REMEMBRANCE OF THOUGHTS PAST Canadian Thinkers Victorian, Tory and Grumpy

April 1, 2002,  Books in Canada

A Disciplined Intelligence:
Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era
A. B. McKillop
McGill-Queen's University Press
ISBN: 0-7735-2141-0

Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition,
and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939-1970
Philip Massolin
University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0-8020-3509-4

Intellectual history demands a precise grasp of the ideas under study and their development and a judicious assessment of the extent to which they reflect or influence their times. A clear focus is essential or intellectual history becomes a blur.

Ideas can have a history of their own. The deepest and most important thinking may be eccentric and marginal in its time. Its influence may come generations later. Its importance may be its truth rather than its representativeness. The ideas that hold sway at any particular time may be commonplaces best found in the popular media or political speeches. What intellectuals write may be of secondary importance. In Canada intellectuals have seldom been a major influence. Even when they were famous - perhaps Marshall McLuhan was the most famous - their significance was more as objects of national pride than in any impact on the life of the country.

These two books open doors onto Canadian thinking in two periods in the past. They fail to shed much light on it.

Brian McKillop's A Disciplined Intelligence is a seminal work. First published in 1979 it is now reissued with a new introduction and an updated bibliography. At the time McKillop was working on the thesis that became the book Carl Berger's The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914 (University of Toronto Press, 1970) was practically the only book on the Canadian intellectual history shelf. It is still perhaps the best. In his new introduction and bibliography McKillop is able to note upwards of a dozen later books in the field, many directly influenced by him.

McKillop deals with little more than a handful of thinkers in Protestant English Canada from roughly 1850 to 1920. Most were philosophy professors. They were often also clergymen or scientists or both. By the 1860's they were wrestling with the impact of Darwin. Before that they seemed to have found a happy orthodoxy combining Protestant theology, Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and William Paley's argument from design, under which every new scientific discovery could be taken as fresh evidence of God's ingenuity and benevolence.

It is well to be reminded, when all public education is atheist, that English Canada's universities at their foundation were all Christian establishments. Their faculty were practically all British educated, if not British born, and very often Scottish. Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, though now reduced in the history of philosophy to a minor school, was big in Britain.

McKillop disparages it as little more than an ideology convenient for its compatibility with Christian theology. He finds it guilty of dualism, as if this were an elementary error now behind us. Dualism is a perennial problem of philosophy. Many philosophers who claim to overcome it have been accused of lapsing into it. Others who are expressly dualist accommodate it in ways that seem to transcend it.

McKillop gives the impression that universities were in the grip of a stifling dogmatism like that of dialectical materialism in the old Soviet Bloc. One would not suspect from McKillop that undergraduates at King's College in Toronto in the 1840's were required to study Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, condemned by the Common Sense school as a wrong turning.

19th century students were not free to pick and choose their courses as students do now. They got prescribed doses of Christianity and philosophy. Philosophy was probably more important to the tiny minority of young people who went to university then than it is to the host of young people who go to university now, among whom an even tinier minority study philosophy. But 19th century students also studied Classics, English and European literature, history, mathematics and the sciences. Compared to today's conventional mix of political correctness, trendy reading and lip service to critical thinking it was probably quite a broadening curriculum.

McKillop never studied philosophy, put off he says by a University of Manitoba department interested only in Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer. For a book catalogued under "philosophy" this might be a bit of a handicap. But A Disciplined Intelligence is not a work of philosophy even if most of its subjects taught philosophy. Its treatment of Common Sense Philosophy and Hegelian idealism as transmitted by Edward Caird of Glasgow University to John Watson and expounded by him for fifty years at Queen's University is superficial. A little training in the precision and clarity of analytic philosophy might have helped McKillop to bring the thought of his subjects into better focus.

In a long review in Canadian Historical Review (June 1999) McKillop was harshly critical of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? (Harper-Collins, 1998). He fairly argued that there is more to Canadian history than politics and war. But if history is to include conditions of domestic service and academic writing in Victorian Canada it must still make the connection between these fields and the life of the country. Rather obscurely the thought McKillop chronicles finally issued in the Social Gospel, whose impact on the life of Canadians in the early 20th century was important. But until that development the place of Victorian thought in the life of the country is not explained.

In neither of these books is it supposed that the ideas treated might have any value in themselves. They are simply expressions of attitudes and interests that rise up and fade away and can have now only a kind of archaeological interest. For McKillop the ideas of his subjects are simply the period attire of a continuing struggle to "to reach a modus vivendi between intellectual inquiry and conventional wisdom, between individual autonomy and the social good, between the myth of freedom and the myth of concern.". The last antithesis is a patriotic borrowing of language of Northrop Frye, which may have been useful in his own writing but only adds to the vagueness of McKillop's.

A source frequently relied on by McKillop is university addresses consisting of edifying platitudes. Anyone who tried to understand what goes on in universities today by reading the addresses of university presidents would be in deep trouble.

The title of Philip Massolin's Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939-1970 promises a more precise subject and a more carefully circumscribed period. There is a particular Canadian Tory tradition and it has had some significant intellectual exponents. Unfortunately it is a poor book, reworking a particularly pedestrian thesis. It is largely clumsy paraphrases of a disparate selection of writers who are united not in being Tory but in being grumpy. The platitudinous moaning about the decline of culture and civilisation is tediously repetitive. The same quotations recur in different chapters. Massolin writes badly and pretentiously. He is almost comically fond of the verb "aver". There is quite a lot of mundane university history, the amounts of government grants, the political troubles of Frank Underhill, no Tory he.

