Banting House, London, Ontario

Over the past year, I have become very passionate about social media in cultural and heritage institutions, this passion grew after attending the Museum Next 2011 Conference in Edinburgh. It still baffles me that many museums/arts organizations still do not have a social media presence. If you are one of these establishments – stop what you’re doing, put everything down and carry on reading.

I have realized that we are in a bit of a rut in the not-for-profit heritage industry. Those entering the field tend to embrace social media and encourage change. Those close to retiring from the profession, and in positions of power, often tend to be reluctant to try something new and challenge the validity of social media. I am lucky that in my experiences I have not faced this challenge when trying to push the benefits of social media, but unfortunately many of us do.

It is important to note that establishing a good social media policy is crucial before indulging in this exciting world of conversation and knowledge sharing. Most of the following points appear in the social media policy for Banting House. If you’re looking for a foundation, there are plenty social media policy templates online.

I manage the social media for Banting House National Historic Site of Canada (@BantingHouse) and based on my experience these are ten tips about managing an institutional social media presence.

1. Yes, you do have time for social media. The most common excuse I hear for not embracing social media is that there is no time for it. It takes less than 5 minutes to write a tweet or Facebook post. Schedule a time (every day) for doing your social media. If you do it at the same time every day, it will become a force of habit. You can also (if you really have to) schedule tweets ahead of time by using a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite. However, just posting and not creating conversation is bad social media etiquette. Organizations should be prepared to answer and respond to tweets.

2. Yes you have time, but don’t get caught up in reading every post or tweet. Sometimes your feed will be filled with amazing content and won’t want to go back to what you were doing. But, unless you are the social media manager or social media is your only job – you might want to limit the time you spend on it. Try favouriting or bookmarking interesting posts so that you can read them later.

3. Create epic content. Try to avoid posting content that only you will find interesting. Keep in mind that your audience is broad and has many different interests, so keep them keen!

4. Keep it timely. Make sure your content is relevant and timely. Simple.

5. Don’t flood. Sometimes, when you’re managing a social media presence and have had a gap in posts – the need to post everything at once becomes overwhelming. Space it out – you don’t want to tick your readers/followers off by flooding their feed.

6. Try to limit how many people are posting to your organizational account. Sometimes it can become confusing if you have several people posting from one account. If you choose to have more than one person posting, perhaps use the initials after each post so that you know who has responded.

7. Each post does not need to go through 2392384092384902830 people to be approved. Trust your employees. If approval is necessary pre-approve a large amount of content at once so that posts can be frequent and not only once every few weeks.

8. Reply to those who tweet and comment on your content. It’s common courtesy. They will become your biggest fans if you do this!

9. Don’t cheat. One of the biggest pet peeves I have is when I see tweets posted to Facebook. Yes, you can post the same content to each medium, but don’t cheat. Take the time to format it appropriately for each forum.

10. Have fun! Social media is fun, engaging and is a free way to promote not-for-profit organizations on a low budget. Take advantage!

Jenn Nelson is a recent graduate of the MA Public History Program at the University of Western Ontario. She has experience working at several museum and heritage institutions such as the National Museum of Scotland, Banting House National Historic Site of Canada and the Ontario Heritage Trust. Her specialties include social media and digital media, event planning and research.

George Craig, “Deportation of the Acadians,” (1893), Musée acadien, Université de Moncton

According to a poll conducted for the Toronto Sun, over eighty per cent of Canadians support the decision of Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, requiring face veils to be removed during the swearing of the oath of citizenship.  These results were consistent across all age-groups, regions and political affiliations.  I had the same initial reaction to what seemed a reasonable decision.

But I started thinking about another oath of allegiance controversy.  After France ceded Acadie to Great Britain in 1713, the inhabitants were given the choice of leaving the colony or staying and becoming British subjects.  Since most Acadians elected to remain, officials required them to take an oath of allegiance to their new monarch.  The colonists equivocated, requesting guarantees that their property rights and religion would be respected and that they would not be conscripted.  The governor eventually agreed to these conditions and the Acadians duly swore.  During the 1740s, however, when war resumed between France and Great Britain, the Acadians were once again pressured to take an unconditional oath of allegiance.  They refused, believing that such an oath was intended to commit them to taking up arms against the French.  Lieutenant-Governor Charles Lawrence cited this as proof that they were secretly enemies and gave the order to deport them.  Several thousand men, women and children were imprisoned, loaded on boats and shipped to Britain’s other American colonies.  About one-third of these unfortunates died from disease, accident or starvation and the remainder suffered impoverishment, isolation and discrimination as dangerous traitors.  A few thousand other colonists escaped the ships and fled to the woods, suffering their own hardships, illnesses and deaths as refugees.  Some were eventually captured and deported anyway, while others made it to Québec, just in time for that city, too, to fall to the British.

