Search results for ""university of british columbia press""

Stretching across Ontario, Manitoba, and Minnesota, the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake basin spans boundaries and jurisdictions. Levelling the Lake explores a century and a half of social, economic, and legal arrangements through which the resources and environment of the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake watershed have been harnessed and harmed. Jamie Benidickson traces the environmental consequences of mining, forest industries, commercial fishing, hydro-electricity production, and recreation, as well as their often unanticipated impacts on local residents, including Indigenous communities, which encouraged new legal and institutional responses. Assessing the transition from primary resource extraction toward sustainable development at a watershed level, Levelling the Lake also shows how interjurisdictional and transboundary issues – many involving the Canada-US International Joint Commission – continue to play a significant role throughout the region.

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Stretching across Ontario, Manitoba, and Minnesota, the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake basin spans boundaries and jurisdictions. Levelling the Lake explores a century and a half of social, economic, and legal arrangements through which the resources and environment of the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake watershed have been harnessed and harmed. Jamie Benidickson traces the environmental consequences of mining, forest industries, commercial fishing, hydro-electricity production, and recreation, as well as their often unanticipated impacts on local residents, including Indigenous communities, which encouraged new legal and institutional responses. Assessing the transition from primary resource extraction toward sustainable development at a watershed level, Levelling the Lake also shows how interjurisdictional and transboundary issues – many involving the Canada-US International Joint Commission – continue to play a significant role throughout the region.

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On the eve of celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in Canada comes a book, the first in a series on women’s suffrage and the struggle for democracy, by acclaimed historian Joan Sangster.The achievement of the vote in 1918 is often presented as a triumphant moment in the onward, upward advancement of Canadian women. In this beautifully illustrated book, acclaimed historian Joan Sangster looks beyond the shiny rhetoric of anniversary celebrations and Heritage Minutes to show that the struggle for equality included gains and losses, inclusions and exclusions, depending on a woman’s race, class, and location in the nation.Beginning with Mary Shadd Cary’s demands for equal rights for women and blacks in the 1850s and ending with Indigenous women’s achievement of the vote in the 1960s, Sangster travels back in time to tell a new, more inclusive story for a new generation.The history of the vote, as Joan Sangster tells it, offers vital insights into our political life, exposing not only the fissures of inequality that cut deep into our country’s past but also their weaknesses in the face of resistance, optimism, and protest – an inspiring legacy that still resonates to this day.

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On the eve of celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in Canada comes a book, the first in a series on women’s suffrage and the struggle for democracy, by acclaimed historian Joan Sangster.The achievement of the vote in 1918 is often presented as a triumphant moment in the onward, upward advancement of Canadian women. In this beautifully illustrated book, acclaimed historian Joan Sangster looks beyond the shiny rhetoric of anniversary celebrations and Heritage Minutes to show that the struggle for equality included gains and losses, inclusions and exclusions, depending on a woman’s race, class, and location in the nation.Beginning with Mary Shadd Cary’s demands for equal rights for women and blacks in the 1850s and ending with Indigenous women’s achievement of the vote in the 1960s, Sangster travels back in time to tell a new, more inclusive story for a new generation.The history of the vote, as Joan Sangster tells it, offers vital insights into our political life, exposing not only the fissures of inequality that cut deep into our country’s past but also their weaknesses in the face of resistance, optimism, and protest – an inspiring legacy that still resonates to this day.

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Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement.Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this original contribution explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers’ compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). It deepens our knowledge of the role of people with disabilities within social movements in disability history. The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change.

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The landmark decision R. v. Morgentaler (1988) struck down Canada’s abortion law and is widely believed to have established a right to abortion, but its actual impact is much less decisive; and women’s access to abortion in Canada remains uneven and at risk of being curtailed. In After Morgentaler, Rachael Johnstone examines the state of abortion access in Canada today, maps its historical development since 1988, and argues that substantive access is essential to full citizenship for women. Demonstrating how access varies at the provincial level, Johnstone presents three case studies – Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick – to assess the role of both state and non-state actors in the creation and maintenance of, as well as restrictions on, access. This book affirms the need to recognize abortion as an issue fundamentally tied to women’s equality while stressing the continued utility of rights claims as a means to improve access.

