Overall, what stood out from these talks was the need for recent graduates to expand their scope of what it means to be an historian. As most are well aware, tenure track positions are no longer as viable, but what must be made even clearer are that the opportunities that do exist should not be conceived as some sort of consolation prize. It was said that historians need to begin to think about where they fit in outside of the university and know that it is not simply enough to say that field is “public history,” if the expectation is that “public history” means a position in a museum. Budget cuts and a glut of applicants may mean that these opportunities are limited as well. Instead, historians need to begin to conceive as to how their skills and knowledge may fit into any other number of areas, including (but certainly not limited to) government, non-government organizations, journalism, and consulting.

While the AHA may have focused on the lack of opportunities in traditional areas of employment, the AHA also spent a significant portion of this year’s proceedings devoted to the opportunities available in the field of digital history.

As an emerging field, digital history remains hard to define, and many willingly admit to knowing little about the subfield. Writing of his experience at the AHA THATcamp on digital humanities, Jonathan Rees wrote in his blog More or Less Bunk:

The folks in Digital Humanities aren’t exactly sure what precisely it is that their subfield does and willingly admit it. My quick intro suggests to me that there are interesting DH [digital humanities] projects that involve putting stuff up on the web (sometimes to do new things with it that you wouldn’t get to see otherwise and sometimes so that more people can do the same kind of things with the same data); new digital tools being developed to do new things; and new digital tools to do the same thing everyone else already does, but better.

Rees wrote his comments not as a critique, but as an honest observation of the evolving nature of the field. He goes on to describe that as a professor it is these new tools, used in conjunction with the traditional tools and teaching the traditional skills of the humanities, that excite him as a teacher.

While the AHA certainly did not solve the problem of underemployment, it is at least refreshing to see the organization’s members voice their concerns and begin to discuss solutions, both for the issue of employment, but also in how this may alter teaching and career advice provided to students in the field. In addition, it is also hopeful to see the embrace of new technologies that will surely come to define the field. Again, the issue of digital humanities focused not only the tools themselves, but how best to use these tools in the classroom and how to teach the students who will be the architects of these tools in the future.

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Jamie Oliver eating Bahn Mi in east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

Jamie Oliver has made a name for himself as a celebrity chef who has sought to improve the way we eat.  Whether it be his instructional cooking or his fight to reform school cafeterias, Oliver has spent over a decade teaching us how to make food, and urging us to think more about it.

Some of his series have explored different national food cultures.  In Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, he tried to answer why Italy has a lower GDP than the United Kingdom, yet its people enjoy a healthier diet.  Oliver traveled across the USA in Jamie’s American Road Trip, while he showed us that despite outside stereotypes of a monotonous fast-food culture the country has a diverse number of cuisines based on its many different regions, histories, and people.

His newest show is called Jamie’s Great Britain, and its argument is a historical one: the foods that many Brits see as traditionally “British” weren’t always so.  The series is one example of connections between historical perspectives and food culture in popular media.

In the first episode, Oliver outlines the mission of the series.  “I want to scratch under the surface. I want to see what the modern day communities are like, whether they’re classic British (whatever that is) or the new waves of immigration,” he says.  The chef explains that he’s “not going to stop at the classic British dishes. I’m going to show you how centuries of foreign influences on our island have changed the whole landscape of what we eat and how we eat it. We’re like magpies. We love to sort of get little ideas or steal things.  Then what the British are brilliant at is making it our own.  At that is what I really love about British food.”

He offers an example in the apple pie: “We think its British? No way.  The whole concept of a pie came from the Egyptians.  The great British eating apple. Not British.  Came from western Asia.  And cinnamon. Not a single bit of that has ever come from Great Britain.  But you know what? It tastes so good, and it’s ours now.”

Jamie Oliver walking through east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

The series’ first segment starts off in the east end of London, where he notes different immigrant groups arrived before continuing their journey outwards. As he walks through Whitecross Street Market, he describes an unspecified earlier era, “back in the day,” when the area was known as Squalor Street, filled with street vendors and the mixing of immigrant cultures.

“Food was always a representation of immigration.  You take something quintessentially British like Fish and Chips – it’s not English!  You know, it’s Jewish.  And that was two hundred years ago when the Jewish were coming through east London. Hundreds of years before that it was the French Protestants.  In more recent times, it was the Bangladeshis, the Italians.”

