Fixing Library and Archives Canada
We have an archive, and it's a problem for historians
This is a condensed and edited version of a talk I gave in Ottawa this morning to the Association of Canadian Archivists.
On the weekend, I was in Picton, Ontario, mostly just get something to drink, because I was collecting trilobites. I saw the Shire Hall, which is always cute. No hobbits, but next to it was another building, the local land registry office. And if you start to look for these things, or think about where you've seen them, every county has or had them. A little squat stone building, solid as a rock. That building will be there when everything else is gone, like the Roman Senate building in the Forum. It'll be there because this was important to the people who built it. Why was it important? Because they put the records of property ownership in there, and they looked after them really carefully. Really, really carefully. They did not want them to burn, because if they burned, people would not know who owned what, and that keeps a lot of civil peace in our society. If you look at different parts of the world where awful things are happening, quite often, it's cause by lack of concern for who owns what. Maybe if there were land registry offices in certain other countries in the world, and the records were well kept, and people actually respected them, there would be a lot less war and genocide.
These buildings are often built around Confederation because they saw the importance of a documentary record, a very limited one. And we now see, or we are here because we are concerned about a documentary record that is far larger, but one that we hope would be as well protected as the documents next to the Shire Hall in Picton. Now I'm not an archivist, but I am a consumer of archival services, or whatever, whatever the buzzword is, for the stiffs who walk through the door of the different archives
In 1849 a mob burned down the parliament building in Montreal. There was an archive and library there. There were something like 27,000 books. There's not much I could find on what records were there, but there were quite a few. The government tried to rebuild the library and the archives. And five years later, they had another fire in Quebec City in the parliament buildings. The 17,000 books that they'd bought to replace the 23,000 lost in Montreal were all burnt. Then the government of Canada was sort of on the road. And when I'm saying Canada, I'm talking about the United Provinces of Canada. From Quebec City to Toronto to Kingston and eventually to Ottawa, and a lot of times they just had the records in boxes.
A lot of the earliest records were stashed in sort of a loft in the reading room of the center block of the parliament buildings, which is where the fire started in 1916 and they were burned. So it's a wonder we have anything now.
This seem like just bad Canadian stewardship or bad luck, but it was actually fairly normal for the last couple of hundred. During the French Revolution, Paris’s archival materials somewhat survived, but most of the regional archives were burned. In Puys in 1794 the local government, the soldiers and townspeople, had a grand old time burning all of the archives and records of the community, and then threw medieval statues into the fire for just to keep it going. The Palace of Westminster burned in 1834, taking a lot of the British records with it. The British started a public records office four years later, and began the process of putting together what we now think of as Kew. The German archival system had a few shake ups around 1945. A lot of regional documentary material was carted off to the Soviet Union. From Berlin, all the military archives are gone. And in Britain, a lot of the First World War personnel archives were lost during the Blitz. The Russians carved off the Manchu archives of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1902 and didn't give them back to the 1950s. The Public Record Office in Dublin was destroyed in 1922 during the Irish Civil War when the Four Courts were shelled at the beginning of the Irish Civil War.
Now, at the same time that all of these horrible things are happening, we saw a massive growth in government, generating tons and tons of paperwork ,and an expectation that this stuff will be kept. And a lot of it is not interesting to people.
At least you don’t think it’s interesting to anyone. Then someone needs it.
Say you have the old surveyor notes of an Ontario township. Then people start arguing about who owns the beach. Did the surveyor draw the property line of the Crown lands down to the water? Or did he, or she, draw it to some sort of high-water mark? Do the cottagers own to the water? Or do the cottagers own to the edge of the sand? Can you and I can walk along the beach?