Why all of this over an oath?  The truth is that the oath was a symbol for a larger problem: prejudice, anger and fear.  A century of often brutal war had characterized British-French relations in North America.  French and Aboriginal raids on British settlements were well-remembered.  The British officials never trusted the Acadians – French Catholics presumed to remain loyal to France and close to the Mi’kmaq.  A few of their priests were notorious in fomenting rebellion.  They spoke, worshipped, dressed and behaved differently from other British subjects.  It did not matter that only a handful of the over ten thousand Acadians ever actively supported the French cause.  What the British saw was thousands of potential enemies and rabid clerics trying to stir them up.  Significantly, the decision to deport came shortly after news that General Braddock’s army had been soundly defeated in the North American interior by the French and their Aboriginal allies.

Does any of this sound familiar?  There is a lot of anger and fear about Muslim fundamentalism in North America today.   We remember 2001.  We think about the loss of our soldiers in Afghanistan, the rhetoric of radical imams calling for the destruction of western society, the threat of Iran to global peace and the violent repression in countries like Syria.  High profile murder trials like that of the Shafias and ever-increasing security measures at airports, border crossings and public buildings constantly remind us of the danger here in Canada.

I realized that it was my unthinking connection of face veils to fundamentalism that fuelled my gut reaction to Kenney’s decision.  The oath controversy was a proxy for my anxiety and fear.  These women look different, behave differently and share the same religion with a small group of radicals inciting violence and hatred in the world.  That does not mean that all Muslims wearing face veils are potential enemies, faking the oath in order to implant themselves in our society.  Nor does it mean that their fathers and husbands are a fifth column of terrorists waiting for the right moment to strike.  I associate veils with the oppression of women, but maybe this is not always a fair assessment.  After all, our hyper-sexualized standards for female dress can be demeaning and objectifying too.  I challenge you to find an appropriate bathing suit for a ten year old girl.  A newcomer to Canada might be more comfortable covering themselves and their children.  At the same time, choosing to immigrate to Canada is likely to reflect openness to change and a desire for peace.

It is easy to chest thump about loyalty to the nation.  Yet native born Canadians never have to swear an oath.  What does the oath of allegiance mean, especially one to a faraway figurehead monarch?  What are our duties as Canadian citizens?  The government helpfully provides a list.  We must obey the law and serve on juries.  We should vote.  Further, “getting a job, taking care of one’s family and working hard in keeping with one’s abilities are important Canadian values.”  Newcomers are encouraged to volunteer in their community and play their role in preserving Canada’s environment and heritage.  Needless to say, by these standards, a large proportion of both native-born and immigrant Canadians should have their citizenship revoked.

Does singling out women wearing face veils as potential traitors really protect Canadian society?  What potential repercussions could result from playing on public anxieties about Muslim fundamentalism?  This may be a popular decision, but, is it the right  one?  We can learn from our past.  The deportation of the Acadians, the creation of reserves and residential schools, the internment of Canadians of Japanese and other “enemy” ethnicities during the world wars; these were all popular decisions motivated by anger, fear and prejudice directed towards people who were different, but who were not really a threat.  We can do better.

**********

Gregory Kennedy completed a PhD at York University in 2008 and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Université de Moncton.  A specialist of pre-Confederation Canada and Acadie, his research interests include social, demographic and economic history, particularly using comparative and quantitative approaches. 

