BY-PRODUCTS OF THE LAW Stikeman Elliott, Tom Berger, Scott Turow

March 1, 2003,  Books in Canada

Stikeman Elliott
The First Fifty Years
by Richard W. Pound
McGill-Queen's University Press
ISBN: 0773524118

One Man's Justice
A Life in the Law
by Thomas R. Berger
Douglas & MacIntyr
ISBN: 1550549197

Reversible Errors
by Scott Turow
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
ISBN: 0002005301


Aspiring lawyers used to be told that the practice of law was no way to become rich. Lawyers have generally vied with doctors for the honour of having the best paid occupation, but, though many lawyers have made a very good living, lawyers who grew rich generally did so from business interests outside the practice of law itself.

Yet in 1952, the first year of his partnership with Fraser Elliott, Heward Stikeman, not yet 40, made about one million dollars from their practice. Later Stikeman and Elliott became very rich indeed from business interests outside the practice of law, particularly from CAE, which dominates the market for aircraft simulators for pilot training. But the interest of Stikeman Elliott is in the first few chapters, which describe how Stikeman and Elliott managed to build their extraordinarily lucrative practice.

Stikeman, born in in Montreal in 1913, worked as a lawyer for the Department of National Revenue from 1939 to 1946. From 1943 he was Assistant Deputy Minister of National Revenue. The Commissioner of Income Tax, from 1943 Deputy Minister of National Revenue, was Colin Fraser Elliott, the father of Roy Fraser Elliott, Stikeman's future partner. In the small society of Ottawa Stikeman became a friend of the father and the son.

Roy Fraser Elliott, born in Ottawa in 1921, graduated from Queen's in 1943 and Osgoode Hall Law School in 1946. After a year at Harvard he joined, at Stikeman's bidding, the firm Stikeman had gone to on returning to Montreal in 1946 after his war service at the Department of National Revenue.

War-time demands and post-war hopes had greatly increased the level and complexity of taxation. Stikeman had gained unparalleled knowledge of the legislation, some of which he helped to draft, and of its administration. Stikeman Elliott started out as a tax law boutique with only four lawyers. Good advice or successful representation could save clients lots of money and Stikeman and Elliott were paid accordingly. There were few other tax lawyers and none who could claim the knowledge and connections of Stikeman and Elliott.

Left wing critics would see in this something crooked: high priced talent helping corporations avoid paying their fair share. In fact the opposite is true. Overreaching governments risked stifling the economy with high taxes and were forced to try to mitigate the economic damages through   complicated legislation. These produced their own economic distortions and a lucrative but finally unproductive service industry of tax advice. Getting in on the beginning of this industry allowed Stikeman and Elliott to become rich through the practice of law.

Stikeman Elliott's advantage in tax law could not last forever and the firm gradually expanded into general business law and has now become a big full service firm much like all the others, whatever Stikeman Elliott may say about its special values. But as late as the early seventies Stikeman and Elliott were the only partners, doling out salaries and bonuses to their hard working and talented associates as they saw fit.

In the 1950's the old law schools did not produce lawyers fast enough to keep pace with the growth of the country, its economy and the complications of the law. There was work to be had for the asking and Stikeman and Elliott were never shy about asking. Even today the market for legal services is not so efficient that getting work does not count as much as doing it well, to say nothing of pricing it competitively. But the corporations that sustain the big firms are not so tied to old connections and will shop around. Careers such as Stikeman and Elliott enjoyed are now impossible.

Richard Pound is known to Canadians as a member of the International Olympic Committee. Like a good sport he has compiled the book his firm wanted though no one will want to read it through. It is surely no a coincidence that it is published by McGill-Queen's University Press and Pound is Chancellor of McGill. They have published duller and less worthy books. Hundreds of people who have worked at the firm are kindly mentioned. Big deals and big cases are briefly recognised. The opening of new offices in Toronto, Ottawa, London and beyond is chronicled. Those who left the firm early, unless like John Turner and Donald Johnston they went on to distinguished careers in politics, are sometimes curtly dismissed. There is nothing on the firms finances after 1970.

