The Thursday Question 2:10 ½: Remembering Roger Gibbins
An indulgent bit of personal nostalgia
Readers looking for hardcore political commentary will want to skip today’s bonus issue.
If you listen to podcasts or read the newsletters run by journalists who are in their 50s, they sometimes take a moment to revisit the glory days of their profession. And they are uniquely positioned to do that as their profession’s transitional generation. These writers are old enough to have enjoyed the heyday of journalism, when newspapers and magazines could finance lots of short- and long-form reporting. They remember when publications could paid their salaries and their expenses to write about the leading issues of the day. But they are also young enough to have been hit when the business models of that journalism imploded. Listen to the episode of the SubBeacon podcast devoted to reviewing The French Dispatch. Three alumni of The Weekly Standard pay homage to a film that embodied their nostalgia for the serious journalism of the past. Or, read any account by the first-day staff of the National Post.
I sometimes wonder if there is more to these recollections than just memorializing. Journalists in their fifties – the ones of my generation – grew up reading how the new wave journalists covered the battles of the 1970s - the low point of Anglo-American society – and of the 1980s – the cultural renewal. Are their rosy views partly a realization that they missed out on Carter and Reagan, Trudeau and Mulroney, Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher? Were their talents wasted on the Lewinski, Clinton, the Chretien-Martin civil war, Major, and Blair?
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Today, I hope you will indulge this 50-something political scientist in a bit of nostalgia triggered by the recent passing of Dr. Roger Gibbons.
I had only known Roger Gibbons for a few weeks before he revealed something about himself that made me laugh 25 years later when I saw he'd been appointed to the Alberta Order of Excellence.
I met Roger on August 3, 1990, which turned out to be an important day in my life. That’s when I first set foot in Calgary and visited the University of Calgary. I had been admitted to the U of C’s MA program in political science and would move to the city in early September. I needed to find an apartment and meet some of the people I would be working with.
The night before, Saddam Hussein's army had invaded Kuwait. So, when I met Ted Morton, who would eventually become my thesis supervisor and friend, he joked that the “drinks were on the house” at the Petroleum Club that afternoon. It took me a while to understand the joke.
On that August 3, I met many scholars I had admired from afar during my studies at McGill. Ted and Rainer Knopff, the great skeptics of the Charter of Rights. Tom Flanagan, already a renowned scholar, he would later give me my first job as a political staffer. Barry Cooper was off that day, probably on recce for a hunting trip. Eventually I would also meet Neil Nevitte, Keith Archer, Shadia Drury, Dr. Parel, Jim Keeley, Stan Drabek, Gretchen MacMillan, and the other members of that remarkable department.
I also met the Department Head, Roger Gibbons, that day. I had read some of his books in McGill’s fourth-year Canadian federalism seminar, one led by J.R. Mallory. Once in Calgary, I took Roger's seminar on Canadian political institutions. He combined it with an undergrad seminar and ran it as a simulated First Minister's Meeting. Peter Lougheed co-taught the course, and every fall it attracted ambitious students. I enrolled alongside a future Pulitzer Prize winner. The class started just weeks after the Meech Lake Accord had collapsed. While we students were trying to sort out what would come next, the real world of Canadian politics was moving ahead on the same question.
Roger was a remarkable teacher. He was open-minded. He shared his curiosity about the political world freely with students of all levels. He offered his views and his reasons for those views on the health of the country, the health of the federation, and the health of our political parties while inviting students to share their thinking as well. He was a sensitive student of the West. He understood the West was a source of conflict in Canadian politics, driven by its different cultural roots and economic base, but also a source of unity given that westerns are Canada’s most patriotic citizens. He knew Alberta and Quebec were allies on some key issues in the federation, but prone to deep division on others.