Another immigrant group to make the east end home is the Vietnamese, who came as refugees to Britain in large numbers during the Vietnam War.  Oliver chats with two workers at a food stall selling Bahn Mi.  The sandwich is a mix of Vietnamese ingredients like red chilis, cilantro, and pork shoulder in a French bread slathered in mayonnaise.  Oliver points out that it is also an artifact of history, a product of the French colonization of Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century.

Oliver is taking apart the popular myth that there is one authentic, static, British food culture.  His point about Fish and Chips shows such an intention.  This is a political exercise.  It repudiates a corresponding idea that thinks there are Brits who have a more traditional claim to Britishness, ie white Anglo Saxons, compared to more recent inhabitants of the island, many of whom are people of colour.   By underlining the ways in which Britain’s food culture is historically contingent and a constant process of evolution, he shows that its populace, also ever changing, mirrors this phenomena.

As Jamie’s Great Britain illustrates, food history is a fruitful historical subject.  Food, after all, has been essential to the survival and everyday experience of all people living in the past.  It has also served as a key aspect in the development of human culture: the signs, symbols, and practices that we use to understand the world around us.

These factors help to make food history a topic with much popular appeal.  Everyone eats.  And recently there has been a growing interest in food, whether it be the popularity of Food Network or farmers markets.  A number of popular history books, some of which have become New York Times best sellers, have catered to this interest by examining the history of specific foods or ingredients like cod, sugar, chocolate, bananas, coffee, oysters, and corn.  Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), for example, traces the culinary origins of the mineral and its importance to various cultures.

Even popular books about food without an explicitly historical dimension make arguments based on particular perceptions of the past.  Food historian and ActiveHistory.ca contributor Ian Mosby has shown this with Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.  Pollan writes: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  This rule is based on a nostalgic understanding of the past, of an earlier time before factories made food (despite the fact that Jello was invented in 1897, Mosby points out).

In Canada, food history is a growing field.  Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010) looks at the role of Chinese immigrants within the Canadian restaurant industry and the ways in which such spaces have connected Chinese Canadians and people of other ethnic backgrounds.  The next few months will see the release of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, a collection of chapters edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp that is sure to continue this trend by exploring how food links to wider historical themes like religion, immigration, politics, gender, and science.  However, food has long had a subtle yet significant place in Canadian history books.  One only has to think of the importance of cod and wheat to the Staples Thesis of Canadian development, or the role of food shortages in the rebellions of 1837.

Oliver’s argument about the heterogeneity of British food culture would probably come as less of a surprise to people living in Canada, a country whose recent national identity has been built more explicitly around immigration and multiculturalism.  Our national food culture is also certainly one of evolution, ever changing with new developments in technology (for example, deep freezers), economy, and cultural influences.

With food, we can see how the quotidian things of our everyday lives are not timeless.  They have a history that appeals to wide audiences.  And as Jamie’s Great Britain shows, these histories can make more palatable a larger argument about the need for cultural acceptance.

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Canadian history section of Chapters bookstore, North London, Ontario, May 2010.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to announce its first paper of 2012: “A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada,” by Alan MacEachern.

Here is Alan’s introductory blurb:

The following was my contribution to a 2010 Canadian Historical Association roundtable, “So What IS the Story? Exploring Fragmentation and Synthesis in Current Canadian Historiography.” In it, I tried to a) graphically illustrate the marginalization of Canadian historical scholarship, b) argue why demography is likely only to make this problem worse, and c) suggest a response. All in under 1400 words. As far as I know, only one person was at all convinced, let alone inspired, by my presentation: me. It got me thinking about how one might go about writing a history of Canada that would necessarily cover the entire country from the beginning to the 21^st century, that would treat Canada in global terms, and that would be relevant. Last month, I published a very, very early outline of such a history, “A Little Essay on Big.” In an uncharacteristic fit of confidence, I’ve dusted off my presentation and asked ActiveHistory.ca if they’d like it, largely unchanged. I welcome your thoughts.

You can read Alan’s paper here.

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Last week I presented some of my research at a conference in Boston and drove from Toronto in order to do so. I have not driven in the north-eastern United States in a few years and was quickly surprised to learn that I-90 for most of its length from Buffalo to Boston has become a toll road known as the Thomas Dewey Thruway and the MassPike. The existence of tolls on a previously free road made me think about the relationship between how roads are paid for and other economic behavior.

