Canada’s Secret Archives

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Dennis Molinaro

Wikimedia Commons

By now the story of Canada’s secret archive has made the news. I will take the time in this post to elaborate more on what I found and why I think it matters to everyone.

This began during my search for documents pertaining to wiretapping in the Cold War. My early research finds made news in December 2016 and January 2017. The discovery of P.C. 3486 and the PICNIC wiretapping program led to a search for more material. The early indications were that this wiretapping went on for decades and that a paper trail had to exist. The RCMP paid rent to Bell for the wiretapping, so where were the financial records, the transcripts of calls, the warrants that were issued, etc.? To my dismay, a thorough search at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) involving the aid of the Information Commissioner’s office led to nothing. Where were these records?

I decided to try something different. I filed Access to Information (ATI) requests to every institution that I could think of that may still have material. This included: the Privy Council Office (PCO), RCMP, CSIS, National Defence, Department of Justice, Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Global Affairs. Some preliminary searches came up negative, some places never replied. In most cases I asked the Commissioner’s office to intervene to expedite the search.

In the course of the search I learned more, such as that Global Affairs had some sort of facility in Saskatchewan that contained historical documents, enough that an archivist was needed. Some institutions like CSE wanted me to take other documents in lieu of abandoning my request because they thought it so broad that it would impede their function (something I assumed could only occur if they had too many documents); other institutions asked for a year extension because they had too much, and PCO told me they initially found 147 boxes of material. That’s usually enough material (if most of it is research rich) to give someone a decade worth of work.

One of the biggest problems I faced was that institutions wanted more specifics on what I was looking for. I told them my general research direction but as part of my request for “wiretapping files” from the Cold War, I also asked for the names of files in these institutions possession that pertained to my subject: in essence I wanted a list. If I had that, I could be specific, but no one wanted to provide one, except PCO which asked for more time but the time extensions became unreasonable. PCO then told me they actually had 1.6 million documents pertaining to my research. It was at that point I decided the public needed to know how bad this situation was.

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History Slam Episode One Hundred: History Five Years Later

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By Sean Graham

Five years ago, we had an idea to do a conversational podcast that looked at a wide variety of historical issues. 100 episodes later, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing some outstanding people and having some terrific conversations. I’ve learned a lot along the way while also having a lot of fun. To highlight that latter part, we put together a compilation of some of our favourite moments from our first 100 episodes.

As we hit the 100 episode mark, however, I was thinking of how much the discipline of history has changed over the past five years. Since we started, there has been a greater expansion of digital history, Reconciliation has become more prominent in historical study, and the academic job market, well, it is what it is. And these are just some of the major shifts that I’ve noticed over the past five years.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with the podcast’s most frequent (starting with the never released pilot episode) guest Aaron Boyes. We talk about the podcast’s origins, how history has changed over the past five years, and the adoption of digital tools by historians. We also talk about the job market for historians and the pros and cons of doing a PhD in history. As an added bonus, we talk with Megan Reilly-Boyes about the benefits and challenges of doing history in the 21st century.

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“Men Want to Hog Everything”: Women in Canadian Legislative Politics after Suffrage Victories

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By Veronica Strong-Boag

“Men Want to Hog Everything”: in one revealing phrase, Agnes Macphail, Canada’s first female parliamentarian (as of 1921), summed up the decades after the first partial suffrage victories.  Admittedly, she went on to note that

There are even some men who think a woman should get a fair break. Not many, but enough to make the struggle seem worth while.[1]

But the overall assessment was bleak.

Hillary Clinton’s fate in November 2016, and many before her, invites the same conclusion. Many men (and male-identified women), like, to invoke yet another farm-yard metaphor from Nellie McClung’s anthropomorphic Mike the Ox in her suffragist manifesto In Times Like These (1915), to resist sharing power and fiercely defend their privileges. As my 1996 article “Independent Women, Problematic Men: First and Second Wave Anti-Feminism in Canada from Goldwin Smith to Betty Steele” demonstrated, Canada’s anti-woman politics has a long history.

While admitting the familiar argument that women sometimes let themselves down (not hard to do in deeply patriarchal cultures), that no party has a monopoly on misogyny, that the ‘first past the post system’ discriminates against women, and minority candidates, and that few suffragists embraced inclusive democracy, this paper highlights resistance to the first enfranchised female voters.[2] That subversion of even partial democracy is easy to find. Continue reading →

What Does Canadian History Look Like? The Story of Us

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By Thomas Peace

It is that time of the year again when historians from across the country are preparing to gather together at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting to talk about our work. The theme of meetings, being held in two weeks time, is “From Far and Wide: The Next 150.” As Canada enters the sesquicentennial’s summer season, hallway conversations will no doubt address subjects related to Confederation and its commemoration (or lack thereof, if the first half of the year is any indicator). Perhaps at top of mind will be CBC’s The Story of Us, a ten-part dramatization of the moments some of Canada’s best-known entertainers, politicians, business people and even a few historians wanted to celebrate with high production-value television. The series, as the tone of the previous sentence sought to instil, was widely critiqued by historians (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Looking at this year’s program, however, suggests we may want to be careful in just how loudly we critique the television series. Some of the problems outlined about The Story of Us seem to apply equally to the CHA’s annual meeting. There are two widespread critiques of the television program that might also be applied to the content of this year’s annual meeting. Continue reading →

Dreams of This as Home: Chinese labourers in children’s history books

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Samantha Cutrara, PhD

My last two blog posts for ActiveHistoy.ca deconstructed pre- and post-Confederation Canadian history in children’s books. My findings suggested that stories that explored difficult histories or social justice topics often did not connect these stories to larger national forces and thus felt isolated from the rest of Canadian history. These findings suggest a dangerous separation. Historians, teachers, and intellectuals can scoff at an add-and-stir or drag-and-drop approach to teaching and learning Canadian histories, but this pattern of seeing some histories as the primary subject of history and other histories are secondary is a pattern that begins early in one’s understanding of national literacy.

