The State of our Politics
2024-09-27 19:00 (America/Toronto) | Cameron Hall, 1585 Yonge Street, Toronto
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In his lecture, Sean Conway, a long-time member of the Ontario Legislature and a former senior minister in the Liberal government of Premier David Peterson (1985—1990), will focus on some of the central issues which seem to be roiling our democratic politics in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Among these issues are: increased polarization, the decline of trust in our political institutions, the lamentable state of our political parties, the corrosive effect of money in our public affairs, the new media environment and its very worrisome effect upon our democracy, foreign interference in our elections and the passivity of too many citizens at a time when some issues – e.g. climate change and intergenerational stresses in our society – present unusually difficult political choices. Conway will suggest some modest proposals to deal with some of these problems and will argue that for a vibrant democracy to succeed, the citizen must become more engaged if we are to avert real trouble in our town square.
BIOGRAPHY:
Born in Pembroke Ontario in 1951, Sean Conway grew up in Renfrew County, studied Canadian history at Waterloo Lutheran University (now Wilfrid Laurier) and Queen’s and was elected ‘at a rather young age’ to the Ontario Legislature in 1975 where he served for 28 years including as minister of education during the Liberal government of Premier David Peterson. In 2007 he received the Churchill Society’s Award for Excellence in the Cause of Parliamentary Democracy. Since his retirement from active politics Conway has taught history at Queen’s, Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) and the University of Toronto. While at Queen’s, he led a major research project into the public life of the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, the former prime minister of Canada. He has also been a public policy advisor at the Gowlings law firm and an analyst on TVO’s popular public affair program 4th Reading hosted by Steve Paikin. Conway lives in Barry’s Bay and enjoys reading, dabbling in local history and watching U.S. college football.

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Family business and the private sector’s role in Canadian prosperity
2024-10-25 19:00 - 21:00
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Growing up attending Yorkminster Park provided an excellent grounding in the importance of family, a theme that would shape Galen Weston’s path towards becoming the fourth generation of family leaders at Canada’s largest private employer, leading real estate investment trust, and largest network of independent food and drug retailers. In this candid conversation, Galen will share his thoughts about the uniqueness of family businesses and the role of private enterprise in the community.
BIOGRAPHY:
Galen Weston is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of George Weston Limited where he is the fourth generation of family leaders. Founded in 1882, George Weston represents a portfolio of businesses including Canada’s leading real estate investment trust, Choice Properties, as well as supermarket and pharmacy retailing, fashion, and financial services through its holdings in Loblaw Companies Limited where Galen is Chairman. Galen is also Chairman of President’s Choice Bank, as well as a Director of Wittington Investments Limited and the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Galen holds a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.

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By The Ghost Light: Wars, Memory, and Families
2024-11-08 19:00
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Lecture Description : R. H. Thomson’s book By The Ghost Light: Wars, Memory and Families is a personal, emotional and intensely engaging exploration of how the stories we tell affect the wars we fight. On publication in November 2023, it was on the best seller list for Canadian non-fiction. In this lecture, R. H. Thomson will talk about the book, the family stories on which is based and about “The World Remembers” WWI memory project.
Biography : R.H. has appeared in film and theatre across Canada, as Matthew Cuthbert in Anne With An E, and as Marshall McLuhan in The Message by Jason Sherman. An advocate for the arts, R.H. has also worked on many history/arts projects. He built The World Remembers-Le Monde Se Souvient, an international World War One commemoration exhibit now installed at war museums in Canada and the United States, theworldremembers.ca. He is a Member of the Order of Canada and was awarded the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

