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

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Adam Dodek about his book, Heenan Blaikie: The Making and Unmaking of a Great Canadian Law Firm.

In 1973, three young lawyers founded Heenan Blaikie in Montreal, which grew to be a prominent Canadian law firm with notable members, including former political leaders. Despite its close-knit atmosphere, the firm faced significant internal issues, leading to its collapse in 2014. Adam Dodek, an impartial observer, examines the firm’s rise and fall, highlighting its unique culture alongside underlying problems like workplace bullying, challenges for women and minorities, and sexual harassment. The narrative is contextualized within broader societal changes, including economic shifts and crises. Dodek's thorough investigation serves as an essential read for legal professionals and those interested in the dynamics of corporate failure.

Adam Dodek is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. Among his numerous publications are In Search of the Ethical Lawyer; The Canadian Constitution, Third Edition, named by the Hill Times as one of the top 100 books on Canadian public policy; and Solicitor-Client Privilege, which won the Walter Owen Book Prize. He is a recipient of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Prize for Academic Excellence, the Mundell Medal for excellence in legal writing, and the Law Society of Ontario’s Law Society Medal. He is also a director of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics and the Canadian Legal Information Institute, and a past governor of the Law Commission of Ontario.

Image Credit: UBC Press

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 talks to Ken McGoogan about his book, Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship.

Shadows of Tyranny by Ken McGoogan explores how figures like Donald Trump reflect the authoritarianism of the mid-20th century. Drawing on thinkers like Orwell and Atwood, McGoogan examines how paranoia and demagoguery contributed to democracy's decline and argues these same forces are fueling a far-right movement in the U.S. that threatens democratic values.

In this cautionary work, McGoogan warns of a dark future while urging action to prevent it.

Ken McGoogan is a Canadian author of seventeen books, primarily nonfiction, including bestsellers like Searching for Franklin, Fatal Passage, and Canada’s Undeclared War. His latest book, Shadows of Tyranny, examines how figures like Donald Trump reflect mid-20th-century authoritarianism. McGoogan has received numerous awards, including the Pierre Berton Award for Popular History. He is a fellow of the Explorers Club and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and works as a resource historian with Adventure Canada. Originally from Montreal, he now lives in Guelph, ON.

Image Credit: Douglas & McIntyre

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 talks to David Frank about his book, J.B. McLachlan: A Biography: The Story of a Legendary Labour Leader and the Cape Breton Coal Miners.

J.B. McLachlan: A Biography presents a vivid portrait of a significant early twentieth-century Canadian rebel. Recognized as a remarkable biography, it chronicles the life of a Canadian labor hero and provides an unparalleled account of twentieth-century Canadian labor history, inspiring readers who seek social and economic justice.

David Frank is a leading figure in Canadian history. He taught for over 30 years at the University of New Brunswick, and he has written six books on Atlantic Canadian labour history. His articles on labour and social history have appeared in numerous books and journals.

Image Credit: James Lorimer & Company Ltd.

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 talks to Mairi Cowan about her book The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada.

A timely arrival for the upcoming spooky season, this episode features a reissue from 2022 in which Greg Marchildon interviews Mairi Cowan, author of The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada. Cowan's work explores the social and religious context of 17th-century Quebec through the case of Barbe Hallay's possession, highlighting the fears and anxieties of people in New France. She examines beliefs about witchcraft, demonology, and the influence of the Church, illustrating the colony's precarious social dynamics during that time.

Mairi Cowan is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga with a cross appointment to the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy. She is a historian of the late medieval and early modern world, with specializations in the social and religious histories of Scotland and New France. She is also an officer of the Champlain Society.

Image Credit: McGill-Queen’s University Press

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 talks to Sandra Rollings-Magnusson about her book, Folklife and Superstition: The Luck, Lore and Worldviews of Prairie Homesteaders.

The homesteading era on the Canadian Prairies (1867–1914) saw hundreds of thousands of migrants from northwestern and eastern Europe settle in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, seeking prosperity or fleeing hardship.

Historian Sandra Rollings-Magnusson emphasizes the personal stories of these homesteaders, using archival sources to showcase their lives filled with humor, superstition, and resilience. She explores practices like water-witching and neighborly pranks, illustrating how they adapted to challenges and formed diverse communities. This blend of traditions created a unique Prairie culture, enriching our understanding of this significant period in Canadian history.