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This vibrant biography of Griffintown, an inner-city Montreal neighbourhood, brings to life the history of Irish identity in the legendary enclave. As Irish immigration dwindled by the late nineteenth century, Irish culture in the city became diasporic, reflecting an imagined homeland. Focusing on the power of memory to shape community, Matthew Barlow finds that, despite sociopolitical pressures and a declining population, the spirit of this ethnic quarter was nurtured by the men and women who grew up there. Today, as Griffintown attracts renewed interest from developers, this textured analysis reveals how public memory defines our urban centres.

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In 1968, Canadians dared to take a chance on a new kind of politician. Pierre Trudeau, a relative newcomer to federal politics, became the leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister that April. Within two months, he led the Liberals to victory in a snap election. His meteoric rise to power was driven by Trudeaumania, an explosive mix of passion and fear fueled by media hype and nationalist ambition. Exhilarated crowds greeted his appearances across the country. He became a sex symbol whose image was burnished by the star-making machinery of posters, fashion, and hit songs.This book is the definitive account of Trudeaumania. Combining a lively narrative with images reflecting the rich visual culture of the times, Paul Litt’s carefully considered cultural history traces what happened when the fabled spirit of the sixties – human rights, ban-the-bomb, Vietnam, sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll, psychedelia, the counterculture – met the excitement of the Centennial and Expo 67. Canadians wanted to modernize their nation, differentiate it from the United States, and thwart the threat of Quebec separatism. Within this charged setting, Trudeau was seen as a transformative figure who would rejuvenate the nation in keeping with the idealistic hopes of the times.Litt’s evocative account of the times shows that the mania that swept Canada fifty years ago was not just a sixties crazy moment. It was a passionate quest for a new Canada that would define the values of Canadians for decades to come.

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Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground.Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors document how residential schools have been understood and represented by various groups and individuals over time; how survivors are undermining colonial narratives about residential schools; and how the churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the “new” residential school story.Ultimately, Power through Testimony questions the power of the TRC to unsettle dominant colonial narratives about residential schools and transform the relationship between Indigenous people and Canadian society.

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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region of Liangshan in southwest China was plagued by violence. Indigenous Nuosu communities clashed with Han migrants, the Qing and Republican states, and local warlords. Large numbers of Nuosu and Han alike were kidnapped and killed in widespread patterns of captive taking. The first English-language history of Liangshan, A Frontier Made Lawless challenges the view that the persistent turmoil was the result of population pressures, opium production, and the growth of local paramilitary groups. Instead, Joseph Lawson argues that the conflict resulted from the lack of a common framework for dealing with property disputes, compounded by the repeated destabilization of the region by turmoil elsewhere in China. Drawing on a range of sources including court records, locals’ memoirs, regional government records and surveys, and Nuosu epic poetry, Lawson adds new insights and comparative perspectives to the study of conflict in Liangshan.

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In August 1917, the Canadian Corps captured Hill 70, a vital piece of ground just north of the French industrial town of Lens. The Canadians suffered some 5,400 casualties and defeated three days of determined German counter attacks. This spectacularly successful but shockingly costly battle was as innovative as Vimy, yet only a handful of Canadians have heard of it or of subsequent attempts to capture Lens, which resulted in nearly 3,300 more casualties. In Capturing Hill 70, leading military historians mark the centenary of this triumph by dissecting different facets of the battle, from planning and the conduct of operations to long-term repercussions and commemoration.This richly illustrated and thought-provoking book reinstates Hill 70 to its rightful place among the pantheon of battles that helped forge the reputation of the famed Canadian Corps during the First World War, and it sheds new light on the key role played by Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie, who fought his first major action as commander of the Canadian Corps.

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Social theorists have argued that as the complexity of our ecosystems becomes more apparent, the line between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and technology and bodies becomes less distinct. Yet contemporary masculinity studies has generally failed to incorporate this new way of thinking. In this penetrating analysis of the relationship between gender and nature, Steve Garlick proposes that masculinity is best understood as a technology that shapes both our engagement with the natural world and how we define freedom.Extending the work of the Frankfurt School and Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, The Nature of Masculinity draws on case studies and new materialist theories to argue that the essence of technology is not in mechanical devices but in a particular relationship to natural forces. Within this critical framework, masculinity is a technology of embodiment, and freedom does not lie in the domination of nature but rather in fostering a new relation to it.

