Welcome to the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History

Colin Campbell and Robert Raizenne, A History of Canadian Income Tax Volume 3: Tax Reform and the Modern Act, published with the Canadian Tax Foundation. This final volume in the history of the emergence and development of the federal income tax in Canada addresses the extended tax reform exercise which produced the Income Tax Act which went into effect on January 1, 1972.  The Carter Commission’s report in 1967 proposed a radical revision of the tax law based on the...

David Berg, There is No Place for Sympathy Here: On Trial in the Belcher Islands, published with McGill-Queens University Press. In the late summer of 1941, the Belcher Islands in Hudson’s Bay were the scene of a series of murder trials that became a cause célèbre in southern Canada. Known to very few Canadians at the time, the murders of nine people occurred in an area inhabited only by small bands of nomadic Inuit and the trials put the Islands...

Patricia I. McMahon and Robert Bothwell, In the Shadow of the Manhattan Project: Radium, Larceny, and Secrecy at Eldorado, published with the University of British Columbia Press. This book offers a cautionary tale of how secrecy can undermine accountability. During the Second World War, a Canadian company became a crucial supplier of uranium for the Manhattan Project, the program which developed the atomic bomb during World War Two. With uranium came radium. In the name of “national security,” ordinary safeguards...

Ian Radforth, Making a Killing: Murder and Life Insurance in 1890s Ontario, published with the University of Toronto Press. In late nineteenth-century Canada, the life insurance industry expanded impressively, offering policyholders a sense of greater security, but insurance fraud accompanied the expansion with murder sometimes being a deadly outcome. Radforth examines six legal cases in 1890s Ontario in which the Crown alleged men or women had murdered for the life insurance payouts. This book uses principally legal records and newspaper...

Tom Mitchell and Reinhard Kramer ‘P.S. Burn after Reading’: The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espionage in Canada, published with the University of Toronto Press. In September 1945, Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected to Canada, and revealed that Canadians were spying on their own country. Canada used the Kellock-Taschereau Commission – sometimes appropriately, sometimes inappropriately – to thwart these homegrown agents and defend Canada’s national security. Others have written about the Gouzenko affair, but this deeply-researched account brings forward new...