Keith Fleming

Professor

PhD, The University of Western Ontario, 1988

Email: kfleming@uwo.ca
Telephone: 519-661-2111 ext. 83645
Office: Lawson Hall 1208

Full CV

Supervision

Master's & Doctoral Level supervisory privileges

Teaching: Fall/Winter 2025-26

Research and Specialization

Professor Fleming is a specialist in Canadian history and North American business history, with research interests in Canadian political history, the history of Ontario, and the history of business entrepreneurship.

Current Research Projects

My principal research project currently is a book-length History of the Liberal Party of Ontario, 1830s to 2025.

The Liberal Party of Ontario’s ideological origins are traceable to the 1830s, and its institutional framework emerged during the 1850s, making it one of Canada’s oldest political organizations.  Despite the party’s role governing and shaping Canada’s most populous and economically powerful province over extended periods since 1867, a comprehensive history of the Liberal Association of Ontario/Liberal Party of Ontario has never been written.  In addition to documenting the party’s institutional evolution and analyzing its erratic history of electoral fortune (and misfortune), the main focus of the research will be on the party’s ideological makeup, policy formation, and influence shaping Ontario’s political culture.  The specific nature of the Liberal Party of Ontario’s brand of liberalism – how it was articulated, evolved, promoted, and received – from the 1830s to the present will be central to the research.

A second project is an article scheduled to appear in the journal Ontario History entitled “‘One Boy Who Left the City to Make Good in the Country’:  the political rise and fall of Walter Edward Harris”

A lawyer based in Markdale, Grey County, Harris served as the Liberal MP for the rural Ontario riding of Grey-Bruce from 1940 to 1957. Little known nationally but especially popular among his fellow caucus members, he was widely considered a rising star in the Liberal government and soon touted as a leading candidate to succeed Louis St-Laurent as party leader and Canadian prime minister. As Canada’s first Minister of Citizenship and Immigration from 1950-53 he oversaw changes to the country’s post-war immigration policies, as well as the first substantial revisions to the Indian Act since the 1880s. From 1953-57 he served as Minister of Finance, establishing a reputation for fiscal conservatism. Despite years of favorable publicity highlighting his leadership prospects, Harris opted not to compete in the 1957 Liberal leadership convention won by Lester Bowles Pearson, a veteran diplomat and Secretary of State for External Affairs. By that point, saddled with several policy missteps as finance minister and sharing blame for the Liberal government’s 1957 general election defeat, Harris conceded he could not compete with Pearson’s celebrity as recent winner of the Nobel Peace Price which made him the “world’s best-known Canadian.” Harris attempted to revive his political career in 1958 by running for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party but lost by a narrow margin. Thereafter, his life in electoral politics finished, Harris focused on practicing law in Markdale and as an executive of the Victoria and Grey Trust Company.

Teaching Philosophy

Effective teaching entails achieving a creative balance between communicating facts (although many historical “facts” are disputable), and enabling students to arrive at their own reasonable conclusions about the practical and intellectual implications of a particular historical event, personage, or idea. Through the examination of historiographical trends I attempt to convey to students the importance of repeatedly questioning and reinterpreting what is commonly regarded as knowledge and truth, not just in history, but in any subject. By assisting students to become diligent researchers, careful readers, clear and cogent writers, and critical interpreters and synthesizers of multiple forms of information, my underlying purpose is to communicate to them that informed and substantiated opinions are a hallmark of an educated and hopefully engaged citizen.

Latest Publications

Books

• (2015) “The world is our parish”: John King Gordon, 1900-1989: An Intellectual Biography (University of Toronto Press)
  
  The biography documents Gordon’s extraordinarily varied career as clergyman, university professor, CCF political candidate and organizer, book and magazine editor, journalist and author, and United Nations official. With intellectual origins in the social gospel and Christian socialist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, Gordon was a leading Canadian political activist and advocate of internationalism and human rights by the 1970s and 1980s.

Refereed Journal Publications

• (2020) "'Socially Disruptive Actions … Have Become as Canadian as Maple Syrup': Civil Disobedience in Canada, 1960–2012" in Journal of Canadian Studies (Volume 54 Issue 1, Winter 2020), pp. 181-212.
  
  

  Focusing on the period from 1960 until Quebec’s “Maple Spring” protests of 2012, this article examines the practice of civil disobedience by a diversity of dissenting individuals and groups in Canada. Considered collectively, the examples of peace, anti-nuclear, and civil rights protests; defence of English-language minority rights in Quebec; corporate resistance to Sunday shopping restrictions in Ontario; pro- and anti-abortion advocacy; and the often overlapping activism of Indigenous and environmentalist groups illustrate how civil disobedience endeavoured to influence, whether by conversion or coercion, public opinion on some of Canadian society’s most complex and divisive issues.