Photo Credit: http://www.eastmarket.com/smash/honour_roll.htm

The failed campaign to “Save the Memorial Library” (STML) at Mount Allison University is a fascinating study of the importance – or, lack thereof – of history in contemporary Canadian culture. For the better part of the past nine months, a small but determined group worked to stave off the demolition of Mount A’s largely unused Memorial Library building. The Library was built in the 1920s to commemorate World War I dead but has not been used as a Library for at least a generation. The campaign organized an on-line petition, wrote a never-ending stream of letters to the editor, and even urged students to make a human chain around the building to protect it. My aim is not to wade post hoc into the merits of this campaign. Instead, my goal is to look at the STML controversy from perspective of “active history”: what does this debate over the Library tell us about history and historical culture in Canada today? What can those of us interested in “active history” — the dynamics of history in contemporary life — learn from this contentious issue? Clearly, I can’t address this entire issue in one short blog, but I will suggest that there are several matters to which we should pay attention. 

First, those interested in active history might note that history has been both omni-present and strangely absent in this controversy. The STML campaigners argued that Library was a “cenotaph” (a war memorial), that it was architecturally important, that old buildings should be preserved because they are particularly attractive, that it was a site of memory, that it is an ethical trust to preserve memorials, and that those favouring destruction are not connected to local history or culture. To sustain their case, the STML campaign referred not simply to memory but to local pride and ethics: the living had a moral responsibility to remember the dead. This point was reinforced with reference to archival sources that supposedly provided irrefutable proof of their case. In short, STML was about history and how history should be honoured and respected. The level of emotion it engendered demonstrates how intense debates about history can become.

Yet, history was also completely absent. I am not faulting anyone, but making an observation. To the best of my knowledge, not a single professional historian was interviewed for a Memorial Library news story. The STML campaign did not ask a single professional historian to assess their case (or, help them make it); no trained architectural historians were asked about the value of the building; nor was any historian asked about the use of archival evidence. In short, the STML campaign did not feel that they needed historians to make an argument about history, conduct historical research, weigh archival evidence, or assess the historical value of architecture.

Nor was the STML campaign alone in ignoring professional historians. It seems that the wider community didn’t feel the need for historians, or even (at times) for history. The STML campaign is the work of a relatively small group of intensely committed people. The degree to which the university community engaged this issue is a matter of debate. One example: the student body (despite urging from activists) ignored the issue. In a recent issue of The Argosy, a student leader noted that not a single student had asked the student council to take a stand, one way or another. A court case seeking an injunction did not involve any historians as witnesses; nor, from what I understand, did the provincial minister who denied an application that would have converted the Memorial Library to a heritage site.

This might not lead to particularly positive conclusions about the relevance of professional historians, but it is also true that few historians seemed particularly interested in wading into this controversy. Mea culpa. Historians were neglected but they also opted out. Am I odd in thinking that people who have devoted their professional lives to the study of the past and its meanings had nothing to offer? The STML controversy demonstrated an interesting characteristic of contemporary historical culture: it does not seem to need or want contributions from historians while historians don’t seem particularly interested in engaging at least some historical issues.

For me, the role of historians is not to arbitrate historical significance, but I do think that an opportunity to engage the meaning of the past has been missed. Engaging this issue carries a risk because historians needed to confront the different sides with tough questions about the complexity of the past, the character of war and its effects on Canadian society, and how and why people die and kill in the name of the greater good. For example, the STML campaign mobilized a war narrative that was shockingly simplistic and, according to the best scholarship we have on WW I, inaccurate. The STML narrative never moved beyond a “Coach’s Corner” Cherryesque discourse. All dead “paid the ultimate sacrifice” and “gave their lives for us.” The politics and ideology of World War I and its effects on Canada were never discussed.

Effectively engaging this issue required making people uncomfortable by disrupting cherished storylines (whether about sacrifice or archival evidence). It seems to me that the historians (again, mea culpa) who could have engaged this issue shied away for precisely this reason. Perhaps that is the most important lesson to learn: an active history will not necessarily earn historians any brownie points. Active history requires courage because it may make historians unpopular. If we want to contribute a new relevance for history, however, this may be a price we need to pay.

Andrew Nurse lives in Sackville NB and teaches Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. His current research focuses on the history of participatory democracy and the history of arts activism in Canada. He can be reached at anurse [at] mta.ca.

Cover Image of Michael Pollan's Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).

by Ian Mosby

This month’s publication of a colourfully illustrated, revised edition of Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, once again has me thinking about the role of historians in contemporary debates about the health and environmental impacts of our current industrial food system. As a historian of food and nutrition, I often find myself getting a bit squeamish whenever I hear anyone invoking the past to either defend or critique contemporary dietary practices. And Pollan, like other critics of the food industry, makes extensive use of history to guide his analysis of our current food choices.           