The tolls to get from Buffalo to the Massachusetts border were $14 for my car, with a further $3.50 to get from the border to Boston. Gasoline Taxes are also lower in the United States, so at $3.39/gallon (rather than $1.18/litre in Toronto) it cost me about $15 less to fill the one tank required to get from Buffalo to Boston. In Canada, the added taxes that make gasoline more expensive contribute to the construction of roads, so are somewhat analogous to the tolls charged on some American highways and bridges. My car is fairly efficient on fuel, so while I paid about $3 more to drive on I-90 than a similar Canadian road, a larger and less-efficient vehicle would have paid less to drive on American turnpikes, despite the tolls. Which transactions are taxed affect behavior and it is worth noting that vehicles tend to be somewhat smaller in Ontario than in New York. To the extent that limiting gasoline consumption is important for limiting the problems of peak oil and climate change, New York would be well served to institute much higher gasoline taxes to replace tolls on the interstate. Such high taxes would also affect behavior on the many non-toll secondary highways and local roads. It would also be more efficient to increase gasoline taxes as they would not require building toll booths or having people collect small tolls, like the $0.15 charged when I made a brief stop in the suburbs of Buffalo.

Charging tolls in order to pay for the upkeep of roads has a long history. This was frequently done on stretches of privately maintained roads in the Roman Empire, although carts carrying grain were usually exempt. Many private roads, known as turnpikes, were built in Britain during the 18^th century. These were built by private companies but required an Act of Parliament in order to expropriate land, realign fields and charge tolls. English turnpikes always had some people and goods that were exempt from paying tolls. For instance, the 1790 Act allowing for the creation of a road from Canterbury to Gutteridge Bottom exempted carts carrying manure for fields or stones to repair roads, along with people travelling to elections, soldiers, those carrying sick people or going to church. In other parts of England, carts carrying coal away from mines paid lower tolls than those carrying other goods. A number of historians have argued that the improvements in transportation with better roads, along with lower dues on coal and manure, contributed to the growth of manufacturing during the early Industrial Revolution.

The differential tolls charged to vehicles affect who pays for the upkeep of roads, as well as which vehicles are more likely to use them and the end costs of goods travelling by truck. Nobody likes traffic jams but most people would agree that the speedy passage of commercial trucks is more essential to our manufacturing economy and consumption of foods while busses allow more people to pass through the same road. An ideal combination of gasoline taxes and tolls would pay for the costs of road construction and encourage the use of more fuel-efficient vehicles while also allowing public transit and commercial trucks to move quickly. Tolls are rare in Canada, but the Ontario government, in partnership with a private company, constructed the 407 through suburban Toronto in the 1990s. There are legitimate complaints about the financial arrangements between the two parties but the current situation is a quick route for buses that connect the suburbs whose construction has been paid for with the tolls of cars willing to pay a premium for faster transit. Its off-peak tolls are $0.1935/km for light vehicles, $0.387/km for heavy single unit vehicles and $0.585/km for heavy multi-unit vehicles. New York and Massachusetts also have differential tolls depending on vehicle size but their turnpikes are dominated by transport trucks. The high tolls on transport trucks in Ontario contribute to its being mostly used by passenger cars, but if they were re-balanced it might encourage the road’s use by larger vehicles and help ease the gridlock which hampers Toronto grocery stores and manufacturing.

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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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“Places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become… When places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination, and where the latter may lead is anybody’s guess.” – Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 107.

Just as I read these words last week, the Toronto Star disclosed municipal plans to close three of the City of Toronto’s ten museums.  Montgomery’s Inn, Gibson House and the Zion School House – museums outside of the downtown core and closely allied with the Etobicoke and North York Historical societies – are on the chopping block due to municipal cutbacks.  This decision builds on the recently announced closure of the Air and Space Museum at Downsview Park, one of a few other museums in the north end of the city.

In an age of austerity, as Sean Kheraj noted last week, all public institutions supporting culture and heritage are vulnerable. But these cuts do not just reflect cutbacks in the culture and heritage sectors. In a city already bereft of recognized historical sites outside of the downtown core, this municipal decision reinforces urban and suburban differences in how Toronto’s past is told. If places have the power to shape our self-perception and how we situate ourselves in the world, as Basso and others have suggested, how has the uneven distribution of historical places influenced the culture and politics of Canada’s largest city?

