Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Political organizer and Diefenbaker foe Dalton Camp, who had courted both Roblin and Stanfield as leadership candidates, had grown impatient with Roblin’s dilly-dallying. “Duff wanted to wait until all the presents were under the tree,” he confided to cronies. By the time Roblin finally declared, Stanfield had already entered the contest with the backing, organizational commitment, and razzmatazz of the Camp organization. Although Stanfield’s French was poor and his provincial accomplishments lacklustre, the Nova Scotia premier defeated Roblin on the fifth ballot at the leadership convention in Toronto in September 1967.

  Having lost his bid for leadership of the federal party, Roblin resigned as Manitoba premier in November 1967. He ran federally in Winnipeg South, supposedly a PC stronghold, which included part of his old provincial riding of Wolseley, in June 1968. “He was the wrong man in the wrong party at the wrong time,” said victorious Liberal E. B. Osler on election night. In fact, Roblin was done in by the tsunami of Trudeaumania and local displeasure at a provincial sales tax his government had instituted the year before.

  In 1970 Roblin joined the corporate world as director, executive vice-­president, and then president of Canadian Pacific Investments Ltd. in Montreal. Four years later he again made a run for political office, winning the PC nomination for the federal riding in Peterborough, Ontario. As a popular and distinguished former premier of Manitoba, Roblin failed to anticipate the opposition he would encounter, not only from the local Liberal candidate, Hugh Faulkner, but also from the Peterborough Examiner, the town newspaper, which took editorial exception to what it considered parachute tactics by the Progressive Conservatives.

  As Roblin admitted in his memoirs, running in an Ontario riding was a huge mistake. He was roundly defeated, but he returned to public life when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed him to the Senate in 1978. Brian Mulroney named him leader of the government in the Senate in 1984, which gave him a seat at the Cabinet table.

  A progressive to the core, Roblin was a vocal supporter of Senate reform even while sitting as a member of the upper chamber. In 1987 he wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail arguing in favour of an elected Senate because “the present body is responsible in no parliamentary sense and representative in no democratic sense.” He stepped down from the Senate in 1992 when he reached seventy-five, the mandatory retirement age.

  Among the tributes was one from Robichaud, who rose in the Senate chamber and said: “I want to tell Duff Roblin . . . how proud I was of him, and I want to tell [his family] that Duff Roblin is a great Canadian . . . He consistently talked about the Metis, because they were of special interest to him. He was an honest, dedicated, sincere politician, but above all he was a great Canadian and still is.”

  Robichaud, who was eight years younger than Roblin, continued to serve in the Senate, but he admitted in the late 1990s that he had grown “bored with the shenanigans.” After twenty years’ service, he stepped down in 2000, when he turned seventy-five. He moved to a modest house on the Acadian shore of the Northumberland Strait near Bouctouche, N.B., with his second wife, Jacqueline Grignon, whom he had married in 1998.

  As Frank McKenna, another visionary premier of New Brunswick, said after Robichaud died at seventy-nine of cancer, on January 6, 2005, “Diminutive in appearance, [he] was a giant in action. . . . He set a fire under New Brunswick that continues to rage. . . . He made us believe in ourselves. He firmly established us as a province that could punch above its weight at the national level.”

  After retiring from the Senate, in 1993 Roblin accepted an appointment as chairman of a provincial commission into post-secondary education in Manitoba. After that he largely retired from public life, although he continued to play squash, play the bagpipes, and enjoy vigorous but not partisan discussions about politics, history, and contemporary events. He lived in good health into old age and had the pleasure of seeing himself proclaimed the “greatest Manitoban of all time” by the Winnipeg Free Press in 2008. He died, aged ninety-two, on May 30, 2010.

  J. M. S. Careless

  Historian

  February 17, 1919 – April 6, 2009

  IF EVER A person soared above the inherent liabilities of his name, it was historian J. M. S. (Maurice) Careless. As a scholar, writer, teacher, and family man he was the antithesis of negligence. Of course, that didn’t mean that his moniker escaped titters and jokes, some of them made by the man himself. He liked to tell his students at the University of Toronto that having a professor named Careless shouldn’t alarm them, because an earlier generation had been taught by a man named Wrong.

  Careless was a triple-hitter as a historian: he was a diligent scholar who delved deeply into primary documents, he was a visionary who could discern patterns and develop theories to explain the past, and he was a compelling writer and an engaging stylist who could communicate his historical passions both in the seminar room and beyond to people who were curious about their country and how it had developed. Such was his prowess that he spawned a generation of enterprising scholars who built on his pioneering ideas in intellectual, urban, and regional history and went on to teach these emerging scholarly fields at universities across the country.

  An undergraduate student of Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Frank Underhill, Careless taught at U of T for nearly four decades, attaining the rarefied rank of university professor and helping to build the history department into a pre-eminent centre of Canadian studies. He taught survey courses and undergraduate seminars, supervised doctoral students, and served as chairman of the department from 1959 to 1967. The Careless era represented an enormous expansion in hiring, a broadening of subject areas, and a democratization of the curriculum, including the controversial abandonment of the four-year honours program.

