Remembering University Professor Peter H. Russell, CC, FRSC.
Our esteemed colleague left us on January 10, at the age of 91. Peter joined our predecessor department, Political Economy, in 1958. He remained deeply engaged in the life of our community throughout his long life. Just a couple of months before his death, he attended a departmental seminar led by a distinguished visiting professor. As usual, he asked a penetrating question that stimulated a lively and illuminating debate.
Originally appointed on a political theory line, over the course of his career Peter rose to the very top of several related fields of study within Canadian politics. He was a pioneer in the study of Canadian courts considered as political institutions. His book The Judiciary in Canada: The Third Branch of Government (1987) instantly became the authoritative account in the field. That interest in the judiciary connected seamlessly with his larger interest in constitutional politics, and during the thirty-year “mega constitutional” era in Canada, Peter became the country’s chronicler-in-chief. His Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People? – first published in 1993, then twice updated – remains definitive. The sequel – Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (2017) – was widely recognized as his finest work. It is a magisterial narrative of Canadian constitutional history, the first to give equal standing to all three “pillars” of the Canadian political community – French, English, and Indigenous.
Peter’s inclusion of Indigenous people in Canada’s “odyssey” was the product of long engagement with Indigenous questions. In 1974, the Dene nation asked him to help them understand the bewildering and oppressive provisions of the Canadian constitution. This encounter propelled him down another scholarly path that led to Australia (Recognizing Aboriginal Title - 2005) and back to Canada in a comparative context (Sovereignty: The Biography of a Claim – 2021).
Peter was also both a scholar and advocate of parliamentary democracy. The title of his 2008 monograph - Two Cheers for Minority Government (a revised edition just published posthumously) – telegraphed one aspect of his contribution to understanding Canada’s central political institution.
Although his spectacular record of research and publication inevitably brought him great academic honours, Peter worked hard to actually apply the lessons learned in the policy world. He was one of the founders of the Canadian Law and Society Association and its second president (1985-87). He also played an important role in transforming Ontario’s judicial appointments process. Later, having gained the trust of several Indigenous nations, he helped build vital bridges with governments of the day. In addition, he worked with the McDonald Commission in holding the RCMP accountable for its security and intelligence operations. Finally, and over many decades, his discreet advice was sought by numerous Governors-General when they faced difficult decisions.
With the support of his spouse of sixty-five years, Sue Jarvis, Peter was a generous and wise mentor to colleagues in the department as well as across the University. And when invited to serve—whether as long-time member of the Manuscript Review Committee of the University of Toronto Press, principal of Innis College, graduate director in our department just before he “retired,” or co-founder of Senior College in the years after he “retired”—he never declined.
Over the coming year, Peter’s colleagues will be working to ensure that his memory endures. They will make their own contributions, but they will need some help to do justice to the cause. His students were at the core of his life’s work. He loved and inspired them. Perhaps they will now help us raise an endowment in his name to support in perpetuity the study of Canada’s federal system and its implications for a rapidly changing world. Peter certainly earned such a tribute, and the Canadian story he did so much to interpret and explain deserves continuing attention, and not only in Canada. As Peter himself put it in Canada’s Odyssey, “What we have learned about living well together could be of value to all of humankind. Multinational, multicultural Canada might offer more useful guidance for what lies ahead for the peoples of the planet than the tidy model of the single-nation sovereign state.”
- Professors Louis W. Pauly & Robert Vipond