Take a look at this map.  On it, I have coded Toronto’s proposed and existing heritage conservation districts in green, municipal museums in blue, and the three museums slated for closure with red pushpins.  Notice the centralized distribution of sites deemed worthy of preservation.  Most are located in the pre-1998 City of Toronto and few are located in the other former boroughs of Metro Toronto.  Historic properties are similarly distributed. Within the boundary outlined on the map lie 12,258 of Toronto’s 13,660 heritage properties (about 90%).  What emerges is a gap in historical interpretation.  One part of the city is steeped in officially sanctioned historic sites; in the other part, the past is almost entirely absent from the city’s landscape.

View Toronto Museums in a larger map

Now take a look at another map. This map reflects voting patterns in Toronto’s 2010 mayoral election.  A similar image emerges.  People living in the historic core of the city voted one way; people living on its periphery voted another.

Although there are lots of reasons that account for this similarity (interestingly household income does not seem to be a factor), I would like to suggest that perhaps some of these differences have emerged because of the way that the past has been used and not used to construct a sense of place in Toronto.  Recognizing historic sites has an important role in protecting architecture, determining the design of new buildings and shaping the city’s network of parks and roads.  In other words, it helps to determine how urban residents live and go about their daily tasks in their city’s spaces.  Historic places also build connections to those people who lived in these places before, establishing patterns of continuity and discontinuity with the past that shape our outlook for the future.  In the core of Toronto, I wonder whether the more prominent presence of the past helps to foster a greater sense of collective identity and corporate welfare than elsewhere in the city.

The differences in how the past has been interpreted in urban and suburban Toronto stem from the city’s development.  Historic Toronto was where the city slowly took birth.  It had the highest population, better infrastructure and was more heavily industrialized and developed.  As it expanded, it consumed agricultural areas that were less dense and more easily developed.  For many, these were empty spaces whose history remained to be written.

This interpretation, though, reflects a particularly pernicious view of the past, which – as social historians have emphasized for the past couple of decades – excludes just as much as it explains.  Neither the historical downtown nor ahistorical suburb was developed from pristine forest or abandoned farmland.  The space that comprises Toronto today is one with many stories.  In every part of the city, there is a physical legacy of an Aboriginal presence, the arrival of non-Aboriginal farmers, the building of industry and lives of workers, and the process of urban development.  Sites like the Parson’s site along the Black Creek, aircraft manufacturing at Downsview airfield, and the development of highway 401 shaped how people conceived of the spaces around them in the north end of the city.

In the core of the city, though, this story has been better displayed in public spaces and official commemoration, building a stronger sense of civic identity and community.  Outside of the core, the tale of change over time and urban evolution remains silent.  There are few spaces beyond the perimeter of the downtown core that encourage people to consider the city’s diverse pasts and the experiences of those people who lived there before.  Isolated from the contexts of the past, people in these places are left to build different forms of community, less anchored to place and the lessons of the past.  In Toronto, and many other cities, inscription of the past onto the urban landscape has been used to build different places and different visions of urban identity.

The closure of these museums exacerbates these differences and creates a larger chasm between the everyday experiences of those living in Toronto’s core and those living elsewhere.  Equally as important, though, these closures encompass the three museums most closely identified with local historical societies for the former boroughs of Etobicoke and North York.  If successful, the result of these closures will be a further simplified public telling of Toronto’s past as a historical urban core and an ahistorical suburban periphery.

Toronto historians have voiced their opposition to these cuts in an open letter to Toronto’s city council.  You can voice your opposition to the proposed cuts by signing a petition.  Also, you can visit Zion School House during the next Approaching the Past workshop (Secret Lives, Affective Learning: Using Drama to Teach History) on November 29^th.  Click here to RSVP.

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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On Monday November 14th Arthur Bousfield and Garry Toffoli, co-authors of Royal Tours 1786-2010 (Dundurn, 2010) will place this most recent royal tour in the context of those that preceded it, going back to 1786! Nathan Tidridge author of Canada’s Constitutional Monarchy (Dundurn, 2011) believes there’s a crisis in our understanding of the role the Crown plays in our government. He argues that the monarchy is a rich institution integral to our ideals of democracy and parliamentary government. What do you think?

