Canadianization And The Disease Of Social Science: A Review Article

Unfortunately, the book is biased; it is laced with unnecessary errors; it is hopelessly colonial-minded; it is fundamentally inadequate in its coverage, seemingly purposefully manipulative of fact, and hip-deep in platitudinous (mostly foreign) Social Science models, frames, and superficial theories. They clutter and impede a story - or, rather, stories - that can be complete and perfectly understandable alone. The embarrassing hocus-pocus is intended, it would seem, to give "scientific" validity to the bundle of prejudice presented in the book. The actual Canadianization movement was complicated, rich with contradictions, and even laced (at times) with humour. Essentially, it was - looking back on it - an incident in the struggle against Globalization in which institutionalized forces of many kinds fought to prevent the democratic power of popular forces from expressing ideas and from gaining effects in legislation to satisfy the largest portion of the Canadian people. Canadians wanted more power in Canada and over Canada. They wanted their culture to speak with its own voice. And they wanted control of Canadian wealth. The closer they got to the genuine levers of power, the greater was the resistance they faced. The universities, colleges, and cultural institutions were and are the key to the production of the country's intelligentsia and management class. Clearly the people chosen to teach them and what is offered as curriculum were worth fighting about. Jeffrey Cormier's book tends to suffocate those facts, being - one might say, systemically - a part of the oppressive forces. It misreports, presents partially, or misunderstands many key events in the struggle. Above all, it lacks any depth of analysis, cloaking itself in the superficial and fustian robes of the inappropriately named Social Scientists. As a contribution to Canadian history, the work is so flawed its existence cries out for a new work to correct its endless error. As a contribution to the literature of social movements it leaves out so much that is absolutely essential to understanding the Canadian condition it is a hopeless parody of bad U.S. theorizing from actual events. The book fixes upon models and theories largely from the U.S.A. In doing so, it fails to look clearly at Canada and at the real social conditions here at the time. The U.S.A. is not Canada. Much, much better if the book had presented a framework of understanding by examining all the forces at work in Canada at the time instead of reaching outside Canada, especially across the border as if to the Well of Eternal Truth. For instance, three of the forces of key significance to the role of the higher education institutions were the national presidents' organization, the national organization of professors, and the various organizations of particular studies, such as history, English, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Since those forces were operative in the struggle - often as negative forces, they need to be placed and explained for the reader. They had characteristics that were peculiarly Canadian and that need careful explanation - and don't get it in the book They were not - as they would be in, say, France, Belgium, or the U.S.A. - operationally nationalist in matters of hiring and curriculum. For that reason sociological studies of such organizations from those (or most other) countries would be of doubtful use in Canada. That is particularly important in relation to the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. In the second part of the book, that organization is raised to central position (more than a little extravagantly) in the Canadianization struggle after 1972. It must be noted, however, that in the first years of intense debate and discussion, no organization of any specific discipline supported the move to Canadianization, certainly not the CSAA. From 1968 to 1972 (and, indeed, after), moreover, many members of that organization and other Social Scientists were virulent opponents of Canadianization. I quote Denis Forcese, sociologist, a little further on. The famous John Porter (sociologist) of the prize-winning The Vertical Mosaic (1965) threatened to attack Steele and Mathews publicly and was only dissuaded from doing so by some of his close friends at Carleton University. Forcese and Porter were two among a large number. Jeffrey Cormier states that all such people believed "scholarship is international", and used that belief as a basis of their resistance. Cormier accepts that reason as sufficient. But in Canada that explanation is simply not sufficient. Canadian analysis based upon Canadian cultural reality, social psychology and history must be brought into play. A Canadian sociologist might well look into other important reasons, which almost certainly would reveal colonial-mindedness, a desire for approval from the imperial centre, a belief in the inferiority of Canada, a desire to please foreign colleagues with whom Canadians shared Departmental work, expectation of reward from administrators who disapproved of Canadianization, and more. The forces I mention are not usually in play in the sociology of U.S. social movements, for instance. And so dipping relentlessly into U.S. experience as guide and authority is not only colonial-minded; it is also badly misleading. The book does nothing to focus on particular Canadian responses. A characteristic peculiar to Canada, moreover, goes unmentioned and unresearched. That is fear. Because of Canada's colonial status, Canadians cannot depend upon their own to back them in struggles like the one with which the book concerns itself. Canadians, then, live in fear on matters of nationalism, sovereignty, self-respect, and resistance to takeover. Repeatedly, the book asserts that Steele and Mathews - ice-breakers in the whole conflict - could not get a national organization constructed, and failed, largely; it would seem, because of Mathews' general disposition and the fact that the two somehow embodied the movement. That is romantic nonsense. Mathews' disposition may have contributed to the problem, but the claim - in a serious global consideration - is personalist. When Steele and Mathews visited universities and colleges, often with enthusiastic support and very large audiences, to hear and discuss related problems, they would work to get core groups to found local Canadianization