Category: History

November 18th in previous years

2014: Clara

2013: The scale of our energy challenge, Lauren

2011: The Hound of the Baskervilles

2010: Ottawa solar power workshops, Six Easy Pieces

2009: Anthropogenic climate change: evidence from isotopic ratios, The IPCC, climate, and consensus

2008: Oil tanker captured off Somalia, Climate change and forest management

2007: IPCC 4AR SPM, The Bottom Billion, ‘Nuclear weapons sharing’ in Europe

2006: A market for kidneys?

2005: Not particularly notable day (and dietary justifications)

Canada’s Indigenous apocalypse

You’ll meet Indigenous people of Canada who describe their world as postapocalyptic, an alien and hostile place where a stable existence is pieced together, if at all, from the cultural rubble of a cataclysmic conquest. On the far side of two centuries of disruption and oppression on the Canadian prairie — massacred bison herds, the forced assimilation of the 1876 Indian Act and the reserve system, the horrors of the residential schools, and the ecological upheaval of an economy driven by lucrative resource extraction that steadily eroded every way the First Nations of the prairie and boreal forest knew to live off the land — there is rarely any continuity for Indigenous people with their past, its culture and traditions, and the land that once sustained them.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 152

Targeting pipelines

By the time of the 2015 World Heavy Oil Congress, midstream companies like Kinder Morgan, Enbridge and TransMountain PipeLines had grown used to the calamity that accompanied their pipeline applications. TransCanada’s Keystone XL project had ignited the battle, drawing ferocious protests from ranchers and Indigenous people in Nebraska. This in turn had attracted opposition from regional and then national and global environmental groups, which had long searched in vain for a catalyst to intensify and expand climate change activism. Keystone XL turned oil sands pipelines into an international political issue and a proxy of the first resort for the much broader debate about climate and energy policy. In the process, the pipeline — eventually any pipeline intended to move bitumen to tidewater — became the symbol of the entire fight. It was the line in the sand, the first full and direct conflict between progress in the age of fossil fuel — defined by expanding energy use and industrial megaprojects — and progress in the age of climate change, which sought to balance economic growth and industrial development with sound environmental stewardship and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 119 (emphasis in original)

Fort McMurray in 2007

The city existed in a perpetual state of growth and agitation. Numbers were murky at the peak of the boom — no one could get a clear count of the “shadow population” living in work camps and other short-term arrangements — but safe to say there were many hundreds like Raheel Joseph arriving each month. Hundreds and hundreds of young people, young men especially, who’d come from somewhere far away because here was a place where the full scale of opportunity a person could grasp all at once was still an open question. And so there were too many people and there was too much money and there was not enough of anything else in Fort McMurray in 2007. A little snow or a single stalled truck, and traffic on Highway 63 was pure gridlocked chaos. You went to Walmart, and no one was stocking shelves — they couldn’t afford the wages to pay someone to do it, and there was no time. They just put the groceries or housewares or work clothes or whatever new stuff made it to the boomtown that week out on pallets, and the pallets would be empty within hours. This was really how things went, day in and day out. Any warm body could find a job, but try to get a table at a restaurant, try to get a coffee at Tim Hortons in less than half an hour, try to find a bed to sleep in.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 5

Related: Boomtowns and bitumen

Open thread: Michael Marrus and Massey College

For at least a year now people have been quite appropriately doing important work in questioning legacies of racism and institutionalized forms of racism at Massey College, including in the traditional use of the title “Master” to refer to the head of the College.

A hurtful, callous, and offensive remark made in the dining hall has added urgency to the discussion. It was described in the resignation letter of the scholar who made it as “a poor effort at jocular humour” and a “bad joke”. In part, Dr. Michael Marrus’ letter from 1 October 2017 says:

First, I am so sorry for what I said, in a poor effort at jocular humour at lunch last Tuesday. What I said was both foolish and, I understood immediately, hurtful, and I want, first and foremost, to convey my deepest regrets all whom I may have harmed. What I said was a bad joke in reference to your title of “Master,” at the time. I should never have made such a remark, and I want to assure those who heard me, and those who have learned about it, that while I had no ill- intent whatsoever I can appreciate how those at the table and those who have learned about it could take offense at what I said.

I’m not going to link the rather foolish editorials published by The Globe & Mail and the National Post (two papers that seem to share lazy assumptions and ineptitude much like Canada’s Liberal and Conservative parties). Some more meaningful commentary has already been in the public press:

Op-ed: Reconciliation at Massey College
An Indigenous Junior Fellow shares her story
By Audrey Rochette

Op-ed: The importance of forgiveness
A former Don of Hall reflects on moving forward from conflict at Massey College
By Juliet Guichon

Black faculty members pen letter condemning Marrus, coverage of incident
Open letter criticizes media outlets for framing incident as “political correctness run amok”
By Aidan Currie

In my six years at Massey College, I have had regular routine and polite interactions with Dr. Marrus. My only exposure to his academic work has been two lectures he gave on the theatrical quality of trials.

