Ian Kyer’s The Ontario Bond Scandal of 1924 Re-examined investigates a famous case from the 1920s. Peter Smith, the former treasurer of the Province of Ontario, and Aemilius Jarvis, one of Canada’s most prominent businessmen, were found guilty of criminal conspiracy to defraud the Ontario government in connection with the repurchase of three series of succession duty-free bonds. At the time (and since), people have disagreed about whether they were guilty or whether they acted honestly and legitimately but were caught up in the tangled party politics of the period. Kyer, a historian and a lawyer with extensive experience with corporate finance and government-business relations, has extensively researched the case to provide a very well-written and well-​informed analysis of the bond transactions, the police investigation, the trial, and the appeal decision. He argues cogently that Smith and Irving were wrongly convicted and explains why. This is a first-rate example of the genre of legal history usually known as “legal archeology,” an excavation of a case fully informed by the law, politics, and personalities involved that serves to illuminate not just the case, but the tenor of the times.

C. Ian Kyer is a distinguished lawyer, historian, and author. For more than thirty years he practised law with Fasken, a prominent Bay Street firm. Ranked as one of Canada’s top 500 lawyers, he advised private sector parties as well as various governments on numerous projects. On his retirement from Fasken, he became in-house counsel to RPM Technologies, now part of Broadridge, a multinational provider of services to the financial industry. But Ian was an historian before he became a lawyer (with a PhD in European history), and he never abandoned his historical interests; he merely refocused those interests on legal and business history. He has written histories of legal education, the Fasken firm, the origins of the Toronto Transit Commission, and the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation. He has also written numerous biographies of lawyers and businesspeople for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the Canadian Encyclopedia, and New Federation Press, and a historical novel about Salieri’s relationship with Mozart.

C. Ian Kyer's profile page

“The author has done an absolutely extraordinary job of tracing the threads of a complex financial, political, and legal “scandal” from its earliest inspiration to its final — perhaps! — implications in the creation of the Serious Fraud Office in Ontario in 2018. At its simplest, the Ontario Bond Scandal is a convoluted affair, and here Ian Kyer does herculean work to untie the knots and lay it all out for his readers to understand.”

Professor Penny Bryden, University of Victoria history department

“The cast of interesting and important legal characters is unmatched in any other Canadian case, as are the twists and turns in the case. I am proud to have this book dedicated to me.”

Martin L. Friedland, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto and former Dean, University of Toronto Law School

“This is a very interesting, first class book of interest to legal historians in the corporate-commercial context. It is very thoroughly researched and well and clearly written. Although the subject matter is somewhat technical, the author makes everything clear to the general reader.”

Professor Jim Phillips, University of Toronto Law School and Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society