Witness to Yesterday (The Champlain Society Podcast on Canadian History)

Larry Ostola speaks with Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell about their book "P.S. Burn after Reading”

After Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in 1945, Canada was shocked by the revelation that its own citizens were engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. P.S. Burn After Reading explores how the Canadian government used the controversial Kellock-Taschereau Commission – sometimes judiciously, sometimes not – to uncover and thwart domestic spies during the early days of the Cold War.

Drawing on a wealth of sources, including the Commission’s extensive records, GRU documents turned over by Gouzenko, American Venona decrypts, Soviet KGB archives, and newly released British MI5 and MI6 files, authors Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell provide a comprehensive account of the crisis. They reveal that, despite some civil liberties missteps, the government’s suspicions were largely justified.

The book weaves together the evidence against the spies, the tradecraft of Soviet espionage, complex legal challenges faced by the state, and the political fallout. With access to hundreds of newly released British intelligence files, P.S. Burn After Reading offers both specialists and general readers fresh insights into the espionage crisis of 1945–46 and the pivotal role it played in exposing Canada’s postwar security and intelligence vulnerabilities.

Reinhold Kramer is a professor in the Department of English at Brandon University.

Tom Mitchell is a university archivist at Brandon University.

Larry Ostola speaks with William Jenkins about his book Canada and the Great Irish Famine.

In the summer of 1847, over four hundred ships arrived in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carrying Irish men, women, and children who were fleeing the starvation and misery of the Great Potato Famine. Tens of thousands of famine refugees rebuilt their lives in different parts of Canada, in places urban and rural, Anglophone and Francophone. Though still a young province within the British Empire, Canada would be marked permanently and in significant ways by this mass migration.

Canada and the Great Irish Famine examines how people confronted, experienced, and remembered the famine migration. Essays consider the transatlantic voyage; the collection of donations and organization of aid; the challenges encountered by the cities of Quebec, Saint John, Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, and Hamilton and their public debates over the impact of so many new arrivals; the accompanying problems of disease, destitution, mental illness, death and burial; the stories of orphaned children; and expressions of famine memory. The worst demographic catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe inspired generations of political writings, artistic and literary endeavours, and commemorative practices, and it was woven into narratives of Irish nationalism and the founding of Canada.

Canada and the Great Irish Famine provides a new perspective on the social outcomes of Ireland’s famine migration as well as on the resilience and adaptability of the receiving communities and the migrants themselves.

William Jenkins is associate professor of history at York University and the current president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. He is the author of Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Image Credit: McGill Queens University Press

Nicole O’Byrne speaks with Hayward Blake and Raymond Blake about their book Outport Woman: Life on the Ocean's Edge.

Every family has a story. Some just haven’t been told – until now. Outport Woman uncovers the remarkable life of Minnie Beatrice Blake, a woman who spent nearly eighty years on Newfoundland’s rugged South Coast. Through Minnie’s experiences, readers are invited into a world of resilience, loss, laughter, and love – where women held families and communities together in the face of hardship and change.

Drawing from family memories, local stories, and archival discoveries, this vivid narrative brings to life outport communities like Saddle Island, Pushthrough, and Hermitage. Minnie’s story reveals the quiet power of women whose work, courage, and spirit shaped not only their families but the province itself. More than a single biography, Outport Woman is a tribute to the generations of women – mothers, grandmothers, daughters – whose lives built the backbone of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Heartfelt, moving, and beautifully told, this is the story of one woman – and of countless others – who found extraordinary strength in ordinary life.

Hayward C. Blake was born in Pushthrough and resettled to Hermitage when he was fourteen years old. Graduating from Memorial University and the University of Toronto, Hayward taught in the K-12 school system and served as principal of Ascension Collegiate in Bay Roberts, completing his career as an administrator in the faculty of Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Raymond B. Blake is a professor at the University of Regina and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is author and editor of more than twenty books. His Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity won the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing from the Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2025. He was resettled from Pushthrough to Hermitage before studying at Memorial and York universities. Raymond lives in Regina with his wife, Wanda, and their two sons, Robert and Ben, and their partners, Lauren and Katherine.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Nicole O’Byrne speaks with Kent Roach about his book Justice for Some: A Comparative Study of Miscarriages of Justice and Wrongful Convictions.