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Sir John A. Macdonald in History and Fiction:
2024-11-20 19:00 - 21:00
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Sir John A. Macdonald & The Apocalyptic Year 1885 will be published by Sutherland House Books in November 2024. “In this fascinating and authoritative study of a skilled politician at the peak of his powers, political historian Patrice Dutil shows how Macdonald navigated persistent threats to public order, anchored the stability of his government, and ensured the future of his still fragile nation. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a man who, notwithstanding his personal failings and the sins of his times, was the most enlightened and constructive public figure of early Canadian History.” (from the dust jacket.) Professor Dutil will be joined on stage by novelists Gordon Henderson and Roy MacSkimming, both of whom have written historical fiction featuring Macdonald, for a conversation about Macdonald’s central place in Canadian history, the challenges he faced and overcame in holding Canada together, and how fiction can help inform our understanding of history. The panel will be led by CIHE board member Lynne Golding, herself the author of an historical fiction trilogy.
BIOGRAPHIES
Patrice Dutil is the author or editor of a dozen books, a frequent commentator on policy and political issues, and the host of over 100 podcasts in the Canadian history series, “Witness to Yesterday.” He is a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). He founded and for five years edited The Literary Review of Canada and served as president of the Champlain Society for seven years. He is a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow at the Macdonald—Laurier Institute. Among his books are Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election, Prime Ministerial Power in Canada: it’s Origins under Macdonald, Laurier and Borden, and Macdonald at 200: New Perspectives and Legacies (edited with Roger Hall).
In a fifty-year career in journalism Gordon Henderson has been a parliamentary correspondent, a current affairs field producer and an award-winning documentary producer. He’s directed films from Afghanistan to the Arctic, Beijing to Buenos Aires, and his company, 90th Parallel Productions, has produced more than a hundred documentaries. Henderson was a senior series producer of the CBC/Radio-Canada series Canada: A People’s History and taught in the Journalism Department at Toronto’s Ryerson (now Metropolitan) University. He is semi-retired and writing. His first novel, Man in the Shadows was built around the assassination of Irish-Canadian politician D’Arcy McGee. His second, Out of the Shadows, co-written with Métis writer David Bouchard and published in September 2024, takes place during the Red River Resistance in Manitoba. Both feature Sir John A. Macdonald.
Roy MacSkimming is the author of nine books, including the historical novels Macdonald, a Globe & Mail best book of the year, and Laurier in Love. His study of Canadian book publishing, The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Authors, was also a Globe & Mail best book and finalist for the National Business Book Award. MacSkimming has spent his working life in and around the book industry as author, editor, publisher, and books editor of the Toronto Star. Set during Sir John A.’s final months, Macdonald, published in 2015, portrays a lion in winter fighting for his life and legacy. Peter C. Newman hailed it as “a singularly well-crafted novel that deserves top place among the books on Canadian history that matter.” MacSkimming is finishing a new novel, The Cure for Love, a prequel to Macdonald.
Lynne Golding is the author of the historical fiction series, “Beneath the Alders.” A graduate of the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, she is a senior partner at the international law firm Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP where she co-leads their health law practice group. Lynne lives in Brampton, Ontario, and has three grown children. Beneath the Alders is inspired by stories told to Golding by her great aunt, Jessie Roberts Current, born in Brampton, Ontario in 1903. Those stories, supplemented by extensive research led to the creation of three novels about life in small-town Canada: The Innocent (1907 – July 1914); The Beleaguered (1914 – 1918) and The Mending (1918 – 1931). Golding is an advisory board member of the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and gave a lecture in the Yorkminster Park Speakers Series in January, 2022.

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Marsha Faubert in conversation with Christopher Moore about her book, Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour and a Canadian Immigration Scandal
2024-11-29 19:00
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Lecture Description : In Wanda’s War, Marsha Faubert introduces a dimension of the Second World War many Canadians have rarely contemplated. Stories of Canadians on the battlefield, the struggles of the home front, even the experience of Britons under bombing, are well known. But many of today’s Canadians trace their roots to the postwar migration of refugees from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, whose war experiences remain buried.
Wanda’s War reconstructs the lives of Faubert’s parents-in-law, Wanda and Casey, and the lesser-known events of the war that shaped their lives. With not one, but two occupations of their homeland in Poland’s eastern borderlands, both were torn from their homes and deported to forced labour — one to Nazi Germany, the other to subarctic Russia. An “astonishing yet uplifting addition to the great body of literature of the Second World War” (David Marks Shribman), Wanda’s War speaks to the broader refugee experience that has unfolded globally since WWII and, tragically, continues today.
Historian Christopher Moore will join Faubert in a wide-ranging conversation about the book’s themes — the geopolitics of eastern Europe, gulags and slave labour camps, postwar displacement and immigration, and the politics of memory.
Biography : Marsha Faubert is a lawyer and writer of narrative nonfiction. She began her legal career as a litigator, and later worked in various roles in the administrative justice system in Ontario. Her first book,
Wanda’s War — An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, raises themes of memory and silence, justice and forgiveness through the lens of the wartime and immigration experiences of her husband’s parents. She is in the early stages of a new project which will examine the history and legacy of environmental injustice in her hometown of Sarnia, known to some as Canada’s Chemical Valley.