committees, connect with the Ottawa group and with others in the country, and build in solidarity. They failed in that task over and over. They failed because (1) university administrations did not support the aims of Canadianization. (2) Many Departments were controlled by aggressive foreign scholars who wanted Canada to continue funnelling in foreign scholars regardless of Canadian needs. (3) Foreign nationals were often strongly opposed to the idea of teaching Canadian materials. (4) The national professors' organization was hostile to the changes requested or could not be depended upon to support them. (5) Governments, both provincial and federal would not take a stand on the legitimacy of the Canadianization demands. As a result, people who worked in the universities and colleges who were convinced action had to be taken were, quite simply, afraid that if they acted organizationally, openly and publicly, they would suffer reprisal, would lose their jobs, or would face continuous harassment. And so when Steele and Mathews left a particular university or college, the Canadian faculty they were afraid to begin organization. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success are written almost as if those facts did not exist. It, therefore, does not face one of the central facts of the conflict. That is strange because the historical record shows how virulent the opposition was to change on behalf of Canadians. The famous remark to Time Magazine by Professor Denis Forcese of Carleton University's Department of Sociology and Anthropology before the first major meeting on the subject in December, 1968, shows the mood of the opposition. "I hope we can club these people [Steele and Mathews] to death when it comes up at the meeting." Subsequently, Mathews had to use threats of court action and a particularly frank meeting with Carleton's president, A. Davidson Dunton, to back off a fraudulent whisper campaign to destroy a supporting colleague by the promulgation of a backroom and baseless charge of anti-Semitism. Both of Mathews' promotions at Carleton University - from assistant to associate professor and from associate to full professor - were political battlefields. Indeed, in relation to the latter, president Michael Oliver wrote to Mathews that he used his discretionary vote in the promotion meeting to assure the promotion went through because it became plain to him committee members were trying to deny promotion on grounds other than academic ones. Academics across Canada knew that was the atmosphere in which the fight was being conducted to guarantee that Canadians of excellence would be hired in Canadian educational and cultural institutions and to assure students that a full range of Canadian materials and courses would be in place for them. Many people, understandably, didn't want to step into that threatening atmosphere. Much the same atmosphere characterized the struggle that went on in the Union Movement, the Arts community, and other areas involved in that period of national reassessment. The book could have broken important ground by including research on the role of fear in the Canadianization struggle. It offers nothing. Strangely, The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success may be judged important because of its badness. The book presents an example of an increasingly frequent kind of Social Science and History publication now produced by reactionaries for whom the presentation of a Rightists world view is primary. The world view is founded upon a wonderland of corporate totalitarianism and Globalization. The products of research by "expert" reactionary writers are misshapen and stuffed into the cracks and crannies of the world view. The book is important because it uses - so badly - hocus pocus "expertise", Social Science structures, and inept foreign references that are visible for all to see - who look. Looking takes a little training because such writers don't just say incorrect and manipulative things. Rather they use methodologies, seemingly authoritative and objective, which - in fact - set up the enemies to be crushed as if the crushing is then done as a result of the findings of sweet reason in a search for objective truth. That's a key statement. In The Canadianization Movement there apparently are no good guys or bad guys. There is just a so-called scientific examination of a set of events. In fact, the book goes far to erase many of the essential differences between those fighting to get justice for Canadians and those fighting to prevent justice for Canadians. And it does that by the employment of vaunted Social Science, value-free methodology. The book sets out - on the surface - to tell the story of Canadianization. Beginning in 1968, a movement was set afoot to end discrimination against the hiring of Canadians and the exclusion of Canadian materials, especially in relation to universities and colleges and cultural institutions. But the reach of the movement joined it more broadly with primary and secondary school organizations, with the union movement, political parties, artists' organizations, and many more. The book sets out (apparently) to follow the movement from its inception in the 1968 conversations of James A. Steele and Robin Mathews, teachers in Carleton University's English Department; through the dogged struggle by many people to get Canadians hired and Canadian materials used; to the year 1981 when the federal government increased what had become its growing demands. It first required advertising of all positions in Canada and urged Canadian preference. In 1981 it codified those demands in what became known as the two-tier system in which qualified Canadians had to be considered and hired when available. The book doesn't inform its readers that the two-tier system is presently increasingly in disarray, undermined by university presidents and other forces pressing upon the federal government. Nor does it report that Canadian offerings for Canadian students are still seriously limited. To do so would prevent the story from being tied up in a bright ribbon as if it ended happily-ever-after. To admit the conflict is on-going would, moreover, suggest that deeply ideological forces are at work tirelessly to destroy Canadian viability, forces which cannot be disguised by Social Science jargon and sleight-of-hand. At least since the publication of The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900-1945, by