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In the latter half of the twentieth century, legions of industrial pioneers came to northwestern British Columbia with grand plans for mines, dams, and energy-development schemes. Yet many of their projects failed to materialize or were abandoned midstream. Unbuilt Environments reveals that these lapsed resource projects had lasting effects on the natural and human environment. Drawing on a range of case studies to analyze the social and environmental impacts of unfinished projects, Jonathan Peyton considers development failure a productive concept for northwestern Canada. He looks at a closed asbestos mine, an abandoned rail grade, an imagined series of hydroelectric installations, a failed LNG export facility, and a transmission line – and finds that these unrealized developments continue to shape contemporary resource conflicts.

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Since the seventeenth century, Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, Russian, and other imperial forces have defied Manchuria’s unrelenting summers and unforgiving winters to fight for sovereignty over the natural resources of Northeast Asia. Until now, historians have focused on rivalries between the region’s imperial invaders. Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria examines the interplay of climate and competing economic and political interests in the region’s vibrant – and violent – cultural narrative. In this unique and compelling analysis of Manchuria’s environmental history, contributors demonstrate how geography shaped the region’s past. Families that settled this borderland reaped its riches while at the mercy of an unforgiving and hotly contested landscape. As China’s strength as a world leader continues to grow, this volume invites exploration of the indelible links between empire and environment – and shows how the geopolitical future of this global economic powerhouse is rooted in its past.

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Three-quarters of a century after the Second World War, almost all the participants are gone. This book contains interviews with and about the Canadian who led the troops during that war. Edited and introduced by one of the foremost military historians of our time, this carefully curated collection brings to life the generals and their wartime experiences.The interviews are based on lengthy conversations that J.L. Granatstein had with the surviving generals, their key staff officers, fighters under their command, and their families. Generals McNaughton, Crerar, Simonds, Foulkes, and Burns are among those discussed. The content is revealing and conversations frank. Peers and subordinates alike scrutinize key commanders of the war, sometimes offering praise but often passing harsh judgment. We learn of their failings and successes – and of the heavy weight of command borne by all.

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Casey Ready combines the personal and the political to ask: What is neoliberalism? How does it harm women? And what can be done about it?Her book looks at how three YWCA women’s shelters in Ontario were affected by the neoliberal policies of Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservative government and the subsequent “new-neoliberal” policies of Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government. In particular, it focuses on how the Liberal government built upon its predecessors’ neoliberal policies to try to control the shelters’ organizational structures and services, and even to neutralize the language used to describe violence against women.Drawing on interviews with forty-one shelter staff, clients, volunteers, and activists, Shelter in a Storm exposes the dangers for women that are embedded in neoliberal policies and reveals the value of revitalizing feminism to counteract this powerful ideology.

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Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring black slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, Loyalist families brought slaves with them to settle in the Maritime colonies of British North America.The transition from slavery in the American colonies to slavery in the Maritimes required slaves to use their traditions of survival, resistance, and kinship networks to negotiate their new reality. While some local judges chipped away at slavery, Maritime slaves fought against the institution of slavery by refusing to work, by running away, by reconstituting their families, and by challenging their owners in court.Harvey Amani Whitfield’s book, the first on slavery in the Maritimes, is a startling corrective to the enduring and triumphant narrative of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad.

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In From Left to Right, Brian Thorn explores what motivated Canadian women to become politically engaged in the 1940s and ’50s. Although women in these decades are often depicted as being trapped in the suburbs – caring for children, baking pies, and leaving politics to men – they joined diverse political parties, including the Social Credit Party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and the Communist Party of Canada. Thorn argues, controversially, that while women on the left and right had different goals, their activism continued to be informed by maternalism. They used their roles as wives and mothers to influence their parties’ positions on war and unions, to break down barriers between the private and public spheres, and to push for a new world order. Along the way, they laid the foundations for the 1960s feminist movement.