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Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario and the Anthropocene
2025-01-10 19:00
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Although humans have impacted their environment for millennia, it is the fundamental change recorded by indicators of this Great Acceleration in the geologic record that justifies erecting a new interval of geologic time. Rejection of the proposal to define the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch with a ‘golden spike’ in varved sediments from Crawford Lake means that -by strict convention- we are still living in the Holocene– but is this societally relevant? Understanding how our planet functions allows us to make useful projections, and examining the geologic record allows us to predict the consequences of warmth equal or exceeding that of the last interglacial. Formally recognizing that ‘Holocene’ no longer accurately describes our planet by adding a new epoch named after the main agent of change (Anthropos, Greek for human) would highlight the value of Earth Sciences in addressing the existential issues that face humanity in the coming decades.
Francine McCarthy is a geoscientist whose paleoecological and geoarchaeological research focuses on pollen and the remains of algae and their consumers in ‘pollen slides’. Her (and her students’) research includes recent studies of the intestinal contents of a mastodon found in Nova Scotia, an underwater archeological site in Greece, several sites in the Great Lakes and many small lakes in its drainage basin (including the Experimental Lakes Area of NW Ontario and Lake George, NY), the iconic Walden Pond and the meromictic Sluice Pond in Massachusetts. Her most highly publicised research has been on the varved sediments from Crawford Lake, proposed as the ‘golden spike’ to define the Anthropocene. She embraced the multi/ transdisciplinary nature of the proposed Anthropocene epoch and is a member of the Anthropocene Commons as well as the Anthropocene Working Group. In addition to NSERC funding to support research on ‘The impact of land use at mid-latitudes in eastern North America on the global carbon budget: implications for the Anthropocene’, she is co-recipient of a SSHRC grant entitled: ‘Bomb Pulse: Cultural and Philosophical Readings of Time Signatures in the Anthropocene’, through which she is currently writing a graphic novel. She has presented the results of her research on Crawford Lake in a Ted Talk and at the Vatican, among other venues.

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The Music of Talk
2025-02-07 19:00 - 21:00
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With musical examples and the insight gained in a 40-year career combining the narrative and emotional connections between music and talk, master storyteller and broadcaster Tom Allen brings you on a stirring and inspirational journey to the deepest roots of human communication where melody and meaning become one.
Tom Allen was born in Montreal and went to school there, at Marianapolis College and McGill, before finishing degrees at Boston University and Yale. He worked as a bass trombonist in New York City when there were still places you just didn’t go, then in Toronto and on tour with the Great Lakes Brass. He began working for the CBC on his 30th birthday, a very long time ago, and at the time of writing is still there. He has since written three books, been a Resident Artist with Soulpepper Theatre, delivered storytelling workshops at various University music programs and at the Banff Centre, been named an honourary Doctor of Letters by Thompson Rivers University, hosted countless concerts across the country and written a series of cabaret storytelling shows he calls Chamber Musicals, including From Weimar to Vaudeville, The Missing Pages, A Poe Cabaret, Being Lost and the latest: JS Bach’s Long Walk in the Snow. Tom Allen lives in Toronto with his beloved, the harpist Lori Gemmell, their son, and a very enthusiastic dog.

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The Irish in Canada: A Mildly Subversive History
2025-03-07 19:00 - 21:00
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For much of the 19th century, the Irish were the single largest ethnic group in English-speaking Canada, outnumbering the English, Scots and Welsh combined. This lecture focuses on four aspects of their history: the Famine migration of 1846-51; the Fenian invasions of 1866 and 1870; D’Arcy McGee and Canadian Confederation; and the rise and fall of the Orange Order. In considering each aspect, it challenges traditional images of the Irish in Canada and highlights new research in the field.
David A. Wilson is a Professor in the Celtic Studies Program and History Department at the University of Toronto, and the General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a winner of the University of Toronto’s Outstanding Teaching Award, he has published and edited numerous books, including a prize-winning two-volume biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee. His latest book, Canadian Spy Story: Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police, was the recipient of the Champlain Society’s Chalmers Award and the C.P. Stacey Prize in Canadian Military History.

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The Lives of Writers
2025-04-04 19:00 - 21:00
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Eleanor Wachtel’s lecture was live streamedon April 4th 2025, however as agreed withthe speaker, it will not be available foron-demand viewing.

