bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contesting the Rule(s) of Medicine: Homeopathy’s Battle for Legitimacy
Authors: Steuter Erin
Published: December 2016

This essay examines the political, economic and ideological elements at work in a battle over authoritative knowledge in the field of biomedicine. The orthodox medical establishment is facing a challenge to its historical position of dominance from an array of alternative therapies. As one of the leading forms of alternative medicine, homeopathy is seeking legitimacy but faces significant opposition from the scientific and medical community. The Canadian public and other social organizations are lobbying for medical pluralism and more access to alternatives. In this essay the author examines this contest and evaluates the nature of the ideological debate between homeopathy and the medical establishment historically and in the contemporary period.
“Kicking Uncle Sam out of the Peaceable Kingdom”: English-Canadian “New Nationalism” and Americanization
Authors: Edwardson Ryan
Published: December 2016

This essay examines the English-Canadian nationalist intelligentsia’s reaction to Americanization and the attempt to reclaim Canadian sovereignty during the 1960s and 1970s. Ranging from moderate to radical, the so-called “new nationalism” I boomed as English-Canadians indulged in producing and consuming Canadiana. While the movement failed in its political goals, it succeeded in drawing attention to domestic problems and in providing a “Peaceable Kingdom” sense of place during a time of national renegotiation and international insecurity.
High Technology Policy in the Alpes-Maritimes and in British Columbia: Two Cases of Adapting Regional Economies to Globalization
Authors: Hoven Adrian van den
Published: December 2016

This essay compares how subnational actors adapt their economies to globalization with policies to promote high technology industrial development. It examines this issue by comparing high technology policy in the Alpes-Maritimes (France) and in British Columbia (Canada). It argues that globalization has reduced the ability of the Canadian and French national states to direct industrial policy because of external constraints on budgetary and tariff policies, but that subnational authorities in both countries have increased their participation in economic development. Both regions have adopted high technology policies that respond to their specific political, economic, geographic and demographic constraints. The relative success or failure of their policies depends on institutional, economic and cultural variables.
Barometers of Change: Presidents Hugh Eayrs and John Gray of the Macmillan Company of Canada
Authors: Panofsky Ruth
Published: December 2016

This essay examines the deliberate role undertaken by the Macmillan Company of Canada to develop a contemporary Canadian literature. It focusses on the period from 1921 to 1973, when first Hugh Eayrs and later John Gray were presidents of the company. Under the direction of Eayrs, Macmillan established itself as a publisher with a culture and interest separate from its parent and affiliate houses in London and New York. Eayrs built a roster of important writers, including Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove, E.J. Pratt, Grey Owl and Morley Callaghan, and helped establish an audience for Canadian novels and poetry. After Eayrs’s death, Gray continued to publish Canadian writers, among them novelists Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell and Adele Wiseman. Both Eayrs and Gray were visionaries who shared a deep commitment to fostering the literature of Canada, which they often published in difficult circumstances and at considerable financial risk.
Catching Fire: Allegories of Alchemical Transformation in the Art of P.K. Page
Authors: Mitha Farouk
Published: December 2016

P.K. Page’s story “Unless the Eye Catch Fire” stands out in her oeuvre, in part because of its relative length but also due to its mixing of genres - part fictional narrative, part autobiographical journal, and part prose poem. Despite its distinctive form and style, it embodies an allegorical structure which explores the theme of spiritual self-transformation. This is a key theme across her poetry and prose. “Unless the Eye Catch Fire” resembles allegories of alchemical transformation, focussing on processes of transmutation through fire, where fire is not only for burning but is a source of light - spectral, visionary and spiritual. This essay offers a reading of “Unless the Eye Catch Fire” as an alchemical allegory and argues that Page’s handling of alchemical themes goes beyond simply imitating or borrowing from alchemical traditions, but represents a unique aesthetic vision of mystical transformation.
Establishing a Context for P.K. Page’s Interest in Eastern Religions: When Papier-Mâché Angels Descend among the Metals and the Flowers
Authors: Vavassis Vivian
Published: December 2016

This essay demonstrates that the desires for selfhood and wholeness propel P.K. Page’s poetic vision. In an attempt to establish a context for the studies that focus on Page’s later interest in Eastern religions - especially Sufism - the article investigates the spiritual principles that drive the poet’s early works, with particular attention paid to her second volume of poetry, The Metal and the Flower (1954). Although the volume depicts a spiritual drought in the postlapsarian world that hinders its individuation, glimmers of the active imagination provide a vehicle for redemption. Appropriating Jungian symbology, the study argues that, for Page, the imagination is a divine faculty whose figures hint at the completeness embodied in the archetype of the God-image. A thorough investigation of the interrelationship between the paradigms of the self and the God-image reveals the spiritual implications of self-actualization as they pertain to the individual and to the collective progression of humankind towards individuation.
P.K. Page and Surrealism
Authors: Trehearne Brian
Published: December 2016

