March 7th 2025,

Back to our regularly scheduled program. Sorry it took so long to get this out, the semester was a nightmare.

Canadian history continues after the online lectures as my professor as sick (March 3rd). Those lectures were about conscription and diplomacy in the 1930s. SO I will actually give a very brief overview of what was said. Do not get your hopes up, I think I talked more in depth about Mackenzie King’s affection for Hitler in my paper than my professor did in any of the lectures he gave.

So Canada went the appeasement route at first and was isolationist, having been traumatized from WWI. Canada blamed Europe for the war and was pissed they paid such a big price for a war that wasn’t theirs. While King was a monarchist, which is weird considering Liberals were more pro-US historically, but he decided to pull away from London to appeal to the French-Canadians. The only conflicts he’d get involved with are the big ones. During these lectures my professor gets a bit… he likes to narrate like it’s a story if that makes sense. So when he got. To this next section he says “in the early 1930s liberal capitalism was under attack” and massive unemployment brought Hitler to power. The invasion of Manchuria was mentioned as it was the first threat to collective security and showed the League of Nations would do nothing. The Canadian representative to the LoN acknowledged China as the victim BUT said Japan had “legitimate” interest in the region and even questioned China’s legitimacy in the league. He was not supposed to praise Japan but did anyway, the Canadian government did not clarify their position due to the Japanese consulate in Ottawa expressing gratitude, which is fucked.

When Abyssinia was invaded the permanent representative to the LoN (different guy) wanted a full embargo on Italy, King was pissed about this because Quebec really liked Fascist Italy due to the trains running on time and the fact that the fascists were chill with the Pope. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was mentioned but nothing about King’s stance on it. When I was writing my paper, in the book Canada in the world there are many entries from King’s diaries where he expresses explicit support in Hitler and sees him as a positive force in Europe. He actually wanted Germany to invade Russia to restore order, it was really bad. It was less appeasement and more encouragement, but that is not mentioned in the lecture. The rest of the lecture was about King struggling to implement conscription.

So the March 7th lecture was not as interesting. The Cold War follows and this era was considered a diplomatic revolution. Canada aligns with the US and the UK was unable to pay back its debt. Then he talked about this weird system called “land lease” and how money would just circulate. We all know what the Marshall Plan is where 12 billion dollars was used to rebuild Western Europe. He did not mention how this was also a PR scheme by the US to establish dominance in the region. Then there was the oil boom in Alberta, 1948. US flooded into the market and Alberta shifts its economy from agriculture to oil (I wonder what could’ve been if Alberta never had oil, would it have still turned politically fucked? Or would it be slightly more progressive?). Because of this the Canadian government becomes concerned over foreign investment and create the Gordon Commission. This was looking at US branch plants and how although workers were Canadian, the managers were American. There were also balance payment problems and how 80% of investment in Canada came from the US, meaning they were just going from one empire (British) to another. I guess we were just being passed around, which is a funny image but makes me sad. I hate our dependence on America and our politicians from the past noticed this too but did NOTHING. Because that would mean probably pivoting to the USSR and we can’t have that!

Anyway Laurent replaces King as leader. He actually wins the largest majority government (at the time) and was called “Uncle Louis.” He wanted to centralize the federal system, he proposed a national health program and a social safety net which would give cheques to those 70 years and older. Newfoundland would become part of Canada under Laurent and this was not an easy feat due to Quebec wanting Labrador, which if you have never seen a map of Canada Labrador is very large. Quebec was able to be wooed on this so it doesn’t matter I guess. Newfoundland joined because it was bankrupt and Britain wanted Canada to have it, they were worried because the US was showing interest which is never a good thing.

Okay no let’s move on to French Revolution class! So this one was all about the moderate phase of the revolution which begins with the Tennis Court Oath. The second stage was the forming of the Bastille, where the governor and his sone were beheaded. Third stage was when the revolution spreads to the countryside, resulting in the Great Fear where peasants attack feudal privilege, there was also a “plot mentality” that spurred this as the peasants thought that the nobles and king would starve them, they also feared MArie-Antoinette’s brother invading. The last stage was the women’s march on Versailles, this is when working women, who were also incredibly drunk, made their way to Versailles to demand bread and the relocation of the royal family. Lafayette was there to mediate and brokers an agreement for the family’s relocation to Paris.

So what are the accomplishments? Well, first of all, the old regime was dismantled, this was done by abolishing feudalism and social privilege (august 4, 1789), and by nationalizing the Catholic Church. They also constructed the new regime with the declaration of the rights of man and citizen. This declaration was put forth first to guide the creation of the constitution (this was debated during the tennis court oath). The DRMC guaranteed the”natural, inalienable and sacred” rights of man, social distinctions based on utility, freedom of religion and expression, and sovereignty residing in the nation rather than the monarch. The DRMC was naive in that it thought that a rights-based political system would solve all their problems and article 6 left a crucial issue undecided: does the constitution create direct or a representative democracy? Universal rights applied to all mankind, not just the French; slaves would soon claim to be included.

Since March 7th is a Friday that means there was no Political Science class, but I did have my work placement. I am a bit worried about how much info I can give but what we did do was have a meeting where we learned about naming things, specifically when special places are named. Because I am Canadian and working in a Canadian place, all the names that are dealt with have to deal with settler given names and the original indigenous ones. The main issue we talked about was renaming things, as old names were incredibly offensive. Like one place was actually called the N-word, it was that bad. There are also other places that are named after terrible people, like one used to be names after the Vichy France guy, this was before be became a Nazi. There is a mountain that is being considered for a name change. Its current name is not offensive but it is not Indigenous, so the proposed new name is to revert back to what it was originally called.

The mountain is named after a WWI ship, and it was named that because there as at least one Canadian on the boat. It was the first to get destroyed in a battle and the government wanted to commemorate it for that singular soldier. The other students and I were tasked with debating whether we should give the mountain its original name back. The guy that was lecturing us about name changes also warned us that the process is incredibly controversial and usually brings out anger in people, such as veterans groups. He told us about an incident with a war museum where a veterans group protested the museum because it portrayed Canadian soldiers as less than stellar. I said if you don’t want to be seen as a war criminal then don’t commit war crimes.

Anyway, we all agreed that the Indigenous name should be what it’s called, but our intensities were different. Everyone made good points but I was a bit aggressive in that I explicitly stated that we should not bend the knee to racists, because whether people try to dress up their concern as anything else, if you dig deep enough you’ll find that the main motivating force for opposing the name change is anti-Indigenous racism. The Indigenous people have had to suffer so much at the hands of the government, the LEAST you could do is respect the original names given by the people you destroyed. I have never really spoken that harshly before but I got fairly comfortable here and wanted to make my stance crystal clear. Anyway that was the gist of the meeting and when it was over I headed home.