My first reaction when I read Pollan’s second rule ­– “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” ­– was therefore immediately defensive. In part, this was based on my own reading of the often strange and wonderful recipes from the dozens of early- and mid-twentieth century cookbooks that were part of the research for my dissertation on the politics and culture of food and nutrition in Canada during the Second World War.

Arguably, for instance, most of us would have trouble recognizing mid-century Canadian food celebrity Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for “Green Salad” as something edible. With an ingredient list that includes gelatine, green food coloring, lemon rind, mayonnaise, chopped green pickles, and horseradish, this quivering green mass from Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book would be, to say the least, hard for most contemporary eaters to stomach. (I know from experience: I was recently left with a pretty much untouched salad after my 1940s food themed post-dissertation defense party.)

Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for Green salad from her Canadian Cook Book (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2004), 224.

Kate Aitken's green salad (photo by author)

“Green Salad,” of course, is just the tip of the culinary iceberg. I could list dozens of other recipes that my great-grandmother might have read in cookbooks and magazines from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that would seem alien to most of us in the early 2010s. I’m personally still not brave enough to try Mrs. Elmer Scott of Newington Ontario’s recipe for “Pork Fruit Cake” – which includes 1 lb of “salted fat pork, chopped fine” – from the 1941 Cornwall Standard Freeholder Cookbook.

In Pollan’s defense, he readily concedes that the rule doesn’t always work perfectly and he stresses that it’s main purpose is that avoid eating many of the industrial preservatives, flavour enhancers, stabilizers, and other food additives that have become the basis our modern food system since the 1940s. Pollan even adds an addendum that you could substitute your own great-grandmother if she was a “terrible cook or eater” for someone else’s great-grandmother – particularly if that person is Sicilian or French.

While it’s easy to quibble with the details of Pollan’s great-grandmother rule – pointing out, for instance, that something like Jell-O, one of the quintessentially modern, mass-produced convenience foods, was introduced in 1897 ­­– the rule itself nonetheless acts as a useful shorthand for Pollan’s broader point. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, by and large, ate far less processed and heavily refined industrial foods than most of us currently do. The great-grandmother rule therefore provides a good place to start thinking about how our diets have changed over time. And, despite its faults, it’s probably much easier to wrap your head around than the confusing “servings” that form the basis of the contemporary Canada’s Food Guide  or the recently abandoned USDA Food Pyramid.

Pollan, of course, is not alone in pointing to the past for solutions to our contemporary problems. Whether it’s the current movements promoting the 100- mile diet, slow food, or the legalization of raw milk sales, food reformers often invoke the past as both a model and justification for changing contemporary practices. The same is also often true of the proponents of genetically modified foods, who point to the post-World War II green revolution and the history of famines and food shortages in the developing world to justify current drives to increase yields through the patenting of novel plants and animals. Even fad diets like the popular “paleo diet” often claim a certain level of legitimacy for their recommendations by invoking the supposed foodways of our ancestors.

In many ways, Pollan’s great-grandmother food rule and all of these broader attempts to use our knowledge of the past to deal with some of the most pressing contemporary issues is an extremely hopeful sign – despite the cringe inducing use of history by some, such as the “paleo diet” promoters. The general public and policy makers alike are, perhaps more than ever, looking to the past to explain our present predicament and to come up with viable solutions. This means that, not only can historians provide some important nuance and detail to these contemporary debates, but they can also help to encourage Canadians to engage more broadly with their past.

Ultimately, my own hope is that these kinds of calls to examine the diet of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers is accompanied by a growing interest, not just in how they ate, but in the role that food played in defining their lives and work, more broadly. While it is often easier to draw a direct line between the work of environmental and economic historians and problems with our contemporary food system, these kinds of invocations of our shared social and culinary history offer new outlets for other groups of historians to similarly engage with the general public.

In Canada, academic social and cultural historians, in particular, have been slow to meet this growing interest in food and culinary history. But the recent publication of an edited collection on Canadian food history from McGill-Queen’s University Press and a forthcoming collection from the University of Toronto Press – combined with a growing interest at a number of libraries and archives in cookbooks and other forms of culinary literature – are encouraging signs. Hopefully, by adding our voices to these contemporary debates over the future of food in Canada, professional social and cultural historians can find new audiences for our work and a more active (and activist) role in our communities.

