Report of the President
Of the Canadian Historical Association

May 2009

The presidency of the Canadian Historical Association is an honour, but also a weighty responsibility. It demands serious work internally to sustain a vibrant intellectual community among historians in Canada, but also externally to represent our profession to kindred academic and heritage organizations and to public institutions whose policies have a significant impact on our professional lives, state funding agencies, archives, parliamentary inquiries, and much more. Over the past year our association has taken great strides on both fronts.

It must be said at the outset that the president's main task is to marshal a substantial army of volunteers who put in long hours to keep our many programs and projects running effectively. That widespread commitment is what keeps us going, but also what makes the presidency such a rewarding office to fill, I am inspired by all that energy and creativity among so many of our members.

As I argued a year ago, it also became clear to me that as a substantial, multi-faceted professional association, we need to sustain all that volunteer commitment with more effective administration at the centre. So, in CHA lore, 2008-9 will probably be remembered as The Great Leap of Faith. We have shaken up our administrative regime and convinced our membership to reach deeper into their pockets to support a more effective association. I still believe that those initiatives were necessary and appropriate and am happy to report that they have proven successful. In the meantime, we have faced our usual challenges to support various networking, publishing, and advocacy projects.


1. ADMINISTRATION

Last June the Council and the membership in the AGM voted unanimously to raise membership fees, in a new geared-to-income formula, to generate at least an additional $30,000 and to use that extra revenue to reconfigure our staff structure and to move into larger office space. We are now almost a year into that transformation.

1.1. Office

At its June meeting the Council agreed that the offer extended to the CHA to move into the offices of the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) at 130 Albert St, Suite 501 (also shared by the Association of Canadian Archivists) should be accepted. Later that month we reached an agreement with the CCA to take over a small suite of newly renovated offices within their office complex, and on 3 September moved out of the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC) building and into our new, more spacious quarters. The additional space has been much more appropriate for our staff and for the occasional meetings that we need to hold there.


1.2 Staff

At its June meeting, the Council also agreed that the office staff should be restructured to include a full-time executive person and a part-time administrative assistant, alongside our part-time assistant treasurer (Marielle Campeau). We therefore informed Joanne Mineault, our full-time Administrative Assistant, that, effective 1 April 2009, her position would cease to exist in our office. She immediately declined to apply for either of the new positions. In August she informed us that she had obtained a new job, and would be leaving on 4 September (the day after our move). Our new offices therefore opened with no full-time staff. Marielle stepped into the breach and spent a great deal of time helping to keep our administration functioning, with help from our English-language secretary Alexandra Mosquin.

The Executive then got the Council's approval to proceed immediately with filling the new full-time position of Executive Coordinator, rather than waiting until the late winter as originally planned. Our advertisement drew ninety-nine applications, and, after interviewing five applicants, we decided to offer the position to Michel Duquet. Michel impressed the hiring committee with the range of his experience and the energy and imagination he displayed during the interview. He has had an interesting career. After many years of long-haul truck-driving (and serving as a teamsters' shop steward), he turned to academia at the University of Toronto, where he did his BA and MA, and then completed his PhD at the University of Ottawa in 2007, where he worked on the history of informal justice in New France. Along the way he did research for Indian Affairs and the Museum of Civilization. In 2007 he began work as the Project Manager of two Franco-Ontario heritage organizations, where he was able to hone his administrative skills. He has also been active in his own housing coop, of which he is currently president.

Michel started work on 14 October, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the revolution in efficiency, energy, and creativity that has taken hold in our national office. He has found innumerable ways to improve our practices: saving us money in several areas, pursuing ad revenue for our Bulletin, recruiting part-time administrative support through the Ottawa school system's coop program, expanding the range of our contacts in Ottawa, enhancing the services available on our website, developing a promotional campaign, and, perhaps above all, tackling our woefully inadequate computer services, including our membership management. He has been a godsend to our association, and will certainly continue to make the work of the President and the Executive less onerous and the service to members more effective.

His transition into the job was facilitated by the generous, invaluable help of Marielle, who continues to be a fountain of wisdom about all things administrative and financial. We can never adequately express our deep gratitude to her for the faithful service she continues to provide far beyond what might be expected from the small honorarium we pay her as Assistant Treasurer.


2. FINANCES

The move, staff changes, and new overhead costs have been expensive for our association, and had to be undertaken in a context of uncertainty about whether the new fee structure would generate the expanded income that we had projected a year ago. We await the results, as membership numbers slowly rise again. Our Treasurer's report will doubtless make this clearer. In the meantime, Michel has undertaken some substantial cost-cutting measures, including, for the time being, avoiding the recruitment of a paid part-time administrative assistant. A small sub-committee of the Council is also investigating fundraising options. We were also fortune to get a substantially increased grant from SSHRC to support our Journal.