Doug Owram (1986), the "expert" and "the intellectual community" have come more and more to mean so-called objective Social Science specialists apparently without ideology. They find careers in universities, corporations, and governments. They are often hirelings with "methodologies" that can be used to legitimate Death Camps or Childrens' Camps. They are frequently ideologically committed to corporate totalitarianism and to serving the forces of Globalization. So intense is the training and indoctrination of such people in the Social Science and Management sections of universities that many graduates of those institutions don't fully understand the use to which they are being put. . Apart from creating hirelings for administrations of any kind, one role of the Social Science machines is to lobby for the elevation of Social Scientists into positions of power where they frequently demonstrate their reliability as reactionary agents. A key point needs to be repeated. The chief expertise of the Social Science hireling is a particular kind of methodology. It has been constructed in the Social Science disciplines so that it may be used to wipe out fundamental differences and distinctions in disputes. It is used to massage negative and destructive policies and institutions to make them look inoffensive, neutral, or positively attractive. Social Scientists might be described as the Public Relations boys (and girls) of the larger intellectual community. Plainly, over many decades, the Social Scientist has become an increasingly powerful force in what is called "the new managerial state". As the state has shifted to the Right, shifted away from democratic viability towards corporate totalitarianism, Social Scientists have become, in very large numbers, a solid portion of the rightward shift. I have described, above, what the book, The Canadianization Movement, apparently sets out to do. What it really does is very different. It demeans and discredits James Steele and Robin Mathews (especially the latter) and the people associated with them in "the struggle for Canadian universities". Major founders of the movement and major workers in its development, they cannot easily be discredited. But the task must be undertaken as a part of the ideology of the Right and in the service of Social Science "expertise". Stated simply, Steele and Mathews must be removed as effective instruments in the movement and replaced with the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. By doing that the book can erase the claim for effectiveness of the so-called non-expert, especially those not bound in fealty to the ideological power centers. And it can elevate an argument for the reasonableness, the prudence, the efficacy of working through "expert" organization (the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association) with institutions acceptable to the ideological power centers, which in this case are the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Association of University and Colleges of Canada (the presidents' organization), and the Canadian government. Cormier writes that "in North America, at least, social movement activity is becoming increasingly institutionalized" (p. 192). "Institutionalized", of course, means "tamed and in the hands of 'experts'". To succeed in its task, the book must radically misshape the history of the movement and artificially place the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (hereafter CSAA) in pre-eminent position. Just for instance, it cuts off the work of Steele and Mathews almost completely at 1972, even while admitting in the entry on Archival Sources that the Robin Mathews material on the subject provides "an extremely rich resource" which begins "in 1967 and tapers off around 1977". (p. 198) In addition, the book fails to characterize the role of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (hereafter the CAUT) and the Association of University and Colleges of Canada (hereafter the AUCC). Both were key and active forces in the resistance to change on behalf of Canadians and Canadian materials. As a product of its serious failure in characterizing those institutions, the book can present reports of events that have been emptied of their meaning and may then be used to make Steele and Mathews (especially Mathews) look like publicity-seeking trouble-makers. The issue itself is given what may be called "Right ideology treatment". It is not given legitimacy but is handled at arms-length as a kind of interest group expression. Cormier writes such phrases as "Cultural nationalists believed…." And "Cultural nationalists maintained…."(p.7) Most humorously he reports not that - by the mid-1960s - the U.S. controlled a large part of the Canadian economy, but that "it was believed that the United States controlled a large part of the Canadian economy". (p. 20) Steele and Mathews are disorganized, quasi-failures who are publicity seekers unable to forge a lasting organization. When, however, the full might of the CSAA fails on the issue and falls into decline after 1976 (p. 163) the book makes no such judgment of those "experts". Their failure is merely (the book uses a U.S. definition, of course), a matter of "movement abeyance". By U.S. definition again, Mathews was "a self-aggrandizing people-oriented leader". And the two men were "social movement entrepreneurs". (p. 20) When Mathews had disagreements with some organizations which retreated from the issue of Canadian sovereignty, he - according to the book - showed "the trademarks of a self-aggrandizing people-oriented leader". What is more (without the book producing a shred of evidence) by 1971 "he [Mathews] was largely alone on the issue having alienated … many of those with whom he had earlier formed an alliance". (p. 33) The book settles upon, demonizes, and falsely places Mathews in a position which sees him as almost the only and key force in the movement. The concentration on Mathews to the neglect of other important people and aspects of the movement - some of which I point out - does serious harm to the study. It permits the book, moreover, to characterize the whole movement (outside the CSAA) as faulty, failure bound, and a little ridiculous. Such a strategy prepares for the entrance of the CSAA as sober, sane, rational, and bound to succeed. I wrote at the beginning that the book is hopelessly colonial-minded. It is so with a clear Rightists effect. It evokes, tirelessly, mostly