Tom Berger has not grown rich from the practice of law. Its attraction for him has been influence rather than money. Berger is best known to Canadians for the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry and for resigning from the British Columbia Supreme Court in 1983 after public statements he made urging the inclusion of native rights in the constitution lead to an investigation by the Canadian Judicial Council. British Columbians may remember him as the leader of the provincial NDP for a brief period before he lost his seat and retired from electoral politics in 1969.

One Man's Justice is a memoir of Berger's favorite cases. Only incidentally does it recount his life beyond the cases. Berger had a commendable distaste for the phony side of politics:

...the proclamation of slogans....the constant meetings, speeches, the time spent in "working the room," meeting people you'd never met before and ("Nice to see you again") and would never meet again."

But he was as keen as any politician to make his mark on the life of the country; he simply wanted to do it in the courts rather than in a legislature. He would not have to persuade the people to support him, just a few judges.

Berger says nothing about his work as a judge. He is a strict believer in the rule that judges have their say in their reasons from the bench and should say no more than that. He breaches no client confidentiality describing his cases off the bench. But he whinges that others did it and got away with it in defending himself against the allegation that by urging the inclusion of native rights in the constitution he had breached the rule that judges should not speak out on political issues. It is a longstanding and sound rule made only more important by the increased political importance of the courts since the Charter. The Canadian Judicial Council did not recommend his removal from the bench. But Berger was fed up with the controversy. He had always been uncertain about wanting to be a judge, and finally he saw his hopes of sitting on the Court of Appeal or Supreme Court of Canada—where he fancied he could make law rather than just decide individual cases—fading. He flatters himself that his intervention helped get native rights in the constitution.

Berger likes to believe that in the cases he recounts he was "engaged in the pursuit of justice". Such a belief may give an advocate the confidence and energy to carry through a case to a successful conclusion. But it can also blind an advocate to the messiness of life, which the law exists to sort out. Berger's accounts of his cases are recapitulations of his advocacy. His clients were always right and if they did not win they should have. The only criminals Berger knew in an extensive criminal practice were pitiful or innocuous fellow who simply had their own subculture. Though he goes on too long about some of his cases one never feels one gets the full story.

On native rights Berger is a true believer. Fellow true believers will be grateful for his advocacy. Those unsure what to make of it all will learn nothing from him.

Scott Turow has grown rich from writing mystery novels about the law. The money he has made from novels like Presumed Innocent, turned into a successful movie starring Harrison Ford, has allowed him to do pro bono work that has extended his experience of criminal law and provided raw material for further novels. He has acted for prisoners on death row and prosecuted corrupt judges, both themes in his latest novel.

In Reversible Errors Rommy Gandolph, a dim witted petty criminal, is, in 2001, awaiting execution for a triple murder that took place on July 4, 1991. Arthur Raven, a former prosecutor now settled into a comfortable civil litigation practice, is conscripted by the Federal Court of Appeals to make one last attempt to save Gandolph. Rommy gave a full and videotaped confession. It looks like a simple open and shut case. But not for long. The pace and complication of the story,  which never loses plausibility, is impressive. The original investigating policeman, prosecutor and judge become involved. Divergent perspectives and interests are developed. One grows impatient for the next twist as Turow recounts the dreary amours of his principal characters at unnecessary length. The dialogue can be disconcerting. Turow seems to be trying to update the hard boiled idioms of film noir. Either that or cops and  criminals and lawyers in Chicago, where Turow practices, learned to talk at the movies.

Reversible Errors is not a novel about capital punishment. Turow set out his reasoned pragmatic opposition to capital punishment in a New Yorker article in January. In Reversible Errors it is simply a background fact. For the crime novelist the end of capital punishment would be a loss, draining some of the life and death drama from the genre.

The practice of law is not about winning or losing or changing the law without bothering with politics. It is the hard and generally well paid work of resolving people's conflicts according to settled rules so that they will not fight in the streets. Drama, wealth and power are occasional by-products of the resulting exposure to all aspects of human life.

IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW J. L. Cohen

November 1, 2002, Books in Canada

Renegade Lawyer:
The Life of J. L. Cohen
The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History
University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802035132

J. L. Cohen was one of the most prominent labour lawyers in Canada before the present regime of collective bargaining was established in the middle of the last century. He played an important role in establishing that regime, working with both the Ontario and Dominion governments. He also acted for a number of Communists in trouble with the law. The eminent career he built on exceptional hard work and intelligence ended with his conviction for the assault of his 22 year old occasional lover and secretary in 1945 and subsequent disbarment. He died in 1950 only a few months after his reinstatement. Laurel Sefton MacDowell speculates he committed suicide.

Cohen’s is a poignant story and a significant public life. The personal sources for his life are limited until the crisis at the end, for which MacDowell gives us more than we need from the transcripts of the proceedings against him. A workaholic, Cohen had for years relied on a combination of poorly understood prescription drugs and alcohol to keep him going.

We cannot now know Cohen. The death of his father when he was 13, leaving him to support his mother and five other children, no doubt shaped him. But invoking feminist theories of masculinity, a presumption of general Anti-Semitism and political prejudice is no help in understanding the man or his career.

It is Cohen’s public life that must be of lasting interest. Today labour law is a specialty sharply divided between union work and management work. Lawyers choose to go into it on one side or the other as they start out. Cohen seems simply to have taken what work he could get. Actually born in England in 1897 to immigrants from Lithuania, Cohen grew up in the garment district of Toronto. He found himself acting for both employers and employees in the garment industry. Some union activists were Communists whose demonstrations had them in continual conflict with the police. Cohen acted for them. MacDowell wonders why he never joined the Communist Party of Canada. Perhaps the answer is simply that he was never a communist. No doubt he was sincerely sympathetic to the CCF. He hoped to run for parliament as a CCF candidate in Windsor in 1945. His candidacy foundered on the reluctance of the CCF to accept a candidate with Communist support when the Party, under its latest directives from Moscow, was making common cause with the Liberals in the face of the rising CCF.

And no doubt Cohen sincerely believed in the collective bargaining regime modelled on the American Wagner Act that he advocated on behalf of unions. But what came first for Cohen was the work, for which he seems almost always to have been fully paid. He made for himself and his family a good life. He had little time for politics or society except as it related to his work.

Until 1934 Cohen acted for both employers and employees and was a director and shareholder of several companies. He arranged police protection for strikebreakers with Police Chief Draper, who had led the long running battle with Cohen’s Communist clients.

MacDowell speaks of Cohen bringing “his practice into line with his social outlook” and an “inherent conflict of interest in acting for both management and employees...”. But there is no inherent conflict. Paradoxically, while labour management relations have become more pragmatic and even businesslike under the regime that Cohen pioneered, labour has felt it necessary to construct a moral divide across which no bosses’ lawyer could be trusted to represent workers and any union lawyer who represented a boss would be a traitor.

Renegade Lawyer is published by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, but there is little law in it. Cohen had mixed success for his Communist clients, partly because they rather wanted to go to gaol for propaganda purposes. He declined to act for Tim Buck when the Communist Party of Canada was outlawed fearing Buck “wanted a show trial to propagandise the Communist Party of Canada’s aims, not a simple legal defence to gain the release of the accused.” MacDowell seems not to have read the reasons for judgment in a single case in which Cohen appeared, preferring to insinuate judicial bias rather than to analyse legal reasoning. If Cohen’s civil liberties work had any effect on the law it does not appear from this book. Cohen’s dedicated advocacy bespeaks a faith in the law and the courts his biographer obscures.

The daughter of a distinguished union organiser and official and former wife of an Ontario Labour Relations Board chairman and affiliated with the Centre for Industrial Relations at the University of Toronto. MacDowell is steeped in labour history and industrial relations ideology. She does not feel it necessary to explain the significance of the struggles in which Cohen represented unions. Unions had a long history in Canada before Cohen came on the scene. The procedures of labour relations boards, certification, collective agreements, grievance and arbitration, the sidelining of courts, in the establishment of which Cohen played an important role, were major breakthroughs for unions but not the only possible outcome. It remains basically a North American model classically entrenched in Canada and more fragile in the United States. A large constituency of industrial relations academics, labour lawyers, law professors, arbitrators, human resources professionals and union officials have decided it is for the best and argue only over details, either pleasing to unions or not.

