A Source of Perspective: The Great Acceleration and The Canada Land Survey System

June 3, 2026 No Comments

Andrew Burke

This is the seventh post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE

It is fundamentally about change; constant, rapid change. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke described the Great Acceleration, in part, as “what is certainly the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere.”¹ The Great Acceleration appears to mark a true rupture, and if McNeill and Engelke’s predictions are right, a moment which does not last.² What value then does centring this potentially ephemeral, exponentially unstable, and measurably unprecedented period bring to the development of a framework for Canadian environmental history? It provides perspective. The concept, applied as part of a frame for historical thinking, establishes a kind of exceptionalism of the present that leads to questions around how current conditions came about, what triggered the acceleration, and whether the future might look more like the past than the present. Equally exceptional is the level of personal access to technological resources enjoyed by those living in the Digital Age. Individuals, as well as institutions, rely daily on abundant and available technologies of measurement and administration that permeate our relationships with the physical world. Meteorological forecasts, regulations, maps, and statistical products (including those measuring the acceleration itself) exist as facts in our lives, making it easy to forget that they are interpretive tools.

In this context, a historical framework centred on the Great Acceleration must be grounded in a firm understanding of how systems, tools, and structures for knowing the environment have developed with reference to the acceleration. What is novel and what is a continuity with the past? Have developments in these systems come in response to the acceleration; are they made conscious of accelerating circumstances? Where can causal links be made to the acceleration and what is coincidental? As a point of departure for these inquiries in the environmental history of Canada, scholars might look to the Canada Lands Survey System as both a resource of pertinent information and a key, relevant subject for these historical questions.

As a repository of historical survey plans and surveyor’s notes, the Canada Lands Survey Records and other Canada Lands datasets represent a valuable and constantly evolving inventory (as of 2010 expanding by 2,000 new documents each year) of records capturing how a variety of lands have been viewed within the lens of rights-bearing parcels and the experiences of those completing the work on the ground.³ Moreover, barriers to accessing the information are minimal. The Canada Lands Survey System’s interface and services provide direct and easy access targeting a variety of current day needs for the community of Canada Lands Surveyors. This active role in the ongoing surveying of Canada Lands means that inquiring historians can easily and freely access detailed sources generated by historical and current surveying activities.

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The Governors General – What’s Old is News

June 1, 2026 No Comments

By Sean Graham

This week I talk with John Fraser, author of The Governors General: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office. We talk about John’s experiences meeting all the Canadian-born Governors General, how personality shapes the office, and the role’s political limits. We also discuss the people who held the office, how they managed the position’s responsibilities, and what purpose the monarch’s representative in Canada has in the 21st century.

Historical Headline of the Week

John Fraser, “Julie Payette’s disastrous reign as Governor General: ‘Act of perpetual petulance,‘” National Post, April 2, 2026.

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Supporting Collective Bargaining, Unless it Works: The Past and Present of Federal Labour Rights Suppression in Canada

May 29, 2026 No Comments

Christo Aivalis

This is the third and final post in the Canada Post and Canadian Culture series.

Canada Post and its employees have had an undeniable impact on the culture of this country, both via the artistry and symbolism on stamps, and also as an essential facilitator of communication across a vast and diverse nation. From my perspective as a labour and political historian, however, Canada Post and other federal government jobsites have often been a laboratory wherein governments have experimented with ways to restrict the right to strike and bargain collectively, even though those rights are now[i] protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At times, examples set by the federal government to suppress workers’ rights have been followed by employers in the private sector and in other government jurisdictions.

Because of this Charter recognition, and the negative optics of attempting a total ban on labour rights, governments have implemented various tools to quietly diminish the rights workers do have, especially in cases where workers—via unions like Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)—are actually in a position to achieve victories. Indeed, the victories of unions like CUPW, including maternity leave in 1981, have taught Liberal and Conservative governments alike that they must be careful in explicitly and violently curtailing rights, lest they create martyrs and public sympathy, like when CUPW President Jean-Claude Parrot was jailed in 1979.

Thus, in the postwar era, federal governments have gradually moved away from cracking skulls and locking people up and towards using subtle bureaucratic tools to achieve their objectives more discreetly. During Pierre Trudeau’s time in power, this was achieved under the dubious guise of inflation control, but it continues today with back-to-work legislation, along with the more insidious Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.

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Canada’s Competing Definitions of Bilingualism

May 28, 2026 No Comments

Bilingual & Bicultural Press Conference with A. Davidson Dunton and Jean Louis Gagnon. Library and Archives Canada item 5101609.

