Paul Romney – författare

Canada''s Founding Debates is about Confederation—about the process that brought together six out of the seven territories of British North America in the years 1864-73 to form a country called Canada. It presents excerpts from the debates on Confederation in all of the colonial parliaments from Newfoundland to British Columbia and in the constituent assembly of the Red River Colony. The voices of the powerful and those of lesser note mingle in impassioned debate on the pros and cons of creating or joining the new country, and in defining its nature.

In short explanatory essays and provocative annotations, the editors sketch the historical context of the debates and draw out the significance of what was said. By organizing the debates thematically, they bring out the depth of the founders'' concern for issues that are as vital today as they were then: the meaning of liberty, the merits of democracy, the best form of self-government, the tension between collective and individual rights, the rule of law, the requirements of political leadership, and, of course, the nature of Canadian nationality. Canada''s Founding Debates offers a fresh and often surprising perspective on Canada''s origins, history, and political character.

Previously published by Stoddart Publishing, 1999.

In early Upper Canada the attorney general was little more than a skilled functionary -- the Crown''s chief legal counsel; by the mid-nineteenth century he had become a leading member of cabinet and generally premier. Mr Attorney is the story of this transformation and many other aspects of the attorney general''s role in nineteenth-century Ontario.

A central figure in the story general''s rise was John Beverley Robinson, a slippery zealot whose loathing of libertarian ideals drove him to flout the most essential duties of the office. His mishandling of the Alien Question and failure to check civil rights abuses discredited the government and spurred the first public campaign for ''responsible government.'' His successors'' failure to uphold the rule of law in the face of political repression and increasing pro-government violence helped to provoke the rebellion of 1837; but the discontents of the era were rooted not only in the corrupt administration of justice but in the fact that the law itself offered farmers little protection against exploitation by merchants and financiers.

Moving into the Union period, Paul Romney explains how the attorney general acquired constitutional responsibility for the administration of justice. He reviews important procedural and administrative topics relating to the attorney general''s responsibility for law enforcement: the Felon''s Counsel Act of 1836, the origin of the county attorney system, the controversy over the idea of a provincial police force. A chapter on the post-Confederation struggle over ''provincial rights'' depicts Oliver Mowat as a legal mastermind whose victory was the fruit of intellectual subtlety and tactical ingenuity. Turning to the attorney general''s role in late nineteenth-century criminal and civil law reforms, Romney describes how trial by jury was compromised by the introduction of Crown appeal against acquittal in the Criminal Code of 1892.

This important study of the office and the men who held it offers a fresh perspective on the history of nineteenth-century Ontario and illuminates the state of civil liberties in Canada today.

Epics of Disaffection is an exploration of the epic imagina­tion. It brings a historian''s sensibility and expertise to bear on four eccentric works of literary genius, each of a differ­ent genre: The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, and two books by the historian E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class and The Sykaos Papers. Each underwent a metamorphosis in the course of composition, emerging as an account of a historical crisis - actual or fictional - set in a broader temporal context. Each acquired an epic theme, tone, and structure, becoming a narrative that contemplates human experience in the light not just of history but of eternity. The book links this thematic and formal convergence to the authors'' personal encounter with history and politics, which in each case included military combat. The books are dissenting histories, and epics of disaffection, because the epic transformation was triggered in each case by a prophetic urge arising from the author''s profound alienation from mod­ernity and sense of being at the mercy of history.