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In the early 1900s, panic over the arrival of South Asian immigrants swept up and down the west coast of North America. While racism and fear of labour competition were at the heart of this furor, public leaders – including physicians, union leaders, civil servants, journalists, and politicians – latched on to unsubstantiated public health concerns to justify the exclusion of South Asians from British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. Not Fit to Stay examines how and why South Asians were excluded from immigration through legislation that took effect in Canada and the United States in the early twentieth century. This book is an important study of how white North Americans saw first-wave South Asian immigrants as separate from, and inferior to, other groups in the evolving racial hierarchy on the west coast of North America.

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For over a decade, Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan dominated media headlines, government discussions, academic studies, and the public international security debate, often to the exclusion of issues that have traditionally shaped Canadian approaches to security and defence policy. Now that the mission in Afghanistan is over, what issues should define Canada’s international security agenda? This collection of essays, written by leading observers of Canadian policy, seeks to answer this question by investigating how Canada will likely respond to new threats and security challenges in light of the experience gained in Afghanistan. Topics include the future place of NATO in defence and security policy; emerging regions of concern and interest; and nuclear weapons and arms control, including missile defence and the military use of space.

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Just as Canada’s population has changed in the past four decades, so too has its prison population. The increasing diversity among prisoners raises important questions about how we punish those who break the law. Parole in Canada is the first book to explore how concerns about Aboriginality, gender, and the multicultural ideal of “diversity” have been interpreted and used to alter federal parole policy and practice.Using the Parole of Board of Canada as a case study, this book shows how certain facets of offender differences are selectively included for “accommodation,” while fundamental institutional structures, practices, and power arrangements remain unchanged. Sarah Turnbull argues that, as the current approach fails to challenge outdated notions about gender, race, and aboriginality within the penal system, instead of addressing concerns around diversity, these measures end up contributing to further exclusion and discrimination within the system.

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In recent decades, community forestry has taken root across Canada. Locally run initiatives are lauded as welcome alternatives to large corporate and industrial logging practices, yet little research has been done to document their tangible outcomes or draw connections between their ideals of local control, community benefit, ecological stewardship, and economic diversification and the realities of community forestry practice.This book brings together the work of over twenty-five researchers to provide the first comparative and empirically rich portrait of community forestry policy and practice in Canada. Tackling all of the forestry regions from Newfoundland to British Columbia, it unearths the history of community forestry, revealing surprising regional differences linked to patterns of policy-making and cultural traditions. Case studies celebrate innovative practices in governance and ecological management while uncovering challenges related to government support and market access. The future of the sector is also considered, including the role of institutional reform, multiscale networks, and adaptive management strategies.

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In 1875, the Canadian government created a reserve for Icelandic immigrants on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. Hoping for a better life in Canada, many of the New Iceland colonists found only hardship, disappointment, or death. Those who survived scurvy and smallpox faced crop failure, internal dissension, and severe flooding that nearly ended the project only six years after it had begun.This innovative book looks beyond the experiences of these Icelandic immigrants to understand the context into which their reserve fits within the history of settler colonialism. Ryan Eyford juxtaposes the Icelanders’ experiences with those of the Cree, Ojibwe, and Metis people they displaced. By analyzing themes such as race, land, health, and governance, he draws out the tensions that punctuated the process of colonization in western Canada and situates the region within the global history of colonialism.

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As the nineteenth century ended, Ontario wildlife became increasingly valuable. Tourists and sport hunters spent growing amounts of money in search of game, and the government began to extend its regulatory powers in this arena. Restrictions were imposed on hunting and trapping, completely ignoring Anishinaabeg hunting rights set out in the Robinson Treaties of 1850. Who Controls the Hunt? examines how Ontario’s emerging wildlife conservation laws failed to reconcile First Nations treaty rights and the power of the state. David Calverley traces the political and legal arguments prompted by the interplay of treaty rights, provincial and dominion government interests, and the corporate concerns of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A nuanced examination of Indigenous resource issues, the themes of this book remain germane to questions about who controls the hunt in Canada today.