Parler Fort is a series of themed discussions that examines the impacts of past events on our lives today. Featuring novelists, historians, artists and city planners among others, each session explores a topic in a way that sparks dialogue and provides insight into issues that matter today. Fort York National Historic Site is an apt setting in which to enrich our understanding of our city and fortify our connections with one another.

Admission Price $10 ($8.85 plus tax)
Free for students compliments of Dundurn Press
R.S.V.P. to 416-392-6907 ext. 221
Fort York, Blue Barracks. Doors open at 7 p.m.
Complimentary Refreshments provided by Fort York Volunteer Historic Cooks
Presented in partnership with The Friends of Fort York
fortyork@toronto.ca ? www.toronto.ca/fortyork ? Twitter @fortyork ? Facebook.com/fortyork

“Ottawa looks at rewriting rules on charitable giving,” the Globe and Mail announced last Friday, kicking off a running series on the evolution of philanthropy in Canada and abroad. Federal charities policy is front page news. According to the Globe’s reporting, the federal government is proposing, among other reforms, to make changes to the tax rules governing charities in order to increase the personal tax credit for charitable giving. According to a follow-up article, the House of Commons finance committee has approved “a study of whether to change Canada’s charitable tax credits to encourage more giving […which is] expected to take a broad look at expanding the tax credit.” I believe that any discussion of changes to charitable tax policy in Canada would be the poorer for failing to consider the history of that policy.

The federal government currently funds registered charities in two ways: by direct funding grants (which are also available to other voluntary groups which do not meet legal and regulatory criteria for charitable registration), and indirectly through the tax system. The most significant tax advantage enjoyed by registered charities is the power to issue tax receipts to their donors, receipts which entitle donors to claim tax credits when filing their annual income tax returns. Let us be clear: through the medium of charitable tax credits, the federal government forfeits revenue annually in order to encourage the funding of registered charities by private donors. This represents a significant indirect subsidy of registered charities.

The federal government has opened a discussion about the charitable tax credit, and it is imperative that this discussion be informed by the history of changes and proposed changes to this policy. It is only in the context of this history that we can fully appreciate the choices at hand. The question before us is not simply one of expanding or limiting the charitable tax credit in order to encourage the donation of more or less money to charity; it is also a question of how the tax benefit should be structured, who should be encouraged to give, and what that says about our priorities as a society.

Charitable tax exemptions were part of Canada’s first income tax law, the Income War Tax Act of 1917. Initially providing taxpayers with exemptions for donations to a specified list of charitable organizations, the Act was amended in 1930 to extend the exemptions to all charitable organizations meeting a legal test established in English common law. As first established, charitable tax exemptions took the form of a tax deduction. Donors were permitted to deduct the cost of their charitable donations (up to 10 per cent of income) from their gross income, before calculating their tax payable. As a tax deduction, the value of the tax exemption for charitable giving varied between taxpayers according to the taxpayers’ income tax rates. In a simplified example, if a taxpayer made a donation of $100 to charity and that taxpayer was taxed at a rate of 50%, the donation would cost the taxpayer $50 and the federal government would forfeit $50 of tax revenue to make up the difference. If, by contrast, the same taxpayer was taxed at a rate of 20%, the donation would cost the taxpayer $80 and the federal government would forfeit $20 to make up the difference. Thus the higher a taxpayer’s income, the less expensive it was for them to make charitable donations, and vice versa.

By the 1970s, this situation was increasingly disconsonant with changing social values concerning the place of voluntary organizations in the practice of Canadian citizenship, and in the fostering of democratic participation in Canada. Following the Second World War, Canadians had become increasingly concerned with fostering equitable political participation – often through broad-based political engagement with the state through voluntary organizations. Through direct grants to public interest groups, limits on the amount that any one individual could donate to a political party, and the introduction of tax credits for political donations, efforts were made to ensure that everyone had an equal opportunity to have his or her voice heard the public life. Following the postwar expansion of government services, charities, forced into a process of self-reflection and redefinition, had increasingly begun to understand advocacy on behalf of their clients as a key part of their role in Canadian society. But if charities were to be vehicles of representation and (non-partisan) political expression, they needed to be equitably accessible to all members of society. The surest way to make certain that charities represented the interests of the greatest number of people was to involve as many people as possible in the funding of those charities. Charities were increasingly seen as one vehicle among many to enhance democratic participation in Canada.

