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Late last year, I spent a few days in Washington, DC, and was grateful to have the opportunity to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Its many powerful exhibitions walk the visitor from slavery through civil rights and up to present day times. To say “I had no idea,” would be an understatement. I left there changed by what I had learned about what African Americans have endured. 

This experience was replicated for me when I read Tyler LeBlanc’s Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion. 

In the same way that I knew racism existed, but didn’t grasp the extent of the brutality suffered by African Americans, I also knew the basic facts of the Acadian Expulsion but really never thought of it as an ethnic cleansing. 

Thanks to LeBlanc’s beautifully written book, brought alive in riveting detail, more of us will understand how the British tried to erase a people—the Acadians—from the landscape of the Atlantic region, and the horror these individuals experienced as their homesteads were destroyed and their families torn apart. 

LeBlanc’s ancestors were one such family, but the author himself didn’t know of his Acadian roots until well into his adulthood. In his own words, LeBlanc says, “The surprising discovery set in motion a curiosity that plunged me into nearly four years of research and transformed the way I thought about identity, family, and the history of the place I call home.”  

Readers will likely appreciate the book’s preface, which is a lovely nod to the Indigenous peoples of Canada, who were here before any of these settlers, Acadian or British. LeBlanc concedes that the story of the Acadian Expulsion is one small part of a much broader history that occurred within Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. 

Through multiple viewpoints, all of which represent members of his family who were deported from their homeland, Acadian Driftwood sheds light on what happened to his ancestors—the ten children of Francois LeBlanc and Jeanne Hébert.   

There was Bénoni, a farmer in Grand Pré in 1755, who was called to a meeting at the local Church along with all other Acadian men of the region. Surrounded by soldiers, the men were imprisoned in the Church for days, then marched to the shore and loaded onto boats while their wives and children watched.  

There was Jacques and his wife Catherine, locked in the dark beneath the deck of a ship with hundreds of others, cramped and seasick. After a horrible three-week journey, during which many would have died of smallpox or dysentery, they arrived in Boston where the hostile locals shunted them to the outskirts of the city.  

And there was Anne, who was deported by boat and ended up in quarantine in a “pesthouse” outside Philadelphia, where she watched friends and family, including her husband, die from deadly viruses. 

This book is a work of creative nonfiction. LeBlanc uses his considerable skills as a writer to fictionalize more unknowable aspects of his relatives’ experiences, such as what they may have been thinking or feeling. The result is a searing and compelling tale that is hard to put down. 

Wanting to document the suffering of some of the 15,000 Acadians who have mostly been lost to history, LeBlanc writes: “This is a personal book about ten siblings, all distant ancestors of mine, who found themselves tossed from their quiet pastoral lives into the turbulent world of eighteenth-century geopolitics.” 

It’s obvious that this book was a labour of love, written after extensive research. The result? A gorgeous piece of truth-telling, sure to make LeBlanc’s ancestors proud. 

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“Dangerous Enemy Sympathizers”
Andrew Theobald
Goose Lane Editions

Erwin Schild was there at a Jewish seminary in Wurzburg, Germany that dreadful night of murder and wanton destruction that was to become known as “Crystal Night.” Rioters were destroying Jewish homes, hospitals and synagogues, and brutally murdering more than 91 Jews throughout Germany, Austria and the German-occupied portion of Czechoslovakia. Police, obeying Gestapo orders, looked the other way.

Although an innocent, peace-loving, 20-year-old rabbinical student, Schild was dragged away to Dachau, outside of Munich, soon to become one of Nazi Germany’s notorious death camps.

Walter Igersheimer, a schoolboy from Frankfurt, also left Germany for England the year Hitler became chancellor. By May 1940, at aged 23, he was about to complete medical studies at London’s St. Mary’s Hospital and join the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Louis Philipp Fran Spanier also fled his homeland when Adolf Hitler seized dictatorial powers. He settled in Holland and worked in a factory, which manufactured defence equipment for Britain and France, until May 1940, when the Nazi Army swept though the country during its Blitzkrieg invasion.

As German soldiers closed in on the Netherlands, Spanier fled the country in a small rowboat. He was machine-gunned and bombed by enemy vessels. After four days adrift at sea, he was taken aboard a British submarine.

These Jewish men, and hundreds more like them, had more in common than a universal fear of Hitler. As German jack boots goose-stepped across Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, and as France teetered on the verge of surrender, expatriates of German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian origin who resided in the United Kingdom were widely perceived as potential Nazi spies, saboteurs or Fifth Columnists ready to set the stage for a German invasion.

With only the English Channel separating Britain from the advancing Nazi forces, these victims of war were summarily rounded up by police and classified as “enemy aliens” instead of as war refugees, their true status.

The story of the apprehension of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression, and their eventual experience behind barbed wire deep in the New Brunswick wilderness, is a major thrust in author Andrew Theobald’s wartime history Dangerous Enemy Sympathizers. Sub-titled Canadian Internment Camp B, 1940-1945, this Goose Lane Editions/New Brunswick Military Heritage Project publication was chosen winner of this year’s Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing.

Theobald, who holds a PhD from Queen’s University, documents how these men were arrested, sent across the submarine-infested Atlantic on the same ships as hardened Nazi prisoners of war. At sea, the Germans, under the umbrella of the Geneva Conventions, received better ship-board treatment than the so-called “enemy aliens.” German prisoners of war, housed in upper decks, had a reasonable chance of survival if the ship were torpedoed. The innocent Jewish refugees, locked far below deck, had little chance of escape.

After a brief internment in Quebec, more than 700 Jewish men aged 16 to 64 were escorted aboard a mystery train with windows nailed shut, and transported to Ripples, New Brunswick, a remote location about 15 kilometres east of Fredericton. At a rail crossing in the deep forests, they were met by Canadian guards armed with bayonet-tipped rifles and Mounted Policemen on motorcycles.

