Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670 – 1940 (review)

Wherein lies the uniqueness, the significance of the experience of Canada’s prairie west? Louis Knafla is persuaded that the key to this slippery subject lies in the frontier thesis as expounded by American Turnerian disciple Walter Prescott Webb. The ‘geodemographic circumstances’ of the Great Plains led to reshaping of laws to suit the region, and to ‘individualism, . . . more democratic political institutions and women’s suffrage’ in Canada as well as in the United States. Knafla thus embraces a thesis that most historians of the Canadian west have viewed with skepticism since the 1930s, and arguably takes a position that goes beyond what his contributors are willing to say. Knafla is at his best in his interesting discussion of the encounter of positive (written, enacted) law and customary law in early modern Britain. Unhappily, his paper is marred by several errors, as well as questionable and unsupported judgments about prairie history.

Three essays, by Hamar Foster, Russell C. Smandych, and Paul C. Nigol, address the period of Hudson’s Bay Company influence, 1670–1870, what Knafla describes as ‘a battleground between the forces of English and Native legal cultures and private and public law.’ Unable systematically to enforce British law either at its posts or among the Aboriginal population, the hbc had to accommodate local customs (held to be a form of unwritten common law) with respect to trade, gender relations, and other matters. Foster especially (but Smandych and Nigol as well) subtly understands the ways that Europeans continued to view law, customs, and morality through a British lens, and how that view gradually gained greater influence and acceptance in the region, especially in the period after 1870. This experience also continued to shape the approach to law after 1870.

Less satisfactory is Sidney Haring’s contribution, essentially a reprint with a few added details of the eleventh chapter of his 1998 White Man’s Law. This is black-and-white history with the federal government as villain and Aboriginals as victims; regrettably the errors and misjudgments of the original remain unchanged.

Greg Marquis instructively examines comparatively the structures of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the North-West Mounted Police from the 1870s to the First World War. He explains their respective adaptations to circumstances and environment, and why the ric folded around the time that the Mounties were embraced by their region and gained a new lease on life. Sociologists Zhiqui Lin and Augustine Brannigan provide extremely useful statistical analysis of how provincial police forces in Saskatchewan and Alberta in the period from the end of the war to the beginning of the Depression dealt with crime, demonstrating conclusively how police priorities shifted when provincial governments were in charge. Unfortunately the authors base their work almost entirely on printed police reports and seem unacquainted with the large scholarly literature on labour, policing, and ethnicity in this period.

Tristan Goodman provides a solid overview of how British, Australian, American, and local experience were drawn upon to produce water laws adapted to the Canadian prairies. Janice Erion lucidly explains the development of the Calgary Power monopoly, and why the Alberta Public Utilities Board was ineffective in regulating it in the period to 1930. John McLaren provides a good explanation of why, despite similar laws, responses to the educational needs and nude protests of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors differed significantly in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, 1929–32. The attempt by Roderick G. Martin to elucidate the approach of the Supreme Court of the North-West Territories to the common law is spoiled by poor and confusing presentation of cases, conclusions that sometimes do not arise from the evidence presented, and at least twice seeming to mean the opposite of what he actually says.

This book is the product of a conference on prairie legal history held at the University of Calgary in 1997. Two previous volumes (Law and Justice in a New Land, 1986; Law...