P.K. Page’s poetry is often associated with Surrealism, but critical articulation of her Surrealism is minimal. The style and structure of much of her early poetry is arguably Surrealist, in its just a positive imagery, rapidity of association, parataxis, and intermittent effect of automatist composition. Her Surrealist mannerisms reflect a number of thematic concerns she shares with the French Surrealists, especially with André Breton: concern with psychic wholeness, reverence for the unconscious, fascination with dream and its representation, emancipatory but non-aligned politics, and sympathetic portrayal of the nature of and social responses to mental illness. Like many women artists of the mid-century, Page is both attracted to and disturbed by Surrealism’s quest for an absolute liberation of the artistic unconscious. Her contacts with other women Surrealists, with the Montreal Automatistes, and with European Surrealism generally, invite further study.
Kinds of Osmosis
Authors: Godard Barbara
Published: December 2016

Under the signature P.K. Irwin, poet P.K. Page has created a body of work in the visual arts. Exploring plastic concepts of rhythm and texture, she has composed surrealist landscapes, eerily suggestive and complexly layered. Notable for the architectonics of massing and subtle play of colour, her most powerful work has been in media such as oil pastel, egg tempera and pen and ink, which carry the energy of the artist’s gesture working and reworking the pictorial surface, building up brilliantly coloured layers, then sharply, intricately incising them with microscopic lines. Resonating on both aesthetic and psychological levels, her imagery constitutes a symbolic idiom through which to explore the nature and function of art. Seeing the world through the eye, she remarked, has taken her on a “journey from the material to the immaterial” (“Artist’s”).
“Their small-toothed interlock”: Biomorphism and Mystical Quest in the Visual Art of P.K. Page and John Vanderpant
Authors: Messenger Cynthia
Published: December 2016

Even though Canadian artists John Vanderpant and P.K. Page were working more than three decades apart and in different media, biomorphic modernism is observable in their visual art. (Biomorphic art is visual abstraction based on organic forms.) Vanderpant, an early twentieth-century photographer, and P.K. Page, a mid-century poet and painter, both exhibit in their visual art the intricacies of lineation that signify a belief in the transcendent powers of forms in nature. The works of both artists attest to their belief in the transforming power of art in society. Page’s poetry echoes the modernist undercurrents of her visual art. The ecological themes of her late-century poems resonate with the vitalist impulses of early twentieth-century modernism.
P.K. Page: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Authors: Djwa Sandra
Published: December 2016

This essay traces some aspects of the development of P.K. Page (1916- ) Canadian poet, writer and visual artist, from her early childhood up to 1944 when she received the Oscar Blumenthal Award for excellence from Poetry (Chicago). It draws upon unpublished letters, photographs, poems and interviews to show that the adolescent Page was exposed to English modernism, especially art and literature in 1934-1935. She read Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield whose feminist and aesthetic concerns inform the progress of some of her early poems and a novella, The Sun and the Moon. Subsequently, in the early 1940s, Page developed a more impersonal poetry in response to T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative. The influence of her own early poetry and prose on later writers like Margaret Atwood is briefly indicated.
Rituals of Rhetoric and Nationhood: The Liberal Anti-Deficit Campaign (1994-1998)
Authors: Weinroth Michelle
Published: December 2016

In 1993, the Liberals came to power on a platform of job creation. Yet soon after their ascendancy, their election promise to invest in more jobs faded; deficit reduction became their foremost preoccupation. In spite of their altered political priorities, and in spite of their announcement that deep cuts in government expenditures were imminent, the Liberals won substantial public support for their fiscal actions. Like all moments of crisis, Canada’s accruing debt in 1994/1995 was potentially double edged; it could well have incurred a political disaster for the Liberals. Instead, it was exploited as an opportunity. The deficit crisis of the 1990s became a significant moment of Canadian consensus-building in which the Liberal Party, once known for its Keynesian posture, sought to redefine the national economic psyche in function of a rising monetarist trend. This essay seeks to account for the success of this ideological venture, and argues that the Liberals’ “marketing strategy" can be analysed in terms of a symbolic language of nationalism—a discourse whose persuasive power resides in its archetypal narrative of sacrifice and redemption.
“While Unpleasant it is a Service to Humanity”:The RCMP’s War on Drugs in the Interwar Period
Authors: Hewitt Steve
Published: December 2016