Theobald, who grew up in Saint John and holds history degrees from the University of New Brunswick at Mount Allison University, tells how these men were held behind barbed wire for nearly a year at a former relief camp, established to keep unemployed men out of trouble in the growing hobo jungles of the Great Depression.

The site, known as Camp B, had been hastily converted into an internment camp, after British officials decided that Canada, with its wide-open spaces, would make escape difficult for Nazi sympathizers. Britain, largely dependent on the importation of goods by ship during the Battle of the Atlantic, also considered Canada, with its more secure food supply, as having been better able to feed prisoners. Britain was also reeling from its staggering military casualties of the recent evacuation of Dunkirk, France, and did not want to spare soldiers for internment camp duties.

At Ripple, immigrants, an ocean away from home and family, did not have access to lawyers or the right to appeal their detention.

Even Rabbi Erwin Schild – who had suffered seven years of Nazi abuse and debasement in Germany and barely got out with his life from the notorious Dachau Nazi Concentration Camp – was considered a security risk. He and the 700 or so others, mostly European Jews, were held behind barbed wire and observed round the clock by armed sentries posted high in guard towers.

They were forced to wear the same blue denim prison-style work clothing issued to captive Nazi soldiers, sailors and airmen held in high-security POW camps elsewhere in Canada. Red circles had been dyed into the fabric on the back of their shirts, making them an easy target for marksman in the event of an escape.

The high-level security continued despite the fact that the expanse of dense black-fly infested woodland surrounding the compound was deterrent enough to prevent escapes for older men and the scholarly youth accustomed to a more sedentary life in study halls and cafes of Europe.

To prevent idleness, control dissatisfaction and provide a routine for the internees, they were marched out into the woods to fell trees and cut firewood needed in the basic sheds that served as their barracks. Guards referred to as “scouts” passed through their crowded sleeping quarters for unannounced inspections at any hour night or day.

For relatively minor offences, internees could be put into solitary confinement in very tight spaces that could be cold or damp in winter or hot and humid in summer. Their bathroom was a bucket that was dumped once a day.

“They can take everything away from us except our talent, our joy of music, and our capacity for mocking ourselves,” said Walter Igersheimer, the London medical school student that British authorities felt better suited to  languishing behind Canadian barbed wire than serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Their musical life centred around a number of highly acclaimed European-trained musicians, including John Newmark, who was destined for a storied carrier as a concert pianist and long-time accompanist for famed Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester. School and college courses were conducted, often with the guidance of the nearby University of New Brunswick. Painters painted and artisans crafted souvenirs from scraps of wood and metal.

Guarding the often younger, better educated and more sophisticated internees were members of the Veterans Guard of Canada. They were middle-aged veterans of the First World War who had seen close friends slaughtered and maimed by German and Austrian machine guns and artillery. Initially, many of these battle-scarred veterans thought if the internees spoke German, they must be German and were therefore a threat.

But as time went on, there was an evolution of mutual respect between guards and the guarded. Overall, Theobald concludes that the guards and administration, which was largely made up of New Brunswickers, “reacted to the often-confusing circumstances” with “compassion and laudable fair-mindedness.”

However, Erwin Schild did point out that the customs and rituals of the secular Jews amidst the camp population “created bewilderment” in the Canadian military mindset of the times and could uncork “the evil genie of anti-Jewish prejudice.”

Camp doctor F Munroe Bourne, making sure to claim “I’m tolerant of the race,” expressed concern if his young replacement turned out to be Jewish that he might be badly treated by his less-enlightened colleagues. “I realized that one Jew has a hard time in any mess, but particularly in the mess of a Jewish internment camp,” he wrote in his diary.

Captain Bourne’s thoughts, in tandem with those of Immigration Minister FC Blair, who did so much to curb immigration as to make his title an oxymoron, “illustrate the majority attitude towards Jews in Canada in 1941,” Theobald concludes.

The unjustly labelled “enemy aliens” saw some of the stigma removed from their status by July 1, 1941, when they were reclassified by Canadian officials as “refugees.”

Many Camp B internees returned to Britain to serve as military pioneers, soldiers assigned to build the bridges, roads and defensive infrastructure needed to support the infantry. Others were transferred to internment facilities elsewhere in Canada. By this time, the Holocaust was underway and many Jewish internees did not learn the fate of their friends and loved ones until long after the war was over, if ever.

After the war, Erwin Schild went on to become the highly respected rabbi of the Adath Israel Congregation in Toronto. Walter Igersheimer became an eminent psychiatrist in the United States. He wrote later in life that his “unjust incarceration” made him a strong supporter of human rights and minority groups.

Six of the Camp B alumnus, including Rabbi Schild and John Newmark, were appointed to the Order of Canada. A theoretical chemist named Walter Kohen shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The list included acclaimed journalists, authors, inventors, a number of accomplished musicians and university professors.

After their departure, the camp took responsibility for holding Canadians opposed to the war effort — including home-grown fascists and men of German and Italian descent — as well as captured enemy merchant mariners.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from Theobald’s book is the reminder that the seeds or fascism were being sewn in Canada in the years leading up to the Second World War. Montreal journalist Adrien Arcand is described as “a charismatic leader of a small band of home-grown fascists” known as the National Union Party. Displaying Nazi insignia and propagating Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda, the NPU had a paramilitary wing assigned to intimidate and provoke brawls with leftists and Jews.

Arrested in May of 1940, Arcand remained unrepentant even after serving five years behind Canadian barbed wire, much of it at Ripples. In post-war years, Arcand went on to mentor Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, nurturing “a nucleus of hatred that remains disturbingly present today,” Theobald observes.

