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

Greg Marchildon talks to Andrew Lawton about his book, Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life.

When Pierre Poilievre was elected leader of Canada’s Conservative party in 2022, he vowed to put Canadians back in control of their own lives.

He took aim at the country’s elites and “gatekeepers” as well as governments that sneer at their own citizens. Railing against the housing crisis and spiralling inflation, Poilievre was telling ordinary Canadians he was on their side. As the adopted son of two Alberta teachers, Poilievre knows the middle class. But he’s also the embodiment of a career politician, having spent nearly his entire adult life in politics.

Andrew Lawton is a senior journalist at True North and host of The Andrew Lawton Show. He previously hosted a daily talk show on Global News Radio. He has published written work across the world, including in the Washington Post, the National Post, the Toronto Sun, and on Global News. He is the bestselling author of The Freedom Convoy.

Image Credit: Sutherland House Books

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 Richard White about his book, The Beaches: Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood.

The Beaches is one of Toronto’s best known and most admired neighbourhoods. It has no striking works of architecture or splendid public spaces, no must-see galleries or public institutions, and no associations with historic events or great celebrities – the sort of things that create neighbourhood reputations and draw visitors. It does, however, have an attractive character, and it is this character that Richard White seeks to understand, offering insights into how it came to be and why it has endured.

With an eye to the broader historical context, The Beaches recounts the neighbourhood’s initial colonial settlement, its development as a lakeside recreational community in the late nineteenth century, its emergence as a streetcar suburb after 1900, its maturation in the 1920s and 1930s, its relative decline in the 1950s and 1960s, and its revival in the 1970s and beyond. Utilizing a wide range of archival records, including council minutes, plans of subdivision, newspapers, public land records, city directories, assessment rolls, and historical photographs – as well as the present-day landscape – The Beaches reveals the various forces, public and private, local and international, that shaped this cherished urban neighbourhood.

Richard White is a historian, author, and former lecturer of Canadian history and urban planning history at the University of Toronto.

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.

Greg Marchildon talks to Raymond B. Blake about his book, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity.

This incredibly thorough analysis of the words of prime ministers will find an appreciative audience among scholars and students in Canadian and political history, and political science and rhetoric studies – and readers of Canadian history will discover a new take on Canada’s development as a nation.

Raymond B. Blake is a professor of history at the University of Regina and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has held visiting professorships at Philipps-Universität Marburg and University College Dublin, where he has twice held the Craig Dobbin Chair in Canadian Studies. He was formerly the director of the Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy and the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. He has written and edited more than twenty books, most recently Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland’s Rocky Road towards Confederation (with Melvin Baker), which won several awards, including the Pierre Savard Award from the International Council for Canadian Studies.

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 Gerald Friesen about his book, The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman.

John Norquay, orphan and prodigy was a leader among the Scots Cree peoples of western Canada. Born in the Red River Settlement, he farmed, hunted, traded, and taught school before becoming a legislator, cabinet minister, and, from 1878 to 1887, premier of Manitoba.

Once described as Louis Riel’s alter ego, he skirmished with prime minister John A. Macdonald, clashed with railway baron George Stephen, and endured racist taunts while championing the interests of the Prairie West in battles with investment bankers, Ottawa politicians, and the CPR. His contributions to the development of Canada’s federal system and his dealings with issues of race and racism deserve attention today.

Recounted here by Canadian historian Gerald Friesen, Norquay’s life story ignites contemporary conversations around the nature of empire and Canada’s own imperial past. Drawing extensively on recently opened letters and financial papers that offer new insights into his business, family, and political life, Friesen reveals Norquay to be a thoughtful statesman and generous patriarch. This masterful biography of the Premier from Red River sheds welcome light on a neglected historical figure and a tumultuous time for Canada and Manitoba.

Gerald Friesen taught Canadian history at the University of Manitoba from 1970–2011. He has written several books, including The Canadian Prairies: A History and Citizens and Nation, and is co-author of Immigrants in Prairie Cities. Former president of the Canadian Historical Association, he was an advisor on CBC-Radio Canada’s television series Canada: A People’s History. He lives in Winnipeg.

Image Credit: University of Manitoba 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 Ian MacLaren about his four-volume set, Paul Kane's Travels in Indigenous North America.

An all-encompassing exploration of the nineteenth-century painter’s documentary record and controversial place in Indigenous studies in North America.

Paul Kane has been called the founding father of Canadian art, and Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America a classic of Canadian literature. Yet his studio canvases are stereotypically generic, and his book is infamous: in word and in image, it depicts vain, vengeful, vicious, violent, and vanishing Indigenous people, disregarding its subjects’ lived experiences and providing little of ethnohistorical significance. Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America rediscovers the primary fieldwork underlying Kane’s studio art and book and the process by which his sketches and field writings evolved into damaging stereotypes with significant authority in the nineteenth century, in both popular and learned circles.

A painstaking, panoramic exploration, Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America also studies the artist’s oeuvre in terms of his contemporaries, his technique, and the complicated history of the provenance of the works. The whole lays the groundwork for future discussions of the pertinence of Paul Kane’s documentary record to Indigenous studies in North America.

I.S. MacLaren is professor emeritus of history and English at the University of Alberta.

Image Credit: MQUP

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 Allan Greer about his book, Before Canada: Northern North America in a Connected World.

Showcasing the exciting work of historians, archaeologists, and literary scholars who are rewriting North America’s ancient past.

Long before Confederation created a nation-state in northern North America, Indigenous people were establishing vast networks and trade routes. Volcanic eruptions pushed the ancestors of the Dene to undertake a trek from the present-day Northwest Territories to Arizona. Inuit migrated across the Arctic from Siberia, reaching Southern Labrador, where they met Basque fishers from northern Spain.