Stepping back in an epilogue to assess the importance of Cohen’s public life MacDowell sees nothing to consider but the arguments of Marxist academics for whom collective bargaining is a detour from the path of revolution. Their worst offence is to sound some times like right wing critics of unions.

MacDowell entertains suspicions of a political conspiracy behind Cohen’s conviction for assault and prejudice in the benchers of the Law Society in his disbarment. But her account makes the simplest explanation the most likely. He was guilty of assault causing bodily harm and his reformatory sentence and disbarment followed inevitably from that.

Cohen was by all accounts an abrasive personality. Many eminent lawyers have been difficult, flawed personalities. He did important work. But his work was finished. He would have been out of place in the conformist world of labour relations he helped establish.

CHEERING BERTHA WILSON The First Woman on the Supreme Court of Canada

October 11, 2002,  Books in Canada

Judging Bertha Wilson:
Law as Large as Life
Ellen Anderson
The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History
University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802036481

In 1976 Bertha Wilson became the first woman on a provincial court of appeal, Ontario's, and in 1982 the first woman on the Supreme Court of Canada. The coming of the Charter has drawn public attention to the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada. Judging Bertha Wilson is the first biography of a Supreme Court judge of the Charter era. Ellen Anderson is a fan of Bertha Wilson. She neither judges her nor pleads a case for her. She cheers her on through a full life.

Wilson was born in Kirkcaldy in Scotland in 1923. She received an excellent Scottish education and developed a lifelong interest in philosophy growing from the Scottish Enlightenment tradition including Hume and Adam Smith. Both her brothers became philosophy professors. She married an equally bright Presbyterian minister, John Wilson, and began the life of a Scottish minister's wife. In 1949 John Wilson was called the the United Church in Renfrew Ontario. A stint as a navy chaplain brought the Wilsons to Halifax where, in 1954, Bertha enrolled at the Dalhousie Law School. John's job in church fundraising brought the Wilsons to Toronto and in 1958 Bertha was hired as an articling student by the old and respected firm of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt.

Hard work, intelligence and and an appetite for reading that extended to the dustiest law books enabled Wilson to build from the routine legal research of an articling student a unique research practice at Osler's. She never went to court and had practically no clients of her own but she proved herself invaluable and was esteemed and rewarded accordingly. When Ottawa was looking for a woman to appoint to the Ontario Court of Appeal she seemed eminently qualified.

Anderson's account of Wilson's life is straightforward and agreeable. But the bulk of this book is a review of Wilson's judgments. Even for lawyers, trying to discern a pattern in the judgments in the hundreds of cases which circumstances bring before a long serving appellate judge is a daunting task. Anderson thinks she has found a 'Canadian Philosophy of Judicial Analysis' in Wilson's judgments. Her summaries of Wilson's judgments are superficial and uncritical. Only once does she tentatively suggest that Wilson fell short of her ideal. As one struggles to make sense of the flow of cases it may seem that Wilson was surrounded by fools, so obviously right Anderson always thinks she was. But few cases reach the appellate courts if there is not something to be said for both sides.

Judging Bertha Wilson is the culmination of years of work. It is based on Anderson's doctoral thesis 'Bertha Wilson: Postmodern Judge in a Postmodern Time'. She also wrote an MA thesis on the Scottish common-sense philosophers and their importance to Canadian law and culture and an LLB study on Wilson's jurisprudence. Anderson is the victim of too much postmodern education. Her theoretical apparatus only obscures her story. Her reading in fashionable theory has not been digested and she seems not have have managed the one thing educators at all levels say they aim at, critical thinking.

Anderson says Wilson is a postmodern judge with a distinctively contextual approach to the law. "Postmodern" or "contextual" occur hundreds of times in the book but could be deleted from the text with little damage to the syntax and no loss of meaning. Both are simply pretentious ways of excusing lax thinking. The judge who disregards context is a straw man.