In 1998, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) celebrated the 125 th anniversary of its creation; however, the modern RCMP had actually come into existence in 1920 as a completely different police force from the North West Mounted Police of 1873. In 1917, the force had, with the exception of the northern territories, given up ordinary policing duties to devote its full attention to domestic wartime security and to sending an overseas contingent to Europe. After 1921, the future of the Mounted Police was uncertain. Continuing it in its present form, relegating it exclusively to the north, or abolishing it completely were among the options considered. In the end, however, it survived and eventually prospered, returning to provincial policing duties first in Saskatchewan in 1928 and then in several other provinces in 1932. Why and how the RCMP survived is the subject of this essay. There have been two recent historical interpretations. One points to the RCMP’s intelligence work against radicals, labour, and ethnic minorities as key to its demonstrating its importance within the Canadian state. An opposing interpretation argues that the significance of intelligence work has been overstated and that the real story of the RCMP’s survival related to the cost and efficiency of its work for federal government departments. This essay offers a third approach, looking at the important but little examined “war on drugs" that the RCMP fought in the 1920s. The campaign against drugs was inspired by racist discourses against Asian-Canadians in an era of great fear towards challenges to Anglo-Canadian dominance. Although they firmly believed in the cause for which they fought, the RCMP, employing the same methods that they used against communists and others, also capitalized on the hysteria in an effort to convince the Canadian state of its importance and, in the process, ensure its survival.
Technology and Choice: George Grant’s Disparate Ethical and Legal Positions on Abortion
Authors: Gerrie James B.
Published: December 2016

Although the victory of the Liberals under Paul Martin in the most recent federal election on a platform that included protecting the access of women to abortion indicates that many Canadians remain committed to a pro-choice position, the controversy surrounding the issue of abortion suggests that it remains a live political question. Those who would look to the work of the influential Canadian political thinker George Grant for insight, and to the main commentators on his position, might come to the conclusion that his work fits easily into the pro-life camp. The author argues that Grant’s views are more ambiguous than his commentators on this issue suggest. Grant’s views on abortion are grounded in a radical understanding of technology, and this understanding prevents Grant from speaking unambiguously about the question of the proper legal status of abortion. Instead, his understanding of technology requires adopting a perspective on the issue that would have us reject the polarized political positions of the pro-life and prochoice movements.
Nature, Technology, and Nation
Authors: Jones-Imhotep Edward
Published: December 2016

This essay explores the early cold-war attempts of the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) to link shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Born out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and applied to the communication demands of the Second World War, this approach placed the laboratory in the midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty over the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation. The laboratory’s approach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional act of sovereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research on which those associations depended. The resulting arguments from the laboratory echoed with broader post-war understandings of how the North and technology were intertwined.
Montreal and Its Environs: Imagining a National Landscape, c. 1867-1885
Authors: Poulter Gillian
Published: December 2016

Historians of nationalism have demonstrated that national identity is as much a cultural as an ideological construct. Like other identities (class, gender, race), national identity has to be imagined, performed, and witnessed if it is to achieve widespread recognition and produce a common consciousness. Participating in indigenous activities such as snowshoeing and tobogganing, and turning them into organized sports, allowed urban anglophone colonists in Victorian Montreal to invent for themselves a new Canadian identity. On their tramps over Mount Royal and into the countryside outside the city, they envisaged themselves as latter-day Nor’Westers setting out into the wilderness—an indigenizing experience that linked them to the national landscape and the historic pasts (both Native and French-Canadian) of the new Dominion, and allowed them to imagine themselves as “sons of the soil,” a new British type of native Canadian. This essay explores the role played by the landscape of the city of Montreal and its rural environs in this cultural performance.
The Emigrant and the Noble Savage: Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic Approach to Aboriginal Policy in Upper Canada, 1836-1838
Authors: Binnema Theodore , Hutchings Kevin
Published: December 2016

Sir Francis Bond Head (1793-1875) was a respected man of letters and the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada from January 1836 until March 1838. During that time he proposed to remove local Anishinaabeg peoples from their traditional territories in present-day southern Ontario and relocate them to Manitoulin Island. This article explores how Head used Romantic notions that exalted primitivism and the “noble savage” to justify this plan. In so doing it clarifies the relationship between European Romantic theory and Canadian colonial practice in the early nineteenth century. A careful analysis of Head’s Indian policy reveals that many Romantic perceptions of Aboriginal peoples, while seemingly benevolent, were consistent with colonial policies that sought to alienate Aboriginal peoples from their lands and to segregate them from contact with European settler societies
“God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!”: The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays
Authors: Wasserman Jerry
Published: December 2016