Out of this new commitment to equity emerged a proposal to allow taxpayers a choice between claiming their charitable donations as either the traditional tax deduction, or as a 50% tax credit. This proposal was put forward by the National Voluntary Organizations (NVO) – a group formed in 1974 to represent the interests of the voluntary sector to the federal government. Substituting the charitable tax deduction with a 50% credit would have worked to equalize, in part, the cost of giving between taxpayers in different income groups. The group framed their proposal as a way to make the practice of charitable donation more equitable and to make charities themselves more democratic and responsive. If charities were supported by a broader group of citizens, they thought, charities could not help but become more expressive of a broader range of interests and points of view.

For a variety of reasons, which I am in the process of exploring in the course of my research, despite having some significant support in parts of the federal government, the NVO’s proposal was not implemented. In 1988, however, the tax deduction was replaced with a graduated tax credit, under which the first $250 of charitable donations would receive a credit of 17%, and donations exceeding that amount would receive a credit of 29%. Subsequent changes to the policy preserved this graduation. Though this tax structure was arguably more equitable than the original tax deduction, it nonetheless continued to favour those earning higher incomes. The goal of fostering democratic participation by equalizing the cost of giving between income groups had fallen by the wayside.

If the new policy proposed by the federal government follows in this vein, increasing the tax credit rates while preserving this distinction between donations of differing amounts, Canada’s charitable tax policy will continue to privilege the involvement of those with more to give. That might be a price that we are willing to pay for the benefit of increased donations from the richest Canadians. It comes down to a question about priorities and about what we want our charitable tax credits to do; by simply increasing the value of the tax credits and preserving their current structure we could use them to encourage increased giving by the highest earners as a substitute for or a supplement to our current structure of progressive taxation. But Canadians of the 1970s had a different vision of the place of charitable tax credits in civic life, one in which charitable giving could possibly have served to increase the democratic potential of Canadian society. In 2011, what do we value more – increased giving or increased participation? We need to talk about it.

Cate Prichard is a PhD student in the Department of History at York University. Her thesis explores the relationship between the Canadian federal government and the voluntary sector between 1930 and 1988 through a close examination of changes and proposed changes to charitable tax exemptions as a policy.

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Want to know more? For information about the changing place of charity and charitable fundraising following the expansion of government social programs after WWII, please see Shirley Tillotson’s book Contributing Citizens: Modern Charitable Fundraising and the Making of the Welfare State, 1920-66, published in 2008 by UBC Press. For a history of and commentary on the history of charitable tax deductions and credits in Canada, please see Peter Elson’s book High Ideals and Noble Intentions: Voluntary Sector-Government Relations in Canada, published this year. Finally, for a description of the “citizenship regime” of the 1970s, please see Jane Jenson and Susan D. Phillips’ article entitled “Redesigning the Canadian Citizenship Regime: Remaking the Institutions of Representations” from Citizenship, Markets, and the State (eds. Crouch, Eder and Tambini), published in 2001.

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Ma’s grinning. “We can do anything now.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re free.”

- Emma Donoghue, Room (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2010).

Free of “Room” – a locked garden shed with a single skylight, the primary setting of Emma Donoghue’s award-winning fiction novel, Room.

In Room, Donoghue brings readers into Jack’s world, an eleven by eleven ‘cell,’ that he shares with Ma and a key cast of inanimate characters like Rug, Bed, Table, Tooth, and Door. While readers can sense within pages that Jack’s world is a little too small, he reminds readers that “We [Ma and Jack] have thousands of things to do every morning, like give Plant a cup of water in Sink.” It is through this eerily ‘safe’ space that Donoghue eases her readers into an alternate America: captive America. And, while Ma is never sold by her captor, it is through Ma’s story that Donoghue draws readers’ attention to a thriving 32 billion dollar minimum criminal industry: human bondage.

Donoghue wrote a book that I couldn’t put down. A suspense novel that had me Google-searching for spoilers. A book that made me want to learn more about Donoghue, how she recreated Ma’s world, and what she wanted to tell her audience about human bondage. What follows is a Q & A with Emma Donoghue and key passages from Room.

BL: In previous interviews you indicated that you conducted most of your research for Room online. What key sources helped you with your research? And, did any of the sources provide support to survivors?