Wilson's fondness for reading philosophy - she and her husband would spend days mulling over a passage from Heidegger - has encouraged Anderson to sprinkle references to Aristotle and Hume through her commentary on Wilson's judgments. Those who have not read philosophy will find these largely meaningless. Those who have will be sceptical. Anderson seems to think, and Wilson, who read the manuscript, may agree, that Hume's position on causation has some application to deciding cases. Thus "Her recognition that self-defence and provocation could co-exist and be co-determinative of the appellant's behaviour suggest a much more Humean notion of causation than is customary in our law courts". But Hart and Honoré's classic Causation in the Law, not in a bibliography that includes Aristotle, Derrida, Hume, Lyotard, Rorty and Adam Smith, firmly and rightly says that Hume's treatment of causation "is on a level of generality which is au dessus de la melée of the lawyer and the historian."

Wilson was a clear writer, an essential qualification, not by any means always met, for an appellate judge. She was fond of writing and wrote too much. On the bench she was courteous but firm, attentive, gently witty and well prepared. On the court of appeal and in commercial cases in the Supreme Court of Canada she stood generally for clarity and certainty. In family law cases, where feminists looked for a partisan, she was most concerned to see that legislative reforms, driven by the women's movement, worked as the legislatures intended. All this was neither exceptional nor exceptionable and well done.

Wilson's arrival on the Supreme Court of Canada coincided with the coming into force of the Charter. Judges knew well the dramatic implications of the Charter. They were faced with a choice between an restrained approach consistent with received jurisprudence and respectful of parliament and the legislatures and seizing on the Charter as an instrument of untrammelled power. With the slightest of hesitation they went for it. Wilson's account of the keenness of the judges to deal with Charter cases as they began to come before them, leaving aside, often to her, the traditional common law and statutory interpretation they had been used to, gives the lie to her claim "We didn't volunteer" set out in a 1999 contribution to Policy Options.

The most dramatic, and predictable, illustration of this was the Morgentaler decision. Positions on abortion are so vehemently held that on both sides ends seem to justify means. Politicians gave assurances when the Charter was being passed that, despite Roe v. Wade in the United States Supreme Court, it should not mean an end to the law on abortion. This was both true and disingenuous. Nothing in the Charter implies a right to an abortion. If you can find that in it you can find anything. But that is exactly the point. Finding whatever you like in the Charter was the predictable outcome.

Other judges tried to cover their decision in Morgentaler on procedural rights grounds. Wilson would have none of that and became the pro-choice hero as a result. She was pro-choice when she went on the court and no amount of legal analysis can get around the fact that she used the power given her by the Charter to enforce her personal convictions. Nor again, pace Anderson, does Hume have anything to do with it.

Wilson was both a card carrying New Democrat and a socialist. She seems never to have been politically active except on the bench. She showed her colours most freely in dissents that would have extended the Charter's guarantee of freedom of association to collective bargaining and a right to strike. The principal cases in which she did this concerned the public sector, the most doubtful field for union activity. The point of such a fanciful reading of "freedom of association" is not that it would stop governments from passing back to work legislation or wage controls but that it would subject them and finally the minutiae of labour legislation to the arbitration of the Supreme Court of Canada, which, under Section 1 of the Charter will allow or disallow whatever it likes.

In McKinney, a case concerning compulsory retirement at universities, Wilson sets out her understanding of Canadian's political beliefs as an aid to interpreting the Charter:
 
"The vast majority of citizens nowadays want their government to be continuously active. Few people still subscribe to the doctrine that the less government does the better will be the result. The main controversies are centred not on whether government should act, but on how and when it should act.
....
...it seems generally accepted by our historians that the political philosophy of laissez-faire has not been embraced to any substantial degree in Canada.
....
I believe that this historical review demonstrates that Canadians have a somewhat different attitude towards government and its role from our U. S. neighbours. Canadians recognize that government has traditionally had and continues to have an important role to play in the creation and preservation of a just Canadian society. The state has been looked to and has responded to demands that Canadians be guaranteed adequate health care, access to education and a minimum level of financial security to name but a few examples."
 
Apparently the Charter has nothing to offer the substantial minority of right-wing Canadians. They are one minority not to be protected.

As Anderson explains it, Wilson believes the Charter is to be interpreted in the context of a kind of Canadian political consensus. Neither she nor Wilson seems able to contemplate the possibility that the consensus could change. If the longstanding Liberal hegemony were to end and be replaced by an Alliance/Conservative hegemony would the Charter be there to accommodate it or to thwart it?