Just as revelations of massive abuse at residential schools began to become public in the late 1980s, two major plays appeared on Canadian stages chronicling the damages done to First Nations by the Catholic Church. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Ought a Move to Kapuskasing and Wendy Lill’s Sisters were the first plays to address the residential school legacy. Dry Lips dramatizes the impact of missionary Catholicism on one reserve but makes no overt reference to the residential school experience. Sisters looks at a Catholic residential school but focusses on the white nuns rather than the Native children. In the context of residential school histories and literature, this essay examines the plays’ theatrical forms and silences with specific reference to trauma theory and a series of debates in 1988-1989 around the issues of Native peoples going public about their experiences of the schools and non-Native writers appropriating Native stories.
Holiday at the Banff School of Fine Arts: The Cinematic Production of Culture, Nature, and Nation in the Canadian Rockies, 1945-1952
Authors: Reichwein PearlAnn
Published: December 2016

The National Film Board’s 1946 production Holiday at School was the culmination of a decade’s work in university extension education by Donald Roy Cameron, the director of the Banff School of Fine Arts. Established by the University of Alberta in 1933 and shaped by Cameron’s vision from 1936 to 1966, the Banff School promoted Canadian nation-building through the arts and contributed to the construction of Banff as a prime tourism destination and wilderness recreation park. The strategy was not unlike the way Canadian cultural policy in the mid-twentieth century approached national development through tourism in the national parks and through film-making by the National Film Board. All three institutions—the National Film Board, the Banff School of Fine Arts, and Banff National Park—constructed Banff as a symbolic national landscape for leisure and tourism consumption. The film Holiday at School was thus produced at the intersection of these institutions participating in the construction of citizenship in Canada after the Second World War: holidays at the Banff School became a site for the expression of postwar ideals of liberal democratic citizenship that encompassed public education, leisure consumerism, and Canadian nationalism.
The Predicament of Belonging: The Status of Enemy Aliens in Canada, 1914
Authors: Farney James , Kordan Bohdan S.
Published: December 2016

This essay examines Canada’s internment of enemy aliens during the First World War. The internment of thousands of aliens, who had been invited to Canada short years before as immigrants, was not grounded in international law or xenophobia. Instead, the decision by the Borden Cabinet to intern enemy aliens was rooted in an imperialist understanding of Canada and the associated understanding of individuals as subjects of a sovereign. Internment forced the articulation of these important categories and, as a result, the decision casts light on broader notions of “belonging” in pre-war Canada.
Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques
Authors: Rifkind Candida
Published: December 2016

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.
Constructions of Identity in the Life Stories of Emma Albani and Glenn Gould
Authors: Elliott Robin
Published: December 2016

Biographical accounts of musicians have enjoyed widespread popularity since the late-Victorian era. Literary theory has recently held biography to be a literary construct, rather than a factual enterprise. Biographies and music are both governed by narrative structures and help to create a sense of individual and collective/national identity. Biographical accounts of two Canadian musicians—Emma Albani and Glenn Gould—are examined. Both musicians are Canadian national icons, but there are several problematic issues in their life stories: Albani’s elitism, class consciousness, and ambiguous relationship to Canada, and Gould’s eccentricity and uncertain sexual identity. The article examines how these issues have been handled in various auto/biographical accounts of the two musicians.
Understanding Alienation in Western Canada: Is “Western Alienation” the Problem? Is Senate Reform the Cure?
Authors: Lawson Robert J.
Published: December 2016

This essay investigates the conceptual foundations of “western alienation" and evaluates whether Senate reform is the appropriate cure for alienation in western Canada. It disputes the thesis, put forward most persuasively by political scientist Roger Gibbins which argues “western alienation" is both an exceptional type of regional alienation and is more salient for many western Canadians than other types of alienation. Two main problems with this conceptualization of western alienation and, by extension, its claim about how we ought to understand alienation in western Canada are identified and explained: a failure to acknowledge the wide variation and complexity of regional alienation within the West; and the marginalization of political alienation. The essay argues that the problem of political alienation is central to understanding the alienation of many citizens in western Canada. Because “political alienation" is rooted in discontent with political representatives, institutions, and procedures for decision-making associated with representative government in Canada, the essay concludes that the curative benefits attributed to regionally biased institutional reform of the federal government (e.g., Senate reform) by proponents of the western alienation thesis are more limited than otherwise suggested.
The Harmonization Accord: Stakeholder Influence on the Canada-Wide Standard for Dioxins and Furans
Authors: Alcantara Christopher
Published: December 2016