ED: I don’t have a record of exactly what sources I used, because researching a novel – unlike, say, a book of history, which has to cite all its sources – is a matter of grazing and picking up impressions. What I can comment on are some of the benefits of researching a painful storyline such as Ma and Jack’s online. Some readers were surprised that I did not interview rape survivors in person, but to me that would have been horribly intrusive. By listening in on sites in which, for instance, women who have got pregnant by rape chose to share their stories anonymously, I was able to pick up many of their insights without having to put individuals through a probing interview. Because the situation in Room is such a very rare one – I only found a couple of cases worldwide in which a man kidnaps a stranger, holds her for years and children are born – I had to read much more widely, which benefited the novel because it gave it a broader focus on issues of confinement and freedom. When I was forming the character of Old Nick, in particular, I decided to think of him not specifically as a violent pervert, but more generically as the kind of person who likes to own people, likes to consider them as convenient resources: the Nazi camp guard, the Old South slaveowner, the wife-batterer…

BL: Near the end of Room, Ma speaks out against other forms of slavery, thus challenging her interviewer to look beyond sexual and/or domestic enslavement. How do you define modern day slavery? What do you see as the central importance of Ma’s definition?

ED: It’s only one sentence in the book but to me it’s a crucial one, the distillation of a lot of research; to me it was crucial for an intelligent woman like Ma to rise above her own misery for a moment and glimpse the ways in which her terrible story echoes the less headline-grabbing situations of so many captive people worldwide – anyone who, by pressure, by threats, by having their passports held, by so-called debt to pimps or traffickers or moneylenders, by parental or police authority, by any kind of compulsion is forced into a situation, whether that be soldiering, marriage, prostitution, or simply endless unpaid labour in a sweatshop or home. While it would have been unrealistic for Ma to launch into a long lecture on the subject, I needed her to say something – because otherwise I feared that in writing this novel I would be doing what writers so often do, making one white middleclass American girl’s story sound like a uniquely important tragedy.

BL: Towards the end of Room, you seem to poke fun at professionals analyzing Ma and Jack’s capture and release on television. Was this critique inspired by your research? How would you, if at all, like to see the conversation around enslavement change?

ED: Absolutely, my research prompted me to put a lot of media satire into the novel, which hadn’t been part of my original plan. I was so intrigued and appalled by how we all – and I mean contributors to message boards or Facebook as much as professional journalists – so often get it wrong when dealing with survivors of freakish crimes. The mixture of reverence and blame someone like Natascha Kampusch or Elisabeth Fritzl has attracted, for instance. The barely disguised voyeuristic focus on the sexual aspects of the imprisonment; the fascination with Stockholm Syndrome. I would like to see a lot more political context in the discussion of these cases – for instance, a drawing of the patriarchal connections between one stranger kidnapping a teenager on a street, and girls being forced to submit to FGM, child prostitution, underage marriages or marital rape.

BL: In previous interviews, you have indicated some discomfort with the connection between Room and the Fritzl case — largely a result of media buzz. What do you see as the limits (and, perhaps, benefits) of this connection?

ED: As you can tell, I am more than happy to discuss my novel in terms of real-world issues of, say, parenting, media or slavery. What I can’t stand is being called a ‘Fritzl author’, or having Room reviewed alongside a mugshot of Fritzl, when in fact all I took from that case was the basic premise of life in a locked room. I went out of my way to make the story of Room different from that and other individual cases because I was not trying to fictionalize a real person’s suffering; I was working to create a pure fiction which would get people talking about things that urgently matter.

Emma Donoghue’s Room – winner of Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize – is not only excellent fiction, but an excellent launching pad for discussions of contemporary slavery. Room‘s effectiveness as a learning tool results (in part) from the ‘naturalness’ Donoghue creates around Ma and Jack’s captivity: their story is exceptionally-unexceptional. By writing about human bondage through the eyes of a child, Jack, Donoghue made it difficult for her readers to dissociate bondage with now. Donoghue thus highlights the continuation of slavery, showing readers how seemingly eradicated practices (e.g. human ownership) continue to shape our world today – maybe in our country, our province, our town, our neighbour’s garden shed. I actively encourage anyone with a penchant for good reads and an interest in an illegal/criminal industry that affects 27 million people today to read Room.

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