This book defines the differing concepts of miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions and innocence in relation to the presumption of innocence and the rationing of justice. It compares inquisitorial systems, with examples from Europe, South America and Asia to adversarial systems. It contrasts England's focus on the miscarriage of justice and the remedial institutions of the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission, with the United States and China's narrower focus on proven factual innocence It highlights new laws enacted in India in 2023 that increase the risk of wrongful convictions, and details how the International Criminal Court has taken steps to reduce the risk of false guilty pleas that may have been accepted by previous international criminal courts. The book examines the roles of racist prejudice and gender stereotypes in wrongful convictions. It also examines false guilty pleas such as those in the Post Office scandal, as well as wrongful convictions for crimes that did not happen.

Kent Roach, CM, FRSC is a professor of law at the University of Toronto. He is the author of eighteen books including Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change, shortlisted for both the Balsillie and Donner Prizes for best book in public policy. He has conducted research for public inquiries on policing including the Arar, Air India, Ipperwash, Public Order Emergency, and Toronto Missing Persons inquiries and served as chair of the RCMP’s Management Advisory Board. He received the Molson Prize in 2017 for contributions to the social sciences and humanities.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Donald Wright speaks with Bill Moreau about his book The Writings of David Thompson, Volume 3: From the Northwest to Montreal, Selected Letters and Contributions to Newspapers, published by the Champlain Society in 2025.

David Thompson is one of the touchstone figures in the early history of Canada, and is celebrated for his distinguished fur trade career with the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company. But Thompson’s life after he retired from this career in 1812 is less well known. The forty-five years of Thompson’s post-fur trade life, spent largely in Glengarry County and Montreal, were as dramatic and historically relevant in their own way as his years in the West: his family grew, his financial fortunes waxed and then devastatingly waned, and his work as a surveyor took him from the St. Lawrence to Lake of the Woods, to the Eastern Townships, Muskoka, and New York City.

Volume 3 of the Writings of David Thompson gives us a deeper appreciation of the full life of this fascinating figure. Made up of professional and personal letters, and contributions to Montreal newspapers, this volume follows Thompson through all the stages of his life, beginning with his years with the HBC and NWC, continuing through an active middle period as a Glengarry landowner and international boundary surveyor, and then into later life as venerable contributor to public debates and supplicant for pension and patronage. As we read through Thompson’s letters, addressed to fur trade colleagues, boundary commission officials, colonial administrators, British and American cabinet member and personal friends, his life and times come into vivid focus. This volume nicely complements Thompson’s Travels, the work that is the subject of Volumes I and II, and is marked by the same incisive mind, intellectual breadth, reflectiveness, and literary skill that characterize that great narrative.

Bill Moreau is the editor of the three-volume Writings of David Thompson, the final volume of which was published last fall by the Champlain Society. Bill lives with his family in Vaughan, Ontario, and teaches Grade 5 at Dunlace Public School in North York

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Larry Ostola speaks with Robert D. Banks about his book, Warriors and Warships: Conflict on the Great Lakes and the Legacy of Point Frederick.

The untold story of Point Frederick, where early nineteenth-century Canadians built warships that stopped invasion and brought peace. Warriors and Warships brings to life a much neglected part of Canada’s military history, covering the warships and the people who built them at Point Frederick from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Opposite Kingston, Point Frederick was the 1789 dockyard home of the Provincial Marine on Lake Ontario and the headquarters of Britain’s Royal Navy from 1813 to 1853. Today, it is the home of the Royal Military College of Canada.

In this detailed narrative, with over one hundred colour archival maps, aerial views, photographs, and 3D reconstructions, Banks recounts Point Frederick’s building of great sail and steam warships and the roles these vessels played in conflict on Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and Niagara. Among the conflicts is the War of 1812, when French Canadian and British shipwrights made warships that forced the U.S. Navy into port and led to the American withdrawal from Canada. Banks also covers the role of the ships in the settlement of Upper Canada, the rebellion of 1837, the early planning of the Rideau Canal, and the beginning of the undefended border.

Banks shares the moments of hardship, triumph, and tragedy of both the warriors and the warships in this important contribution to Canadian history.