We are also passing through another significant transition in our financial affairs, as David Moorman has decided to retire as Treasurer after eight years at the helm. We have benefited enormously from his careful stewardship of our financial resources and his voice of caution and restraint in the face of spendthrift Councils. He was always a bastion of good sense in Executive Committee meetings. He has served us well, and we will miss him.


3. MEMBERSHIP / OUTREACH

We are grateful to Tina Chen for efforts to reach out for new members, and to Betsy Jameson for liaison with department chairs and for coordinating our outreach activities.

3.1 Fees

Last fall our membership passed the 1,200 mark for the first time in living memory, but, in mid May 2009, it had dipped to between 800 and 900, though the numbers were rising daily as we approached the AGM. Was this a reflection of the higher, geared-to-income fees that we introduced last winter? It is hard to tell yet. We will need more time to assess the longer-term impact. We can only hope that members will appreciate the importance of sustaining a strong national association of historians and the value of the services and programs that their association provides.

3.2  Membership Management

Holding onto those members and adding more has been a significant challenge. For many years there has been an unfortunate pattern of people coming and going from our membership rolls, often, it seems, simply out of neglect or absent-mindedness. We have long needed a better system of reminders about renewal. Over the past two years, we have had the additional problem that our electronic service provider has not had our on-line registration system working properly at key moments for membership renewal. Our Executive Coordinator is actively pursuing other options, and there is every reason to believe that we will be in much better shape electronically within a few months.

3.3 Broadening Our Membership

For some time the Executive and Council have been aware of the need to broaden our membership base and have been pursuing initiatives with that goal in mind. In the hopes of making francophones feel more welcome, we are developing a new working relationship with the Institut d'Histoire de l'Amérique française. To attract historians in non-academic jobs, we have welcomed the revival of a lively Public History Group as an affiliated committee, and attempted to integrate their interests more fully into our AGM programs. To expand our membership base in graduate programs, we continue to work closely with the CHA Graduate Student Committee in developing our programs and policies.

As Canadian history continues to shrink as proportion of the faculty complement in many departments, we are particularly concerned to draw in our colleagues in "international"(non-Canadian) fields. Our Vice-President Mary Lynn Stewart is developing new dialogues with these historians in our Bulletin and at the AGM. Our program chairs continue to plan comparative and transnational sessions that integrate scholars from many fields. Our Journal publishes articles from any and all geographical and theoretical spaces. And our short-book series is deliberately aimed at an international audience. It remains to be seen how many international scholars can be convinced to add the CHA to their already full list of professional memberships.

3.4 Affiliated Committees

The CHA's many affiliated committees and groups vary in their activities and vitality, but, in many cases, they are playing a significant role in the intellectual life of our association, sponsoring sessions at the annual meeting (in some cases virtually running small conferences of their own right through ours) and maintaining networks of historians through their own websites. A number of new committees have sprung up over the past year - Media History, Northern History, Political History, and Active History. This year three groups have organized special workshops just before or just after our AGM (Labour, Public History, and Children and Youth). We now have a Council member with responsibility for keeping tabs on them, Jerry Bannister, to make sure that their concerns are well reflected in as many aspects of our work as possible, particularly the Bulletin and the website. These groups are a natural recruiting ground for non-Canadianists and should be promoted in our outreach to "international" scholars.


4. COMMUNICATIONS

The creation of a Communications Committee chaired by Suzanne Morton has helped to bring together the various parts of our efforts to communicate with each other and with wider publics.

4.1 Bulletin

Our two Secretaries, Alexandra Mosquin and Jean Martin, who are responsible for the CHA Bulletin, have made some important innovations in the production of this newsletter over the past year, which enables them to lay out each issue on their own computers, thus saving time and effort. In addition to bringing together interesting and important articles, they have given this publication a lighter, friendlier feel, notably through the use of more informal photographs. The inclusion of advertising will help sustain such new initiatives.

4.2 Website

Since our new website was launched three years ago, its potential as a significant site of interaction and communication within our association has not been fully realized. Despite the high competence and dedication of our webmaster, Mark Humphries, we lacked the dedicated staff attention to updating and expanding its content. Our new Executive Coordinator is committed to overcoming that neglect. He now monitors and updates the content of the site regularly and has added new features, notably job listings in public and academic institutions. He has also been overseeing an updating of our long-awaited database of historians in Canada, which will be on line in the near future.

Members can now access all our publications through the website. The program and papers for our AGMs are now available there each year (until the end of the particular calendar year). Our registry of dissertations is now organized on-line as well. There is enormous potential for expanding the range of information and services that are available through this site and making it a major networking tool among historians in Canada.

