Ontario: Image, Identity, and Power (review)

This book is part of a series intended by its publisher to draw on 'recent social history' to present an account of Canada through its 'major regions.' Doing this for Ontario poses many challenges, which Peter Baskerville has accepted at their fullest. His Ontario includes Native peoples from their first arrival to the present; fauna and flora as well as the people; the powerful and 'those who resisted'; women and men; and north and south. Six of the ten chapters, making up half the book's length, are devoted to the period before 1871.

Selected from a wide and imaginative range of sources, the approximately 170 illustrations (which do not, however, include tables, graphs, or modern maps) are one of the book's strengths. At least one-quarter pertain to Native themes, and an even higher proportion relate to women. In his preface, Baskerville argues that each illustration was 'a product of its time ... [and] we must ask, Who created it? In whose interest?' Although he sometimes supplies information that would allow the reader to answer these questions, many captions provide information not about the image, but about something else altogether. For example, a description of the Calvin timber enterprises at Garden Island, at the head of the St Lawrence, accompanies an image of a timber raft in a very different setting, on the Ottawa River. Despite the importance of this material, much of it is not included in the index, and sources are not given for many of the quotations in the captions.

Many relevant themes, including those at the core of social history, such as class, family, and gender, are not especially regional. Even so, Baskerville makes a determined effort to incorporate detailed findings, frequently of micro-studies set in other contexts, directly into his account; and he cites an impressive array of recent literature relevant to the province's social and political history. Given tight space limitations, this organization contributes to an elliptical form of argument and abrupt shifts of focus and perspective. At its best, it provides stimulating juxtapositions and succinct, opinionated comment on issues.

At other times, arguments seem arbitrary (or perhaps incomplete) or inconsistent; and it does not help the book's authority that there are also many errors. The latter begin at the beginning, with the wrong date for the striking illustration chosen for the cover, Robert Whale's The Canada Southern Railway at Niagara. (The date given, 1870, is inconsistent with the corporate history of railways in the Niagara Peninsula; in fact, as the National Gallery Web site confirms, the painting is from 1875.) In a short review, the extent and variety of problems can only be suggested. To say, for example, that 'rural householders believed that credit ... was simply morally wrong' crudely oversimplifies a complex issue. It is inconsistent to argue that by 1900 'an advanced industrial economy' existed in Ontario, then to title the next chapter 'The Making of Industrial Ontario, 1905-23.' The book provides two very different characterizations of the 1919 United Farmers of Ontario election victory on a single page, two different years for the same land purchase from the Mississauga, and two flatly contradictory views of the extent of land clearing by 1832. It is incorrect to say that 'in 1861 sawmilling and blacksmithing were Ontario's two largest employment sectors' and that 'by 1911, the majority of Ontario's population lived in cities.' Other errors include relocating Thessalon to Lake Ontario, by giving the wrong title to a painting by John Elliott Woolford, then discussing the wrong geography in the caption; quoting Timothy Eaton, who had been dead for five years, on a 1912 strike; calling the ufo the United Farmers Organization; including in the index two railways that never existed, the 'Ontario Northern' and the 'Simcoe and Lake Huron'; and dating David Peterson's majority election victory to 1985. Finally, something...