Patrice Dutil

The ironies of history bite, and sometimes they puncture hard. Thomas White was a Liberal who had faithfully supported Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his policies, but in 1911 the prime minister went a bit too far for this Toronto banker, when he signed a free trade agreement with the United States (more accurately, a reciprocity agreement to lower…

It is not that we do not have such a history. It is ­simply that we have chosen not to remember it.— J. L. Granatstein As the Cold War ended, with liberal democracy seeming to prevail, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously argued that “the end of history” had arrived. A few years…

Raoul and Joséphine Dandurand were among the glamour couples of Edwardian Canada. He was a dashing senator for the division of De Lorimier, and she was a leading feminist and femme de lettres. He was Wilfrid Laurier’s Quebec homme de confiance, with contacts across the country, especially in business circles. She was belle époque brains and elegance personified — a perfect candidate to represent Canada at the Exposition universelle of…

When I finished my PhD, I had absolutely no prospects of finding employment in academia, because everything I was turned out to be an obstacle: a French Canadian male specializing in Canadian political history — at the very bottom on anyone’s hiring list. So when I was offered a decent job in government, I seized it. I joined the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs as a policy adviser not long after the Meech Lake…

My last year of high school was spent at L’Amoreaux Collegiate, in northern Scarborough. The middle-class Toronto suburb was heavily Jamaican (both Black and Chinese), but it also included kids from Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, and all over Europe. More than half of the L’Amoreaux student body had just immigrated or had immigrant…

They bamboozle us still. Marshall McLuhan started to write to Pierre Trudeau in April 1968, at the height of Trudeaumania. It was a unique period in electoral history: the new prime minister had become a hip sorcerer whose ability to seductively use the media seemed limitless. McLuhan was fascinated to see, right before his very…

It was incontestably part of the Liberal platform in 2015. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau solemnly pledged to change the electoral system so that the next election, presumably in 2019, would be decided by a new way to count votes. The Special Committee on Electoral Reform was created in the spring of 2016, and it delivered its report in…

Three years ago a new hospital opened in Brampton, northwest of Toronto. Long awaited in this rapidly growing city, the Brampton Civic Hospital had barely begun operations before it was mired in controversy. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in hospitals, two of its patients died. But it was not providence, or bad luck, or professional incompetence that in this case was…

Early this spring, the City of Toronto’s Public Health Department released a report that estimated that about 450,000 Torontonians become sick each year as a result of ingesting tainted food. The causes for the illnesses were found to be as numerous as they were avoidable: most were caused by sick and often unsanitary food handlers. The news item was not…