With Letters of Commission

In exploring a subject that may not have an immediate hook or a wide audience, the authors of The Rowell-Sirois Commission and the Remaking of Canadian Federalism were astute enough to start with an obvious question. “Why,” Robert Wardhaugh and Barry Ferguson ask, “write a book on a Canadian royal commission established in the 1930s?”

It’s not as though Newton Rowell and Joseph Sirois, the two men for whom the commission is named, are leading figures in Canadian history. Nor do the words “royal commission” typically cause a passionate stir among even the most politically or historically minded audiences. But in a country that does not tend to celebrate or nurture the chronicling of its past, the arrival of a well-written book examining a key period is an important contribution (and a welcome addition to UBC Press’s C. D. Howe Series in Canadian Political History, which is edited by the eminent scholars John English and Robert Bothwell).

Indeed...