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Gerry Hallowell in Sicily

Although he was born on a farm near Port Hope, Ontario, and reached the pinnacle of his career as senior editor of history at the University of Toronto Press, Gerald Hallowell has captured the community and seafaring spirit of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in wartime. As British as the King, which was recently shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, tells of the offshore German U-Boat sinking of fishing schooners sailing from Nova Scotia shores. The tales are peopled with local personalities of distant Germanic origin.

Subtitled Lunenburg County During the First World War, Hallowell’s book takes aim at the aura of suspicion, bordering on paranoia, surrounding locals with German sounding names, although their families had been residents of Lunenburg County since 1753. Lunenburg County’s Atlantic Ocean-facing coastline left it exposed to danger of attack by German warships, and later, as technology advanced, by submarines. “It was one of the few points in Canada” that was visited by U-Boats, said war veteran and politician JW Margeson in retrospect.

There were cases where fishing and freight-carrying schooners had been sent to the bottom, their crews set adrift in dories far from land. “Our fleet now on the banks (the fishing grounds of The Grand Banks of Newfoundland) is liable to be attacked and sunk to the bottom,” the Bridgewater Bulletin warned on August 13, 1918.

Eight days before, a German submarine crew boarded and placed a bomb aboard the Newfoundland vessel Gladys M. Hollett, off West Ironbound Island. TheNelson A, a Yarmouth-based schooner returning home from a fishing trip in the summer of 1918, had been sent to the ocean bottom off Shelburne. It was the first vessel to be sunk off the Nova Scotia coast. Its crew safely reached Lockporte.

In that climate of war, rumours were rampant as people imagined German spies in every barn or shed. In the Chester area, a Swiss immigrant, now believed to have been German, was highly-suspect for spending his time painting shoreline landscapes. “Has the wartime created a demand for Nova Scotia coast scenery?” asked the Halifax Herald. No, it was speculated, he was signalling to offshore enemy vessels and gaining information to relay to the “many spies” that were surely in Halifax.

In what was believed to have been a battle for survival of the civilized world that could only be won by men of courage and honour, rigidly partisan local newspapers went so far as assaulting the character of a Tory politician already serving as a volunteer commissioned officer of the First World War. The Halifax Herald praised Joseph Margeson, local Tory candidate in the 1917 federal election, as “the Empire’s gain on the Battlefields of Europe,” but Lunenburg’s Liberal-biased Progress-Enterprise described him as a “featherbed soldier,” saying his job as paymaster was “not of itself extremely hazardous.”

The 1917 election is often described as the most divisive in Canadian history, and is generally thought of as having driven a wedge between Quebec and the rest of Canada. The vote on whether military service should be mandatory created its own localized pocket of division within Lunenburg County. While Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden had formed a Tory-Liberal coalition party to facilitate approval of conscription, Lunenburg Mayor and Member of Parliament William Duff defied the trend and ran as a Liberal. “A vote for Duff means desertion of our soldiers in France,” said the Bridgewater Bulletin. When Duff won, The Bulletin commented: “A new partnership – Lunenburg County and Berlin.”

Lunenburg County fishermen – who contributed greatly to the nation’s food supply – had maintained their work was as important to the war effort and just as dangerous as that of conscripted soldiers. There were minor skirmishes on the wharves of Lunenburg as military policemen waited for men who had left draft cards at home hoping all would be forgotten by the time they returned to port.

In these times of bitter newspaper wars, the Halifax Herald delighted in writing that since “the local weekly” is “the only mental pablum” of “some fishermen,” they have not learned of “the power and might of the British Empire with its principles of Justice, Liberty and Brotherhood.”

The Tory Bridgewater Bulletin took the view that those men should not have been condemned because they could not see “the difference between living under the good old Union Jack and the muddy German flag with its horrible bars sinister.”

But as Gerald Hallowell points out, the German settlers who arrived in Lunenburg in 1753 were invited there by King George II of Britain, who also ruled Hanover, Germany. It was his descendant, King George the V, who ruled Britain during The First World War. Hence, Lunenburg County’s families of German-origin were, as the book title suggests, as British as the king.  

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David Mossman’s ultimate “who’s your father?” story of life on Hirtle Beach, The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen: Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach is a Maritime tale of family success and love. And while this is his fourth book about Mossman’s own life and family, unlike some of his other titles, Gladee’s Canteen is a little more light-hearted and fun.

A retired geology professor, Mossman combines his love for family with his love for geology by exploring the life on Hirtle Beach and the surrounding Kingsburg area. His narrative interlaces historical facts about the area with anecdotal evidence, including storytelling from Hirtle family members and his own first-person accounts.

The success of sisters Gladee and Flossie and their determination to show their father that yes, women can be entrepreneurs is a riveting experience of learning not only family history, but geology and environmentalism. The passion for making sure that their story isn’t forgotten is clear in Mossman’s attention to detail. From the minutia of pricing information at the Canteen to the intimate relations of who does what, like Old John being the King of peeling potatoes and apples even in his later years, there seems to be nothing left out.

There were two things I had wished for while reading the book. 1) That I could’ve witnessed the operation of the Canteen in person. 2) And a family tree to keep up with who was related to who and in what way because as a true Maritime story of “who’s your father?” relations, bloodlines can get complicated.

History lovers should be sure to pick this one up off the shelves. Gladee’s Canteen is in the bookstores, now.

Published by: Pottersfield Press

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A Family of Brothers
J Brent Wilson
Goose Lane Editions/
Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society

University of New Brunswick history professor J Brent Wilson’s contribution to the growing body of literature about the First World War is well timed to take advantage of the interest the centennial of the end of that war has generated. Published as Volume 25 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, A Family of Brothers recounts the story of the 26th New Brunswick Battalion, an apt subject indeed.