U.S. sources upon which to build a fiction of expertise for the "findings" in the book. Using chiefly U.S. sources, it establishes the obvious, over and over. The Canadianization movement was a movement. It had a purpose. It needed people to make it happen. They connected across organizations, and so on. (Morris, Staggenborg, McCarthy, Zald, Garner, Klandermans, and Buehler are only a few of the mostly U.S. "authorities" and "experts" the book cites tirelessly to establish the scientific integrity and expert authority of platitudinous, highly prejudiced, and ideologically loaded argument.) Look at the statement that Steele and Mathews were "social movement entrepreneurs". An "entrepreneur" (Gage Canadian Dictionary) is "a person who organizes and manages a business or industrial enterprise, attempting to make a profit…." What, then, is a "social movement entrepreneur"? Continuing the "expert" construction of Steele and Mathews, the book asserts that they "actively manufactured a sense of grievance around the issue of Canadianization". (p. 47) Indeed, in its desire to locate Canadianization in a few personalities, the book attributes astonishing power to the two men. They "manufactured" the feeling Canadians were being discriminated against. They alone broadened the issue so that unions, student organizations, press, media, politicians, the man and woman in the street, academic associations, provincial governments and many others took it up. According to the book, those forces didn't take up the issue because they recognized it as real, because they were convinced by the evidence presented, and because they recognized that a number of its conditions paralleled conditions in their own lives. They took it up because Steele and Mathews were effective publicists and grand-standers. As the book puts it (using, of course, a U.S. source to give the statement authority) the "movement's agenda was taken seriously by politicians largely as a result of the manner in which it was framed by its leaders" [Steele and Mathews]. (p. 56) The book's astonishing failure in simple, factual reporting, moreover, is demonstrated again and again. As I have suggested elsewhere, (Treason of the Intellectuals, 1995) error by writers capable of checking and removing error may be a matter of intention. Or it may be the result of slovenly research and reporting techniques. No excuse exists for many of the errors in the book, for a very simple reason. Through the whole time of research, writing, and editing, Steele and Mathews were available for the simple checking of facts. They were never enlisted for that purpose. . The book wishes to establish Mathews' activist past. It does so by having consulted a former academic colleague of Mathews in Alberta, Henry Beissel - but the facts apparently elicited was never checked with Mathews. Henry Beissel's romantic account of the actions undertaken to protest the election of corrupt Edmonton mayor William Hawreluk becomes an error-filled part of Cormier's book... "Some thirty University of Alberta professors" (p. 21) could not have become "increasingly concerned about the growing corruption of Hawreluk's administration" simply because Hawreluk was not in office to head an administration. The number of people who protested in the Council Chamber, moreover, were not three, but four. Mathews did not engage in "actually shouting from the gallery". The meeting was inaugural and celebratory, to swear in the aldermen and the mayor and to hear his first remarks as mayor, returning after a five year hiatus. Mathews rose to deliver a carefully prepared speech as Hawreluk took the mayor's chair and before he spoke. Mathews delivered his words into several media microphones. He did not engage in "castigating Hawreluk and his corrupt administration" (since Hawreluk had not been in office and so was not able to have a corrupt administration at the time of the election). Rather, Mathews called upon the citizens of Edmonton to look to constitutional procedures for the protection of democratic integrity. The police did not arrive "asking (the protesters) to leave quietly", but to remove them. Having done so, the sergeant in charge asked for the mayor's directions. "Arrest those men, take them to jail, and charge them with something", Hawreluk said. When Mathews left Edmonton in 1966, it was not for "a year in France and England", but for two. In the space of a page, the book presents six unnecessary errors in fact. History? The book's reporting of the national executive meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers at the Park Plaza Hotel in Toronto in May, 1969, is also totally incorrect. According to its version, Mathews appeared at the hotel carrying a picket sign in order to use "high drama to draw attention to the cause of Canadianization". For that reason, repeated by Cormier, "Mathews demonstrated in front of the Park Plaza Hotel. (pp. 40-41) "The demonstration", he reports, "lasted for roughly an hour". The book's account, as I say, is incorrect. The CAUT represents all full time faculties in Canada. It was a natural centre for Steele, Mathews, and others concerned with the issue to call upon for institutional support to end discrimination against qualified Canadians in the hiring process. And so (see Mathews and Steele, The Struggle for Canadian Universities, 1969) from February 2, 1969 through to August 2, 1969, the two men attempted to get CAUT support. It was denied by CAUT president C.B. Macpherson, highly regarded University of Toronto political scientist. The book presents no serious analysis of the CAUT's ideological position, but it carries a quotation, almost by accident, by CSAA's Canadianization activist Elliott Leyton in 1984 reporting that on a question of principle "the CAUT has capitulated, as usual" (p. 173). What the book fails to report is key to the Park Plaza event. U.S. people among the executive members of CAUT (and perhaps others) were actively committed to preventing CAUT action on Canadianization. Steele and Mathews were rebuffed when they informally met Gordin Kaplan, vice-president of the CAUT. Ironically, Kaplan had been a Canadian resident for more than twenty years without taking Canadian citizenship. When he wrote the CAUT position and guidelines for hiring, called "Canadianization and the University", he was articulating policy for a Canadian organization. The guidelines constituted a stalling device and a statement that