And of course, much of the indigenous historical work that's being done now relies on written records that were made by Crown agents. And this record is vital to the to the reconciliation project and to the settling or litigation of land claims. At some point in our history, it's not unlikely that these were not seen to be important records. If the record is not there and we need it, we're in trouble because we probably can't get it again
Now we have a crisis in Canadian history. It just sounds like such a cliche, but we have a problem right now in that we are not attracting enough people to study history, and to research history, and to read history. There is a lack of graduate students in history right now. I tell students I have never met a person with a PhD in History who didn't have an interesting job. The idea of the PhD driving a cab is a myth Yes, some struggle. Some who try to do sessional lecturing for a living work way harder than they should for the money they make. Academic careers are tough to get. Some end up as archivists. They all find work.
But the problem is cultural. It's not really a problem of the academy, as much as it is a product of mass culture. People believe things like History are not worth studying because they are not money makers. I would not be anywhere near the person I am without my training as a historian. We have a problem with getting grad students. We have a problem with getting money. Of course, here I'm singing to the choir. We need money to write. Anybody who's not connected to a university does not qualify for SSHRC. The Canada Council is not giving grants out for biographies or other research nonfiction. It's nice to have an academic job so you can afford to write, but then you're writing in a language that is exclusionary of the readership at large.
Jack Granatstein wrote a book called Who Killed Canadian History, and his very original take was that the woke people did it. But of course, he was wrong. Social history and military and political history are not warring in the bosom of a single state. They’re warring in the bosom of the shed behind the state, because Canadian non-fiction accounts for 5% Canadian book sales, and that's everything from birds in Newfoundland to cookbooks to biographies to memoirs to military books to Jack Granatstein. We don't have a textbook history textbook business in this country anymore thanks to the Canadian government's insane copyright rules, which I hope to some either litigate or somehow fight to change. And it's almost impossible to promote a Canadian history book. We don't have the CBC making many Canadian history. Our newspapers – what’s left of them—don’t have book pages. People just don’t hear about our books.
When I was at a recent book launch, people were saying, “Well, no one, no one reads history.” But that's not true in Canada. Canadians read lots of history. I told them Alice Roberts, who is an British osteoarchaeologist, was filling a theater in Ottawa with people who were paying to see her talk. Maybe Charlotte Gray could sell tickets to a lecture, but I can't think of any other historian in Canada people would pay to hear.
People have heard of her because the BBC still makes historians famous. And if you are a YouTube freak like I am, and you watch like archeology shows with Tony Robinson, who's got a knighthood, who went from being an actor to host these dirt-cheap archeology shows. Alice Roberts’ outfit sends archeologists out with a camera, and at the end of the season, they come back with some of their stuff. She spends a few minutes going over it, and that's her BBC show. And Mary Beard does ancient history, and she's famous.
We don't do that in Canada even though we are next to a superpower that says two things. One is that we're no different from them, so we would easily be integrated as a 51st state; and two, they're quite interested in doing that. When we talk about Canadians being different, Canadians having a different worldview and a different past, it's hard to balance that claim with the fact that Canadians don't get our history. They don't hear about our books. We don't have newspapers that have book sections anymore. CBC has a very limited range of what books it touts. We don't have textbooks or book sales to students anymore. And I know it's a lot of pissing and moaning, I really do. But I also think it's a crisis, because if we're nothing more to the Americans than what the Bulgarians were to the Soviet Union, then our very existence as a country is in trouble.
The point is that we can talk about LAC and all the other archives, good and bad, but really there has to be an overriding political will to tell our stories and to protect this material. That means that the choices should not be as hard as they are for people like (Library and Archives Canada director) Ms Weir.
There are problems with LAC. A couple of years ago, Robyn Doolittle and a team of The Globe and Mail did a series on ATIP across the whole federal, provincial and municipal spectrum and found that, surprisingly to them, the biggest complainers about ATIP were historians. ATIP was supposed to be freedom of information, and it ended up being much more weighted to protection of bureaucracies and protection of privacy.