The 26th was the first infantry battalion raised in the province and the only one of nine recruited there (one of them jointly with Prince Edward Island) to fight on the Western Front in France and Flanders.

The story of this unit has been told before, most recently in New Brunswick’s “Fighting 26th”: A History of the 26th New Brunswick Battalion, CEF, 1914-1919, published in 1994. Wilson’s approach is different from that of this regimental history, as he wanted to provide an in-depth examination of the soldiers who made up the battalion.

The result is a story “about how ordinary men, many of them young, unmarried, and living at home when they enlisted, found a place in history and experienced one of the greatest and most tragic events of modern times.”

It is an ambitious goal, as by the end of the war an astonishing 5,719 soldiers had served in the unit. This may explain why the book is considerably longer than most other volumes in the series.

In any case, this number is in keeping with other Canadian infantry battalions that fought on the Western Front, especially those that were part of the first two divisions to see combat: 1st and 2nd Canadian Infantry Divisions (the 26th served in 2nd Division).

Another major difference in Wilson’s approach to the story is his sources. In addition to standard primary and secondary documents, he relies heavily on letters, diaries and the few post-war memoirs written by soldiers who served in the battalion. Yet, as Wilson admits, “some important parts of the story are either missing or underreported, mainly because the records do not exist.”

Using a chronological format, Wilson takes the reader through the formation of the battalion in late fall of 1914, followed by a lengthy period of training in New Brunswick and Britain until mid-September 1915, when it deployed to the Western Front and fought there until the end of the war. A final chapter recounts a little-known facet of the war: the battalion’s time as part of the Allied occupation force in Germany, followed by a stint in Belgium and Britain until shipping was available to transport the unit home in May 1919.

Wilson also includes what he terms two thematic chapters outside the chronological timeframe, which focus on other topics not usually covered in standard battalion histories. This includes details of soldiers’ lives at the front, especially before and after battle, the experiences of casualties once they left the unit and an examination of the men who joined as reinforcements.

The accounts of the battles in which the soldiers of the 26th participated are particularly well told. This begins with the unit’s disastrous baptism of fire in October 1915 in an action the troops called the “Crater Fight”—which resulted in 21 killed and 31 wounded of the 50 plus who took part. This first taste of the harsh reality of combat also earned the battalion the nickname by which it was known for the rest of the war: “The Fighting 26th.”

The stories of other battles follow—names that still resonate with us today—the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele and this country’s most glorious feat of arms ever: Canada’s Hundred Days, from Amiens on August 8, 1918 to the Armistice of November 11.

During its three years and a bit at the front, 900 soldiers from the battalion were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded. When the 26th returned home after the war, a mere 117 of the original 1,150 recruits that left Canada were still with it.

Wilson has produced a fast-paced, detailed narrative of a Canadian battalion at war. By including several first-hand accounts within the wider story, he has brought his chronicle to a very personal level, allowing the reader to connect with the soldiers in ways that many military histories do not.

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The Dalhousie University Story: A 200 Year Anniversary Portrait
Mona Holmlund, Curator, with Poetry by George Elliott Clarke
Goose Lane Editions and Dalhousie University

University and college anniversaries tend to inspire the publication of ponderous memorial volumes and a goodly share of attractive common room/coffee table books. Most such books end up as alumni keepsakes, visiting speaker gifts or table adornments in the admissions office.

Dalhousie University’s 200th anniversary year commemorative book may be of that genre, but it stands out as a cut above the rest. No attempt is made to duplicate the definitive and authoritative two-volume history, Lives of Dalhousie (1994 and 1997), produced by the venerable Peter B Waite. Instead, we are treated to a visually stunning, finely crafted and exquisitely tasteful living history exhibiting the richness of the university’s visual culture.

The 200th anniversary volume strikes a completely different tone from Waite’s books of record, seeking to build a bridge from the past to the future. The full-colour opening page features three Mi’kmaw Elders-in-residence wearing ceremonial dress. University president Richard Florizone conveys a contemporary message. “Drawing on our founding values,” he writes, “we aspire to academic excellence, to have an impact on local communities, and to become an inclusive institution where everyone belongs.”

Dalhousie’s founder, George Ramsay, the ninth Earl of Dalhousie, featured in Waite’s history, has almost disappeared. In place of the normally obligatory founder’s photo, we are treated to a visually attractive collage of founding artifacts, showing the original building, the cornerstone plaque and the silver trowel used in 1820 to lay the cornerstone.

The unbridled spirit and passionate heart of 200th Anniversary Portrait is to be found in a fiery poetic history composed by celebrated Canadian poet and Halifax’s favourite literary son, George Elliott Clarke. Commissioned as a Bicentennial Poem, it was initially delivered in a virtuoso performance on February 6, 2018 at the celebratory launch. That contribution, exhibiting Clarke’s distinctive lyrical style, sets the stage for a virtual kaleidoscope of images and visual artifacts encompassing university life over two centuries.

Building the volume around Clarke’s poem was an astute editorial decision. With the bicentennial celebration approaching, Dalhousie was embroiled in a very public controversy over its founder and revelations about his rather unsettling attitudes toward slavery and race. What better way to counter the backlash than by enlisting the support of Dalhousie’s most famous Black alumni to perform a poem summarizing the university’s past?

Clarke obliged with a feisty epic poem paying tribute to the Dalhousie tradition without whitewashing troubling aspects of the university’s past. “Dalhousie originates,” in Clarke’s words,

“as a trophy—a profit—of War, as actual booty.”

He captures well Dalhousie’s claim to be “free and open to all,” but, in practice, only welcoming white male Protestants, and mostly Presbyterians.

Dalhousie alumni will spot a few incisive poetic tweaks in Clarke’s verse. High Anglican King’s College, he notes, in passing, “spurned entanglements with Dalhousie” and went its own way. It’s also clear, in his verses, that doors remained closed to women until 1881 and Dalhousie did not record its first “coloured” graduate until 1896.