prevented affirmative action for qualified Canadians facing discrimination. When the meeting was announced for the Park Plaza Hotel, a part of its agenda was a consideration of hiring and what was then called "manpower". By the constitution of the organization (fitting for an academic body), people especially qualified to make representation on particular subjects under discussion (though not members of the national executive body) could ask for and be granted permission to make a presentation before the body of the meeting. Steele and Mathews were recognized as among the best informed in the country on the subject. Mathews wrote more than once, over several weeks, to the permanent executive secretary requesting to be heard at the meeting when hiring was being discussed. Unconstitutionally, Mathews was refused admission to the Park Plaza meeting by Secretary Alwyn Berland, a U.S. citizen who had chosen not to take Canadian citizenship. As Dean of Arts at the University of Regina, previously, Berland was alleged to have been most sympathetic to U.S. hiring in his faculty. He did not take Canadian citizenship when he became permanent executive secretary of the CAUT. He took it only later when he applied for a job in Ontario that demanded Canadian citizenship as a qualification. Mathews faced a difficult choice. He was being asked to accept unconstitutional exclusion from the meeting of an organization of which he was a member, to which he had a right to appear, and which was going to consider policy on matters about which he was especially qualified to report. He had to except unjust exclusion or force his admission to the meeting. How much the whole CAUT executive had worked together to exclude Mathews may never be known. Mathews demonstrated, however, for the simple purpose of gaining entrance to his own organization in order to be heard on a subject he had a right to speak about. When the executive learned that press and media were descending on Mathews and would learn of his unconstitutional exclusion, Gordin Kaplan hastened from the meeting into the street to invite Mathews to make a presentation when the meeting focused on hiring and "manpower". If Mathews had simply been publicity-seeking, had been using "high drama to draw attention to the cause of Canadianization", the national meeting could have ignored his protest. Mathews was not, moreover, engaged in the matter for "roughly an hour", but spent several hours involved with the meeting. (Incidentally, the book uses three sets of U.S. "authorities" to ground its incorrect reporting of the event and its judgment of the actions involved as incorrectly reported.) C. B. Macpherson, chairman, never acknowledged Mathews' presence or questioned him about his earlier rejection. He sat white-faced and silent. Repeatedly attacked by representatives of Canadian university faculties who were U.S. citizens, Mathews had to fight to make his case during a long and painful session. So obvious was the contempt shown and so distasteful was the event that a year later during another such meeting in Montreal at which James Steele, Antonio Gualtieri, and Robin Mathews were making a presentation on fairness in hiring - and being treated contemptuously - a Canadian professor from Manitoba took the floor. He was an older academic with white hair. He had been at the Park Plaza meeting, and he demanded that Steele and his colleagues be treated courteously, as - he declared - Mathews had distinctly not been at the Park Plaza Hotel meeting. Surely in the story of the Park Plaza meeting there are elements to be analysed in any serious examination of social movements in Canada in those years. Those elements are ignored in the book and errors of the kind I have reported above are common in it. Just one more will follow. But I have to underscore that the facts presented as history in the book as they relate to the movement outside the CSAA are repeatedly incorrect. They cannot be depended upon at any level. The AUCC (the presidents' organization) is, mostly, a conservative, even reactionary organization and it has untiringly resisted regulation to provide fair treatment for Canadians. It has been successful to a serious extent by never letting up on its pressure upon government. Cormier makes no mention of those facts, though the AUCC figures importantly in his book. The book accepts AUCC actions as the reasonable norm. On February 4, 1969, Geoff Andrew, permanent executive secretary of the AUCC, wrote to Marya Hardman reporting that "the Board authorized the A.U.C.C. secretariat to find some competent persons to undertake a survey of the current state of Canadian studies - in a bilingual context - in our universities and colleges, and I am attempting to put this matter in hand as soon as possible. By Canadian studies, I do not mean just programmes that are called Canadian studies, but rather, Canadian literature in two languages, Canadian history, the Canadian content of such subjects as political science, economics, sociology, etc. - that is to say studies of the Canadian content in university programmes in the humanities and social sciences". (The Struggle for Canadian Universities, pp. 60-61) Andrew says more on the subject in that letter. A man - unlike many in the AUCC - who was genuinely concerned to get action on the problem, Andrew spoke to Mathews some years later, taking some pains to point out the character of the event he described. As he said to Mathews, "I think you should know this." According to Andrew, the AUCC had made a submission to the major national granter of the day (the Canada Council) for money to survey information of the kind he describes above and to survey library, archive, and museum Canadian holdings. The Canada Council refused, saying there was not enough serious demand for such information. "Then", said Andrew, "Mathews and Steele went on the road, and a little more than six months after they set out, the Canada Council contacted us and said 'how much money do you want?'" There was no doubt from the beginning that the AUCC's "competent persons" would be fully funded. The Canadianization Movement:Emergence, Survival, and Success, however, states that in 1969 "the AUCC did not have the resources to support the project and therefore it was eventually shelved". (p. 166) It gives no source for the information. That is not the sense of Geoff Andrew's letter to Marya Hardman nor of his conversation, later, with Robin Mathews. And