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The image of a rough frontier – where working men were tempted away from church on Sundays by more profane concerns – was perpetuated by postwar church leaders, who decried the decline of religious involvement.In this pioneering book, Tina Block debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that consciously rejected the trappings of organized religion but not necessarily spirituality – and not necessarily God.Secularism was not only the domain of the working man: women, families, and middle-class communities all helped to shape the region’s secular identity. But rejection of religion led to family, gender, and class tensions.Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and archival sources, Block explores the dynamics of Northwest secularity, grounded in the cultural permeability of the Canada–United States border, the independent spirit of those who called the region home, and their openness to secular ways of experiencing the world.

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This vibrant new collection edited by Viviane Gosselin and Phaedra Livingstone explores the central role of museums as memory keepers and makers.The idea of historical consciousness – how our conception of the past informs our sense of the present and of the future – is of growing importance for cultural institutions in North America. Using case studies and observations that emerge from a Canadian context, Museums and the Past considers how the modern museum fosters public perceptions of history.Contributors focus on the relationship between historical consciousness and museum practice and reflect on the challenges of transforming museums into dynamic civic labs and meaningful places of memory and learning. The result is an engaging range of perspectives on the contemporary museum’s pedagogical and ethical responsibilities.

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Every year, over 1.3 million people apply to visit, work, or settle in Canada. It falls to visa officers to determine who gets in – and who stays out. In the face of this enormous responsibility, how do these gatekeepers use their discretionary authority to assess eligibility, credibility, and risk?Seeking answers to this question, Vic Satzewich conducted interviews with 128 visa officers, locally engaged staff, and immigration program managers at eleven overseas offices. He reveals how the organizational context within which they work shapes their decision making. When something in an application does not “add up” – somber photographs from a supposed wedding celebration, for example – an officer conducts follow-up interviews with the applicant.In a world where no two visa applications are the same, and in the context of complex and shifting population movements and pressures, this is a fascinating look at how visa officers do their work.

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Stories of Indigenous children forced to attend residential schools have haunted Canadians in recent years. Yet most Indigenous children in Canada attended “Indian day schools,” and later public schools, near their home communities. Although church and government officials often kept detailed administrative records, we know little about the actual experiences of the students themselves.In What We Learned, two generations of Tsimshian students – a group of elders born in the 1930s and 1940s and a group of middle-aged adults born in the 1950s and 1960s – reflect on their traditional Tsimshian education and the formal schooling they received in northwestern British Columbia. Their stories offer a starting point for understanding the legacy of day schools on Indigenous lives and communities. Their recollections also invite readers to consider a broader notion of education – one that includes traditional Indigenous views that conceive of learning as a lifelong experience that takes place across multiple contexts.

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Disability Politics and Care examines a provincial direct-funding program to illuminate what happens when people with disabilities take control of their own care arrangements.In addition to investigating responses from a wide range of stakeholders, Christine Kelly reflects on the broader social and political implications of these types of programs. She probes the divide that exists between rejections of care by disability activists, on the one hand, and attempts by feminists to value gendered forms of labour, on the other. Rather than trying to find common ground between these viewpoints, Kelly explores how maintaining a tension between them could positively transform the understanding and practice of care. Enlivened by the voices of disabled people, attendants, and informal supports, this book uses one independent living program as a starting point for untangling much larger philosophical, theoretical, and material questions about (self) determination, (inter)dependence, governance, and justice.

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Since the 1960s, bilingualism has become a defining aspect of Canadian identity. And yet, today, relatively few English Canadians speak or choose to speak French. Why has personal bilingualism failed to increase as much as attitudes about bilingualism as a Canadian value?In So They Want Us to Learn French, Matthew Hayday explores the various ways in which bilingualism was promoted to English-speaking Canadians from the 1960s to the late 1990s. He analyzes the strategies and tactics employed by organizations on both sides of the bilingualism debate. Against a dramatic background of constitutional change and controvery, economic turmoil, demographic shifts, and the on-again, off-again possibility of Quebec separatism, English-speaking Canadians had to decide whether they and their children should learn French. Highlighting the personal experiences of proponents and advocates, Hayday provides a vivid narrative of a complex, controversial, and fundamentally Canadian question.