Ian Mosby is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Guelph and studies the history of food and nutrition in Canada during the twentieth century

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Pipeline route, Kbh3rd - Aquifer Map

Transborder pipelines are nothing new. There is a long history, forgive the pun, of such enterprises in North America. In fact, Canada has historically been a pipeline pioneer. Yet the Keystone XL project has attracted what is likely unprecedented environmental opposition for a transnational pipeline, including protests featuring celebrities and arrests outside of the White House. Perhaps this pipeline has become a potent symbol of wider dissatisfaction with our current petro-regimes and environmental approaches?

The Keystone project involves several different elements: the initial Keystone oil pipeline runs from Alberta to Illinois, in part utilizing existing pipelines, while the expansion (Keystone “XL”) entails extending pipeline all the way to Texas refineries and eventually the Gulf of Mexico (see adjoining map or see a more interactive map). Both lines will be able to move over around half a million barrels of oil per day. The original Keystone line is already finished, and the extension is expected to be completed in the next few years, provided that it receives the necessary agreement from the American government. This expansion phase, however, has been greeted by visible protest.

This pipeline debacles speaks to many of the themes that I try to address in my research, which generally focuses on the history of transborder Canadian-American environmental issues. To this point, I’ve concentrated mainly on water (such as the St. Lawrence Seaway/Power Project and Niagara Falls), but there are many parallels between the history of transnational water and oil/gas pipelines projects. Earlier this year I began considering the history of Canadian-American transnational pipelines as a future research project (after a student queried the paucity of sources on such a topic). I found that little had been done from a historical perspective, aside of William Kilbourn’s book Pipeline; at about the same time, the public outcry about the Keystone XL grew, further piquing my interest.

Let’s take a crash course in pipeline history. In the 1850s, the first natural gas pipeline in Canada, and perhaps the world, stretched some fifteen miles to Trois Rivieries. The world’s first oil pipeline was built between Petrolia and Sarnia in the 1860s, and after Confederation a pipeline system was stretched around the Great Lakes region. Before the end of the 19^th century, Canada was already sending gas via pipeline into the U.S. (e.g. Detroit).

It was soon discovered that the western areas held far greater reserves, and their exploitation – and concomitant pipelines – took off in the 20^th century on both sides of the border. By the early Cold War, Canada and the United States had pipelines stretching across much of their respective countries. Technological advancements and further petro discoveries made the idea of the TransCanada pipeline feasible, and, in one of the great Canadian parliamentary controversies, legislation was passed in 1956 and the pipeline constructed in the following years. Since then, a vast network of transborder (state, province, and country) have proliferated in North America.

By chesapeakeclimate (8/22/11 uploaded by Ekabhishek)

But if the Keystone XL pipeline is just business as usual, why is there so much resistance? In past pipeline disputes (e.g. TransCanada pipeline) there was certainly vociferous opposition, but it generally had to do with sectional, regional, political, and nationalist concerns. Many of those issues are at play in the current debate, but more than in previous cases, detractors are focused on environmental repercussions (see, for example, a New York Times editorial). In particular, opponents point out that, on top of the damage of the construction phase itself, pipelines inevitably result in spills and encourage the continual exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources with their concomitant destructive effects, such as greenhouse emissions and global warming. For more detail on the impact of the tar sands, see Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent as well as the tar sands aerial photography by Louis Helbig).

American proponents argue that the pipeline will bring jobs and help the economy, and provide the U.S. with energy security. On top of environmental concerns, critics reply that the job boom will only be short-term, and that much of the oil will actually be exported outside of North America. The argument has been made that Canada is going to develop and sell oil anyway, and if the Americans don’t take the oil and the concomitant jobs, someone else will.

It is claimed that worries about leaks, including the potential threat to the Ogallala aquifer, are overblown. But leakage fears are justified. There have been many pipelines leaks and spills in past years – as Sean Kheraj has shown on his Nature’s Past blog in regard to Alberta spills – and perhaps the major 2010 Enbridge spill in Michigan (Enbridge also owns a transnational pipeline) is behind the increased resistance to the Keystone XL. And that is to say nothing of the horrendous BP Gulf oil spill.