Roger went out of his way to support my studies. In the early 1990s, the department took its responsibility to host academic visitors from other parts of Canada seriously. Back then, Roger didn’t have to justify his choices against institutional priorities or transdisciplinary research initiatives, and back then the department had support staff to help with the arrangements. Visitors made formal scholarly presentations in the afternoon and then sat for free flowing discussions about the state of the country over dinner. Every department member had a research program, but visitors were expected to engage with the public agenda of the country rather than a specialized, esoteric problem of purely academic interest. Guy LaForest was the first visitor in the fall of 1990. He had been a sessional instructor at U of C a few years earlier and had settled at Laval. He went on to be a political figure in his own right. His formal presentation on Pierre Trudeau’s reading of Machiavelli sparked a spirited debate that continued over dinner. Roger, playing host, grabbed me when I went to sit at the far end of the dinner table with the grad students, and plopped me next to Guy (back then, junior graduate students were welcome at departmental dinners). Watching titanic thinkers argue about what should come after Meech was a privilege. When Roger turned to ask me what I thought, I nearly passed out. What could I contribute to that kind of discussion? Roger was egalitarian like that.
A few months after the simulation course and the dinner with LaForest, Roger was seconded to Ottawa. He joined a team of academics advising the Mulroney government and constitutional affairs minister Joe Clark on what should come next on the constitutional agenda. That summer, I visited Ottawa on a research trip with one of Ted’s research assistants, Sonya Nerlund (now Savage). Roger invited me – keep in mind, I was still a junior graduate student – to dinner in the Bytown Market. He was glum. He wasn’t sure the Mulroney government was thinking hard enough about constitutional reform, and doubted the public service could help much. He worried the academic team would not be able to deliver anything that would serve the country well. Eventually, that team wrapped up its work and handed matters back to Clark. Roger returned to Calgary and resumed his duties as Department Head. What became the Charlottetown Accord went to a referendum vote in October 1992, and Roger organized a public event for the Department’s faculty members, its students, and its alumni to watch the referendum results pour in (back then, engaging students and alumni was seen as part of our mission). He called it “The ‘End of Canada’ Event” and if you watched the results that night, you will remember how the title was appropriate. The Calgary Herald and the local TV news covered Roger’s event as part of their coverage of the referendum vote, because back then that sort of thing happened.
Roger was a good academic leader. He understood the purpose of a political science department and the purpose of the university. He presided over the most diverse academic department in Canada, one full of strong personalities who were committed to strong scholarship and vibrant involvement in the broader community. He leaned into the work, writing fine bits of social science research like New Elites in Old States (co-written with Neil Nevitte), Canadian Political Life: An Alberta Perspective, and Government and Politics in Alberta (co-written with Alan Tupper). In dozens of other books, he tackled the issues of day, ranging from volunteerism to coal policy, Indian affairs to Senate reform. He went on to edit the Canadian Journal of Political Science, serve as Dean of Social Sciences (probably a waste of his talents), lead the Canada West Foundation, and serve on the board of the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
Roger was often sought out by journalists for his insights into Canadian and Alberta politics. I remembered how careful he was in that role when I saw that the RCMP have closed their long-running investigation of Jason Kenney’s campaign for the UCP leadership. I was questioned as part of that investigation years ago and avoided commenting on it until now. I’ve been involved in enough RCMP investigations to withhold judgement while they drag on. Part of the investigation dealt with Jeff Calloway, and it ended with charges a while ago. Other allegations about masses of illegal ballots winning the race for Kenney always struck me as unlikely. There were some illegal memberships, but Jason Kenney did not defeat Brian Jean because a cabal of shady organizers manufactured thousands of fake votes. The role that academic commentators played in legitimating fanciful speculation about that race will have to wait for another day.
It was lucky to land in Roger’s Department in the early 1990s. The University of Calgary seemed proud of its Faculty of Social Sciences, the work of its political science department, and the engagement of its individual political scientists. The faculty generated a lot of controversy, but even members who wanted Quebec out of Confederation went on to receive high honours. These days, universities organize to avoid controversy and vibrant contributions to the public debate. Instead, we practice “knowledge mobilization”, civility in the workplace, and symbolic statements of allyship with fashionable causes. I am not convinced this serves our students or Canada. These days, even asking students to think through our symbolic statements runs the risk of being charged with “denialism” of the approved causes. I have already written about the role conservative governments have played in egging on this trend.
Roger grew up in British Columbia, attended UBC and its coastal counterpart, Stanford University, and returned to BC in his retirement. Once in the simulation course he mentioned he had first visited Alberta in his childhood. He said he had been shocked to discover that “his province” shared the mountains with Alberta. He was miffed that another province had the temerity to claim the other side of the ranges. I hope someone told that story when he was awarded Alberta’s highest honour in 2013.