  He was not as well known outside the profession as the previous chair, Donald Creighton, an early biographer of John A. Macdonald and proponent of the Laurentian thesis, which argues that Canada, a supplier of staples to European economies, developed economically and politically along the St. Lawrence River and other transportation routes. Among historians and students, however, Careless was every bit as revered as a teacher, researcher, theorist, literary stylist, and scholar.

  In a way, Careless is the affable yin to Creighton’s crusty yang. His metropolitan thesis — that cities grow as regional nodules because they harness, dominate, and then service the commercial, political, and cultural activities in their hinterlands — is both the counterpoint to and a refinement of Creighton’s Laurentian thesis and Innis’s staples theory. In an era when nationalist history dominated, Careless demonstrated that the study of local and regional history was key to understanding Canada and how it developed into a modern nation.

  Like Creighton, Careless wrote a pioneering monograph on an icon of Canadian history; both studies are foundation blocks for scholars and buffs. However, Careless’s monumental two-volume biography of George Brown — reformer, founding editor of the Toronto Globe (now the Globe and Mail), and father of Confederation — is a more complete picture of the human being behind the politician than is Creighton’s magisterial biography of Brown’s political rival Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada. Partly that’s because Careless uncovered a trove of family letters and papers in Scotland that predated Brown’s arrival in this country in 1843. They now reside at Library and Archives Canada for others to consult.

  Compared to the often imperious Creighton, he was more approachable as a colleague and supervisor, although no less demanding of his students. He had trained as an intellectual historian by working on mid-Victorian values and beliefs, picking up on theories developed by his predecessor, the great political historian Frank Underhill. But his approach was different. Instead of looking at attitudes and political movements as rationalizations emerging from economic interests, Careless looked at ideas and intellectual history in social and cultural contexts, arguing that it was important to understand what people believed a
t a particular time, even though those ideas might be dismissed as irrelevant or nonsensical by subsequent generations.

  He twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award, for Canada: A Story of Challenge in 1953 and a decade later for the second volume of Brown of the Globe, titled Statesman of Confederation. He wrote at least half a dozen other pivotal works, including The Union of the Canadas; The Rise of Cities in Canada before 1914; Toronto to 1918: An Illustrated History, which won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1985; and Frontier and Metropolis. Careless also co-edited the Canadian Historical Review and served as historical consultant on several films and television shows. He was duly honoured for these achievements, receiving, among other awards, the Order of Canada, the J. B. Tyrrell medal, membership in the Royal Society of Canada, and at least six honorary degrees.

  Careless’s life was not without stress. When he was twelve, he collided with a bus while riding his bicycle; after the accident, doctors had to amputate his right arm. Within the year he was writing so smoothly with his left hand that a teacher observed that his penmanship, then a highly prized skill, was now equally as bad as it had been before the accident. He didn’t dwell on his infirmity. Instead, he coped by keeping his shoelaces done up, his neckties knotted, and his empty right sleeve tucked into his jacket pocket.

  He disarmed strangers with his deft left-handed greeting and impressed his good friend Freeman Tovell with his one-handed typing when they were graduate students at Harvard in the early 1940s. As for his children, they later attested to their father’s capacity to spank, build model trains, and carve a turkey single-handed. He also worked prodigiously. While everybody else would go to bed, he typically stayed up until three a.m. writing. Early the next morning he was off to the university to teach his courses, run his seminars, and conduct the business of the department and the university — just another day in a busy life.

  JAMES MAURICE STOCKFORD Careless was born in Toronto on February 17, 1919, three months after the end of the First World War. The younger son by nearly a decade of William Roy Careless, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Ada de Rees, he was essentially an only child. After elementary school he attended North Toronto Collegiate and then transferred to University of Toronto Schools, an academically elite boys’ school. That’s where he became interested in cultural history, according to a biographical article by Frederick H. Armstrong in Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J. M. S. Careless.

  In 1936 he entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto. By the time he graduated with a history degree in 1940, Canada and Britain were at war. The Armed Forces weren’t interested in sending a one-armed combatant overseas, so he enrolled at Harvard to do graduate work in medieval British intellectual history. Fascinated by ideas — the way they germinate in dense and diverse populations, how cities and regions develop independently of major centres, and how newspapers can disseminate political attitudes and theories — he settled on the convergence of Victorian liberalism and the proliferation of daily newspapers as a thesis topic.

  Thwarted from doing primary research in English repositories because of the war, he pondered the problem with Underhill when he was back in Toronto for Christmas. Underhill directed him to the plentiful newspaper documentation on George Brown in Toronto. Fortuitously, Careless’s Harvard professor, David Owen, agreed to supervise his thesis on Victorian liberalism in the Canadian colonial environment, even though the subject was technically outside Owen’s own field of expertise. Later Careless showed the same leniency and openness to his own graduate students, never expecting them to “write footnotes to his work,” according to intellectual historian Carl Berger. “He was one of those people for whom you could do virtually anything you wanted as long as you had a lot of evidence and you were pursuing a serious line of enquiry.”