Of the writers dealt with only Donald Creighton, W. L. Morton and George P. Grant can surely be called Tory. Harold Innis shared some of his great friend Creighton's ideas but his important writings are too idiosyncratic to bear any label. Northrop Frye was occasionally grumpy about developments in the university but never a Tory. Marshall McLuhan still less. He ended up a kind of post-modern guru. And what are Walter Lippman and Malcolm Muggeridge doing in a book about the Tory tradition in Canada?

Massolin advances only two doubtful ideas of his own and then simply pronounces the Tory Tradition dead. He suggests that the grumpiness he reports was simply an interested reaction of arts professors to declining relative salaries and prestige in the period he covers. He does not make out the case that there was such a decline. He could not explain by it anything specifically Tory when liberal and left-wing academics were in the same boat. Moreover, declining salaries and prestige hardly affected Vincent Massey, who is extensively quoted.

He is on to something when he describes the co-option of the Tory nationalist tradition by the left in the 1960's and after. But he misses a key part of the phenomenon. It is itself an American influence, the overflow of young America's reaction against its country in the 1960's. Often American immigrants were the carriers of the new nationalism.

The Tories Massolin describes are all dead. The Tory Tradition is not dead. It is simply obscured, as it has been for eighty years, under the Liberal hegemony.

The productivity of Canada's university presses is a mixed blessing. Massolin's book will be an obstacle in the way of graduate students required to read the literature. McKillop's book succeeds in exposing some of the forgotten thinking of Victorian Canada. But McKillop's best service has probably been in republishing some of the writings of William Dawson LeSueur in A Critical Spirit: The Thought of William Dawson LeSueur (McLelland And Stewart, 1972). We should do best to dig out what these people wrote and read them ourselves with an open mind, believing their ideas still have something to teach us. History is not progress. Dusty tomes from the 19th century have far better to offer us than John Ralston Saul and Michael Ignatieff, both commended by McKillop in his introduction.

THE MAN(NING) WHO WOULD BE KING

Reform leader wants one thing: to be head honcho on the right November 7, 1998, Ottawa Citizen

Interest in Preston Manning's United Alternative scheme, most notably Alberta Premier Ralph Klein's
agreement to be a keynote speaker at the planned meeting in Ottawa next February, has overshadowed the last stage of the Tory leadership race. Joe Clark's imminent return to the Progressive Conservative leadership hardly seems likely to spark a Tory revival. His claim to have an alternative united alternative plan is simply baffling. But Manning's scheme is still viewed with intense suspicion by many of the Tories it is supposed to appeal to, and with good reason.

Everyone, not just Tories and Reformers, but floating voters and even some Liberals, agrees that
something should be done about the split of votes between the Tories and Reform. Until the last election the favoured solutions were, for the Tories, that Reform should run out of steam and, for Reform, that the Tories should simply expire. When the election confirmed that neither was likely to happen, neither side had any new ideas. But when Jean Charest resigned as Tory leader on March 26, the very next day Manning held a press conference to launch his United Alternative scheme.

Far from a sincere effort to overcome the problem he had himself created by founding his own party and splitting the right, this looked more like moving in for the kill on a now leaderless party. If Manning had been serious about overcoming the split of votes between Reform and the Tories, he would have talked to Tory officials, not the press, and would have waited for the Tories to choose a new leader and then entered into talks with him. Instead he continues to pressure Clark to come to his February meeting and to denigrate the party with which he is supposed to be seeking an alliance.

The February meeting is supposed to be a completely open affair with no predetermined outcome and
Manning's leadership on the line. But this has always been Manning's line at the meetings where he has taken his shrewdly planned steps towards his ambition of running the country.

The Western Assembly in Vancouver in May of 1987 was simply supposed to be an open discussion of Western political discontents. It decided that a new party should be formed. At Reform's founding meeting in Winnipeg in November 1987 Manning became leader and got the party structure and strategy he wanted. When Manning decided that the time had come to move the party beyond its Western roots and "let Ontario in" he again got what he wanted at the party's Assembly in Saskatoon in April 1991. At each of these meetings everything was supposed to be up for discussion and those attending to decide the outcome but Manning always knew what he wanted and always got it.

What Manning wants out of next February's meeting is a Reform Party strengthened by an access ofex-Tory supporters with himself as leader and a minimum of cosmetic changes to accommodate them. Proponents of the United Alternative have been saying that the support for Clark and Hugh Segal in the first round of the Tory leadership voting shows that the party is overwhelmingly Red Tory and therefore incapable of uniting the right. Most of those who voted for Clark or Segal would reject the Red Tory label. More importantly, this argument assumes that the United Alternative scheme is intended to unite the right. On this theory the true conservatives in the Progressive Conservative party must give up on it and unite with the supposedly staunchly conservative Reform Party leaving the Progressive Conservatives to fade away as a faint echo of the Liberals.

Most of the interest in the United Alternative outside the Reform Party comes from right wingers. They mistake Manning's goal. He did not call his scheme the United Alternative for nothing. His goal is not to unite the right but to clear the ground towards the centre so that he can occupy it on the way to winning a majority. For this purpose he needs to eliminate the Tories for two reasons. They occupy much of the centre ground that he wants to occupy, but they are also right wing enough that they could represent a threat to his rear if they remained around after he had made his move.

