, did not like the attention Johnston kicked up with his remarks (which Andrew discusses here.) Continue…

'What would Napoleon do?'

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Bernard Gagnon

In the early 1800s, the French people of the province of Quebec were vanquished in their own land. France, the mother country, had shown how much regard it had for the vast, often frozen colony by trading it away for Guadeloupe in 1763. The British, flush with a sense of entitlement befitting a conqueror, held most of the positions of power, and the Catholic Church dominated virtually every facet of Québécois life. Les Canadiens were in desperate need of a hero to lift the collective ennui of the times.

That hero, a forthcoming book by Sen. Serge Joyal suggests, was Napoleon Bonaparte. Though he died in 1821 without once visiting his orphaned flock across the ocean—and though Napoleon himself suffered his own crippling defeat at the hands of the British, at Waterloo—the diminutive French emperor nonetheless became a symbol of power to the French in Quebec. For many, he remains an enduring obsession to this day.

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Maybe they're still mad they lost

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 11 Comments

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

In the eyes of the world, the War of 1812 may always appear insignificant against its Napoleonic backdrop. But it did decide the destiny of a continent, persuading Empire and Union that it was better to have trade crossing the border than troops.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Niagara Falls, Ont., on May 21, opening a new federally funded expansion to the city’s History Museum, which stands on the site of the ferocious July 1814 Battle of Lundy’s Lane. The federal and provincial governments are each giving the museum up to $3.2 million; for the feds, the money is part of a Throne Speech promise to commemorate the bicentennial of the war, “an event that was key to shaping our identity as Canadians and ultimately our existence as a country.”

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Positively gleeful

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 3 Comments

Imagno / Getty Images

Just as all the clichés about Canadian-American relations say—the mouse and elephant, the U.S. sneezes and we catch cold—Canada does not normally benefit when the Americans undergo one of their periodic upheavals. The way their current security consciousness is thickening the 49th parallel and slowing trade is a prime example. But there are exceptions to every rule, and Prohibition—perhaps the maddest of mad American dreams—did pretty well by our nation from 1920 to 1933. As American writer Daniel Okrent points out in his fine social history of the era, Last Call, the rivers of Canadian booze that flowed south enriched not only the Bronfman liquor empire, but our federal government. Canadians did make and smuggle illegal liquor, evading both Canadian taxes and American law, but we also made millions of litres of the legal, taxed stuff, the ultimate destination of which was of no concern to Ottawa. The amount of alcohol subject to excise tax—most of which went south one way or another—went from 36,000 litres in 1920 to five million 10 years later, and the excise tax on it rose to a fifth of federal revenue, twice as much as income tax.

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Sir John, Eh?

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 12:01 AM - 17 Comments

Today (Monday) is the 195th birthday of our first and greatest prime minister, the man who, in the title of Richard Gwyn’s terrific biography, “made us.” In any self-respecting country, this would be a national holiday, but as this is Canada, it isn’t — though it has, since 2002, been officially designated Sir John A. Macdonald Day, which at least puts him one step ahead of Louis Riel.

I trust you will all find appropriate ways to celebrate.

A textbook for Canada

By The Editors - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

If you want to pass the test, study the textbook. Any teacher or student will tell you that. So it is with becoming a Canadian citizen.

Yet the booklet given to potential new Canadians to study for their citizenship test has always been a dreary and incomplete affair. Last revised in 1995, “A Look at Canada” takes an antiseptic approach to Canadian life, ignores most of our past and is lacking in passion for this great country. If we want to provide immigrants with a full appreciation of Canadian rights and responsibilities, we ought to start by fixing the textbook. Continue…

Discover Canada

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 3:51 PM - 36 Comments

The Globe confirms Jason Kenney’s plans to rewrite the educational booklet for new citizens. One assumes that in the months since Mr. Kenney first mused about this, he has taken the time to thoroughly familiarize himself with said booklet.