  In the summer of 1939 Careless had met Betty Robinson, the daughter of industrialist Gordon Robinson, at Jackson’s Point on Lake Simcoe. They were married on New Year’s Eve 1941 in the chapel of Hart House at the University of Toronto. Careless’s Harvard roommate Tovell acted as best man while the Robinson family chauffeur waited outside to rush the newlyweds to the registry office to obtain a visa for the new Mrs. Careless so that she could return to Boston with her husband.

  Careless was seconded to the Naval History Office in Ottawa in 1943 and then to External Affairs, where he often worked with Hume Wrong, son of historian George M. Wrong, preparing briefings for the Parliamentary press gallery. The official reports, which were always released under the heading “Wrong and Careless,” gave wartime information bulletins an unlikely twist.

  Near the end of the war Careless became an assistant to diplomat Saul Rae, dealing with prisoner exchanges with the enemy as the war approached its inevitable conclusion. A Swedish liner, the Gripsholm, transported Axis and Allied exchange candidates under a safe-conduct agreement, with the result that Careless was nicknamed “the Cruise Kid” because of his frequent sailings across the Atlantic.

  After the German and Japanese capitulations in 1945, Careless was hired as a lecturer in the history department of the University of Toronto, simultaneously writing lectures and completing his dissertation. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1949, the year before he was granted his doctorate from Harvard. The next two decades were an incredibly busy time as the Careless family grew to include five children and he embarked on a bruising teaching and writing schedule. In the early years his wife typed manuscript pages for him after she put the children down for naps.

  Careless succeeded Creighton as chair of the history department in 1959. He broadened, deepened, and expanded the department, which nearly doubled in the early 1960s and introduced Asian and immigration history, among other new fields. Those were the years when the baby boomers entered university, creating a huge demand for space and for academics to teach them.

  When Careless retired in 1984, he was appointed professor emeritus. Of course, retirement was merely a word. He continued to write prolifically, to sit on committees, to serve the profession, and to expand the idea of history by serving as an advisor to regional history groups and documentary film units. He died on April 6, 2009, two days after suffering a stroke. He was ninety.

  James Houston

  Artist, Adventurer, Writer

  June 12, 1921 – April 17, 2005

  &

  Kananginak Pootoogook

  Inuit Elder and Artist

  January 1, 1935 – November 23, 2010

  CARVERS AND PRINTMAKERS put down their tools and closed up their studios in Cape Dorset when they heard the news that Saumik, “the Left-Handed One,” had died. That’s the name the Inuit at Cape Dorset had given the artist and dealer James Houston when he arrived on Baffin Island half a century earlier, seeking a simpler, more elemental life. He stayed just over a dozen years, but in that time he helped the Inuit create a new art form and launched an international craze for the carvings that Inuit had been making for centuries. In so doing he changed their way of life and his own.

  Five years later, the community shut down again to honour Kananginak Pootoogook, the internationally recognized Inuit artist and community leader in the Arctic after Houston returned to the south. Kananginak helped his people develop their own artist-run studios and manage the transition from a nomadic life of hunting and fishing through cycles of plenty and starvation on the land to a modern one in permanent settlements. After Kananginak died in an Ottawa hospital of lung cancer on November 23, 2010, all of Cape Dorset waited for his body to be flown home.

  Then, despite a snowstorm that had made many roads impassable, three hundred people crowded into the community centre for an emotional Anglican service in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit. Because darkness comes early in the arctic winter, the mourners used flashlights to wend their way to the cemetery, where they placed Kananginak’s coffin in a shallow grave, covered it with a blanket of gravel, rocks, and snow, and marked the mound with a handm
ade cross.

  These two men, one white, one Inuit, are forever linked through family ties and the sunburst of Inuit carving and printmaking. Kananginak’s father, Joseph Pootoogook, ancestral leader of the Ikerrasak camp, adopted Houston into his clan in the 1950s, thus making it easier for the southerner to live and work among the Inuit. In his turn, Kananginak adopted Houston’s son John, carrying on a tradition and a relationship with the younger Houston that lasted as long as Kananginak lived.

  With his artist’s eye, Houston was the first white man to recognize the beauty and integrity of the carvings the Inuit had been making since before time was recorded; with his entrepreneurial muscle he found a market for the best pieces in the south; with his creative vision he helped them learn printmaking, a gender-neutral artistic and income-generating activity. A charismatic figure, an artist, and a storyteller, Houston was a modern man at odds with his own civilization. His dual role in the Arctic – as a paid servant of the Canadian government and an art dealer who profited from the marketing of Inuit art — made him a controversial figure, but in the end the markers pile much higher on the positive side.

  Houston wasn’t responsible for contact and commercialization. That was as inevitable as the long polar night following the midnight sun. Transportation and communications systems — especially television and air travel — became more pervasive and sophisticated in the 1950s and 1960s, just as life on the land became less sustainable with the depletion of trapping and hunting.