The history of resource development suggests that we take heed of the law of unintended consequences. It also shows that, even with environmental assessments, public input forums, and other checks and balances, the state and industry will continue to create environmentally destructive megaprojects to exploit natural resources because there is money to be made. But the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem outweighs short-term profits, even from a selfish perspective (e.g. more money won’t do much good if we don’t have clean water to drink).

Canada has a dirty history when it comes to developing and exporting natural resources, from oil to asbestos. The Americans can choose not to take part in the Keystone XL project, but the reality is that both countries (and the developed world) are locked into patterns of fossil fuel dependency, and it is going to take a long time and a lot of effort to change. Unless fundamental structural transformations are made, the view that these sorts of things are going to happen anyway has a lot currency, both metaphorically and tangibly.

  Daniel Macfarlane is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. He is finishing a book, based on his doctoral dissertation, titled To the Heart of the Continent: The Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. He is widely interested in Canadian-American environmental relations, and is also conducting research on the transborder manipulation of Niagara Falls and co-editing a collection on the history of Canadian-American water relations.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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Montgomery’s Inn, Toronto, ON. Photo by loreth_ni_Balor.

Tom Peace recently published a post on Active History calling attention to the emergence of another round of the History Wars, but the more pressing forthcoming history war may be one between the historical community and the politics of austerity. Budget cuts at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government across the country have targeted cultural and heritage institutions, threatening the integrity of the capacity of Canada to maintain an adequate understanding of its collective past.

Reckless tax-cuts combined with a global economic crisis have conspired at all levels of government across Canada to persuade the country’s political leadership to use ballooning budget deficits to justify substantial service cuts with very little public debate and a tenuous political mandate. During the 2011 federal election, the Conservative Party of Canada made a commitment to balance the federal budget by 2014-15 (one which it recently abandoned), “[t]hrough accelerated reductions in government spending” without raising any taxes. Unfortunately, the promise to balance the budget through spending cuts offered no details except that a Conservative government would continue “specific measures to restrain the growth of program spending” and complete, “within one year, a comprehensive review of government spending” [1]. The most detail on these “specific measures” that the Prime Minister offered to voters during the campaign was that “We know there is fat to be saved.”

Similarly, mayoral candidate, Rob Ford, told Toronto voters there was ample “gravy” to be eliminated from the city budget without clearly defining his meaning of “gravy”. In fact, it was that simple message with no details that probably won over Toronto voters in 2010.

It is clear now that some of the primary targets of government austerity measures in Canada are cultural and heritage institutions, including libraries, archives, and museums. Just as Margaret Atwood helped mobilize opposition to proposed cuts to Toronto libraries, the challenge for active historians who oppose such measures is to make their opposition public.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has taken a leadership role with its opposition to the cuts to Library and Archives Canada through an information and petition campaign called “Save Library and Archives Canada”. The federal government’s “modernization” program for LAC has led to a series of substantial service cuts that have undermined its ability to acquire and preserve a diverse collection of artistic, cultural, and historical materials relating to Canada’s past. Readers who oppose such cuts should lend their names to the petition here.

At the municipal level in Toronto, Councillor Joe Mihevc has revealed that closed-door budget planning proposes to shutter four Toronto museums, including the Market Gallery, Gibson House, Montgomery’s Inn and Zion Schoolhouse. The historical community, once again, is trying to clearly voice its opposition through an information and petition campaign. Again, readers can sign the petition to stop these cuts here.  Canadian historians from Toronto’s universities have also written an open letter [PDF] to city council opposing the museum closures.

As a proportion of the budgets of the federal government and the City of Toronto, cultural and heritage institutions are insubstantial. For example, the proposed closure of the four museums in Toronto is projected to save about $1 million, according to a Toronto Star report. This constitutes just a fraction of the city’s $9.2 billion 2010 budget. In 2010, the federal government spent $124.5 million on the operation of Library and Archives Canada. This constituted 3.5% of all spending by Canadian Heritage that year. To put this in further perspective, the cost of LAC in 2010 was just 0.06% of the total ministerial net expenditures of about $225 billion.[2]

If the proportional cost of cultural and heritage institutions is so low relative to total budget expenses, one can assume then that cuts to these services are ideologically motivated. These services have been targeted for cutbacks not because they constitute substantial expenses for government, but because these governments do not see cultural and historical preservation as a significant public responsibility. If readers disagree with these governments and believe that libraries, museums, and archives are valuable public institutions, signing these petitions will begin to let it be known.