Wilson was keen on intervenors. These she felt would help the court with "'legislative' facts illuminating the socio-political environment". In other words they would encourage a free ranging political debate before the court. An unnamed judge wrote in an internal memorandum that the court "now takes on the appearance of an ancient jousting contest with each side gathering up as many spear bearers as they can". The piling up of material from all interested lobbies before the court has coincided with a reduction of actual oral argument to a perfunctory ritual. Despite denials by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and others, the influence of the law schools' star ideologues serving as clerks to the justices must have expanded.

Anderson seems never to have read a judgment of Wilson's she does not like. But Wilson wrote not only too long but too often. She not only dissented often but often wrote "divergent concurrences". For Anderson this is sowing fruitful seeds for the future of the law. In fact, Wilson with her colleagues, was simply sowing confusion by the inability to settle collegially on reasons for judgment. Wilson's bright and curious mind and wide reading seems to have given her an exaggerated confidence in her opinions. Like a tiresome student in a seminar she always had to have her say. And keen on philosophy, history and sociology the facts and the law of particular cases became lost under generalities and her natural clarity became diffused.

When this book was published there was some comment in the press about Wilson's objection to what she called lobbying amongst the judges, from which she felt excluded.  Retired Chief Justice Antonio Lamer was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying:
 
"Bertha was very often out in left field - you know, way out there. There was no point in going to Bertha's office and saying 'Bertha, if you were going to change this or that, I could go along with it.' Because she was as stubborn as a mule."
 
This is, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated and "left field" need not be understood in a political sense. But, if Wilson could often not bring other judges to her position or find her way to agreeing with them it was not because of some fault in the way the judges worked with each other on cases that requires procedural regulation. Wilson's free associating jurisprudence and garrulity is not distinctive but typical of the judges of the Charter era. Precisely because the judges have set themselves free from any strict or restrained construction of the Charter they will be in some difficulty settling on common reasons for judgment. What distinguished Wilson was her special confidence in her own point of view. And Wilson may never have developed a capacity for argument never having argued in court or public controversies.

Despite complaints from REAL Women to the Canadian Judicial Council that she had shown feminist bias in speeches while she was a judge, incidents which only confirm the unwisdom of judicial speechifying, Wilson says she is not a feminist. Perhaps this is postmodern irony. Her first work after she left the bench was heading a Task Force on Gender Equality for the Canadian Bar Association. This produced a predictably feminist report. The most contentious recommendations were for affirmative action to bring women along to law partnerships and the bench and compulsory sensitivity training for judges. Apparently, if this woman judge was not a feminist, male judges were presumptively chauvinist.

As the Task Force was winding down Wilson took on the most arduous task of her life as one of three non-native commissioners on the seven strong Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The commissioners travelled in the bitterest winter to isolated communities. There was the full panoply of sweat lodges, sweet grass smudges, healing circles and feather holding. The largely aboriginal staffed commission produced a vast report advancing the usual aboriginal wish list of self-government, land claims, more money and affirmative action of various kinds. Wilson thinks this is the most important work she ever did. But it is now over five years since the report was published. Most Canadians have forgotten about it, if they ever noticed it in the first place. What little has been done to implement its recommendations would likely have been done without it.

The ghastly emiseration of Canadian native peoples will not be ended by the repetition and endorsement of pie in the sky demands. Not just Canadian politicians, as Anderson seems to think, but non-native Canadians generally remain miles apart from native leaders and their advocates in their understanding of the proper place of natives in Canadian society. A largely native Royal Commission that listened almost entirely to native people could do nothing to bring them together. Wilson and her fellow commissioners made themselves part of the problem rather than part of the solution. This was predictable. Wilson gave her heart and not her mind to the work and neither she nor Anderson seems to get it.

Biography is not the best way to come to terms with the politics of the law and the Charter. Even without a heavy burden of theory it tends too much to hero worship, or, perhaps, for some, demonisation. It is pleasant to read how Bertha Wilson lived, but in its treatment of the important issues she dealt with this book is a failure. It is another case of heart over mind.

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.