4.3 Promotion

Our Executive Coordinator has undertaken a publicity campaign to make our association and its programs and services better known. A new brochure is now available for distribution at conferences and other academic events.

4.4 Conferences

One of the most important ways we communicate with each other is through our Annual General Meetings held during the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences each year. This year the program that John Walsh and his colleagues have organized is outstanding. As has been the case for the past few years, the number of people wanting to present papers to our meetings has grown far beyond our capacities to accommodate them, and at least a quarter of the proposals had to be declined. The numbers attending the meetings is also rising, and the evaluations of the programs each year have been consistently positive. Clearly our annual gatherings have taken on a new vitality as younger scholars return each year to present, discuss, and network with colleagues from across the country. There is no better sign of the health of our association.


5. PUBLICATIONS

As chair of the Council's Publications Committee, Michèle Dagenais has kept a careful watch over the CHA's growing publications empire.

5.1 Journal of the Canadian Historical Association

The other leap of faith that the CHA made in recent years was the decision to add a second issue of our Journal, which would be available only on line. It is now well established and highly successful. We continue to publish high-quality articles in both issues, including many dealing with "international" history and historirography. Having both issues available electronically through Erudit has increased our readership massively. In 2005 some 2,800 people visited Erudits site to view our Journal; in 2008 the number soared to more than 19,000 (that's 82,000 hits).

We are grateful to Adele Perry and Steven Lee for managing the on-line issue and to Jeff Keshen for taking over the print version. Brian Foster has also provided valuable support in the editorial office at Carleton. Steve is leaving the editor's chair, after commendable service in getting the new version of the Journal up and running. We greatly appreciated the imagination and energy that he put into making this new venture so successful.

5.2 Booklets

Booklets have become much less important within the CHA's publication empire. One more is expected in the General Series, and only a small number in the Ethnic Series. Margaret Conrad has arranged that those will be digitized at UNB, and we have finally signed a Memorandum of Agreement with LAC to continue posting them on their website.

After several years as editor of the Ethnic Booklets series, Roberto Perin has retired. We are most grateful for all his efforts in bringing such an excellent series of booklets into production.

5.3 Short Books

These books are intended to be brief syntheses of historical themes, international in scope and published in both English and French, which can be used in undergraduate classrooms. They can also be expected to generate some revenue for us. The first contracted manuscript (Joy Dixon on the history of sexuality) has been delayed, but the next (Sean Kennedy on war) is expected this spring.

On the publication end, we faced some unexpected crises over the past several months. First, our English-language publisher, Broadview Press, was absorbed by the University of Toronto Press. Fortunately most of the staff with whom we had dealt moved over to UTP, into a new university division, and UTP is happy to honour the commitment to produce the books. Then, in mid summer, our French-language publisher bluntly informed us that they were no longer interested in publishing the series. We were fortunate in being able to negotiate a new relationship with les Presses de l'Université Laval, thanks to the efforts of Michèle Dagenais. The series seems on solid ground once again.

5.4 Becoming a Historian

After some delays resulting from the poor quality of the translation, the French-language version of this publication "Devenir historien ou historienne" is finally on line. Our co-sponsor, the American Historical Association, now features the manual prominently on its website.

5.5 Registry of Dissertations

This registry has passed through some hard times, as most graduate history programs more or less stopped reporting their graduate students' work. Thanks to Michel Duquet's efforts, we have finally made updating the registry a far easier electronic process, and we look forward to improving the coverage of dissertations considerably, so that this will once again be a valuable tool for those seeking information on graduate work in progress.




5.6 Resource Guide for Teaching and Marking Assistants in History

The Graduate Student Committee plans to update this guide, which will be available on line. Fortunately we have obtained a grant from Canadian Heritage to cover half the cost of the translation of this valuable publication.


6.PRIZES

The CHA and its committees continue to hand out a large number of prizes, and determining the winners continues to be a major task. We have a small army of volunteers on adjudicating committees, and we are grateful to Martin Pâquet for coordinating the work of the Macdonald, Ferguson, and Bullen prize committees, and Jerry Bannister for handling the Clio and Corey prizes.

This winter we were approached by Canada's National History Society to join in their efforts to create a program of National History Awards to be handed out each fall by the Governor General. We agreed that our Macdonald Prize could be included in such a program, provided that we incurred no additional cost. CNHS has submitted an application to Canadian Heritage for funding, and we are still waiting for news.


7. ADVOCACY

For the past few years, the Council has had an Advocacy Committee, currently chaired by Tina Loo, which helps to develop policy on the steady stream of issues that confront us.

