This episode is the second of two taken from a CIHE event held in March 2025 with Oxford

Professor Nigel Biggar, recently appointed to the UK House of Lords, and Margaret

MacMillan, Companion of the Order of Canada.

This second part features the conversation between Lord Biggar and Professor MacMillan

that followed his opening statement. They examined the moral complexity of empires, especially the British Empire, and the modern push to revise or erase elements of

Canadian history. Margaret MacMillan calls for rigorous historical thinking, warning against

using history as a political weapon or reducing it to moral judgment.

http://www.margaretmacmillan.com/

https://cihe.ca/

This episode is the first of two taken from a CIHE event held in March 2025 with renowned historians Professor Nigel Biggar, recently appointed to the British House of Lords and author of the 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and Professor Margaret MacMillan, Companion of the Order of Canada, and author of The Uses and Abuses of History, among many other books.

In the first of two parts, Lord Biggar presents key arguments from his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, challenging one-sided narratives that portray the British Empire as purely destructive. He outlines both the harms and the contributions of empires — including the abolition of slavery, legal institutions, and protection for minority groups — and urges a more balanced, evidence-based view of history.

https://cihe.ca/

Did you know that in World War II, Canada’s “best business brains” traded Bay Street boardrooms in support of the country's war effort?

In this episode of History Matters, I sit down with Winnipeg-based historian and author Allan Levine to talk about his new book, The Dollar a Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War (Barlow Books, 2025).

We open with a gripping story from December 1940: C.D. Howe, E.P. Taylor, and other Canadian industrialists crossing a U-boat–infested Atlantic, only to see their ship torpedoed and still pressing on to London to negotiate urgently needed munitions for Britain.

From there, Allan and I trace how a small, mostly agrarian country of just over 11 million people became the fourth-largest industrial power in the Allied war effort. We explore the rise of C.D. Howe as Minister of Munitions and Supply, the “dollar-a-year men” who left lucrative private-sector careers to serve, the creation of Crown corporations, and the “bits and pieces” subcontracting system that turned refrigerator and bicycle factories into producers of tanks, guns, and Lancaster bombers. Along the way, we talk about labour tensions, accusations of war profiteering, and how Mackenzie King’s cautious political genius coexisted with Howe’s bulldozing efficiency.

We also zoom out to ask bigger questions: What does this wartime experiment in state–business partnership tell us about Canadian political culture, emergency powers, and the limits of parliamentary accountability? Why has this story been so neglected in mainstream Second World War histories? And what lessons—good and bad—might it hold for governments facing crises today?

If you enjoy historically grounded conversations about Canadian politics, World War II, economic history, and the people behind the policy, this episode is for you.

Allan Levine

https://www.linkedin.com/in/allan-levine-90284869/?originalSubdomain=ca