Save Library and Archives Canada Petition

Toronto’s Heritage Museums Petition

[1] Conservative Party of Canada. Here for Canada: Stephen Harper’s Low-Tax Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth, 2011, pg. 23.

[2] For details on 2010 federal government spending, see Government of Canada, Public Accounts of Canada 2010, Volume II: Details of Expenses and Revenues, Ottawa: 2010.

Sean Kheraj is an assistant professor of Canadian and environmental history at York University. He blogs at http://seankheraj.com

On October 31^st the United Nations announced the birth of the seven billionth person. Many stories were published on this event, but to me the most revealing was by David Suzuki, the venerable leader of Canada’s environmental movement. As Suzuki pointed out, the human population has increased three-fold during his lifetime. Nonetheless, he refused to blame population growth for our ecological malaise. As Suzuki argues, “most environmental devastation is not directly caused by individuals or households, but by corporations driven more by profits than human needs.” According to his line of thinking, it is overconsumption by the wealthy, not the ever-increasing population, that is causing the problem.

There was a time when population size was a central concern within the environmental movement. Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 treatise, The Population Bomb, sat alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on environmentalists’ “must read” list. Full of doom and gloom, this book linked exponential growth of the human population with ecological destruction, resource exhaustion, mass starvation, and political instability. The only solution, according to Ehrlich, was to reduce the rate of population growth to zero percent. A variety of solutions were prescribed, including tax incentives to men that voluntarily underwent sterilization, luxury taxes on children’s goods, the promotion of abortion and other forms of birth control for women, and an end to foreign aid to countries that did not put a check on their population growth. The Population Bomb sold millions of copies, Ehrlich became a media darling, and the goal of reducing the global population became standard within the American environmental movement.

As Roy Beck and Leo Kolankiewicz have pointed out, support for population control among the environmental movement’s leadership in the United States “was paralleled, and bolstered, by widespread agreement among influential researchers and scholars in the natural sciences throughout the 1960s and 1970s.” By the 1990s, however, this support had subsided. Beck and Kolankiewicz note many reasons for this drop, chief among them being the fact that it proved to be politically incorrect to critique immigration, the main source of the United States’ population increase in the years following 1972.

The population control movement failed to gain significant traction within Canada’s environmental movement. It had advocates within mainstream groups such as Pollution Probe, but rarely made its way into their action campaigns or policy work. This was largely left to Zero Population Growth Canada, which peaked in 1971 with eight chapters and a membership of 500. Given Canada’s relatively low population density and birth rate the members of this group were given short shrift by elected officials. As Ontario premier John Robarts wrote to one of its members in May 1970, “Where overpopulation may become a problem on a world basis some time in the future, it is certainly not the case in Canada nor here in Ontario.”

It is worth noting that while Suzuki dismissed the advocates of population control as rich white conservatives, the chief benefactors of Zero Population Growth Canada were George and Barbara Cadbury. It is true that the Cadburys were wealthy, but they were hardly conservative. Important players within the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the couple left England for Canada when George decided to work for David Lewis’ Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government in Saskatchewan. George later served as president of the New Democratic Party of Ontario.

According to a survey released in July by the Association for Canadian Studies in Montreal, 54 percent of Canadians felt that the current population was “the right number of people,” while 33 percent felt it was “not big enough.” Those advocating a larger population include Robert Kaplan, the former Solicitor General of Canada, who wrote an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail calling for a Canadian population of 100 million – roughly triple its current size. Advocates of population control, meanwhile, have been assigned to the fringes of the internet, where a variety of organizations continue to operate. The dominant paradigm from forty years ago now appears to have been assigned to the dustbins of history.

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Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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In Part II of “A Town Called Asbestos”, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen continues her survey of the history of asbestos in Quebec by examining the first asbestos industry boom between 1914 and 1939. The outbreak of war in Europe and the advent of aerial bombing in urban areas created a new market for the inflammable mineral. In the years after the war, asbestos found its way into a number of industrial products as both a flame retardant and as insulation. This growth in demand led to an expansion of mining activities and the establishment of large, multi-national asbestos mining corporations.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

Share/Save