Selected Publications

Books:

• (2015) "The world is our parish”: John King Gordon, 1900-1989: An Intellectual Biography (University of Toronto Press).
  
  
• (1992) Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911-1958 (McGill-Queen's University Press).

Articles and Book Reviews

• review of Ken Brown, Macdonald and Mrs. Hall: Brought Together by Beavermead Farm, Peterborough (Cover to Cover, 2024) in Ontario Historical Society Bulletin, Spring 2026, p. 10.

• review of Rideau Township Historical Society, North Gower: A Village History, 1820-2020 (2023) in Ontario Historical Society Bulletin, Spring 2026, p. 11.

• review of Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity (UBC Press, 2024) by Raymond B. Blake in The Canadian Historical Review, June 2025, Vol. 106 (2), pp. 310-311.

• review of Ian McKechnie and Tom Mohr, eds., Reflections on Old Victoria County:  A Tribute to R.B. Fleming (Independently published, 2024), in Ontario Historical Society Bulletin, Fall 2025, pp. 18-19.

• review of Scott Kennedy, Nobody’s Home: Abandoned Houses of York Mills and the Bridle Path (Friesen Press, 2023), in Ontario Historical Society Bulletin, Fall 2025, p. 19.

• “The Rise and Fall of an Ontario Business Dynasty: William Kennedy & Sons and its Successors, 1857-1997,” in Lori Chamers, Edgar-André Montigny, James Onusko, and Dimitry Anastakis, eds., Ontario Since Confederation: A Reader, 2^nd edition (University of Toronto Press, 2024), pp. 182-207.

• “‘Socially Disruptive Actions … Have Become as Canadian as Maple Syrup’: Civil Disobedience in Canada, 1960–2012,” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes, Volume 54, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 181-211.

• review of Brewed in the North:  A History of Labatt’s (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) by Matthew J. Bellamy in The Canadian Historical Review, December 2020, Vol.101 (4), pp. 664-666.

• review of Making Managers in Canada, 1945-1995: Companies, Community Colleges, and Universities (Routledge, 2018) in Business History, April 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1757589)

• review of Imperial Standard:  Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880 (University of Calgary Press, 2019) by Graham D. Taylor in The Canadian Historical Review (Vol 101, No. 1, March 2020), pp. 153-155.

• review of Expect Miracles: Recollections of a Lucky Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014) by David Culver with Alan Freeman in The Prospectus: The Newsletter of the Canadian Business History Association, December 2017.

• review of “‘A Justifiable Obsession’: Conservative Ontario’s Relations with Ottawa, 1943-1985” (University of Toronto Press, 2013) by P.E. Bryden in University of Toronto Quarterly (Vol. 84, No. 3, Summer 2015), pp. 308-310.

• “The Rise and Fall of an Ontario Business Dynasty: William Kennedy & Sons and its Successors, 1857-1997” in Ontario History (Vol CIV, No. 2, Autumn 2012), pp. 63-89.

• review of Profiting the Crown: Canada’s Polymer Corporation, 1942-1990 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) by Matthew J. Bellamy in University of Toronto Quarterly (Vol. 76, No. 1, Winter 2007), pp. 545-7.

• review of Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire by Jamie Swift and Keith Stewart (Between the Lines, 2004) in The American Review of Canadian Studies (Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2006), pp. 357-359.

• “Bishop William Townshend” in Michael Baker and Hilary Bates Neary, eds., 100 Fascinating Londoners (James Lorimer & Company, 2005), pp. 89-90.

• review of Eugene A. Forsey: An Intellectual Biography by Frank Milligan (University of Calgary Press, 2004) in The Canadian Historical Review (Vol. 86, No. 3, Sept. 2005), pp. 555-557.

• “hydroelectricity” in The Oxford Companion to Canadian History (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 300-301.

• "Owen Sound and the CPR Great Lakes Fleet: The Rise of a Port, 1840-1912," Ontario History, LXXVI (1984), pp. 3-31.

• "The Uniform Rate and Rural Electrification Issues in Ontario Politics, 1919-1923," Canadian Historical Review, LXIV (1983), pp. 494-518.

Awards and Distinctions

• Named several times since 2007 to the University Student Council Teaching Honour Roll