As early as the fifteenth century, fishing ships from western Europe were coming to Newfoundland for cod, creating the greatest transatlantic maritime link in the early modern world. Later, fur traders would take capitalism across the continent, using cheap rum to lubricate their transactions. The contributors to Before Canada reveal the latest findings of archaeological and historical research on this fascinating period. Along the way, they reframe the story of the Canadian past, extending its limits across time and space and challenging us to reconsider our assumptions about this supposedly young country. Innovative and multidisciplinary, Before Canada inspires interest in the deep history of northern North America.

Allan Greer is professor emeritus of history at McGill University.

Image Credit: MQUP

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.

Mi’kmaq Who Left a Mark on the History of the Northeast, 1680-1980

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Janet E. Chute and Donald M. Julien about their book, Muiwlanej kikamaqki "Honouring Our Ancestors": Mi’kmaq Who Left a Mark on the History of the Northeast, 1680 to 1980.

Drawing upon oral and documentary evidence, this volume explores the lives of noteworthy Mi’kmaw individuals whose thoughts, actions, and aspirations impacted the history of the Northeast but whose activities were too often relegated to the shadows of history.

The book highlights Mi’kmaw leaders who played major roles in guiding the history of the region between 1680 and 1980. It sheds light on their community and emigration policies, organizational and negotiating skills, diplomatic endeavours, and stewardship of land and resources. Contributors to the volume range from seasoned scholars with years of research in the field to Mi’kmaw students whose interest in their history will prove inspirational. Offering important new insights, the book re-centres Indigenous nationhood to alter the way we understand the field itself. The book also provides a lengthy index so that information may be retrieved and used in future research.

Muiwlanej kikamaqki – Honouring Our Ancestors will engage the interest of Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike, engender pride in Mi’kmaw leadership legacies, and encourage Mi’kmaw youth and others to probe more deeply into the history of the Northeast.

Janet E. Chute is the principal investigator in a biographical project which led to the research, writing, and compilation of a series of entries on Mi’kmaw figures of historic note.

Donald M. Julien is the executive director of The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq.

Image Credit: UTP

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 Dennis Gruending about his book, A Communist for the RCMP: The Uncovered Story of a Social Movement Informant.

In 1941, the RCMP recruited Frank Hadesbeck, a Spanish Civil War veteran, as a paid informant to infiltrate the Communist Party. For decades, he informed not only upon communists, but also upon hundreds of other people who held progressive views. Hadesbeck’s “Watch Out” lists on behalf of the Security Service included labour activists, medical doctors, lawyers, university professors and students, journalists, Indigenous and progressive farm leaders, members of the clergy, and anyone involved in the peace and human rights movements.

A Communist for the RCMP provides an inside account of Hadesbeck’s career and illustrates how the RCMP uses surveillance of activists to enforce the status quo.

Dennis Gruending has written and edited eight books, including biographies of former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney and of Emmett Hall, whose Royal Commission recommended Medicare for Canada. Gruending has worked as a print and television journalist and as a CBC Radio host. He served as a New Democratic Party MP in the 36th parliament and was his party’s critic for the environment and for international development. He later wrote speeches for former Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert, and later still spent six years at the Canadian Labour Congress. He and his wife, Martha Wiebe, live in Ottawa. You can find more information at: https://www.dennisgruending.com.

Image Credit: Between the Lines

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 Mark Maloney about his book, Toronto Mayors: A History of the City’s Leaders.

The first-ever look at all 65 Toronto mayors — the good, the bad, the colourful, the rogues, and the leaders — who have shaped the city.

Toronto’s mayoral history is both rich and colourful. Spanning 19 decades and the growth of Toronto, from its origins as a dusty colonial outpost of just 9,200 residents to a global business centre and metropolis of some three million, this compendium provides fascinating biographical detail on each of the city’s mayors.

Toronto’s mayors have been curious, eccentric, or offbeat; others have been rebellious, swaggering, or alcoholic. Some were bigots, bullies, refugees, war heroes, social crusaders, or bon vivants; still others were inspiring, forward looking, or well ahead of their time.

Mark Maloney is a government relations professional specializing on the City of Toronto and has worked closely for three of Toronto’s mayors. He has also been a municipal affairs reporter and served as an Ottawa City Councillor and Board of Health chair. He lives in Toronto.

Image Credit: Dundurn 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 Matthew Reeve about his book, Casa Loma: Millionaires, Medievalism, and Modernity in Toronto’s Gilded Age.

Leading architect E.J. Lennox designed Casa Loma for the flamboyant Sir Henry Pellatt and Mary, Lady Pellatt as an enormous castellated mansion that overlooked the booming metropolis of Toronto. The first scholarly book dedicated to this Canadian landmark, Casa Loma situates the famous “house on the hill” within Toronto’s architectural, urban, and cultural history.

Casa Loma was not only an outsized home for the self-appointed “Lord Toronto” but a statement of Canada’s association with empire, an assertion of the country’s British legacy. During and after the Pellatts’ occupation, Casa Loma was a major landmark, and it has since infiltrated the iconography and collective memory of the metropolis. The reception of Casa Loma, variously loved and abhorred by Torontonians, reflects many of Toronto’s major aspirations and anxieties about itself as a modern city. Across ten chapters, this book charts the history of Casa Loma from the purchase of the estate atop Davenport Ridge in 1903 and its construction from 1906, through to its sale and the dispersal of its contents in 1924, its subsequent life as a hotel, and finally its transformation into one of the city’s major entertainment venues.

Casa Loma brings to light a wealth of hitherto unpublished archival images and documentation of the house’s visual and material culture, weaving together a textured account of the design, use, and life of this unique building over the course of the twentieth century.

Matthew M. Reeve is professor of art history at Queen’s University.

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.