In any event politics is not a simply one dimensional ideological game. The quarrel between Reform and the Tories is not simply a question of how right you are. It is about populism and principles and how parliamentary democracy should work and regional roots and interests. If Manning sincerely and selflessly wanted to repair the damage that he has done in splitting the right, he would go about it entirely differently. He would seek to deal not with Tory weakness but with Tory strength, not try to draw away Tory supporters but to deal with the party and, above all, acknowledge that his leadership days are over.

As he is proceeding he risks an outcome reminiscent of the founding of the United Church of Canada in 1925. The effort to unite the principle Protestant churches in Canada was only a qualified success as a substantial minority of Presbyterians opted to continue with their own church. If a United Party were to emerge from February's meeting under Manning's leadership many Tories would refuse to join. The United Party might be stronger than Reform and the Tories weakened. But with a United Party getting 30% of the popular vote and the continuing Tories only 10% the Liberals' lock on power would continue.

CHECK OUT THE LORDS OF COOL

 The unreformed House of Lords was the best second chamber in the world

 May 11, 1998 Ottawa Citizen 

It is going to be a long time before Canada's Senate is reformed or abolished. Britain's House of Lords will likely be radically changed in the next couple of years. This will be a pity, because the unreformed House of Lords is undoubtedly the best, as it is the oldest, upper house in any parliament in the world.


Tony Blair's New Labour had to find some policies to distinguish themselves from the Tories as they embraced Thatcherism. They hit on constitutional change as a safe novelty. They moved quickly to set up a Parliament in Scotland and an Assembly in Wales, where there was at least some local demand for change. Elimination of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords is next on their agenda. They are not quite sure how to reform the Lords, but they believe that they are not cool and so must be changed.



Giving people a seat in Parliament because their ancestors had one is generally dismissed as an absurdity in the modern world. This is no argument, but an appeal to prejudice against what is old. The wiser prejudice is in favour of what is old until there is a clear understanding that it does not work and what would work better. New Labour has not got that far yet.



At the worst the hereditary principle simply produces a random selection from the population. Stories appear from time to time of Lords who are policemen or merchant seamen or school teachers. Many Lords still live in stately homes but after several generations the range of experience, talent, interests and conditions that heredity makes available to the House of Lords is much greater than democratic politics yields in the House of Commons. If the preponderance of lawyers in politics is declining, it is only to be replaced by cohorts of professional politicians, an even more suspect group. The chief distinction of the Lords from the general population is that they know from an early age that they may be called to the House of Lords and so are more likely to think about the nation's business.



Heredity is not the absurdity dogmatic modernists maintain. It is common in life that interests and talent pass from generation to generation. In Chrétien's cabinet Paul Martin's father was a cabinet minister for over twenty years, Sheila Copps father was Mayor of Hamilton and Jane Stewart's father was Ontario Liberal Leader and Treasurer. The heirs of distinguished people are distinctly more likely to be distinguished than the general population. The hereditary principle simply recognises this.



And while it recognises this natural fact, the hereditary principle eliminates something that we have too much of. The public is suspicious of the ambition of politicians. This is really absurd, as no one gets anywhere in politics without ambition. Heredity eliminates ambition. You cannot strive to be the Earl of Onslow. You either are or you are not. You go to the House of Lords because you are called. You may even have a touch of what is almost completely gone from politics: a sense of duty.



It would not do to give the interesting selection of people who make up the House of Lords much power. And the Lords never have had much power. Under the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 the Lords can delay a bill for about a year unless it is a money bill, which they can only delay for a month. The Parliament Acts were salutary reforms, but the Lords have never had great power. The sovereign has always been able to create peers to assure a compliant majority. Knowing this, the Lords always exercised their powers with restraint until Lloyd George's 1909 budget enraged them. As far back as 1711, Queen Anne created twelve Tory peers to assure a House of Lords compatible with the Tory Commons elected in 1710. An upper house should not be powerful. Its contribution of sober second thought and delay while sober thought and political pressure can sink in is enough if the quality of it deliberations is high.



The House of Lords as now constituted consists of about 760 hereditary peers, 26 bishops of the Church of England and 460 life peers, who are mostly old politicians, but also academics, artists, businessmen and scientists. Most of the hereditary peers never show up, either out of modesty or lack of a sense of duty. The Lords are unpaid, though they can receive up to about $300 a day in expenses when they attend. Compared to our Senate they are a bargain.

The final test of the Lords value is the quality of their debates. The Lords went on television a couple of years before the British House of Commons. Their Lordships' House became quite a hit of late night television. Their debates are free of the juvenile partisanship of the Commons, informed, thoughtful, good humoured and occasionally eccentric.  They are available on the Web at Lords Hansard full text database menu. Check them out. They are cool.

WELL, WHO IS WHO, ANYWAY? The Canadian Who's Who 199

WELL, WHO IS WHO, ANYWAY?
 April 1, 1998, Books in Canada

Canadian Who’s Who 1997
Elizabeth Lumley ed.
University of Toronto Press
ISBN 0-8020-49966

There is nothing nosy about wanting to know who people are. It is natural and proper to want to know where people come from, what they do, what family they have, even how old they are. For years I have kept an old copy of Canadian Who’s Who handy and made regular use of it to fill in the background of people I have read about or run into or just heard mentioned but could not place. The earnestly casual manners under which people are introduced as Sue or Joe without even a surname to hang on to suppose that our mere humanity is all we need to know, while treating names like pets’ names, simply something to answer to. But we are constituted by every fact about us. If we can know some basic facts about each other, we can have a more genuine regard for each other than the abstract respect enjoined by modern correctness.