In 1998, the federal government, ten provincial governments, and two territories signed the Canada-Wide Accord on Environmental Harmonization, which, among other things, transferred the drafting of environmental standards to the Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment, an intergovernmental body established to co-ordinate policy. The accord mandated that stakeholder input had to be prominent in the drafting of all new environmental intergovernmental agreements. Federal and provincial government officials hailed the accord as the beginning of a new era of accountability and public and stakeholder participation in the environmental management regime. The response from stakeholders, however, was much more tepid. This essay provides some empirical data on the effect of the 1998 Harmonization Accord on stakeholder participation in the creation of one intergovernmental environmental standard. In particular, the essay examines the extent to which there was significant public access to the intergovernmental policy-making process in the creation of the Canada-Wide Standard for Dioxins and Furans for waste incinerators.
Writing the History of Sexuality and “National” History in Quebec
Authors: Vacante Jeffery
Published: December 2016

This article examines the ways that historians write about sexuality. It finds that Quebec historians, like their English-Canadian counterparts, have embraced attempts to integrate the history of sexuality and national history. Unlike those English-Canadian historians who write about sexuality to disrupt traditional national narratives, however, Quebec historians write about it in ways that tend to reinforce traditional assumptions about national history. Pointing to the risks that can arise when the history of sexuality is harnessed too closely to national history, the author argues that the history of sexuality in Quebec has come to reflect the priorities of national history in ways that have deprived it of the influence it has earned elsewhere, and stripped it of the ability to challenge the dominance of national history.
Migration, Mental Illness and Terry Watada’s The Tale of a Mask
Authors: Johnston Kirsty
Published: December 2016

Developed and produced at Toronto’s Workman Theatre Project (WTP) in 1993, Terry Watada’s play The Tale of a Mask weaves a Japanese folktale with a contemporary tragedy inspired by a double murder and suicide in Vancouver. Since 1991, the WTP has collaborated with playwrights to develop plays that educate audiences about mental illness and destabilize representations that perpetuate stigma. The Tale of a Mask was developed as part of a WTP initiative to investigate multiculturalism, immigration, and mental illness in Canada. The eponymous mask of the title, the author argues, acts as an enigmatic symbol for mental illness read differently by different cultures.
Calvinist Pluriformity Challenges Liberal Assimilation: A Novel Case for Publicly Funding Alberta’s Private Schools, 1953-1967
Authors: Hiemstra John L.
Published: December 2016

Between 1958 and 1967, neo-Calvinist immigrants resisted the assimilating pressure of Alberta’s liberal-inspired public school system by arguing that public funding should be extended to independent schools. This essay analyzes how neo-Calvinist ideas about the nature of society, the place of religion in public life, the purpose of schools, and the state’s task in regards to plurality directly challenged mainstream thinking on these issues. The essay argues that the neo-Calvinists believed their new idea of a pluriform public order created space for Albertans to imagine public policies that could escape the assimilating tendencies of mainstream liberalism.
Ontario’s Niagara Falls, 1887-1929: Reversing the Privatization of Hydro
Authors: Froschauer Karl
Published: December 2016

From 1887 to 1929, the binational Niagara Falls supported tourism and power generation in Ontario. Something went wrong with the private hydro development on the Canadian side of the falls, however. This article shows that when private hydro utilities (who had been allocated public water rights to the falls) created conditions of regional industrial backwardness in Ontario because they found exports to US industry more profitable, the state, pressured by municipal movements, intervened to reverse privatization of hydroelectric development and to strengthen export regulation. This archival study demonstrates that asymmetrical political and trade relations between Canada and the US can be overcome.
When Worlds Collide: The Fate of Canadian and French Prisoners Taken at Fort Niagara, 1759
Authors: Steele Ian K.
Published: December 2016

The treatment of French and Canadian captives taken in the battle of La Belle Famille and the consequent surrender of Fort Niagara, in July 1759, reveals the interplay of Amerindian, Canadian, British colonial, and British military values. The Iroquois negotiated separately with Sir William Johnson, the shape-shifting commander of the victors, to keep a number of prisoners taken in battle and destined for adoption or sacrifice. The British colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut initially received all the other prisoners from the surrendered garrison, and promptly hired them out to earn their keep. The British Army belatedly applied that they could of the humane new Anglo-French Convention of Sluis, calling for very different treatment of prisoners. The results were bizarre in several respects and, though occurring after years of bloody frontier war, were surprisingly humane even concerning Canadian troupes de la marine officers who were notorious for what would now be called “human rights violations.”
Triangulating the ROM
Authors: Duffy Dennis
Published: December 2016