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Debating Hate Crime examines the language and argumentation used by parliamentarians, senators, and committee witnesses to debate Canada’s “hate-crime” laws. These lively, and at times raucous, legislative debates and committee hearings reveal much about party politics, public policy, and social issues of the day, including citizenship, nationhood, and Canadian values. Drawing on discourse analysis, semiotics, and critical psychoanalysis, Allyson Lunny explores how the tropes, metaphors, and other linguistic signifiers used in these debates expose the particular concerns, trepidations, and anxieties of Canadian lawmakers and the expert witnesses called before their committees. In so doing, Lunny reveals and interrogates the meaning and social signification of the endorsement of, and resistance to, hate law. The result is a rich historical and analytical account of some of Canada’s most passionate public debates on victimization, rightful citizenship, social threat, and moral erosion.

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“I am not afraid to be called a politician,” declared Paul Martin Sr., defending his life’s work in politics. “Next to preaching the word of God, there is nothing nobler than to serve one’s fellow countrymen in government.” First elected to the House of Commons in 1935, Martin served in the cabinet of four prime ministers and ran for the Liberal Party leadership three times. This book examines his remarkable career as a liberal reformer and politician who tackled the issues of his day with consummate political skill and gritty determination.Cutting a broad swath through the history of twentieth-century Canada, Greg Donaghy uses extensive interviews and untapped archival sources to challenge the prevailing view of Martin as simply an ambitious Windsor ward heeler and party operator. Martin embraced a tolerant politics of compromise and accommodation that sought to unite Canadians in search of a more just and equitable world. Though some mocked his ambition and doubted his progressive politics, his resolute championing of health care and pension rights, new meanings for Canadian citizenship, and internationalism in world affairs would leave an indelible mark on Canada’s political landscape.

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Ever since certain homosexual acts were decriminalized in 1969, queer activists have fought for – and won – a series of public policy battles in governments across Canada. As Queer Mobilizations shows, anti-discrimination legislation, the extension of benefits to same-sex couples, the right to marry, adoption rights, and the protection of gay-straight alliances in schools did not result from a single act nor from the work of a single organization but rather from the concerted efforts of many people, in many places, over many years.This volume examines the relationships between LGBTQ activists and local, provincial, and federal governments. The contributors explore how various governments have tried to regulate and repress LGBTQ movements, and how, in turn, queer activists have successfully shaped public policy, across the political spectrum, from city halls to the House of Commons.

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Far Off Metal River examines how explorer Samuel Hearne’s account of the alleged 1771 “Bloody Falls massacre” in the Central Arctic has shaped ongoing colonization and economic exploitation of the North.As Emilie Cameron demonstrates, the Arctic has for centuries been treated like a blank page onto which a long line of explorers, missionaries, anthropologists, resource companies, and politicians have inscribed stories that serve their own interests. These stories have played a central role in shaping the region, including efforts to open the North to industrial resource extraction. Consequently, Qablunaat (non-Inuit, non-Indigenous people) have a responsibility to question their relationships with the North and northerners, first by placing these stories within their proper historical, geographical, and social context, and then by developing new understandings and new relationships that reflect the actual political, cultural, economic, environmental, and social landscapes of the contemporary Arctic.landscapes of the contemporary Arctic.

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Since 9/11, the wars on terror, economic crises, climate change, and humanitarian emergencies have forced decision makers to institute new measures to maintain security. Foreign policy analysts tend to view these decisions as being divorced from ethics, but Unsettled Balance shows that arguments about rights, obligations, norms, and values have played a profound role in Canadian foreign policy and international relations since the 1990s.The contributors to this volume examine a range of topics – from funding for climate change adaptation to the militarization of humanitarian aid – to collectively explore three key questions. What is the meaning of “ethics” and “security,” and how are they linked? To what extent have considerations of ethics and security changed in the twenty-first century? And what are the implications of a shifting historical context for Canada’s international relations? Their conclusions are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only how Canada responds to global challenges but also why it responds the way it does.

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Breaking open colonization to reveal tangled cultural and economic networks, Webs of Empire offers new paths into colonial history. Linking Gore and Chicago, Maori and Asia, India and newspapers, whalers and writing, Ballantyne presents empire building as a spreading web of connected places, people, ideas, and trade. These links question narrow, national stories, while broadening perspectives on the past and the legacies of colonialism that persist today. Bringing together essays from two decades of prolific publishing on international colonial history, Webs of Empire establishes Tony Ballantyne as one of the leading historians of the British Empire.