Nor is there anything vain about making some basic facts about oneself publicly available. It is a courtesy to save people the trouble of piecing them together over time and to be open and direct. Perhaps in time most of us will have Web pages on the Internet. For now, for most of us, a telephone book listing is the extent of published information available. To get any more detail into a volume even the size of the Toronto telephone book requires a selection to be made. It is the job of a Who’s Who to collect the basic facts about those people who, because of their activity, we are likely to hear of and want to know something about. The Canadian Who’s Who does that job for Canada and does it pretty well. It is the only biographical reference book in Canada that is not restricted to some profession or calling and that does not charge for a listing or expect people it includes to buy a copy. Its limitations perhaps say more about Canadians than any failure of effort or judgement in the editors or staff as they undertake their massive task each year. Now that it is available on CD-ROM it is more useful than ever. Every library and most offices should have one. Individuals should save up and buy one every few years. They never lose their interest and your grandchildren will be grateful for their inheritance.

The obvious test of any biographical reference work is who’s in and who’s out. With more than fifteen thousand entries, up from twelve thousand only six years ago, there should be room for anyone one might hear of. A conscious effort has been made since the University of Toronto Press bought the publication in 1978 to get beyond the politicians and businessmen who in the past made up the largest portion of the entries and to include artists, writers, scientists and sports figures. Despite the editors’ best efforts the list of prominent Canadians who are not in would be a long one. Not surprisingly, politicians are still well represented. The federal cabinet and party leaders, the premiers, are all there. But most members of parliament remain nobodies, though over eighty senators are in. Andrew Thompson is there, if not in Ottawa. He does not list his Mexican home. Perhaps Svend Robinson is the best known missing M.P. Ontario opposition leader Dalton McGuinty and NDP leader Howard Hampton are missing, though McGuinty’s predecessor Lyn McLeod, who always had a recognition problem, is in.

In the media Pamela Wallin, Wendy Mesley and Lloyd Robertson are in but Peter Mansbridge is not. In painting Alex Colville and Paterson Ewen are in but Atilla Richard Lukacs and John Meredith are not. In music the composers, Murray Schaefer, Harry Somers and the rest are well represented, but tenor Ben Heppner and conductor, impresario and Companion of the Order of Canada Nicholas Goldschmidt are not. Lawyer John McKellar is in but his son, actor, director and scriptwriter Don is not.

If distinguished and prominent Canadians are missing it is not for want of the editors trying. They are practically speaking completely dependent on their subjects responding to their enquiries for entries. Over five thousand invitations to submit information for new entries produced only about seventeen hundred new entries for this edition. They have tried to get a response from some people for years without success. Some people may just be too lazy to reply, or think that there is some catch, that they will have to pay to get in, at least for a copy of the book, as they would have to for many apparently similar books. Some may think it is pretentious to be in Who’s Who; but if you are a celebrity anyway such modesty must be false. Some people may be concerned about their privacy. For people who have already been the subject of media profiles, such concern would be equally false. The information provided is anyway is not compromising and under the control of the subject.

The entries follow a standard form: name with any title and degrees; occupation such as author, lawyer or politician; place and date of birth; parents; education; family; present position; career; memberships; politics; religion; recreations and address. Again Canadian Who’s Who is entirely dependent on its subjects for how and how much of this form is filled. The results can be disappointing. Barbara Amiel of course omits her date of birth. Alan Fotheringham omits his parents. So does Art Eggleton, who seems to have done nothing before being elected to Toronto’s City Council at age 26. One expects to find in Who’s Who where people went to school or university and for a politician what was his taking off point. Eggleton also omits his occupation. His cabinet colleague Pierre Pettigrew changed his occupation from politician to statesman for the 1997 edition, getting pilloried in Frank for his pains. Catherine Callaghan simply says she is Senior Editor at Chatelaine and gives her office address. As anyone who might look her up would know that much, there is no point to the entry. The editors must have been so grateful for any response that their judgement was clouded.

Knowing where people live can say a lot about them but many people just give office addresses. Some, like actor Donald Sutherland, just give an agent’s address. Mordecai Richler and his son Daniel both give “c/o McClelland & Stewart”. Gordie Howe gives no address at all.

Some people have altogether too much to say about themselves. Roberta Bondar’s trip in space has led to her receiving 22 honorary degrees in Canada together with many other awards and a whole column of special lectureships, fellowships and committee and patron appointments. The entry badly needs editing. The length of entries seems to have been left to the subjects and is no measure of their celebrity or achievement. Jean Chrétien says enough in three inches. Brian Mulroney modestly takes two. Trudeau takes six. Sculptor Elizabeth Holbrook goes over twenty inches describing all her works. If Canadian Who’s Who is ever going to bring in the large number of notable Canadians who are not in and keep the volume to a manageable size in readable print some limit on the length of entries will have to be set and the editors will have to do some editing.

