Canadian State Trials. Volume 3, Political Trials and Security Measures, 1840–1914 (review)

The Canadian State Trials project began when Murray Greenwood, a fine legal historian, envisioned a comprehensive series of historical studies of Canada’s ‘state trials,’ political prosecutions, and state-security laws and policies in British North America and Canada. The series has been a joint venture of the Osgoode Society for Legal History and the University of Toronto Press. The first volume of essays, published in 1996, edited by Greenwood and Barry Wright, covered state trials from 1608 to 1837. The second volume (2002), with the same editors, dealt exclusively with the Canadian rebellions of 1837–8 and their aftermath. Wright returns as editor for the third volume, joined by Susan Binnie, former research coordinator of the Law Society of Upper Canada Archives. The results are worth a look for scholars in a number of fields.

Volume 3 is a comprehensive collection of studies covering the period 1840 to 1914, a dozen research articles contributed by sixteen scholars in the fields of law and history. All regions of the country are represented except British Columbia. In addition, two archivists have contributed useful overviews of primary sources, one on the John A. Macdonald papers, another on materials relating to the treason trial of Louis Riel. An extra feature is an appendix of supporting documents that relate to the various articles. The editors provide a solid overview of important themes and developments in the literature, notably the emergence of the liberal state, with its reliance on ‘more refined security measures and means of enforcement’ (7). The case studies represented here reflect a broader understanding of state security and extend to political policing, legal responses to First Nations challenges to the Canadian legal, and collective disorder that threatened the economic order. For the most part, the contributions are interdisciplinary in approach and focus. For pure legal history enthusiasts there is the final article by Wright and Desmond Brown on the significant political and public order provisions of the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892.

Contributions on the legal/security reaction to the Fenians in the 1860s by Brown and Wilson establish the importance of internal security threats, with external connections, to the early Confederation state. The Canadian authorities, although they had suspended habeas corpus, adopted a moderate approach to prosecuting Fenian raiders captured in 1866. The next section of the anthology examines legal responses to collective disorder that challenged the economic and social order: Tenant League resistance on Prince Edward Island, social violence in urban Quebec, illegal drinking, possession of firearms and potential violence along the construction route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and street railway strikes between 1886 and 1914. Fyson’s article on public order in Quebec notes a correlation between the decline in riot prosecutions and the expansion of policing and summary justice.

A section on legal responses to the 1869–70 Red River resistance and the North-West rebellion of 1885 includes Knafla’s essay on the murder trial of Ambroise Lépine, who presided over the provisional government court martial that sentenced Thomas Scott to death in 1870, and Beale and Wright’s study of the federal government’s response to the 1885 uprising (the latter characterized as both harsh and careless). Bumsted’s critical examination of the Riel high treason trial blames the inept defence as much or more than the Crown’s prosecution for producing a miscarriage of justice. Waiser’s examination of the prosecution of Plains Cree and other First Nations people uncovers a sinister strategy by federal officials to break Aboriginal resistance by simplistically but effectively linking the isolated acts of 1885 to a wider conspiracy by ‘disloyal’ Indians and Metis. The volume concludes with an examination by Kealey and Parnaby, with Niergarth, of early political policing on the federal level, and its ties to Canada’s place within the British Empire.

One important theme in the collection is that in the past the full might...