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In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For these men, the Prairies were a land of opportunity; there, they could open shops and potentially earn enough money to become merchants. The result of almost a decade’s research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating Connections tells the stories of some of Prairie Canada's Chinese settlers – men and women from various generations who navigated cultural difference. These stories reveal the critical importance of networks in coping with experiences of racism and establishing a successful life on the Prairies. This book offers an incisive look at the organizations, relationships, and ties that were critical in forging and sustaining life – yet it also serves as a remarkable record of the voices of some of the Prairies’ most resilient and resourceful pioneers.

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In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For these men, the Prairies were a land of opportunity; there, they could open shops and potentially earn enough money to become merchants. The result of almost a decade’s research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating Connections tells the stories of some of Prairie Canada's Chinese settlers – men and women from various generations who navigated cultural difference. These stories reveal the critical importance of networks in coping with experiences of racism and establishing a successful life on the Prairies. This book offers an incisive look at the organizations, relationships, and ties that were critical in forging and sustaining life – yet it also serves as a remarkable record of the voices of some of the Prairies’ most resilient and resourceful pioneers.

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Changes in technology and media consumption are transforming the way people communicate about politics. Are they also changing the way politicians communicate to the public? Political Communication in Canada examines the way political parties, politicians, interest groups, the media, and citizens are using new tactics, tools, and channels to disseminate information, and also investigates the implications of these changes. Drawing on recent examples, contributors review such things as the branding of the New Democratic Party, how Stephen Harper’s image is managed, and politicians’ use of Twitter. They also discuss the evolving role of political journalism, including media coverage of politics and how Canadians use the Internet for political discussions. In an era when political communication – from political marketing to citizen journalism – is of vital importance to the workings of government, this timely volume provides insight into the future of Canadian democracy.

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Mixed Race Amnesia is an ambitious and critical look at how multiraciality is experienced in the global north. Drawing on a series of interviews, acclaimed geographer Minelle Mahtani explores some of the assumptions and attitudes people have around multiraciality.She discovers that, in Canada at least, people of mixed race are often romanticized as being the embodiment of a post-racial future – an ideal that is supported by government policy and often internalized by people of mixed race. As Mahtani reveals, this superficial celebration of multiraciality is often done without any acknowledgment of the freight and legacy of historical racisms. Consequently, a strategic and collective amnesia is taking place – one where complex diasporic and family histories are being lost while colonial legacies are being reinforced.Mahtani argues that in response, a new anti-colonial approach to multiraciality is needed, and she equips her readers with the analytical tools to do this.

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In Equality Deferred, Dominique Clément traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins of human rights legislation, demonstrating how governments inhibit the application of their own laws, and how it falls to social movements to create, promote, and enforce these laws.Focusing on British Columbia – the first jurisdiction to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex – Clément documents a variety of absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. The province was at the forefront of the women’s movement, which produced the country’s first rape crisis centres, first feminist newspaper, and first battered women’s shelters. And yet nowhere else in the country was human rights law more contested. For an entire generation, the province’s two dominant political parties fought to impose their respective vision of the human rights state. This history of human rights law, based on previously undisclosed records of British Columbia’s human rights commission, begins with the province’s first equal pay legislation in 1953 and ends with the collapse of the country’s most progressive human rights legal regime in 1984.This book is not only a testament to the revolutionary impact of human rights on Canadian law but also a reminder that it takes more than laws to effect transformative social change.

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The political concept of recognition has introduced new ways of thinking about the relationship between minorities and justice in plural societies. But is a politics informed by recognition valuable to minorities today?Contributors to this volume examine the successes and failures of struggles for recognition and self-determination in relation to claims of religious groups, cultural minorities, and indigenous peoples on territories associated with Canada, the United States, Europe, Latin America, India, New Zealand, and Australia. The chapters look at cultural recognition in the context of public policy about intellectual and physical property, membership practices, and independence movements, while probing debates about toleration, democratic citizenship, and colonialism.Together the contributions point to a distinctive set of challenges posed by a politics of recognition and self-determination to peoples seeking emancipation from unjust relations.