Apart from the few like Catherine Callaghan, and Gordon Capital vice-chairman James Conacher, who are not prepared to say anything about themselves, there seems no reason to drop anyone. The more the merrier. Judith Anderson is a lawyer in Vancouver but nothing in her entry indicates why she should be in when perhaps two thousand other lawyers in Vancouver are not. The effort to include artists has relied too much on membership in the Royal Canadian Academy, sadly no longer the assurance of standing in the visual arts that it once was. But the book is most useful in its coverage of the more obscurely accomplished. The famous we may know well enough already or have other sources for. Several of the famous missing from Canadian Who’s Who are in The Canadian Encyclopedia: Heppner, Goldschmidt and Svend Robinson.

The book is about who is who and entries are dropped when the subject dies. Books in Canada founder Val Clery, however, is still in though he died in the fall of 1996 and this edition is sufficiently up to date to reflect at least partly the results of the June 1997 federal election. Conversely Idler magazine founder David Warren who is still alive and well and busy at the Ottawa Citizen disappeared when the Idler died in 1993. Generally people are in for life, though many stop responding when they retire.

A selection of foreign diplomats posted to Ottawa is included and there are several expatriate stars: Joni Mitchell and Neil Young; Christopher Plummer and Donald Sutherland. Oddly, Body Shop founder and C.E.O. Anita Roddick is in, apparently on the strength of her 118 shops in Canada and an honorary degree from Victoria University.

The editors must largely take the information they are provided on faith hoping that the embarrassment of published fibs will keep their subjects honest. They should however be strict about titles. David Berger, our ambassador to Israel, titles himself “His Excellency”. In accordance with diplomatic formalities he is His Excellency in Tel Aviv. In this country he is plain Mr. Berger. Not a career diplomat but for fifteen years a Liberal member of parliament, Berger may not know that. Who’s Who should. As should our man in Quito, David Adam, and our man in Brussels, Jean-Paul Hubert, both career diplomats. The couple of dozen other Canadian Ambassadors abroad, including Raymond Chrétien, do not make the same mistake.

A sillier instance is John Marvin Mitchell. His 1991 entry describes a plausible career in financial services. By 1996 he has added a series of publications on motivation and negotiation and several odd distinctions including listings in dubious biographical reference books such as International-Men of Achievment and International Who’s Who of Intellectuals and Most Admired Man of the Decade, American Biographical Institute and One in a Million, International Biographical Centre. In 1997 he adds “Mem., Order of the Holy Grail-Knight” and, on the strength of that presumably, titles himself “His Excellency The Hon.”. One hopes that most of this is tongue in cheek, but it is weak humour and the editors should not indulge it.

With the decay of political allegiance in recent decades few people now list their politics. Most who do are Liberals. Even most politicians do not bother to say what they are, perhaps because it is obvious from their career, though Bob Rae tells us that he is NDP. Many Conservatives who state their politics say just that: Conservative, without the official Progressive qualifier. It is a conservative thing to have a conscious long term political allegiance.

Perhaps 15% of the entries list a religion. Anglicans, oddly, seem the most numerous. Most who do not list a religion must still have some religious attachment. Religion is perhaps no longer seen as saying much about who we are. It is more seen as a private matter that the public need not know about.

There is no French edition of Who’s Who, but 195 entries are written in French. Parizeau’s entry is in French. Bouchard’s in English. French Canadians are under-represented in relation to their proportion of the population, but the 195 entries in French represent only a fraction of the entries for French Canadians.

Sport often brings fleeting fame. The inclusion of practically the whole synchronised swimming team from the 1996 Olympics brings in Valérie Hould-Marchand, who, turning 18 on May 29, is the youngest person in the book. Casting the net that broadly could bring in hundreds of amateur athletes destined for lives of obscurity after their moment of glory. Donovan Bailey belongs in, if he never accomplishes anything again, but amateur athletes had better wait until they show whether they are going to establish a career, like skier, now sports commentator, Steve Podborski. Generally professional players are under represented. The superstars of hockey are in: Beliveau, Gretzky, Howe, Hull, Lafleur, Orr. The heroes of 1972, Paul Henderson and Ken Dryden, are not. Alan Eagleson is perhaps the only convicted criminal in the book.

CD-ROM is an ideal medium for works of reference. Canadian Who’s Who has wisely not added any mixed media bells and whistles to its CD-ROM. It gives us just the text. The added value comes from search, copy, print and bookmark functions. You can find people by surname or given name, occupation, position or title, birthday, birthyear or birthplace, creative works, recreations, clubs, address by city, region or postal code or do a full text search for any words you like. Unfortunately there is no search field for education. If you want to find people who went to Trent University, you have to search the words Trent AND University. This calls up anyone who ever taught their or received an honorary degree or had any connection with any university and had a family member called Trent. The CD-ROM makes sticking to the format for entries more important. Future editions of the CD-ROM could be much more easily searched if the format was better used. As it is, many searches are tricky because information is given in different places and different forms. There is no easy way to find all the heads of the chartered banks or all the generals or admirals in the Canadian Forces. But you can easily find the oldest person in the book, retired diplomat and journalist Fulgence Charpentier, who will be 101 in June, or how many people were born in Kamloops, ten, including jazz composer Phil Nimmons and Diefenbaker cabinet minister Davie Fulton, or look up all the playwrights, of whom there are forty-seven.