In “The Lives of Writers” Eleanor Wachtel will illuminate the relationship between writers, their work and their audience. She’ll discuss the appetite for literary biography and how greater knowledge of the life of the writer may affect the reader’s appreciation of their work; how writers reveal themselves in their writing; and the self-proclaimed image of the writer as an outsider, on the margins of society.
Eleanor Wachtel earned a reputation as one of the world’s best literary interviewers during her more than 30 years as host of Writers & Company on CBC Radio. Five books of her interviews have been published, including Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence and conversations with Carol Shields which won the Independent Publisher Book Award; Original Minds; and most recently, The Best of Writers & Company. She also co-founded and hosted CBC’s Wachtel on the Arts, featuring conversations with filmmakers, composers, architects, artists, etc., as well as the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) popular Books on Film series for more than a decade. She has received numerous accolades for her contributions to Canadian cultural life: nine honourary degrees and Officer of the Order of Canada.

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Eleanor Wachtel’s lecture was live streamed on April 4th 2025, however as agreed with the speaker, it will not be available for on-demand viewing.

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Joseph Stalin and the Origins and Legacy of Stalinism
2025-05-02 19:00 - 21:00
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Under Georgian born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (transliterated from Georgian) or Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (transliterated from the Russian variant), better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union reached the zenith of authoritarianism. This lecture examines how historians have debated the origins of Stalinism and the legacy of Stalinism after his death. Historians variously trace the origins of Stalinist policies to a Tsarist legacy, the violence of the First World War and the civil war that followed it, Communism or Marxism as an ideology, Bolshevik belief, or a combination of factors. The lecture then turns to debates on the nature of “De-Stalinization” under Nikita Khrushchev and the apparent return to authoritarianism after Khrushchev’s death.
Tracy McDonald is an historian of Russian and the Soviet Union at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921—1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2011), co-editor with Daniel Vandersommers of Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019), and co-editor with Heather DeHaan and Dan Healey of Other Voices in Soviet History: Collected for a Devil’s Advocate (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). In 2019-2020, she curated an art exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art under the title, “Animals Across Discipline, Time, and Space,” which ran from 4 January until the first Covid lockdown in March. McDonald was one of the three founding members of the independent documentary-film company, Chemodan Films. Between 2004 and 2009 she participated in the making of four films including Province of Lost Film, Uprising, and Photographer.

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Agatha Christie and Archaeology
2025-06-06 19:00 - 21:00
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If you didn’t already know how Agatha Christie and Archaeology were connected, then this lecture by Canadian archaeologist Dr. Amy Barron is your chance to learn how the great mystery novelist’s life is revealed within the pages of her books. Her love of the Middle East and the life she lived with her famous archaeologist husband provided the basis for some of her greatest novels including, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Murder in Mesopotamia. Dr. Barron will discuss Christie’s life, travels, and the fabulous ancient sites whose mysteries she helped uncover.
Amy Barron received her PhD at the University of Toronto in the field of Mesopotamian history and archaeology, specializing on the military history of Iron Age Assyria. She has excavated predominantly in the Middle East but has travelled widely studying the archaeology of various remote parts of the world from Peru to China. Amy has taught archaeology, ancient history and classics at the universities of Toronto and Guelph and presently teaches museum studies in Fleming College’s post-graduate program. She has worked in the museum world for over 30 years and loves sharing her passion for the past.

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Writing History: A Conversation Between Two Storytellers
2025-09-26 19:00
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In this “Conversation between two storytellers,” who are also two friends, Charlotte Gray, the author of twelve best-selling books of (mostly) Canadian popular history, including The Massey Murder: A Maid, her Master, and the Trial that Shocked a Country, and Maureen Jennings, author of the Murdoch Mysteries books on which the popular television series is based, as well as three other series featuring fictional detectives or criminal profilers, each set in a different historical era, will discuss their respective approaches to storytelling, the advantages and disadvantages of the fiction and non-fiction genres, how they select the subjects of their books and conduct their research, and whatever else may come up! An audience Q&A session will follow their discussion. This event is co-sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education, www.CIHE.ca.
BIOGRAPHIES
Charlotte Gray is a non-fiction author based in Ottawa who has written twelve bestsellers of biography and popular history. Her most recent book is Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt. She is also the author of Sisters in the Wilderness; the Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, The Massey Murder and Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention. Charlotte has served as chair of Canada’s National History Society, and has won the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history. She has also chaired the Art Canada Institute board and is vice-president of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Ottawa. Born in England and a graduate of Oxford and the LSE, Charlotte teaches at Carleton University, holds five honorary degrees, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada.
Crime fiction writer Maureen Jennings was born in the UK and now lives in Toronto. She has four ongoing book series, each set in a different era. The first with Detective William Murdoch, is set in late Victorian Toronto. These books were adapted for television and Murdoch Mysteries, now in its eighteenth season, is shown in over one hundred territories around the world. Her second series features Christine Morris, a contemporary British criminal profiler, and a third, with Detective Tom Tyler, is set in Britain during World War Two. Her most recent series returns to pre-war Toronto in the 1930s: The Paradise Café series features a female Private Investigator named Charlotte Frayne. In 2024 she was awarded the Grand Master award by Crime Writers of Canada. And in 2024 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