Sandra Rollings-Magnusson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at MacEwan University with over thirty years of research on western Canadian homesteaders. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Regina and a PhD from the University of Alberta and has published numerous articles and three books on homesteading life.

Image Credit: Heritage House

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 talks to Eric Cline about his book, Squandered: Canada’s Potash Legacy.

An exposé of the reality of Saskatchewan’s potash industry management—prioritizing private profit over public interest.

Eric Cline practiced law in his hometown of Saskatoon prior to serving 16 years in the Saskatchewan legislature, where he held several senior cabinet positions, including Health, Finance, and Industry and Resources. After politics, he worked for 12 years as a corporate executive in the mining sector before establishing an arbitration practice and working as a professional fused-glass artist.

Image Credit: University of Regina Press

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 talks to Catharine Anne Wilson about her book, Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960.

Being Neighbours takes the reader into the heart of neighbourhood - the set of people near and surrounding the family - through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation.

Catharine Anne Wilson, FRSC, is the Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professor in Rural History at the University of Guelph and founder and director of the Rural Diary Archive website.

Image Credit: McGill-Queen’s University Press

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 talks to Greg Marquis about his book "Canada's State Police: 150 Years of the RCMP. Drawing upon all of the available literature related to the organization's history, Marquis lays bare what he regards as 150 years of state police action and seeks to challenge what he claims are the carefully constructed myths about the RCMP's role in Canadian life.

Greg Marquis is a historian at the University of New Brunswick. He specializes in Canadian history and criminal justice theory. He has developed a number of courses in the area of law and society, and is on the editorial board of Acadiensis. He is the author of multiple books including, The Vigilant Eye: Policing Canada from 1867-9/11, Truth & Honour: The Death of Richard Oland and the Trial of Dennis Oland, and John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year That Canada Was Cool. Greg Marquis lives in Quispamsis, New Brunswick.

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: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Ronald Rudin about his book, Against the Tides: Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada’s Maritime Marshlands.

Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration (MMRA), a federal agency created in 1948. As farmers could not afford to maintain the dykes, the MMRA stepped in to reshape the landscape and with it the communities that depended on dykeland. Agency engineers borrowed from some of the farmers’ long-standing practices, but they were so convinced of their own expertise that they sometimes disregarded local conditions, marginalizing farmers in the process. The engineers’ hubris led to construction of tidal dams that compromised a number of rivers, leaving behind environmental challenges.

This book combines interviews with people from the region, archival sources, and images from the record the MMRA left behind to create a vivid, richly detailed account of the push–pull of local and expert knowledge, and the role of the state in the postwar era. Ultimately, Against the Tides is a compelling study of a distinctive landscape and the people who inhabited it that encourages us to rethink the meaning of nature.

Ronald Rudin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Concordia University. He is the author of numerous books, among them Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey through Public Memory and Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park. The latter received the Canadian Historical Association Clio Prize for best book on Atlantic Canada, the Canadian Oral History Association Prize, and the Prix de l’Assemblée nationale from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française. Rudin has produced eight documentary films, most recently Unnatural Landscapes, which accompanies this book.

Image Credit: UBC Press

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 talks to Ross Fair about his book, Improving Upper Canada: Agricultural Societies and State Formation, 1791–1852.

Agricultural societies founded in the colony of Upper Canada were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement, modelled on contemporary societies in Britain and the United States. In Improving Upper Canada, Ross Fair explores how the agricultural improvers who established and led these organizations were important agents of state formation.

The book investigates the initial failed attempts to create a single agricultural society for Upper Canada. It examines the 1830 legislation that publicly funded the creation of agricultural societies across the colony to be semi-public agents of agricultural improvement, and analyses societies established in the Niagara, Home, and Midland Districts to understand how each attempted to introduce specific improvements to local farming practices. The book reveals how Upper Canada’s agricultural improvers formed a provincial association in the 1840s to ensure that the colonial government assumed a greater leadership role in agricultural improvement, resulting in the Bureau of Agriculture, forerunner of federal and provincial departments of agriculture in the post-Confederation era.

In analysing an early example of state formation, Improving Upper Canada provides a comprehensive history of the foundations of Ontario’s agricultural societies today, which continue to promote agricultural improvement across the province.

Ross Fair is a lecturer in the Department of History at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Image Credit: University of Toronto Press

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.