Canadian Who’s Who cannot get much bigger. Perhaps another couple of thousand entries could be squeezed in. If it is to get any better notable Canadians will have to overcome their shyness and coyness and perhaps a bit of laziness and be more forthcoming in supplying material for their entries. If they do, the editors may have to make difficult judgments to accommodate the most useful entries. But, perhaps like The Canadian Encyclopedia, Canadian Who’s Who should abandon the book and once it has mastered the medium publish only in CD-ROM or, shortly, DVD-ROM. The editors might balk at the work and the cost might be prohibitive, but then there would be room for everyone and we could really get to know each other.

THE SERIOUS BUFFOON - John Crosbie's No Holds Barred

Books in Canada

NO HOLDS BARRED
My Life in Politics
by John C. Crosbie
with Geoffrey Stevens
McClelland and Stewart,
ISBN 0-7710-2427-4

John Crosbie is the Mulroney cabinet minister held in the highest regard by both the general public and journalists. He is the only one, with the exceptions of the egregious Kim Campbell, and Erik Nielsen, who resigned in 1986, to have published memoirs. His book makes agreeable reading, but it contains few revelations and will be a minor contribution to Canadian political history. Its main interest is the story of an unusual political career.

Crosbie's entry into politics was effortless. He was easily elected Deputy Mayor of St. John's in the fall of 1965 but only seven months later, when he was 36, Joey Smallwood simply appointed him to his cabinet and practically appointed him to the Newfoundland House of Assembly. Not for him the years of going to mind numbing meetings and working in campaigns and trying to make connections from which most politicians emerge and which leave them too intellectually stunted to make any contribution to government. Politics was government to Crosbie and as a young lawyer in St. John's and a Crosbie he could enter government in Newfoundland at the top. He plays down the wealth of the Crosbies, who certainly had their financial reverses, but they were Newfoundland's most prominent business family and had been active in politics since the days of his grandfather, who had been Newfoundland's Minister of Finance from 1924 to 1928.

Crosbie was an outstanding student at Queen's University and Dalhousie University Law School and won a Viscount Bennett Fellowship to study at the London School of Economics. Unfortunately he was to study law at LSE and gave it up after Christmas because "They weren't really teaching me anything new or different...". If he had returned to his undergraduate interest in politics and economics at LSE he might have learned to think more deeply and critically about those subjects to the benefit of his politics and his book.

Crosbie's father had warned him against getting involved with Joey Smallwood. Crosbie's two years under the madcap, corrupt, petty tyrant he depicts were frustrating but they launched him on his political career and enabled to him to make important contributions to the reform of Newfoundland government. Resigning with Clyde Wells over Smallwood's eagerness to pour government money into John Shaheen's doomed Come by Chance oil refinery, he sought the Liberal leadership but was frustrated again by Smallwood's trickery and corrupt domination of the party. He sat as an Independent Liberal  until June of 1971 when he joined Frank Moores' Tories, serving four years in his government before his election to the House of Commons in a by-election in 1976.

In helping to clear up the mess left by Smallwood and bring in long overdue reforms Crosbie was able to do the good work in government that he entered politics to do. In his first taste of power in Ottawa, as Joe Clark's Minister of Finance, Crosbie was frustrated by politics. The budget that he presented in December 1979, and which led to the government's defeat, was a worthy effort to address Canada's growing financial problems so far as Clark's stupid raft of election promises permitted. In contrast to Crosbie, Clark, who had beavered away at politics from his early teens, had no idea what government was about. Policy was for Clark just another kind of political equipment like buttons and posters and a campaign bus. Crosbie is scathing about Clark's promises but admits to sharing his inept political judgment that they should govern as if they had a majority and that the Liberals would not risk an election. Thus he must share a small part of the blame for Trudeau's disastrous last government.

Crosbie's account of his nine year in Mulroney's government is superficial. He gives little sense of how he worked and what difference he was able to make. He recounts his difficulties with Mulroney's underlings. He had none with Mulroney himself. He complains that twenty-five to thirty hours of cabinet or committee meetings every week left little time "to think or act intelligently on issues...".  His account of his activity in his four successive portfolios seems to confirm this.

His most important work was as Minister of International Trade in piloting free trade legislation through Parliament and speaking up for it and initiating negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement, but his account of this is simply a series of anecdotes. Whether he can take as much credit as he claims for the establishment of the World Trade Organisation history will tell, but it was a worthwhile Canadian initiative.

As Minister of Justice Crosbie presided over the kind of supposed progressive reforms that seem to happen regardless of politics and he takes pride in them and the number of bills that he got passed as proof that on "social and human issues" he is an "intelligent liberal". But his account of his work shows no great thought or awareness of the contradictions in his positions. The review of all existing legislation lest it might conflict with what it was imagined the Supreme Court of Canada would make of Section 15, the equality section, of the Charter was basically a technical job. It amounted to making parliament subject to academic theories of equality that are always abstract and dogmatic but not always coherent. It would have been better simply to wait for legislation to be challenged and defend it before the courts, unless, without speculating as to what the courts might do, it was simply thought to be bad legislation. Crosbie was gung ho for expanding the powers of the Canadian Human Rights Commission to cover alleged cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and for women in combat roles in the armed forces and most other correct causes. On the other hand he introduced precise anti-pornography legislation that would have been made mincemeat of by the courts if it had not died on the order paper after the usual outcry from arts groups, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and others.