No official history comes without a nod to the institution’s benefactors. Sprinkled throughout the book are subtle tributes to major donors, including Ken Rowe (Kenneth C Rowe Building 2005), Elizabeth and Fred Fountain (Fountain School for Performing Arts 2013), Margaret McCain (Wallace McCain Learning Commons 2015) and Marjorie Lindsay (current IDEA Campaign Chair). Figuring prominently in the official opening photos is the Dal president widely recognized as the contemporary campus builder, Tom Traves (1995-2013).

Renowned Canadian novelist Hugh MacLellan once described Dalhousie as “The best-looking Campus in Canada.” That declaratory statement appears in the book, but it must have been referring to Hugh’s student days or the early post-war years. Surveying today’s sprawling University Avenue campus, one is immediately struck by the hodge-podge of clashing architectural styles ranging from traditional Leslie R Fairn classics to modernist monstrosities to futuristic glass-and-steel edifices.

A 200th Anniversary Portrait is experiential and organized around the stages and extensions of university student life. Scenes of a snow-covered square, a Dal spirit rally, open house days and examinations are interspersed with images of colourful Indigenous ceremonies, African Heritage Month flag raising and smiling graduates exemplifying diversity.

Feature pages do capture nicely the evolution of Dalhousie. Registration day visuals include a September 1932 application from Robert Lorne Stanfield of Truro, future Premier of Nova Scotia. The transition in libraries from the MacDonald Memorial Library study carrels of the 1930s to the food fair in the Killam Library mall is striking. Time-lapse group photos of formally dressed Dal students in 1919 are juxtaposed with today’s smiling, relaxed students, 100 years later.

Aside from one or two Lecture Hall photos, there is precious little coverage of professors in action demonstrating academic excellence. Instead, the book features students engaged in active learning on a geology trip, in a technical college lab, the Agricultural Campus milking barn, the music studio, the experimental science lab.

The 200th Anniversary commemorative book presents a presentist spin on the university’s history. Visual culture is the dominant modality and that reflects the creative priorities of Mona Holmlund, the bicentennial project lead. It is essentially a stylish, sophisticated album of fleeting memories.

“It is a cloud chamber,” Holmlund writes, “a place where transformation in time and space has been frozen, offering glimpses into multiple memories.” The result is a visually stunning book of fragmented images very much in tune with the contemporary world.

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I remember sitting at my kitchen table when the verdict of the Jian Ghomeshi trial was announced on CBC. When the news reader said not guilty my phone started buzzing. Emails started coming in. Friends and colleagues began checking in with one another, first in disbelief, then in a panic and finally in resignation.

Why, in a country with some of the most robust rape shield laws in the world, do fewer than one percent of sexual assaults result in legal sanction for the perpetrators? Why, in Canada, do more than ninety percent of sexual assaults go unreported? According to the meticulous and unflinching work of Professor Elaine Craig the answer is this: the process is unnecessarily and, sometimes, unlawfully punitive towards the complainants.

Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession was, as other reviewers have noted, written and researched prior to the most recent deluge of public attention around systemic sexual harassment and assault. Craig, an associate professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law, conducted her exhaustive research before #MeToo gained viral traction and before the development of the legal fund #TimesUp.

And yet, Craig’s case studies are contemporary: not a single case examined occurred prior to 2009. Indeed, the cases Craig unpacks are in great part the material of headline news: the alleged sexual assaults by Jian Ghomeshi, the legal failings of Judge Greg Lenehan in his proceeding over the Halifax taxi driver assault case, the disciplinary action taken against former Justice Robin Camp for his behaviour in a sexual assault trial in Alberta. As Craig outlines in her introduction, the justice system in Canada does not protect the most vulnerable. Rather, in many cases the justice system compounds violence.

In clear, concise language Craig explains how, despite changes to the legal system in the 1970s and 1980s, complainants’ experiences in the courtroom have not been eased. Instead, in example after example, Craig demonstrates that reporting sexual assault and pursuing legal action compounds a complainant’s trauma. Drawing directly from trial transcripts, Craig shows the ways in which defense lawyers rely on tactics of aggression that often cross lines of legality. Page after page of carefully documented evidence demonstrates that if you experience sexual assault and attempt to seek justice in Canada through the legal system you are almost certainly going to experience the opposite. Take, for example, a quote from a Crown attorney interviewed as a part of a 2013 study on the effects of the Victim Impact Statement:

I did not want it to happen this way but it went down that I had a prostitute complainant not show up for court, and I had her arrested on the street that night where she worked so that she could come and testify. She sure as hell wasn’t sticking around to file a [Victim Impact Statement] afterwards.

This is but one of the scores of astonishing pieces of evidence Craig offers to demonstrate the ways in which the system fails complainants at nearly every level. From the various ways in which the Crown fails complainants, to the near-systemic damage caused by trial judges who fail to protect complainants from being attacked on the stand, to the calculated tactics of re-traumatization used and passed down by defense lawyers, there is no denying that the system is broken.

If chapters outlining the fissures in the profession itself—the defense-counsel myths, the failures of the Crown and Juridical error—are somehow not enough to convince readers that we are in a justice crisis in Canada, consider this: Craig asked all of the criminal defense lawyers she interviewed the same question. “If you or someone you cared about were sexually assaulted, would you recommend reporting it and pursuing criminal conviction?”

Almost all of the lawyers interviewed said no, they would not advise loved ones to seek justice through the legal system.

This is a devastating book in both its form and its content. What is perhaps most devastating is Craig’s methodology. Her research and writing are even keeled. At no point does she demand change.

Instead, through evidence-based research, she presents the system as it is. It is up to those working within the system to implement changes to make it what it should and could be: a place to seek and find justice.

