Allegiance Canada Role Historian | Name Desmond Morton Years of service 1954–1964 | |
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Other work Professor of Canadian History Books A short history of Canada, A military history of Canada, When Your Number's Up, Fight or pay, Working people Similar People Jack Granatstein, Ken Bell, Ian MacDonald | ||
Desmond Dillon Paul Morton OC CD FRSC (born 1937) is a Canadian historian who specializes in the history of the Canadian military, as well as the history of Canadian political and industrial relations.
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Born in Calgary, Alberta, Morton is the son of a Brigadier General, and the grandson of General Sir William Dillon Otter. He is a graduate of the Collège militaire royal de St-Jean, the Royal Military College of Canada, a Rhodes Scholar, the University of Oxford (where he received his PhD), and the London School of Economics. He spent ten years in the Canadian Army (1954–1964 retiring as a Captain) prior to beginning his teaching career. He was named Honorary Colonel of 8 Wing of the Canadian Air Force at CFB Trenton in 2002. He received the Canadian Forces Decoration in 2004 for 12 years total military service.
Morton is the Hiram Mills professor of History at McGill University, as well as the past director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, in Montreal, Quebec. As of fall 2011, he continues to serve at McGill as a professor emeritus. Prior to that, he was Principal of Erindale College, University of Toronto, from 1986 to 1994.
Before beginning his teaching career, Morton served as an advisor to Tommy Douglas of the New Democratic Party. In the 1980s he informally advised Brian Mulroney of the Progressive Conservatives. From 1964 to 1966, he served as assistant secretary of the Ontario New Democratic Party. After the success of the famous 1964 NDP Riverdale by-election, Morton wrote and published The Riverdale Story, which detailed how the party's organizing and canvassing changed the way campaigns in Canada are run. In the 1970s he worked with David Lewis, Stephen Lewis and other party leaders to oppose The Waffle, a left wing faction within the NDP.
Morton received his doctorate from the University of London. He is the author of over thirty-five books on Canada, including the popular A Short History of Canada ISBN 0-7710-6509-4.
In 1996, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1985.
Views on Canadians' social memory of the First World War
Morton has addressed the issue of whether the First World War was indeed a war of independence of Canada. He once wrote: "For Canadians, Vimy Ridge was a nation building experience. For some, then and later, it symbolized the fact that the Great War was also Canada's war of independence".
In 2008, however, he published the following remarks: "Canadians are now being told by their government and its friends that we achieved the same joyous state on a snowy April 9, 1917, when four Canadian divisions advanced to capture Vimy Ridge at a cost of about 10,000 dead and wounded – enough to bring on a nationally divisive crisis as the English-Canadian majority tried to conscript the French-speaking minority for a war Quebec had never embraced. This may be Stephen Harper's version of history, learned in the schools of Ontario. But that would be selling ourselves short." Morton states that the abandonment of Canada by British troops in 1871 was a much more important event in the emergence of Canada as a separate nationality.