Crosbie finally says that he is a Newfoundlander first and he unashamedly fought for Newfoundland's interests in Ottawa. But he does not seem to see any future for Newfoundland beyond
its dependency on money from Ottawa: equalisation payments for the Newfoundland government and Employment Insurance scamming for its people, and the kind of big projects that obsessed Smallwood. He calls the development of the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland his proudest accomplishment in politics. He devotes a chapter to it and his two successful efforts to save it. He is contemptuous of his critics but he does not explain what exactly Ottawa's role was or why it should have had any role in financing the project.

Though Crosbie's manuscript was cut to a fraction of its original length with the help of the distinguished political journalist Geoffrey Stevens and the book is easy reading, it is still too long without managing to get into enough detail to come to grips with many of the issues Crosbie faced. Incidents and arguments are repeated and trivia, like a trade mission to Boston are recounted. The early chapters of the book setting out his family background and his struggles with Smallwood are the best. The book is as much reflections as memoirs but these, while thoughtful, are too casual to be persuasive.

Many of his digressions concern the difficulty of intelligently addressing public issues in the face of political correctness and public suspicion of politicians encouraged by the media. From time to time he launches a tirade against media bias and the wilful gullibility of the public. His observations are not altogether unfair, but these are problems that must be faced up to. It does no good to dismiss them with humourous abuse, calling journalism a "grubby little craft". Crosbie has no answer to these problems. The only answer is to show leadership, as Crosbie did to the extent his positions permitted. He earned respect for it. Many politicians have contributed to public suspicion by their unprincipled conduct. Crosbie could say something about this, but he is too genial to draw sharp and insightful portraits. Even Smallwood is finally proclaimed " a great Newfoundland patriot". He is far too generous to Joe Clark and claims to like and admire Trudeau, whom he voted for in the 1968 Liberal leadership convention.

Crosbie is most fondly remembered for his humorous sallies in the Commons and on the hustings. He retails many of these, but however successful they were when launched and however well they filled the need for media sound bites and served Crosbie and his party they mostly seem pretty lame in cold print. Crosbie complains that he was a victim of political correctness when his jokes were denounced as sexist and that the media stereotyped him as a buffoon. But he consciously developed his public speaking style to overcome a native shyness. It worked very well for him and he obviously enjoyed it. The uproar from feminists never did him much harm and if he was not always taken completely seriously, he had no one but himself to blame.

Twice in the book Crosbie calls the Liberals "brothel keepers". Colourful as the phrase is, coming from someone who was a Liberal until he was 41 and sought the leadership of a provincial Liberal party, it does not convey a serious contempt earned from a lifetime's experience. Crosbie calls Trudeau a "worthy adversary'' and Sheila Copps a "worthy antagonist". Whether they conceived as high a regard for him, future memoirs will show, but for Crosbie his exchanges with two people he should regard as particularly vicious and responsible for great damage to the country seem not to have been much more than a jolly game.

Crosbie would have won the 1983 Tory leadership convention if he had been able to speak French and most likely would have become Prime Minister. At the end of the book he reflects on "the importance of being number one". A Crosbie government would undoubtedly have made a difference. Good political leadership is so scarce in Canada that the frustration of Crosbie's ambition must count as a serious loss. As this book shows, when someone of Crosbie's intelligence, talent and disinterestedness makes his way into politics but not to the top, there can be disappointingly little to show for it.

COURTS SHOULD APPLY LAWS - NOT MAKE THEM Rosalie Abella and her Cadillac

COURTS SHOULD APPLY LAWS - NOT MAKE THEM
Rosalie Abella and her Cadillac
January 5, 1998,  Ottawa Citizen

Frustration with the expense and delay involved in going to court seems to be leading people to lose sight of what courts are for. Across the political spectrum, mediation and alternative dispute resolution are promoted as the way round problems in the courts. They have become growth industries for lawyers and lay counsellors and at times the prospect of the privatisation of civil justice looms. Governments baulk at the cost of the administration of justice and judges grow tetchy with the tedium of hearing peoples' private disputes.

The courts, however, are not just there to provide a government subsidised dispute resolution service to parties who could and should resolve their disputes themselves. There has never been anything stopping people from resolving their differences privately. The courts have no monopoly on dispute resolution. The expense and delay in going to court should provide plenty of opportunity for private competition. There has always been some private resolution of business disputes. It has never developed far because the courts offer something private dispute resolution cannot. What is new is government encouragement and, in prospect, requirement of alternative dispute resolution.

What distinguishes courts, what defines them, is their monopoly on the power to invoke the authority of the state. When a court issues a judgment property may be seized or people might be sent to gaol for not obeying an injunction. Alternative dispute resolution, if it cannot invoke the authority of the state, is simply another layer of preliminaries before the parties can finally put their case to the courts who can. If it can invoke the authority of the state, alternative dispute resolution is simply a new form of court proceeding, which there is no reason to suppose will be any cheaper or faster than the traditional courts can be.

The purpose of having the courts adjudicate private disputes is the same as the purpose of the courts in their criminal jurisdiction. It is to keep the peace. If people could not turn to the courts for a final determination of their differences backed by the authority of the state, they would end up fighting in the streets. People who can settle their differences amicably do not end up battling them out in court. If parties to a lawsuit often do manage to maintain civil, and even business relations, it is because they know that the state through the courts will dispose of their dispute and that there is no point in being nasty about it.