Though the story of the Royal Ontario Museum’s founding usually deals with Charles Trick Currelly and Sir Edmund Walker as the diarchy, it is also possible to rethink this figuration and place George Crofts also at the centre of the ROM’s history. His selfless collecting on behalf on the museum gave it a clear lead in establishing itself as a repository of East Asian objects. All these men exploited the arrangements made possible by a global empire, another factor in the ROM’s rise to cultural prominence. The linkages between their various activities show us a work-in-progress, a case study of the ways in which institutions embody from their beginning the questions of ownership and provenance that continue to concern cultural collectors.
Moral Agency in the Modern Age: Reading Charles Taylor through George Grant
Authors: Millard Gregory , Forsey Jane
Published: December 2016

A shared concern with the nature of moral agency in modernity makes George Grant a useful interlocutor for Charles Taylor. Taylor sees human agency as constituted by moral affirmations, as given in the process he calls “strong evaluation.” He examines the “moral sources,” including reason, nature, and God, that inform the modern identity, explaining “technological society” in light of these affirmations. Grant’s analysis of technology shares much with Taylor’s, but underlines the irreducibility of technological civilization’s “will to mastery” to any of Taylor’s moral goods. This “will” is a distinctive and constitutive affirmation of modern agents (akin to a Taylorian “source”); but it is fundamentally amoral and, indeed, corrosive of morality. Reading Grant thus offers an important corrective to Taylor’s historical account of affirmation in modernity, while challenging his theory of identity as necessarily constituted by moral goods.
Hilda Neatby’s 1950s and My 1950s
Authors: Dewar Kenneth C.
Published: December 2016

Hilda Neatby (1904-76), long-time professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, came into her own during the 1950s. A member of the Massey Commission, which reported in 1951, and author of So Little for the Mind (1953), a critique of progressive education, she acquired a high profile based on both of these endeavours. This essay argues that, in her concept of nationhood, her intellectual seriousness, and her posture of moral leadership, Neatby exemplified traits widely shared among others of her generation, and that these traits were manifested as her generation came into its own in the 1950s. The essay reflects on the significance of the decade, partly on the basis of the author’s own experience.
Is That Copyright Too Strong? Copyright in Archival Material
Authors: Dryden Jean
Published: December 2016

The holdings of Canada’s archives serve as the raw material for all manner of new works, but the application of copyright to archival material can be difficult. This article provides a brief overview of the Canadian Copyright Act and how it works, and describes the characteristics of archival material that make the application of copyright law somewhat problematic. The article then goes on to examine the difficulties faced by scholars in obtaining the authorization of copyright owners to use archival material in a new work, before looking at statutory users’ rights (particularly fair dealing), and the possibilities of collective licensing. After briefly discussing the challenges of applying copyright law in the digital environment, the article concludes with an examination of a number of possible solutions that would make archival material more accessible, at least with regard to copyright.
Vérité des archives, mensonge du récit?
Authors: Godbout Patricia
Published: December 2016

Cet article explore la relation entre réalité et fiction qui s’élabore au moment où le chercheur entreprend de fouiller les archives d’écrivains, plus précisément ici celles de Louis Dantin, d’Alfred DesRochers et de John Glassco. Divers regards sur les fonds d’archive contribuent à tromper les attentes de ceux qui avaient espéré voir surgir l’écrivain à visage découvert de la consultation de ses lettres et documents. Comme l’ont montré Hélène Cixous et Jacques Derrida, le secret de l’archive n’est pas celui que l’on croit. Le chercheur en quête de « vérité » participe peut-être, consciemment ou non, aux processus de création.
Editing Archives] Archiving Editions
Authors: Irvine Dean
Published: December 2016

By calling attention to the editorial rationales that inform selected print editions and digital archives of Canadian literary texts and by positing alternatives modeled on Jerome McGann’s theories of social-textual editions and hypermedia archives and Donald Reiman’s theory of versioning, this essay presents ways in which the current transformation of Canadian literature’s print editions and manuscript collections into digital formats mark the transition of the scholarly edition to what McGann calls an “archive rather than an edition.” As an alternative to dominant editorial practices, the essay proposes a theoretical model for the production of new print and digital archives of editions.
Death and the Diary, or Tragedies in the Archive
Authors: Carter Kathryn
Published: December 2016

The privately held diary of Myrtle Gamble Knister, wife of modernist author Raymond Knister, stands as a touchstone document, used as evidence to substantiate her husband’s drowning as accidental and to contradict Dorothy Livesay’s claim that it was a suicide. Exploring the controversy around his death, and using Myrtle Knister’s diary as an example, this essay seeks to evaluate in a more general way the diary’s currency in the economy of the archive, especially the currency of those diaries that face evidentiary demands when called upon to function as eyewitness reports. The essay assesses the similarities and differences between diaries of tragedies and autothanatography, a term developed by Nancy K. Miller in 1994 to describe a genre of life writing that explicitly confronts death.
Adventures in Rainbow Country and the Narration of Nationhood
Authors: Macfarlane Heather
Published: December 2016