when Thomas Symons became commissioner of Canadian Studies, he was able to tap funding as if it were water flowing from a fire hydrant. Despite Andrew's genuine concern, however, the AUCC did not act. I believe that as the pressure grew for change, the AUCC was determined to resist it. All of its proposed commissioners were conservative or reactionary. Above all, the AUCC was not going to have Steele or Mathews anywhere near the commission - which I believe was intended to stall, dilute, and destroy the issue as much as possible. The possibility of an intention to obstruct has to be considered in the light of the continuing rejection of ameliorative change by the AUCC. The first choice of the AUCC for a commissioner (in 1969) was political scientist Donald Smiley who had serious reservations about Canada as a nation. He wrote to Mathews that he was considering taking the appointment and would spend the summer touring Canada to ask people such questions as whether they thought nations mattered and whether Canada exists, and so on. That was his response to what Geoff Andrew reported would be the task of a commission. Mathews replied to Smiley and said if he did approach the subject in that way; Mathews would track him across Canada and drive him off every stage he stepped on to. The book describes the exchange as "extremely acrimonious", and it explains that Mathews "continually expressed his lack of confidence in the AUCC or any commission it might establish that did not include himself or James Steele as participants". (p. 166) Quite apart from the fact that both men were fully qualified to be participants, the book describes neither the AUCC's position nor its choices for commissioner, nor does it attempt to explain the AUCC's long delay in forming the Commission on Canadian Studies. It does not quote from Smiley's utterly absurd letter. Nor does it describe the exchange with anything like fairness. In fact, it fails to present information that might suggest Mathews was making a serious case for a responsible commission and commissioner. Geoff Andrew made clear to Marya Hardman that he believed action should be taken soon. It was not even started for nearly four more years. After Donald Smiley disappeared, rumour suggested that Ramsay Cook, historian, who was publicly opposed to Canadianization, was being considered. And in 1972 the mantle fell on the shoulders of Thomas Symons. >From 1972 onwards, then, the Commission on Canadian Studies was added to the growing pressure for legislative and institutional action. The Commission received briefs and selectively investigated the situation. The book almost erases those facts as well as the fact that the whole weight of public concern was - without legislation - forcing changes in advertising of positions, in subjects offered in colleges and universities, and in the use of Canadian materials. The book doesn't include mention of the foundation largely created by Walter Gordon to encourage and to help finance the production of Canadian materials for use in the educational system. The weight of public concern was expressing itself - as is characteristic of social movements - in a number of important ways the book fails even to mention. New publishers were bursting onto the scene to produce books of all kinds. The fact is hugely significant that Oberon Press, one of the new presses, whose owner was connected to the Social Scientists at Carleton fighting against Canadianization, refused to look at the typescript for The Struggle for Canadian Universities. McClelland and Stewart toyed with the typescript with no intention of publishing it (and, later, refused Pauline Jewett's request to have it republished in the Carleton Library series, "for political reasons", she told Mathews). And so it was issued as the first publication of New Press, just formed by Dave Godfrey, Roy MacSkimming, and James Bacque. And it became a national best seller. The proliferation of presses was part of a general vitality. The launching of the Canadianization movement was followed rapidly by the Waffle Movement in the NDP, and a score of other creations: the Writers' Union of Canada, the National Farmers Union, the Confederation of Canadian Unions, the Committee for an Independent Canada, the Canadian Liberation Movement, the Canadian Artists' Registry, the League of Canadian poets, a new Canadian small publishers association, and many, many more. Almost all of them were formed before 1972. All of them were a part of the huge national reassessment - the social movement - in process at the time. Many of them openly supported the Canadianization movement as it related to education. In 1972 Carleton University's English Department hired twelve new teachers, nine of them Canadians. The Dean of Arts approached Mathews and asked if that was not a good thing. Mathews replied that it should be the normal practice. The Dean said that Mathews had to admit it was a victory. Mathews agreed, and he asked the Dean if, three or four years before, nine out of twelve people hired could have been Canadian. The Dean's reply is enormously important to anyone studying the resistance to Canadianization. The Dean replied that it would have been impossible three or four years earlier to hire that proportion of Canadians, however excellent they were, because general consciousness and the psychological mindset of academics would simply not accept that proportion of Canadians in a group being hired. In that regard the book's failure to depict the real situation is almost perverse. Notice, The changes I cite just above were taking place before federal legislation on hiring and as the Commission on Canadian Studies were beginning its work, and, in addition, before the CSAA took the Canadianization matter seriously in hand. The public was putting increasing pressure on universities and colleges to take account of Canada, and those institutions were doing so, however reluctantly. That is both history and a comment upon a Canadian social movement - both erased by the book. The work of the CSAA and especially the federal legislation were both vitally important to entrenched change. But to suggest - as I'm afraid Cormier's book does - that significant change was not taking place and would not have taken place without the intervention of CSAA in the movement is simply unhistorical and untrue of the social movement in progress. How did the mantle of AUCC commissioner fall on the shoulders of Thomas