Robert Banks is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada and the University of Toronto. A former pilot, he served as a flight surgeon with the Snowbirds and specialized in aerospace medicine, a field where he's known for his research and his role as an investigator of the space Shuttle Columbia crash. A prolific author, he's published over 30 scientific papers and book chapters and has a long-standing interest in the history of Ontario and Canada.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

In this masterful and engaging biography, acclaimed journalist Steve Paikin brings to life John Turner (1929-2020), one of the most glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian history.

Born in England, raised in BC, Turner was a champion sprinter and a Rhodes scholar who captured the national imagination as escort for Princess Margaret on her 1959 Canadian tour. Elected to Parliament in 1962, he served in Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s cabinet and as Pierre Trudeau’s attorney general, minister of justice, and finance minister. In 1984, he won a hotly-contested Liberal leadership contest and served a brief four months as Canada’s seventeenth prime minister before falling to Brian Mulroney in a Progressive Conservative landslide.

In this surprisingly candid and personal book, Paikin draws on unprecedented access to Turner’s personal and public papers to show how he struggled to meet the towering expectations that came with his abundant gifts, and keep his faith in Canadian democracy despite the challenges of his own career.

STEVE PAIKIN has been a journalist in Canada for 40 years, the last 30 of them at Ontario’s provincial broadcaster, TVO. He is the anchor of The Agenda with Steve Paikin, now in its 17th season. He is an officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Order of Ontario. A Hamilton native, he splits his time between Toronto and Manitoulin Island. This is his eighth book.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Stacey Barker and Krista Cooke on the lives of Canadian women and their involvement in the two world wars of the 20th century. They along with co-author Molly McCullough wrote Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914-1945 published by the University of Ottawa Press in 2021 as part of the Canadian Museum of History’s Mercury Series. This book provides short biographies of selected women who served as military nurses, volunteers and workers or who suffered great loss during the two wars. Stacey Barker is an historian in Arts and Military History at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa while Krista Cooke is a Parks Canada curator with two decades of experience in archives and museums.

This podcast was produced by Jessica Schmidt.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: https://bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Image Credit: University of Ottawa Press

Nicole O’Byrne speaks with Keith Mercer about his book, Rough Justice: Policing, Crime, and the Origins of the Newfoundland Constabulary, 1729–1871.

In Rough Justice, Keith Mercer examines the history of policing and crime in early Newfoundland. It focuses on the period between the appointment of the first constables on the island in 1729 to the establishment of the Newfoundland Constabulary in 1871, now known as the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. This makes the Constabulary the oldest continuous police service in Canada. These early policemen, mostly untrained amateurs, were officers of the court, but they also played important roles in some of the most notable historical events and social crises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The establishment of the Constabulary in 1871 built upon that strong foundation of community service. Rough Justice weaves that narrative into the larger history of Newfoundland.

Keith Mercer was born in Gander and holds graduate degrees in history from Memorial and Dalhousie Universities. He works for Parks Canada as the Cultural Resource Manager in Mainland Nova Scotia. He lives in Bedford, Nova Scotia, with his wife, Amy, and children, Abby and Sam.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Greg Marchildon speaks with Steven High about his book One Job Town: Work, Belonging, and Betrayal in Northern Ontario.

There’s a pervasive sense of betrayal in areas scarred by mine, mill and factory closures. Steven High’s One Job Town delves into the long history of deindustrialization in the paper-making town of Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, located on Canada’s resource periphery. Much like hundreds of other towns and cities across North America and Europe, Sturgeon Falls has lost their primary source of industry, resulting in the displacement of workers and their families.

One Job Town takes us into the making of a culture of industrialism and the significance of industrial work for mill-working families. One Job Town approaches deindustrialization as a long term, economic, political, and cultural process, which did not begin and simply end with the closure of the local mill in 2002. High examines the work-life histories of fifty paper mill workers and managers, as well as city officials, to gain an in-depth understanding of the impact of the formation and dissolution of a culture of industrialism. Oral history and memory are at the heart of One Job Town, challenging us to rethink the relationship between the past and the present in what was formerly known as the industrialized world.

Steven High is professor of History at Concordia University and co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.