"for better and for worse, we do not erase. Only ideological dictatorships erase."

John Ralston Saul in the inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, reprinted in Globe & Mail March 24, 2000

In my latest C2C Journal article I said the people tearing down statues of Sir John A. Macdonald have an even greater need to learn humility from history than the rest of us.

“One of the most eerie phenomena of our era, Eric Hobsbawm states in his masterful history Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, is the ‘destruction of the past.’ Most young people, he argues, now ‘grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.’”

Sean Mills in The Beaver April-May 2005

“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."

General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002

In my latest Loonie Politics piece I say the real question about shrinking Toronto City Council is why people who call Doug Ford an evil rights-hating maniac for invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to protect legislative authority aren’t even slightly concerned about judges routinely invoking Section 1 of the Charter to infringe fundamental rights like free speech.

BTW this particular piece is not behind a paywall. But Loonie Politics depends on subscriber support. So please sign up for their monthly or annual plan to support their work… and mine.

“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.