History’s unpredictable paths

Columbus could not have foreseen the results of his search for piperine, Magellan was unaware of the long-term effects of his quest for isoeugenol, and Schönbein would surely have been astonished that the nitrocellulose he made from his wife’s apron was the start of great industries as diverse as explosives and textiles. Perkin could not have anticipated that his small experiment would eventually lead not only to a huge synthetic dye trade but also to the development of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals. Marker, Nobel, Chardonnet, Carothers, Lister, Baekeland, Goodyear, Hofmann, Leblanc, the Solvay brothers, Harrison, Midgley, and all the others whose stories we have told had little idea of the historical importance of their discoveries. So we are perhaps in good company if we hesitate to try to predict whether today there already exists an unsuspected molecule that will eventually have such a profound and unanticipated effect on life as we know it that our descendants will say, “This changed the world.”

Le Couteur, Penny and Jay Burreson. Napoleon’s Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History. Penguin, 2004.

Related: Learning and teaching

Canada’s courts and Indigenous rights

One privilege during my time at U of T was to take Peter Russell’s class on Canada’s history as a series of incomplete conquests in 2013.

He taught the class for several years running to a mixed group of undergrads and grad students, using it partly to help him refine the new history of Canada he was writing.

That book has now been released: Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests.

The paper I wrote for the class was called “The judiciary in the lead: Aboriginal politics in Canada’s post-Charter era“. Russell addresses the subject in the finished book:

The Supreme Court of Canada, as the Powley case demonstrates, continues to be a major player in the resurgence of aboriginal peoples. This is true in other common law countries with colonized native peoples within. The high courts of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are now playing an important role in shaping the rights of Indigenous peoples in their countries. Indeed the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Calder, which was instrumental in changing Canada’s Aboriginal policy in the 1970s, was the crucial precedent in the Australian High Court’s Mabo decision, which changed Australian policy in the 1990s. For Indigenous peoples, as small minorities within democratic countries, resorting to the courts to vindicate rights and defend interests makes good sense, especially when the courts are rooted in the common law tradition of judicial independence and law development, and their judges are no longer soaked in the racism of earlier settler generations. The courts in all four common law countries, in varying degrees, have been relatively liberal in responding to the legal claims of Aboriginal peoples. Their decisions have often been out front of elected politicians, forcing changes in the policies of their governments. But their agency as instruments of full decolonization is limited. They are still the “white man’s courts,” not only in their composition, but also in the justices’ belief that Indigenous peoples are subject to the overriding sovereignty of the settler state.

The Supreme Court of Canada has made its most important contributions to advancing Aboriginal rights in decisions relating to native title. The Court’s 1997 decision in Delgamuukw confirmed that native title was one of the existing Aboriginal rights recognized in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, and spelled out some of its features. Native title is communal, rather than individual. It confers on the society that it has full ownership of the land and its resources, including subsurface minerals. That was the good news. But much of the Court’s treatment of native or Aboriginal title has dealt with its limitations. First, Aboriginal people cannot sell any part of their lands on the private market; native title land can only be sold to the Crown — that is, the Government of Canada. A second limitation smacks of paternalism: the Aboriginal people that hold native title can develop the land in non-traditional ways, providing a development does not undermine their historical attachment to the land. The Supreme Court gave two examples of what it would not allow a native community to do to its own lands: strip-mine a hunting ground or pave over a burial ground for a parking lot. A third limitation underlines the continuing colonialism in the Court’s thinking. In common law, native title is understood as a “burden” on the Crown’s sovereignty, and in discharging the Crown’s — that is, the federal or provincial government’s — responsibilities to the larger community, there might be compelling and substantial circumstances that could make an infringement of native title justifiable. Chief Justice Lamer, who wrote the principal majority opinion, asserted somewhat casually that “the development of agriculture, forestry, mining, hydroelectric power, and general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations” — any of these — “can justify the infringement of aboriginal title.” The Court’s purpose in fashioning this new law, the chief justice explained, was “to reconcile the pre-existence of aboriginal society with the sovereignty of the Crown.”

…

A duty to consult native owners and try to accomodate their interests before pushing through projects on their lands might be better than nothing, but it is still a far cry from affirming Aboriginal peoples’ constitutional right to protect and develop their lands and resources.

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 434–6