Symons? What was his role as actor for the AUCC? It is at this point humour enters the conflict, for the eccentric Commissioner of Canadian Studies was a figure of genteel ambiguity, to say the least. Thomas Henry Bull Symons (of good Ontario family, as we say) was educated largely at Oxford where he received a lower degree. In love with the dreaming spires of that place, he became founding president of Trent University which he helped to establish. Called humorously in its early days Oxford on the Otonabee, Trent, in Symons hands, ached to mirror Oxford University of England, with gowned students and such paraphernalia. Symons was president of Trent for a decade and a full member of the AUCC. He quarrelled, however, with Trent and resigned his position, thinking, some report, that his resignation would not be accepted. It was. Academically very lightly qualified with almost no publication in his field, he was left grasping at straws. The one he took hold of was the position of Commissioner for Canadian Studies. At a time of perceived emergency the AUCC had taken nearly four years in search of someone sympathetic to its ideology. Symons was a club member; he was dependable; he was appointed. Nowhere in the book is the appointment of Symons questioned. Was he the best person available? Or was he a patsy who would do exactly what the AUCC as a reactionary organization wanted done? If Canadianization was a social movement, and if a major commission - supported generously with public funds - was created as a part of that movement, shouldn't a sociological study inquire into the appointment and the appointee? A political Conservative, Symons made up a team of researchers which contained other Conservatives. At least a few of them worked their ways into the federal government (one even became a Conservative MP), and they helped, as time passed, to make Symons' life more comfortable, as well as helping establish a Canadian Studies presence in the (now) Department of Heritage. Symons' distaste for Steele and Mathews (who were not Conservatives) was disguised under an aura of inquiring charm and concern. Upon the publication of the Commission's Report, To Know Ourselves (1975), however, it was found to have somehow failed to include, in its extensive list of related materials, Steele's and Mathews' much used book, The Struggle for Canadian Universities, foundational source book on Canadianization in which the intention to form the Commission was probably first publicly announced. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success reports that the mandate of the Commission on Canadian Studies "acknowledged …the concern over the issue of personnel in its promise to look into whether there was a sufficient number of qualified professors to teach and research Canadian subjects" (pp. 165-66). In its section on the work of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, moreover, the book makes clear that as late as 1981 one of the CSAA's primary concerns was to assure fair hiring practices on behalf of Canadians. Mathews met Symons early after his appointment and pointed out the importance of an early report by the Commission on discrimination in hiring practices. Symons agreed that it was probably the most pressing issue. But he refused to have anything to do with the subject. He was aware that as the two were speaking, excellent young Canadians were being discriminated against in hiring for positions in Canada. Symons did nothing of substance on the issue. He only touched upon unfair hiring practices until 1984 when he published a follow-up report with James Page. The issue of Canadianization was of wide general concern. As a result Symons dragged his feet, returned (more than once) to the granting trough, and controlled large sums of money. Seven years after the AUCC reported a Commission of inquiry would be set up, and more than three years after his appointment, Symons produced the first part of what, apparently, was to be a kind of on-going report. Symons of course was responsible for the French translation of To Know Ourselves. Completed to Symons' satisfaction, it was sent for preliminary reading - before being publicly distributed - to several francophone academics. They were so appalled at the incompetence of the translation all the French copies were quietly shredded, and an announcement was made that the French translation would be slightly delayed. Symons persisted in building a fiefdom, which, incidentally, had the positive effect of helping to keep the Canadianization issue alive - though in a way that would give minimum offense to the AUCC. Some years into Symons' apparently never-ending appointment, Douglas Fisher, former MP, writing a regular column for one of the major Toronto daily newspapers, took up the subject of Thomas Symons. He devoted two substantial columns to Symons. Fisher obviously saw the funny side of the Commissioner for Canadian Studies. To give some idea of Symons' own self-evaluation, Fisher pointed out that Symons had one of the longest entries in the Canadian Who's Who. Symons' entry was considerably longer, for instance, than the entry for Pierre Elliott Trudeau, prime minister. Fisher also recorded that Symons was the recipient of a number of federal contracts of a particular kind. Contracts not exceeding $25,000.00 could be reported as expenditures by a Department without the contract holder's name being made public. That was the kind of contract that Symons - quite frequently apparently - received. Fisher's columns were read and enjoyed by a number of insiders. But no question was raised as to the propriety of the Commissioner for Canadian Studies accepting such contracts, especially not by the AUCC to whom he was responsible. Plainly, the whole role, character, and purpose of the Commission for Canadian Studies was mildly unconventional and of complex importance to the Canadianization movement. The book accepts the Commission without any critical insight or any serious attempt to weigh its political or sociological position or to assess its impact upon the Canadianization movement. In keeping with the thesis that "in North America, at least, social movement activity is becoming increasingly institutionalized" (p. 192) and the belief that Social Science experts are fittingly at the helm of such a development, the book reports that the work of the CSAA for the Commission on Canadian Studies "demonstrates the depth of the relationship