Blacklock's Reporter

Parliament ran its own tavern for 49 years. Sober and sadder are today’s holidays on Parliament Hill. Old-timers recalled the tavern fondly. Here the Fathers of Confederation took a bracer or entertained visitors. It was a “very natural” place, John A. Macdonald enthused.

The bar “accounted for the fine, free flow of language in the press and the House,” one senator wrote in his memoirs. “When the cold hand of prohibition closed the bar, something went out of the House.”

Another Parliamentarian recalled, “It was quite an ordinary thing for at least 50 percent of the members to be more or less under the influence of liquor when the House adjourned around midnight.”

Specialties of the House are today lost to history. Sessional Papers are silent on the question of what parliamentarians drank, though the tavern was so convivial reformers twice tried to shut it down, in 1874 and 1881.

Modern mythology depicts 19^th century drinking as crude and violent. This is untrue. An 1844 creditors’ notice for a bankrupt Toronto grocer details all the ingredients of a first-rate holiday party: claret, Madeira, brandy and Muscovado sugar with ginger root, cloves and nutmeg.

One 1824 diarist wrote that Canadians seemed “very partial to Jamaica spirits, brandy, shrub and peppermint.” Shrub was a cocktail of berries boiled in vinegar and sugar. “Peppermint” was a mix of peppermint oil, whiskey and burnt sugar. The Ontario Historical Society detailed such early recipes in a 1989 booklet Consuming Passions: Eating and Drinking Traditions in Ontario.

What did the Fathers of Confederation drink? Not water, surely. Ottawa suffered periodic epidemics of cholera. An 1832 outbreak killed 1,421 people. And the city suffered occasional plagues of typhoid as late as 1912. To drink unboiled municipal water was to risk sickness or death.

Nor were pioneers partial to beer. The 1852 census showed Upper Canada had nearly twice as many distilleries as breweries. An 1859 visitor reported that ale was “rather a novel thing” in Canada compared to England.

The House tavern would have featured “fancy sugars, bitters, limes, lemons – quality citrus,” says historian Dr. Julia Roberts of the University of Waterloo. “I think they would have had a staggering array of incredibly good liquor: port, champagne, whiskey, rum. Rum was very, very popular.”

Dr. Roberts in her 2009 account In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada calculated early Canadians downed nearly five ounces of liquor a day, more than eight times today’s rate of consumption. “They didn’t drink for relaxation,” she said.

“These were hard-labouring people who needed calories,” said Roberts. She calculated in the 1840s Upper Canada had nearly 1,500 taverns, the equivalent of one roadhouse for every 300 settlers.

Rum was so popular the Royal Canadian Navy maintained the tradition of serving sailors a noon-time tot until 1972. “Today only in very rare and exceptional circumstances,” a Navy spokesperson said as late as 2012, “commanding officers in the Royal Canadian Navy can still permit a celebratory issue of spirits to sailors of legal age.”

The House tavern did a roaring trade until it burned in 1916. Its location today is unmarked.

By Tom Korski

Catastrophes inspire art. Many an 18th century painter documented the Great Fire of London and eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Artists similarly tried to chronicle Canada’s one true catastrophe as described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The results have been jarring. Arts of Engagement spreads the canvas.

From 1867 some 150,000 Indigenous children were forced through the Indian Residential School system. The Commission appointed to examine the historical record was the product of a class action lawsuit, designed by liability lawyers. The outcome satisfied almost no one.

“Truth-telling was not to include the naming of individuals and institutions associated with wrongdoing ‘unless such findings or information has already been established through legal proceedings,’” writes Professor David Garneau of the University of Regina. “Truths were to be accounts of subjective experience, feelings and perceptions rather than the relating of facts.”

The result: Victims of child abuse were angered by public indifference, churches were baffled they as a group were classed as sadists and the public was resentful all Canadians were to be shamed for historical crimes sanctioned by officialdom. When the Commission declined to name names, when everyone is to blame, nobody is to blame.

Professor Garneau writes that the confines of Commission hearings discouraged the most telling testimony: “Rage, the refusal to forgive, the naming of names, the details of intergenerational effects, the use of Indigenous people in these schools to oppress their own, the deformation of masculinity there, discussion of what happened to the payout money and how it distorts individuals, families and communities, the Metis who were also subjects of these places, and so on.”

Yet the Commission’s work was poignant enough to provoke artistic expression. This is the core of Arts of Engagement. It is plaintive and absorbing.

Co-editor Dylan Robinson, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University, recounts one startling incident. At a 2012 hearing in Victoria where commissioners heard hours of tearful testimony on incidents of pedophilia and child cruelty, a local choir wrapped up the session with a song, Susan Aglukark’s O Siem. “I sat listening in disbelief,” Robinson writes.

“Fifty singers repeated the chorus, ‘O Siem, we are all family; O Siem, we’re all the same,’” Robinson recalls. It was supposed to make people feel better.

“To sing this song after three days where a history of inhumanity was overwhelmingly present felt both inappropriate and offensive,” says Robinson. “The irony in this song is, of course, that the history of abuse and cultural oppression in Residential Schools is anything but ‘the same’ as the education received by settler Canadians, nor are the present realities of Aboriginal communities and the settler Canadian public ‘the same.’”

Arts of Engagement cites another awkward incident at the National Gallery of Canada in 2011, where a visiting U.S. anthropologist delivered an oration on the meaning of the Residential School experience as expressed in art. The lecturer was white, his audience was Indigenous. “The crowd was sensitive to his lack of sensitivity,” Arts of Engagement notes. “The talk peaked with a comparison of the effects of Indian Residential Schools to flesh-eating disease compete with photographs. It was offensive, particularly to the survivors present. Oblivious and confused, the man was ushered from the building.”

Interestingly, the failed lecturer inspired an oil painting Aboriginal Curatorial Collective Meeting. It depicts a series of colourful panels with empty speech bubbles. It fits.

By Holly Doan

Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson & Keavy Martin; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 382 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-21699; $29.99