Putting Trials on Trial
Elaine Craig
McGill-Queen’s University Press

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Writing a history of your own institution can be dicey, especially for someone who has played such a central role in its modern evolution. Who and what to include, who and what to exclude, and how much to tell about successes and stumbles was the fundamental challenge faced by former Dalhousie Medical School dean, Dr T Jock Murray, in producing an official history of his school to commemorate its 150-year legacy of service to Nova Scotians.

Dr Murray’s Noble Goals, Dedicated Doctors stands as a fine example of traditional education history, finely crafted and well researched, and embroidered with fascinating personal vignettes. Given the genre, one expects and encounters a glowing introductory tribute to the institution’s greatness delivered by the current dean, David Anderson. Digging deeper into the book, it quickly becomes clear that you are reading not only a faithful, meticulously detailed reconstruction of the Dalhousie Medical School story, but the definitive book on the subject.

The origins of the School are traced back to 1749 when Edward Cornwallis arrived with his 13 ships, carrying “a group of physicians, surgeons, midwives, nurses and medical supplies.” Those personnel would, a year later, establish our first small hospital, just outside the stockade gate.

We learn, once again, about the critical role played by Dr Charles Tupper, as Premier and member of the Dalhousie Board, in campaigning for the establishment of an accredited medical school. The author also does a very effective job explaining the gradual evolution of the school into a regional institution serving the entire Maritime region.

Readers familiar with the school’s recent history will be curious to see how Murray deals with the fall of the 2009 “bombshell” letter and the crisis precipitated by being put on probation for two years. Failing a dozen or more of the 132 standards of Canadian and American accrediting committees was no trifling matter and Murray, to his credit, provides a partial defence of what happened.

“Poor documentation” was regrettably a symptom of deeper problems. Dean Thomas Marrie acknowledged that the curriculum had not been revised for 20 years and that what was once cutting edge was no longer up to standard. It took 600 faculty members 11 months to update the curriculum and, only when the school cleared its record in November 2017 and secured an eight-year accreditation did the full story get publicly aired.

Dalhousie Medical School has fully recovered from the 2009 accreditation crisis and Murray’s history is sure to restore the full lustre to its reputation as a leading Canadian medical school.

Noble Goals, Dedicated Doctors
Dr Jock Murray
Nimbus Publishing

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As a novel, PIAU: Journey to the Promised Land is a gentle, historical page-turner. While most of what has been written about the Acadians focuses on the big-event perspective of deportation, PIAU draws down on the impact on people to give a deliciously different and detailed perspective. It is a perspective that at times leaves the reader who knows the history to cringe, thinking, “Oh bad choice…”

PIAU fills in the gaps from the time of the settlement of Port Royal to the deportation to the return from exile to rebuilding and repopulation of the region. Author Bruce Murray does this with a compelling intimacy of a diary-like tale of several interlinked extended families in multiple communities around the Bay of Fundy.

On the first page Pierre Belliveau, Piau, the main character and diarist, says, “Every possible joy and calamity has come upon me because I am Acadian. Like Moses and the Israelites, who escaped the mighty pharaoh and his army, my people and I escaped the British and their army and have wandered through the wilderness, searching for the Promised Land.”

PIAU is not a book about victimization, rather it is an empowering book that explores decades of co-existence between the French, Acadians, British and Mi’kmaq, as well as colonial commerce and the bloody impact of European wars on these peoples and communities. The story begins with early subterfuge that portrays Acadia as a Casablanca-like hotbed of spies, then leads to arcadian summers and follows history through bloody battles for Annapolis to deportation and return.

Those who live in or are familiar with Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley will appreciate Piau’s observation, “We are living in a splendid and intoxicating world of pink and perfume for as far as our eyes can see and our noses can smell. Thousands of apple trees have burst into glorious bloom. I am organizing an apple blossom festival…”

And in laying out the (non-sexual) intimacy between Piau and his cousin, Benjamin, Murray debunks the emotional eunuch cliché of male friendships and inspires Paiu’s wife Jeanne to comment, “I recognize the depth of feeling you share with one another. You speak in half sentences when you are together, so complete is your understanding.” It’s not that this is a love that dare not speak its name, but rather it is a male love/friendship/bond often ignored or dismissed in other literature.

While the deportation sent more than 10,000 Acadians from their homeland, thousands more, aided by the Mi’kmaq, hid in the forests and survived. Some did not. Piau’s journey illustrates the grim deprivations of such an experience and reminds us that 263 years after the deportation, people are still being driven from their homeland. As the book observes, “Change is inevitable, but forced change is tyrannical.”

PIAU: Journey to the Promised Land is a dynamic story of a people’s survival.

PIAU
Bruce Murray
Dundurn Press

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David Sutherland, formerly a professor of history at Dalhousie University, is the preeminent historian of the City of Halifax, a subject on which he has written extensively since his 1975 doctoral thesis. He was one of the triumvirate of professional historians who, in 1999, produced Halifax: The First 250 Years, which remains the only modern general history of the city.

Sutherland’s new book, published a few weeks before the centenary of the Halifax Disaster on December 6, 2017, is a documentary study of survivor pensions paid out by the Halifax Relief Commission (HRC). The commission was a federal public body, which, at the end of January 1918, took complete charge of disaster relief and rehabilitation efforts. Excepting only Blair Beed’s popular history, 1917 Halifax Explosion and American Response (1999), and Jacob Remes’s academic study, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity and Power in the Progressive Era (2016), “We Harbor No Evil Design” is the only work of its kind. One hopes it will not be the last. The rolling centenary of disaster relief and recovery deserves to be commemorated with the same vigour as the disaster itself has been.