that existed between the AUCC and the CSAA". (p.166) It follows naturally, then, that the book would depict the work of the Steele/Mathews team and their very serious associates as dismaying, especially since Mathews forcefully questioned the actions of both the AUCC and the Symons Commission. The reason neither Steele nor Mathews was invited to do any part of the Commission's work is not hard to discover. It is a sign in the book, however, of their implied illegitimacy. The skewing - almost out of recognition - of the Canadianization movement in the book can only be seen as the result of design forced upon facts and events. The design, as I read it from the structure of the book, serves to invalidate the action undertaken from a humane and moral base, to undermine it constantly in a way that reveals misreporting, incorrect information, and half-truth. It does that in a bath of U.S. Social Science "authority", vacuous at base and inappropriately applied to the Canadian situation. The method results in three effects. The first is to remove a moral base for judgement and replace it with survey/statistical/model theories that legitimate social power - whatever its nature. The book's uncritical acceptance of the CAUT, the AUCC, and the Commission on Canadian Studies is ample evidence of that effect. The second effect of the book's bath in (largely) U.S. Social Science "authority" is to give an impression of raising the examination from the level of political philosophy and cultural analysis to Science, to Science that, of course, does not admit of disagreement. Science is value-free. Science gives scientific answers. Who can argue with its findings? The demands of Science - to trace the third effect - require expert handling of material. Expert handling of material can only mean the training and use of Social Scientists. That means there is a value-laden choice to be made. Should non-Social Science actors working from an admittedly moral and philosophical position be responsible for change or should Social Science experts be responsible, people heavily laden with ideological presuppositions but offering themselves as value-free, scientific servants of Truth? The answer is clear in the book, so clear that Steele and Mathews are proposed as interesting failures happily saved from themselves by an expert organization, The Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. That Steele and Mathews may be said to have succeeded because they maintained their work and focus for at least ten years until the issue became nationally important and brought about institutional and legislative changes is not an idea Cormier's book wishes to entertain. And so the second half of the book reveals how a Social Science institution, CSAA, was able to take hold of Canadianization and help further its purposes in happy relation with power instititutions. That phase of Canadianization support by CSAA is now over. The book, perhaps, exaggerates its effect. In the late 1970s Lloyd Axworthy, minister of employment and immigration, had written to Mathews commending him for his work, had taken the initial steps in legislation to Canadianize, and had joined a young group of politicians demanding attention to Canada. Steele and Mathews and their associates earlier met Employment and Immigration ministers - before Axworthy became minister - and worked with civil servants inside the Department to formulate policies that might be adopted if convincingly offered to the Minister. Overall, such work was rebuffed, until Axworthy. The personal connection of a member of CSAA, John Hofley, with Axworthy, and the excellent work of other members of CSAA on the issue must not be in any way discounted. The book's work to place those matters on the record is of real importance. But a large view of the historical situation has to record that a movement was really on foot in Canada and a post-Centennial generation of politicians had begun to gain influence in Ottawa. They managed, slowly, to turn Pierre Trudeau from a destructive internationalist position which allowed heavy foreign takeover to the post-1980's position that created the National Energy Program and talk of much more. Unfortunately, the book attempts to study a slowly-moving iceberg - nine-tenths of it underwater - from a distance with a hand-held magnifying glass, a magnifying glass, incidentally, supplied by an interested corporation seeking answers it has already formulated. Steele and Mathews did not, alone, or with their many associates, work the magic that brought about federal legislation on Canadianization and a significantly changed attitude in the country, nor did they ever claim to do so. Their tenacity may have assisted others - even the CSAA and federal politicians - to see the need for action and to work for change. Steele and Mathews didn't, as the book wants to insist, however, become isolated, rejected, objects of self-inflicted failure. Such a claim can only be made by a work with a very definite mission to accomplish. But in their own eyes, they didn't succeed in the task they set out, with others, to accomplish. The ugly, colonized nature of Canada's Social Sciences still exists, as amply exemplified by the methodology and organization and thesis of The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success. In addition, not nearly enough Canadian material is used at every level of Canadian education, from K to the Ph.d. And so the statement in the book that by "the late 1980s the movement had succeeded" is false. As I write, Canadian hiring practices are being shredded. Canadian Studies centres in universities are being starved or destroyed. And the construction of methodologies to examine and record Canadian peculiarities are being neglected. Teacher training schools across the country, for instance, are still slavishly tied to U.S. texts and U.S. methodologies. University presidents work relentlessly to be able to hire glitter from outside Canada, willing to sacrifice excellent Canadian scholars. One might well ask where a Steele and Mathews might be found for the needs of the present hour. Where indeed, too, are the noble activists of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association now? The answer is the same as it was before December, 1968: they seem not to be anywhere, but they will be accepted quickly as the most natural manifestation in the world when they step into the public arena and begin to take their place.