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Ask any Canadian what “Métis” means, and they will likely say “mixed race.” Canadians consider Métis mixed in ways that other indigenous people are not, and the census and courts have premised their recognition of Métis status on this race-based understanding.According to Andersen, Canada got it wrong. Our very preoccupation with mixedness is not natural but stems from more than 150 years of sustained labour on the part of the state and others. From its roots deep in the colonial past, the idea of “Métis as mixed” has pervaded the Canadian consciousness until it settled in the realm of common sense. In the process, “Métis” has become a racial category rather than the identity of an indigenous people with a shared sense of history and culture.Andersen asks all Canadians to consider the consequences of adopting a definition of “Métis” that makes it nearly impossible for the Métis nation to make political claims as a people.

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During the “long sixties,” baby boomers raised on democratic postwar ideals demanded a more egalitarian society for all. While a few became vocal leaders at universities across Canada, nearly 90% of Canada’s young people went straight to work after high school. There, they brought the anti-authoritarian spirit of the youth revolt to the labour movement.While university-based activists combined youth culture with a new brand of radicalism to form the New Left, young workers were pressing for wildcat strikes and defying their aging union leaders in a wave of renewed militancy. In Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan looks at these converging currents, demonstrating convincingly how they were part of a single youth phenomenon.With just short of seventy interviews complementing the extensive use of archival records from ten different cities, this book claims a central place for labour and class in the legacy of the Canadian sixties.

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When hundreds of people displaced by mass violence volunteered to tell their stories to the Montreal Life Stories project, they challenged long-held beliefs about how oral stories should be recorded, collected, and shared.Using the Montreal Life Stories project as an example of collective storytelling, Oral History at the Crossroads rejects the idea that there must be “critical distance” between researchers and their subjects. Instead, it provides an alternative model to traditional research practice, one where community members “share authority” as equal partners in a project. More than a hundred photographs illustrate the experiences of those who participated in the project and highlight the intersections between oral history, digital media, and performance.A sustained reflection on collaborative research, Oral History at the Crossroads has methodological and ethical implications for scholars. And, as a contemporary model for curating oral and public history, it pushes the field in new directions.

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The attacks of 9/11 created a philosophical and cultural shockwave felt around the world. For many Canadians, 9/11 also produced feelings of insecurity, vulnerability, and suspicion of “Muslims” in general. Being Muslim was often seen as being Arab, and diverse Muslim communities were glossed over as if they were invisible. How did these negative attitudes come about?Many point to the role of the news media in framing and contextualizing events post-9/11 and its complicity in reproducing racist images of Muslim minorities. Mission Invisible chronicles varying racialized constructions of Muslim communities in the news during the most significant stage of reportage: the initial weeks in which the events, surrounding issues, and primary actors of 9/11 were all first framed by journalists.In showing how media coverage of Muslim communities was imagined, negotiated, and represented after 9/11, Mission Invisible provides much-needed empirical evidence of how racist discourses are constructed and reinforced by the media in Canada.

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In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. Featuring a villainous high-ranking government official, it was the first in a series of wildly popular corruption dramas that riveted the nation. In Staging Corruption, Ruoyun Bai looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of these dramas and the ways in which they express the collective dreams and nightmares of China in the market-reform era. She also considers how these dramas – as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political censorship – unveil complicated relationships between power, media, and society. Her book will be essential reading for those following China's ongoing struggles with the highly volatile issue of political and social nepotism.

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In the early twentieth century, thousands of women from the Samsui area of Guangdong, China migrated to Singapore during a period of economic and natural calamity, leaving their families behind. In their new country, many found work in the construction industry, with others working in households or factories where they were called hong tou jin, translated literally as “red-head-scarf,” after the headgear that protected them from the sun. In Singapore, the women have been celebrated as pioneering figures for their hard work and resilience, and in China for the sacrifices they made for their families. Remembering the Samsui Women looks at who these women really are and at how both countries have commemorated their experiences. It is an illuminating study of the connection between memory and nation, including the politics of what is remembered and what is forgotten.

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