As soon as the HRC was assured of adequate federal funding, it set about developing a pension scheme. The pension case files, now in the Nova Scotia Archives, run to 44 linear metres and provide a collective portrait of the surviving victims. Not every survivor, however, applied for or received a pension. Some accepted a one-off lump-sum allowance in lieu of a lifelong pension, or, if they were minors, such a payment was accepted on their behalf.

Sutherland’s methodology is not quantitative analysis. He is not interested in conventional administrative history, or in the pension system per se. His interest lies instead in the pensioners themselves. He deploys the pension files to shed light on the circumstances of individual users of the system. The organization of the book is appealing. The preface–project history, principal source material, structure and acknowledgements–is followed by a comprehensive, three-part introduction, which merits publication in its own right as a general introduction to the entire subject.

Part one of the introduction–disaster and response–deals with Halifax at war, the disaster itself, emergence of the “citizens” relief committee, formation of the Halifax Relief Commission and the HRC’s first two years. Part two deals with disaster victims and their relationships with the HRC. Part three provides an historiographic perspective and addresses the legacy of the HRC.

Sutherland succinctly describes the 400-page main body of the work as an “edited transcription of the [56] chosen case files.” His sampling technique is purposive rather than representative and the organizing principle is thematic. Four broad themes, each with its own brief introduction, speak to disaster widows and widowers, disaster-disabled adults, children of the disaster (orphans, injured, others) and people on the margins (African-Nova Scotians and First Nations, the elderly, immigrants and military families and unmarried women with children). The structure of each case-file analysis (background–transcript– summary of support–postscript) is very effective.

There are two valuable appendices: staff of the HRC’s rehabilitation department mentioned in the transcribed files (including both an overview and condensed biographies of “principal leaders” and “others,” as well as a summary profile of staff whose names or initials appear in the transcribed files); and professional persons mentioned in the transcripts–almost entirely physicians and clergy.

The illustrations–photographs, textual documents and maps–are uniformly excellent, as are the footnotes and bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A brief index of personal, corporate and geographic names includes the principal subjects of the chosen case files. A detailed chronology covering December 1917 through December 1919, as well as an alphabetical and a numerical list of the files transcribed, would have been helpful.

The pension case files document surviving victim experiences. But do they document rehabilitation efforts and, if so, how and to what extent? The scope of rehabilitation was wider than victim compensation, just as the scope of recovery was wider than rehabilitation. The book’s subtitle might more accurately have reflected its content: “The Halifax 1917 Explosion Pensions.”

While Sutherland’s discussion of the Citizens Relief Committee and the Halifax Relief Commission is exemplary, it provides more context than is required. For example, all we really need to know about the ad hoc, short-lived Relief Committee is that it was soon succeeded and replaced by the HRC.

In a striking locution, Sutherland rechristens the Halifax Relief Committee, set up the very morning of the disaster, the Citizens Relief Committee. That was not its name, but that is what it was. The critically important point Sutherland is making is that the committee had nothing to do with the City of Halifax. Amidst the chaos of December 6, a committee of prominent citizens usurped municipal authority and got away with it for seven weeks until Ottawa stepped in and put a stop to such a daring exercise in lese-majesty.

Nevertheless, Sutherland’s expansive treatment of the context provides a strong “teaching moment.” For example, John DeMont’s article in the Halifax Disaster supplement of the Chronicle Herald of December 6 (for which Sutherland gave an enlightening interview) not only confuses the Halifax Relief Committee with the HRC but also makes the false claim, “In the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion a $40-million fund was established to compensate victims and rebuild the city.”

It would have been more appropriate if Sutherland’s introduction had focused primarily on the commission’s rehabilitation department, as well as on the origins and development of the pension system. The big-picture treatment is too unnecessarily big to serve the immediate purpose. Yet he is undoubtedly right that assessment of the long-term impact of the HRC “remains tentative.” The only way to “contribute to overcoming the prevailing amnesia” about the legacy of the 1917 Halifax Disaster is to restore the HRC to its central role in disaster relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction.

Anyone with an interest in any aspect of the Halifax Disaster will want to acquire this magnificently-produced book, even if it takes joining The Champlain Society to do so. It is well worth the price of a year’s membership (a digital version of the book can be purchased from the society for half the price of regular membership). It is not available in bookstores, physical or online, though in due course it will be available from secondhand or rare-book dealers, like most other Champlain Society volumes.

“We Harbor No Evil Design” is among the distinguished works emerging to commemorate the Halifax Disaster’s centenary year: December 2017-December 2018. November saw the publication of Susan Dodd’s The Halifax Explosion: The Apocalypse of Samuel H. Prince, a commentary on Prince’s Catastrophe and Social Change (1920), the first, and for long the only serious study of the disaster. Summer 2018 will see publication of the late T Joseph Scanlon’s Catastrophe: Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion, a magisterial work of disaster scholarship that will undoubtedly take its place as the definitive history. On a smaller scale, but commensurate with the letter and spirit of “We Harbor No Evil Design,” is Marilyn Elliott’s forthcoming biography of her late father, a pensioner of the HRC: The Blind Mechanic: The Story of Eric Davidson, Survivor of the Halifax Explosion.

“We Harbor No Evil Design”: Rehabilitation Efforts after the Halifax Explosion of 1917
David A Sutherland
The Champlain Society

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New Brunswick at the Crossroads: Literary Ferment and Social Change in the East aims to provide, in Tony Tremblay’s words, “a starting point for literary interpretation” that will rehabilitate Canada’s view of New Brunswick socially, politically and culturally. The chapter titles are definitive: Foreword (Christl Verduyn); Preface and Acknowledgements (Tremblay); Introduction: The Cultural Geography of New Brunswick (Tremblay); Loyalist Literature in New Brunswick, 1783-1843 (Gwendolyn Davies); Emergent Acadian Nationalism, 1864-1955 (Chantal Richard); The Fredericton Confederation Awakening, 1843-1900 (Thomas Hodd); Mid-Century Emergent Modernism, 1935-1955 (Tremblay); Modernity and the Challenge of Urbanity in Acadian Literature, 1958-1999 (Marie-Linda Lord); and Afterword: Congruence and Recurrence in the Literatures of New Brunswick (David Creelman).