7.1 Library and Archives Canada

As a result of the agitation against service cuts that we led in the fall of 2007, LAC created a new Service Advisory Board, which has been meeting every few months since November of that year. It is made up of roughly thirty people, historians, archivists, genealogists, librarians, aboriginal researchers, heritage activists, and more, along with a sizable group of LAC staff, and has been chaired by Doug Rimmer, the ADM of Programs and Services (who has recently shifted to a new role within LAC). It continues to be a lively forum of sharp-edged commentary on LAC policy, where LAC staff present reports and, I believe, actually listen. Rather than becoming merely a cooption of dissent, it has become a much more significant (albeit powerless) watchdog, calling staff to account, questioning policies and practices, and providing extensive feedback on a range of issues, big and small. On a practical level, the hours have been increased, and there have been a number of small, but worthwhile changes in on-site practice (a less restricted use of digital cameras and USB connectors, a reallocation of staff at important spots, and so on). The board is also an important site for the various interest groups to stay in touch and to get better acquainted.

This spring we learned that Ian Wilson had retired from the position of Librarian and Archivist of Canada, and had been replaced by Dr Daniel Caron. We look forward to continuing the current productive working relationship with Dr Caron and his staff in the future.

7.2 Census

Two years ago we were disturbed to learn that only 56 per cent of respondents to the 2006 Census had given permission for their personal data to be released to future generations. We created a working group headed by Eric Sager, in collaboration with other disciplines and with genealogists. We can report significant progress. The Census Branch of Statistics Canada has been quite cooperative in discussing changes in the wording of the informed consent question on the census questionnaire. Last spring our working group participated in focus groups in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal set up by Stats Canada, and eventually got a staff member's commentary on the process and the results of a statistical survey of participants. The result was that a rewording that was quite close to what we had suggested proved more popular, and will therefore be used on the 2011 form. We are now engaged in discussions about how to encourage more Canadians to answer in the positive (and thus allow their personal data to be released in 92 years). There has been no progress on getting the question removed completely.

7.3 Copyright

The new legislation on copyright introduced by the government early last summer died before the election, but will undoubtedly reappear soon. We submitted a letter of concern to the minister, and Tina Loo, chair of our Advocacy Committee, and her committee members will be preparing a brief to the government. The Canadian Federation on Humanities and Social Sciences, to which we belong, is taking the lead on this issue.

7.4 SSHRC

There was great consternation across the country when January's federal budget indicated that new SSHRC money to support graduate students would be limited to research on business. A petition campaign was organized by one MP. We have been working with the CFHSS in developing a strong response.


IN CONCLUSION

When I assumed the presidency of our association two years ago, I had no well-developed agenda to carry out. But a range of issues quickly emerged that required immediate leadership, first, in advocacy, and then in setting our internal affairs in order. I could have accomplished nothing in either area without the deep well of commitment from members on Council, committees, prize juries, editorial boards, working groups, conference program committees, and much more. We should congratulate ourselves on the sense of mutual responsibility and the desire to maintain a creative intellectual community that bind together historians in Canada and that promise our continuing success in the future.

Finally I can never adequately thank Marielle Campeau and Michel Duquet for all they have done to keep us on track and to make my life much easier.

Craig Heron
May 2009
Thanks to the following:

Executive Coordinator
Michel Duquet

Administrative Assistant
Joanne Mineault

Assistant Treasurer
Marielle Campeau

Webmaster
Mark Humphries

Executive
Jean Martin (French-Language Secretary)
David Moorman (Treasurer)
Alexandra Mosquin (English-Language Secretary)
Mary Lynn Stewart (Vice-President)

Council
Jerry Bannister (Clio and Corey prizes; Liaison with affiliated committees)
Catherine Carstairs (Advocacy Committee; Electronic Communication)
Tina Mai Chen (Membership)
Michèle Dagenais (Chair, Publications Committee)
Betsy Jameson (Chair, Outreach Committee; Liaison with History Department Chairs)
Tina Loo (Chair, Advocacy Committee)
Jean-François Lozier (Graduate Student Committee; Advocacy Committee)
Suzanne Morton (Chair, Communications Committee; Advocacy Committee)
Martin Pâquet (Macdonald, Ferguson, and Bullen prizes)
Doug Peers (Booklets, Advocacy Committee)

Journal Editors
Jeff Keshen (Print)
Dominique Marshall (French-language)
Steven Lee (On-line)
Adele Perry (On-line)

Editorial Assistant
Brian Foster

Bulletin Editors
Jean Martin
Alexandra Mosquin

Ethnic Booklets Editor
Roberto Perin

Short Book Series Editor
Beverly Lemire

Coordinator, Census Working Group
Eric Sager

Program Chair, AGM 2009
John Walsh