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Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell
2025-10-10 19:00
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National bestselling author and professional adventure Adam Shoalts will join us to discuss his expeditions in Canada’s wilderness, including especially his brand new book, Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell. It is the story of a legendary lost explorer who disappeared more than a century ago and Shoalts’s quest to retrace his route to unravel the mystery of his disappearance. This is a Book Launch event and copies of Adam’s books will be available for sale and signing by the author.
BIOGRAPHYAdam Shoalts is a professional adventurer and Westaway Explorer-in-Residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His expeditions range from mapping rivers to archaeological projects, but Shoalts is best known for his long solo wilderness journeys, including crossing alone nearly 4,000 kilometres of Canada’s Arctic. Named one of the “greatest living explorers” by the CBC and declared “Canada’s Indiana Jones” by the Toronto Star, Shoalts’s latest quest was retracing the route of a lost explorer, the subject of his new latest book Vanished Beyond the Map. His other books include Where the Falcon Flies, The Whisper on the Night Wind, A History of Canada in 10 Maps, and Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic, all of them national bestsellers. He has a PhD from McMaster University in history, and in his free time, enjoys long walks in the woods.

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Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in Their Finest Hour
2025-11-07 19:00
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“Never in the field of human conflict…” are Churchill’s words that set the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 apart from all others, as the greatest aerial battle in history. As the German Luftwaffe sought to destroy the Royal Air Force, gain air superiority, and invade the British Isles, Commonwealth fighter pilots scrambled from U.K. airfields day after day and flew Hurricane and Spitfire fighter aircraft to thwart Hitler’s plan. They won but paid dearly. Among the 2,937 aircrew in this first test of Allied skill, resilience, and courage, over 100 pilots flew with the “Canada” patch on their shoulder, and another 200 erks (ground crew) kept their fighters in the air. As Churchill continued, never was “so much owed by so many to so few.” Ted Barris has assembled stories of Canadian airmen, ground crew, as well as engineers, aeronautical designers, medical officers and civilians who answered the call and turned back the very real threat of Nazi invasion. In this lecture based on his book, he will tell the story from a Canadian perspective.
BIOGRAPHY
Ted Barris is an award-winning journalist, author, and broadcaster. His writing has regularly appeared in the national press, and magazines as diverse as Air Force, esprit de corps and Zoomer. He has also worked as host/contributor for CBC Radio, NPR and TV Ontario. He taught journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College for 18 years. Barris is the author of 22 bestselling, non-fiction books, many focused on wartime Canada, including The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, which won the 2014 Libris Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and books on hockey and music. In 2011, he was one of 19 civilians presented with the Minister of Veterans’ Affairs Commendation. Barris was the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and, in 2024, was made a Member of the Order of Canada, “for advancing our understanding of Canadian military history as an acclaimed historical author, journalist and broadcaster.”

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Of Mice and Men … and More: The Evolution of Genetics and Recent Developments in Personalized Medicine
2025-11-28 19:00
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Major developments and scientific innovations have revolutionized the field of clinical genetics from Charles Darwin’s day in the mid nineteenth century to the delivery of personalized medicine in patient care in the twenty-first. In this lecture clinical genetecist Dr. José-Mario Capo-Chichi will lead us through this story: the origin of species, Mendelian genetics, the double-helix structure of DNA, DNA sequencing, animal models and the latest in personalized medicine – ie., using an individual’s unique genetic profile, lifestyle, and environment to tailor disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. There will be many other stops along the way. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
BIOGRAPHY
José-Mario Capo-Chichi is a clinical geneticist at the Genome Diagnostics Laboratory at University Health Network in Toronto/Canada, an assistant professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto and a clinician investigator at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre Research Institute. His clinical and research interests are centered on the use of novel genomic tools to improve the clinical diagnosis and management of patients with acquired and inherited genetic disorders. He helped identify and characterize novel disease causing genes in neurodevelopmental disorders using animal models.

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