The rapidly growing political role of the courts has complicated and obscured their basic and essential role. It has complicated it in two ways: by adding to the courts' work and increasing the delays, particularly as political cases are usually given priority for hearing. And by encouraging a weakness of the courts for making law rather than applying it. When courts make law rather than applying it, no one can know where they stand until the highest court has spoken. Parties will not accept the law and settle but are encouraged to think that if they push hard enough they can get whatever they want from the courts. The political role of the courts has obscured their basic and essential role because, apart from criminal cases, most court cases receiving public attention are political.

Even judges have become confused about the role of the courts. Rosalie Abella of the Ontario Court of Appeal, the most popular choice to succeed John Sopinka on the Supreme Court of Canada, in an address she gave in 1991, when she was chairman of the Ontario Law Reform Commission, distinguished between public and private cases and called for more "expansive" hearing of "Constitutional questions, issues involving new jurisprudence", i. e. political cases. For Abella these were Cadillac cases, as opposed to the mere Chevies that you or I might have one day to drive to court.

Such a distinction is dangerous for the courts. The meanest dispute between neighbours must implicate the full authority of the state when brought to court. Conversely, whatever the political implications of a case, it is no occasion for being expansive. The facts must be found based on a painstaking review of the evidence and the law must be scrupulously applied and not made up from political considerations.

If we are ever to get prompt and economical justice from our courts they must be prepared to continue conscientiously in their essential work and not be put off by their mundane substance or distracted by political ambition and the lure of the big fancy cars. 

DO YOUR HOME WORK, SKIP LEADERS DEBATES Canadians pay far too much attention to the painful displays that offer no insight

May 24, 1997,  Ottawa Citizen

Politics is an endless debate. The leaders debates, which have become a fixture of Canadian general elections since 1979, are brief episodes in that debate. They are a contrivance that distorts the reality of the election contest and are paid far too much attention. It would be best if they did not take place at all.

The observation is now trite that it is the media reaction to the debates rather than the debates themselves that has the most influence on the election results. Last week's debates will be seen as defining moments and turning points in the history of the election. They were none of that. Such analysis reinforces the distortion worked by the debates on the election.

Though I have tapes of leaders debates going back to 1984, I have never actually watched one through. They are at once painfully rehearsed and stilted and ragged and disorganised. Anyone who follows politics will hear nothing new and learn nothing new about the characters of the leaders.

Most of the audience must be political enthusiasts who will root for their champions. People who tune in to help decide who to vote for are choosing the lazy and worst route to a decision. If all you know of politicians is the debates, you are seeing politicians at their worst with no background from which to assess their performances critically. If you have the background, you do not need to see the debate.

But for journalists as much as voters the debates are the lazy way of following the election and we have become fixated on them.

The inspiration of leaders debates is the American presidential election debates going back to the classic Kennedy Nixon debates of 1960. American presidential candidates are running for the same office in an entrenched two party system.

Our parliamentary government being radically different the American debates provide no model for us and distort our politics when they are imitated. Real Canadian nationalists would see this and object to leaders debates on that ground.

The debates exaggerate the importance of the leaders, even Jean Chrétien. The distortion is extreme this time round as we all know that only Jean Chrétien will come out of the election as Prime Minister. The other parties are simply jockeying for position in opposition. The inclusion of Gilles Duceppe in the English debate and Preston Manning in the French debate is bizarre, as neither leader expects or wants the votes of the respective audiences.

But the debates have always distorted the election campaigns by giving leaders an audience out of a contrived fairness that they should earn by their support, work and persuasiveness. The debates reinforce the tendency to see the parties as nothing more than the leaders' vehicles. Preston Manning at least, if he were lucid and principled, should decline to participate or send a spokesman for his party. But Reform is nothing but Manning and despite his professed populism he knows it.

In the recent British election there was for the first time a serious prospect of a leaders debate. Happily, Tony Blair was able to bury the prospect in the details of the arrangements. The Tories tried to tag him as chicken, but without a tradition of leaders debates in Britain it had no discernible effect. We can only hope that some future leaders will have the courage to refuse a leaders debate.

France is also holding parliamentary elections, but there will be no leaders debates. French television is running one on one debates between spokesmen for two at a time of the many parties, not always leaders. These are firmly but unobtrusively moderated with a digital clock showing how long each participant has talked and the moderator intervening to even up the time. These debates will not mark turning points or defining moments in the campaign, but with the lightening articulacy of the French political class they make good informative television.

The television networks still conspire to force the leaders debates on us. They should leave it to the CBC, which reaches everyone in Canada with a television, and by offering their usual fare test more fairly how much we really want the debates. At least cable now offers most of us alternative viewing.

The money and air time saved by the private networks not carrying the debates could be put to better use by offering focused debates between other politicians on the French model. Paul Martin could take on Alexa MacDonough. Lewis Mackenzie could debate Douglas Young. Deborah Gray could clash with Svend Robinson. All of these could prove much more exciting and informative than the leaders debates. They would also test the fitness of the participants to serve in parliament rather than leaving them simply to cheer on their leaders and slave away at their local campaigns.

As it is, if politicians are not just newscast sound bites they are too often interviewed and too little forced to debate. Most political interviewers let our leaders off easy while maintaining a detached and slightly cynical pose. Local stations run lots of panels with candidates from each of the major parties, but these are more like confused group interviews than debates.

Above all, if there are to be debates, the people should be kept out of it. The questions from earnest members of the public with their posed indecision are simply a distraction in a distraction.