The I when I was doing military research, I wanted to see the plans for Second World War fortifications around Prince Rupert, B.C., which was a major shipping point for American forces in the Pacific. I had a secret clearance, which was a good thing, because Hirohito plays a long game. Those fortifications are long gone. You can go on Google Earth and you can see that there is nothing there, but the plans for them are still secret. I went into a special room to look at the blueprints for these forts that don't exist, just in case Tojo had some of his spies in the reading room.
It has become so bad that people in the military, who have even higher security clearances than me, pray to God that the project they're working on involves another NATO partner so they can go through the archives of the other country to get the material that they need, because it's so slow in Canada. They go to Brussels or Washington or London to get material because they would be retired by the time it was declassified and got through ATIP here in Canada.
Charlotte Gray recently interviewed Prof. Steven Aziz of Carlton for a detailed article abut LAC’s troubles. He says he's been waiting more than two years for Fauci he needs for his book on the 1988 federal election. All of the party leaders at the time are dead, and probably many of the candidates and strategists are dead, but he can't get stuff to write a book about the free trade election of 1988. The discussion in 1988 is about Canada's relationship with the United States. This is a book that should be written right now, and he can't get the material he needs.
Patrice Dutil at TMU says LAC is the is the research facility of last resort. It's now taking 10 days to get a box from the archive storage building in Gatineau to LAC’s reading room in Ottawa. It used to be two or three days
Professor Norman Hillmer of Carleton told Charlotte Gray, “today, it is the responsibility of researchers to justify their right to know what governments did or were doing, rather than the responsibility of government to put its records and those of its predecessors into sunlight.” That is a very much of a flip of the idea of freedom of information.
Now I'm going to put my lawyer's robe on. I'm going to say something about the interpretation of law. The law does not require heroics. It does not require people to have everything right, to do everything perfectly, to prevent every bad thing from happening. The operative word in Canadian civil law is “reasonableness”. What is a reasonable amount of privacy? What is the reasonable expectation of privacy? We live in a society now where we're constantly data scraped. We’re constantly being surveyed, constantly having to jump through hoops where we have to give out information. So to say that you can't release a file because it maybe has somebody's name and address seems absurd. A a person could go to the same archives or library and pull the city directory from that time and see the name and the address of everybody in the community. The phone books from that time have people's names and addresses. I don't know the criteria the ATIP people use at LAC, but either they need legal advice on reasonableness, or if they are following the law, the law needs to be changed.
There are 200 people at LAC working on ATIP. That's insane. I have nothing bad to say about the people who work at LAC. I realize that they have this huge mandate…
It's relatively easy to get fairly popular stuff, it's much, much more difficult to do historical research. Historians are saying this. They are not coming. Anything that causes LAC to lose support in the greater environment is something that's very dangerous to its future. Governments don't see the upside of archives in any kind of political sense after they've built the building. I worry that we become a country of box checkers. Every developed country has an archives. We have an archives. Doesn't mean it's any good, just like we have an old age pension doesn't support people. We have unemployment insurance that workers can’t survive on. We have a lot of things where we check boxes, and we need to do better than that. I suspect that that the amount of litigation over privacy with LAC has been somewhere between slim and none, and that this is overkill. But if I'm wrong, if it is a problem with the law and that LAC staff have to do this or be in breach of the law, then change the damn law, because this is not working. Also, I noticed that copyright laws misinterpreted at LAC. When staff say you can only photograph 10% of a document, that's based on an absurd idea of copyright law. With fair use for study purposes, you can photograph or photocopy the whole damn thing.
If the government is serious about archives, they will build a single Reading Room at the archives building in Gatineau and not have the archives in the new library on Albert Street. It seems absurd to me that the National Library and the National Archives are a single entity. They seemed like the same thing to somebody on Parliament Hill, but they are not the same thing to researchers. They have conflicting budgets, they have conflicting staff, they have all kinds of demands on resources pitted against each other in terms of Library and Archives. And now we're getting the archives thrown in with the public library and something that's going to look like a little archival Disneyland.
Thank you very much for coming. I know that a lot of you are hurting for coffee. I know I am, and it's charming to see you.