The Canadian family-adventure series Adventures in Rainbow Country followed in the wake of the deeply optimistic 1967 Centennial celebrations and reflects the country’s long tradition of nation building. Given the rise of the Separatist and Red Power movements in Canada, the program’s depiction of the harmonious co-existence of anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous populations is hardly an accurate representation of the era. Its strength lies in both its truths and its untruths, however. While postmodernism has taught us to question dangerous fictions, unmasking injustice, it can also stifle change, since it offers no alternatives to reality. This essay examines the contradictions behind the program’s creation and reception in an attempt to explain its lasting impact.
Explaining Voting System Reform in Canada, 1874 to 1960
Authors: Pilon Dennis
Published: December 2016

This essay explores the efforts to change Canada’s traditional plurality voting system to either majority or proportional voting systems at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels between 1874 and 1960. Specifically, it will provide evidence showing that appeals to populist culture, regional disaffection, and the efforts of individual and party reformers are not sufficient in explaining why, when, and where reforms have occurred. Instead, this essay will demonstrate that serious interest in, and the successful adoption of, majority and proportional voting system reforms in Canada was primarily driven by class factors, specifically the class interests of Canadian farmers and the perceived threat that various labour and socialist parties posed to Canada’s major political parties (and by extension their economic supporters) at different points in Canadian history. By surveying three broad periods of reform efforts, the essay demonstrates that while many different factors—reformer sentiment, party needs, ethnic tensions—may have fueled interest in voting system reforms in Canada, only organized political threats based on class issues motivated any serious or long-standing reform.
Ideology, Policy, and Economy: Liberal, New Democratic and Conservative Reforms of Ontario’s Welfare Program
Authors: Klassen Thomas R. , Buchanan Dan
Published: December 2016

From 1985 to 2000, in an unprecedented development in Canadian politics, three different parties governed the province of Ontario, each for a five-year period. Each party sought to reform the province’s welfare program in keeping with its ideological position. The authors demonstrate the manner in which welfare policies interacted with prevailing economic and labour market conditions to create dramatic fluctuations in the number of welfare recipients. The analysis shows that governing parties generally sought to match policies to economic conditions, but were often unable to do so because of their ideological stance or because of policies inherited from the previous government. The authors’ findings also reveal that it was in fact the New Democratic Party, after 1992, that initiated a restrictive policy of welfare benefits and eligibility, a policy direction continued by the Progressive Conservative Party once it assumed power in 1995.
Visualizing “The Sound of Genius”: Glenn Gould and The Culture of Celebrity in the 1950s
Authors: Carr Graham
Published: December 2016

This essay examines the role of photography, film, and television in constructing Glenn Gould’s identities as an artist and celebrity in the late 1950s. It combines close readings of visual texts with analyses of published and unpublished primary documents. Gould’s sudden rise to fame occurred in a period when technological and corporate changes were profoundly transforming North American music culture. Almost overnight, Gould became highly visible as a mass-mediated figure in the public domain. Beyond the breadth of his exposure, his burgeoning iconography was significant for its style and semiotic contents, which reflected both conventions of traditional portraiture and the influence of contemporary aesthetics. Drawing on media and communications theory, history and political economy, this article explores the ways in which the visualization of Gould derived from, and contributed to, larger social discourses about music and the body, gender and masculinity, technology and work, privacy and fame. While Gould’s exceptional musical talents were obviously crucial to his success, his stardom was equally a function of aggressive marketing strategies that successfully transformed him from a subject of critical adulation to an object of popular consumption.
A Very British Coup: Canadianism, Quebec, and Ethnicity in the Flag Debate, 1964-1965
Authors: Champion C.P.
Published: December 2016

It is usually assumed that the flag debate of 1964 was about replacing an outmoded British vision of Canada with the distinctive Canadianism of the Maple Leaf. In fact, the debate was not between “British” and “Canadian,” but between rival interpretations of Canadianism. Britishness and Canadianness were interpenetrated in both flags. Even if the overt Britishness of the Red Ensign was downgraded, the new flag was a less dramatic break with the past than is commonly thought. If it was not explicitly British in appearance, the new flag remained the product of a British world. In its design and implementation by a small Anglo-Celtic cadre in the government—with the country deeply divided and non-British groups largely sidelined—the Maple Leaf is, in some ways, the legacy of a very British coup.
Staking the Progressive Centre: An Ideational Analysis of Manitoba Party Politics
Authors: Wesley Jared J.
Published: December 2016