One introductory chapter explains the subtitle: literary ferment is “‘the study of transactions among people, their messages, and their message systems’…We isolate historical periods in New Brunswick when literary activity is intensified and we study the agents that give rise to large-scale releases of creative energy within those periods.” Agents are not primarily people; instead the word means, among other things, “…influential teachers and schools; institutional apparatuses (publishing houses, journals, and professional associations); pioneering writers and critics; a social climate that cultivates intellectual or artistic habits of mind…”

Given that broad definition, it’s not surprising that the contributors almost completely refuse to determine artistic value. (While artists’ essays are mined for substantiating proofs of theories, their poetry, fiction and plays are seldom quoted.) The emotional affect wrought by the province’s artists over 200-plus years (inexplicably ending in 1999) does not feature greatly.) Yet that reserve is dropped when Creelman faintly damns as insufficient James DeMille, Lorne Simon and David Adams Richards, “singular and interesting figures [who] prove to be innovative or even transformative, but they still may not spur a new wave of subsequent writers” because they do not form a loose association, are not colleagues at a university or habitués of a salon. The elect artists are those whose socially conscious work seeks to improve society through the depiction of the world via realism. The Group of Seven is one enemy, as are Montreal and Toronto, and the English and French are combative among themselves and with each other.

In this limited space only a few of the book’s subjects can be mentioned. Some readers will welcome Tremblay’s book as a refreshing change from a survey devoted to personalities. Artists aren’t special, they are another vital part of the general culture and they emerge at times of upheaval. This might appear provocative, but it can be a virtue in readjusting our views. It is of great benefit to have assembled the many strands of New Brunswick’s Indigenous and settler histories and to get a better picture of the rivalries between and escalating or deflating fortunes of Fredericton, Moncton and Saint John. I especially appreciated the chapters on Acadia and its history for the ways they set out the tangled socio-politico-cultural setting as clearly as possible.

Certain errors are not virtues. Pace Hodd, Fredericton has never compared to London or Paris as an international capital; even Creelman labels the city, after Confederation, as “hardly a metropolis.” Hodd exhibits an odd blindness when it comes to the “the province’s political elite.” Their presence does not mean the “intelligentsia” has arrived; in my experience, politicians have never identified themselves as such. When Lord calls Quebec “the province next door” that definite article might irk Nova Scotia and, possibly, PEI. A proofreader could have caught such errors.

In the Foreword Christl Verduyn unequivocally states what’s most important about New Brunswick at the Crossroads. This book “can be placed firmly at the forefront of the evolving landscape of twenty-first-century literary criticism in Canada. This study of literary New Brunswick confirms some of the most compelling analytical approaches to Canadian literature today and asserts a more central place for New Brunswick in the country’s cultural history.”

A cohort has erected a work for all to keep in their mind’s eye while travelling through the 83 years left in this century. Are we meant to see this confluence of talent as an academic literary ferment? Is this book one that will be everlasting in importance or will it, sooner rather than later, recall Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and decay into a “colossal wreck?” I encourage everyone to engage with the multitude of ideas contained in New Brunswick at the Crossroads to determine their own response.

New Brunswick at the Crossroads
Tony Tremblay, editor
Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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Brazil Street is the final book in Robert Hunt’s trilogy on his life growing up in downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the 50s and 60s.

Hunt lived on Brazil Street from his birth in 1949 until he married in 1976. Similar to the earlier titles in the trilogy, the book is written in an unassuming, just-the-facts-mister style, the narrative uncluttered with either self-reflection or re-examination of past events through present day lens.

Each chapter title introduces a main story thread, which Hunt populates with one or more related anecdotes from his life, in the era before malls, smart devices or 21st-century ‘enlightenment.’

Hunt writes of a rough-and-tumble life, exploring the nooks and crannies of place, people and situations. Adventures and friends occupy the foreground, while parents and adults exist outside daily life to be feared or revered and called upon only when needed. Stories are of murdered ‘Chinamen,’ confession boxes, gathering metal to sell as scrap and other ways to hustle a buck and starting fires just to see what would happen. He references a woman he dates as “a beautiful sight” and “pretty as a picture,” and in our times, underscored with broad brushstrokes of politically correct dogma, the phrasing and sentiment read almost as poetry.

His recollections are lively and packed with a hefty cast of family, friends and characters, many of whom make brief, albeit one-time-only appearances. Although charming in this inclusiveness, at times Hunt’s proclivity for naming every building, business or soul in the neighbourhood, lest they be forgotten, serves more as a distraction of the too-much-information sort.

The chapters are written as stand-alone pieces, disconnected to any bigger narrative arc, with little orientation or transition between. The result is unadorned, staccato storytelling whereby the book is held together with loosely connected pastiches that document life in another place and time. Whether Hunt is aware of it or not, it is the rhythms of this past, told simply and without artifice, that most resonate. And it is this unfettered storytelling that actually offers most of us, those not from Brazil Street or Newfoundland, a reason to read this book in spite of a few too many exclamation marks.

Hunt’s passion for his neighbourhood is sure and strong and in his last chapter he explains the motivation behind the trilogy, sharing his intent to tell “everything that I could remember from my childhood… so that my children, their children and the next generation will know how we lived, how we survived and how we became the people we are today.”

That seems to be an honest and noble endeavour.

Brazil Street: A Memoir
Robert Hunt
Flanker Press