May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada. This month my focus is on the labour of Chinese men in building the railroad. In looking for and reading children’s books on this topic, I question: Are there books for children representing this history? Did this history connect to other national (or local or global) events? Was injustice featured or was it mentioned as a corollary to the bigger picture?

Thus, I began my research for this post on Chinese railroad labourers by searching the Toronto Public Library. While I wanted to see if I could find children’s picture books on Chinese labourers building the railroad, my previous searches have taught me that the words I expect to search with are not always the ones that turn up results; Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Ninety-Nine: Digital History Open House

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By Sean Graham

A new semester started for me yesterday as I’m teaching an introductory survey course this summer. Something was different when I walked into the room, though – there were no laptops or tablets. All the students had paper and pens and while some did use their phones to take photos of the slides, the distinct lack of typing sounds felt strange. It reminded me a little of when I was an undergraduate student and the idea of lugging a heavy laptop to and from class was remarkably unappealing.

The speed with which digital tools have come to dominate the academic experience represents a major change in the way we all do and consume history. From mining big data to disseminating history in forms other than academic prose, the expansion of digital methodologies has been swift. At schools across the country, faculty have been incorporating these into their classes and students have been producing some outstanding digital history projects.

In this episode of the History Slam, I venture to the University of Ottawa’s Digital History Open House. I talk with the Open House’s organizer, Jo McCutcheon, about her digital history class, teaching students to use digital tools, and the challenges associated with non-traditional projects. I then speak with two of the presenting students, Chris Pihlak and Chloe Madigan, about their respective projects. The episode finishes with my conversation with Carleton University’s Shawn Graham, the Open House’s keynote speaker. We chat about failing in public, creating spaces where it’s ok to productively fail, and how to assess non-traditional history work.

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“The great climate silence” and Historians

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By Jim Clifford

Are historians contributing to downplaying the dangers of climate change by our silence? Clive Hamilton published a provocative extract from his new book in the Guardian titled “The great climate silence: we are on the edge of the abyss but we ignore it“. He starts by introducing the concept of the Anthropocene, outlining danger we face, and lamenting that humanity’s power to influence planet systems has grown so fast that we’ve not had enough time to adapt our thinking. Hamilton then goes on to argue the humanities and social science are a part of the problem:

Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please.

The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.

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Help Needed! Decolonize 1867 at the CHA—Attend! Participate! Join Us!

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By Stacy Nation-Knapper and Kathryn Labelle

Indigenous peoples have long been calling attention to the processes and effects of colonialism in the western hemisphere. With movements such as Idle No More, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and #NoDAPL bringing discourses around colonization to the attention of settler Canadians, discussions and inquiries into what decolonization is and what it means have become increasingly visible. In a year in which the significant colonizing act of Canadian Confederation is celebrated, we invite you to join us on the 28th of May at the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Annual Conference (Ryerson University) to critically examine the year 1867 through the framework of decolonization. Continue reading →

The importance of historical and social context to public art: Fearless Girl and Charging Bull

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By Kaitlin Wainwright

In the cover of night in 1989, Arturo Di Modica installed his bronze statue Charging Bull at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. He had been working at it since shortly after the stock market crash some two years prior. It was a symbol of power and resilience. He did not have a permit, and the authorities were called to remove the work, but the popularity of the statue – and the story of a guerrilla public art installation near Wall Street – saved the bull. Now, 30 years later, the statue is once again part of one of New York’s biggest art controversies.

Photo by Anthony Quintano used under creative commons license CC by 2.0

On March 7, one day before International Women’s Day, Kristen Visbal’s Fearless Girl was installed facing Charging Bull. At first pass, Fearless Girl appeared to take on patriarchal capitalism, but its meaning is more nuanced than this: The 130-cm tall statue was commissioned by marketing firm McCann for State Street Global Advisors Continue reading →

Atheists in the Trenches: Loss of Faith among Canadians in the Great War

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By Elliot Hanowski

Did the horrors of the Great War cause Canadian soldiers to lose their faith? Or is it true that there were no atheists in the trenches? The war has generally been seen as a powerfully disillusioning experience. Books such as Paul Fussell’s widely influential The Great War and Modern Memory portray the war as the origins of modern skepticism and cynicism. The idea of a “lost generation” of disillusioned Anglo-American vets is a widely accepted one. The situation in Canada, however, is a little more ambiguous. In his study of the war’s impact on Canadian culture, Death So Noble, Jonathan Vance argued that most Canadians refused to accept a cynical interpretation of the war. Instead, he writes, they constructed a mythology of righteous valour and Christ-like self-sacrifice to justify their suffering and the deaths of their loved ones. Of course, Vance has not had the last word; the debate around the existence or non-existence of a “lost generation” in Canada is complex and ongoing. This post will focus strictly on religious doubt, with the goal of offering insight into this broader question.

This image of Canon Fred Scott appeared in his 1922 book, The Great War as I Saw it. It is from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Army_Chaplain_Corps#/media/File:Canon_Fred_Scott_(from_his_book).jpg

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