Traditional accounts treat the evolution of Manitoba’s political party system as the product of three confluent forces: region, class, and ethnicity. Observers cite divisions between rural and urban, north and south, British and non-British, and owners, farmers, and workers as the principal cleavages around which parties have built their support. According to this conventional wisdom, the party assembling the largest socio-demographic coalition achieves the greatest level of success. This study supplements these existing accounts by revealing the importance of party ideology in forging these alliances. As demonstrated through an analysis of campaign literature dating back to 1958, the key to success in Manitoba party politics lies in crafting moderate platforms that eschew the extremes of left and right. By emphasizing “progress” and pursuing a middle-of-the-road path, leading politicians—like Duff Roblin, Edward Schreyer, and Gary Doer—have enabled their parties to reach across the socio-demographic divisions that mark the province’s political community. These findings suggest the “progressive centre” is the fertile middle ground of Manitoba party politics.
Understanding the Meaning of Acadie
Authors: Keppie Christina
Published: December 2016

Acadie’s existence has long been debated. This article analyzes the ideological discourse of New Brunswick francophones in an effort to elucidate what is understood by the term Acadie. The author presents three Acadian discourse periods and a typological framework that have served to define Acadie in academic literature. Focussing on data collected as part of a larger project on Acadian identity, the author validates this framework through qualitative analyses, proving the existence of ideological diversity in that province that led francophones to interpret the term Acadie differently. The author concludes by postulating that Acadie is perhaps best understood as a co-linguistic community located within the Maritime provinces whose founding members are francophones and whose heritage can be traced back to the 1755 Expulsion.
The Politics of Love: The 1995 Montreal Unity Rally and Canadian Affection
Authors: Warren Jean-Philippe , Ronis Eric
Published: December 2016

The politics of love has been the subject of much scrutiny of late, yet the concept of love itself as a political tool has been virtually ignored. This essay attempts to rectify this by analyzing the Montreal Unity Rally, staged on the eve of the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty. Relying on news articles published from across Canada in the period surrounding the referendum campaign and the months following, on video documentaries, and on personal recollections, this article discusses the role that emotionality played in the movement. Ultimately, this study led to a reconsideration of the nature of the “love” that was declared at the rally, and the connection of such love to issues of power in Canadian politics.
“It Would Be Best to Leave Us Alone”: First Nations Responses to the Canadian War Effort, 1914-18
Authors: Talbot Robert J.
Published: December 2016

Early histories of the Great War emphasized the more patriotic and enthusiastic contributions of First Nations to the Canadian war effort. Situated in a more recent historiography, the present work applies new anecdotal and statistical evidence to explore the ambivalence and resistance that characterized the wartime responses of countless other First Nations peoples. First Nations responses to patriotic funding drives and to enlistment in particular were informed by a complex set of priorities and circumstances that both reflected and differed from those of Euro-Canadians. On balance, it can be said that First Nations peoples demonstrated significant reticence towards the war effort, and that the apparent enthusiasm of some was seldom driven by patriotism. While the country’s Indigenous war heroes deserve a prominent place in Canadian history, then, the stories of those people who did not respond to the war effort with enthusiasm must also be told in order to understand the heterogeneity of First Nations’ Great War experiences better.
The Role of the Agent in Partisan Communication Networks of Upper Canadian Newspapers
Authors: Koerber Duncan
Published: December 2016

The early newspaper in Upper Canada is often portrayed as a product controlled and operated solely by a partisan editor who sent newspapers to subscribers. The agent, who provided distribution and political feedback to partisan editors, is a rarely examined participant in the partisan newspaper of early Canada. This study examines the letters and biographies of agents to understand agents’ contributions to the early press. Biographies of Reform agents reveal their partisan character and the practical work they did in collecting subscription money. Biographies and letters of Conservative agents reveal extensive networks of relationships between agents who worked for multiple newspapers and the post office. A picture develops of the early partisan newspaper as a collective effort by hundreds of Upper Canadians to influence and circulate newspapers in a burgeoning public sphere.
Three Thousand Families: English Canada’s Colonizing Vision and British Family Settlement, 1919-39
Authors: Mancuso Rebecca J.
Published: December 2016

After the First World War, Canada’s immigration policy became more restrictive and immigration more controlled. For English Canadians, immigration of the “right type” of people—those from the British Isles—remained vital to strengthening the nation. This article examines the 3,000 Family Scheme, a joint British-Canadian settlement project in which British families, comprised of over 18,000 individuals, were relocated to homesteads as colonizers of Canada’s remote areas. There, many endured isolation and hardship, and were largely blamed for their own plight. A nation-building project that failed, the 3,000 Family Scheme reveals the connections among several enduring national myths in the interwar years: the potential for agricultural expansion, British superiority, and the capabilities of a maturing Canadian state to control the settlement process.