Daniel R. Meister

Recent stories in the CBC revisit the controversy surrounding the appointment of Mary Simon, the first Indigenous person to be appointed Governor General of Canada. Simon, an Inuit woman, was bilingual, fluent in English and Inuktitut, and committed to becoming more proficient French while in office. Despite her efforts, and the fact that the Governor General is not subject to the Official Languages Act, some 1,300 complaints were filed related to her nomination. No doubt as a result of this controversy, Prime Minister Mark Carney assured Radio-Canada that the next Governor General would “absolutely” be bilingual in English and French. These comments, in turn, were criticized by some, including retired Nunavut politician Jack Anawak, who countered that it was “colonial thinking” to define bilingualism as meaning only English and French.^[1]

How is it that the even the definition of the term “bilingual” remains contested in Canada today? And why is the issue so important that the controversy lasted for the entirety of Mary Simon’s tenure as Governor General? A closer look at the historical context out of which the Official Languages Act emerged reveals that this simmering controversy is not only unsurprising, but that further contestations and debates are likely.

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Knowledge and Science in Canada’s Great Acceleration

May 27, 2026 No Comments

Shannon Stunden Bower

This is the sixth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

In The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke proposed four paired concepts as avenues into the global transformations they see as defining the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s: energy and population, climate and biological diversity, cities and the economy, and Cold War and environmental culture.¹ I’d like to propose science and knowledge as a pair of concepts with potential to shed light on important dimensions of Canada’s Great Acceleration. What follows are but some preliminary and scattershot thoughts on these matters; I’d welcome discussion and corrections in the comments to this post.

Science as tricky infrastructure

Increased interest in science and technology is a characteristic of Canada’s mid-twentieth century. The questions raised by World War II and, later, the Cold War were taken by some political leaders to demand answers that were at least partly scientific in character. In this context, we see the operation of what Alex Souchen and Matthew S. Wiseman have identified as Canada’s military-industrial complex.² Science served as a means through which the state consolidated authority and control over both human communities and non-human nature, with some social scientists and natural scientists exercising their expertise in service of what they conceived as the public interest, while others worked in private-sector contexts where profit was a prime motivator. As Blair Stein has proposed, mid-century scientific and technological advances like air travel affected people living in northern North America not just through the new possibilities these afforded but also through how these reshaped prevailing ideas of distance and environment – or, phrased more broadly, of human possibility in this time and place.³

A study of science in Canada’s Great Acceleration can take cues from recent scholarly examination of the relation between science and capitalism at transnational scales. Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer have proposed an analytic focus on the ways that science and capitalism have co-produced each other, arguing that the relation between these two is best understood in evidence-based analyses of particular historical contexts.⁴ From this perspective, we might consider how science and capital came together under the particular conditions prevailing in mid-twentieth century Canada, in the understanding that such studies might intersect in productive ways with efforts to probe interconnections between science and capital in different historical contexts or at different analytic scales, including the global or planetary. Studies of Canada’s Great Acceleration can help to illuminate the intersections between science and capitalism, on the one hand, and colonialism or imperialism, on the other – intersections that Rieppel, Lean, and Deringer identify as particularly in need of study.

Science might be understood as the tricky infrastructure underpinning Canada’s Great Acceleration. By the mid-1960s, a variety of ways of thinking about and with science were coming to the fore in Canada. Some federal leaders viewed science as a tool that had yet to be used to its full potential, looking to the prospect of a Canadian science policy as a way to improve matters.⁵ And science underpinned the amplification of this period’s environmentalist critiques, with activists (including some scientists) marshalling scientific insights in efforts to highlight what they saw as the alarming ecological changes associated with the Great Acceleration. While it facilitated the environmental transformations characteristic of this period, science also served as a lightning rod for anxiety on the part of political leaders and expert decision-makers, and it empowered emerging critiques of the accelerated environmental exploitation characteristic of the mid-twentieth century.

The history of science is both an established field of study in its own right and an important sub-theme in many works of Canadian environmental history. And historical work engaging with science is supported in a Canadian context by a number of important institutions, including the journal Scientia Canadensis, the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA), and Ingenium, a crown corporation that involves three museums focused on the history of science and technology in Canada. Expanded engagements with science in mid-twentieth century Canada are needed not only to generate insights on Canada’s Great Acceleration, but also to amplify and enrich important work already underway on the histories of science and technology in a Canadian context.

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Concrete Afterlives: Carceral Landscapes in Canada’s Great Acceleration

May 26, 2026 No Comments

Alicia Carefoote

This is the fifth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

When environmental historians describe the “Great Acceleration,” they usually point to dramatic post-Second World War transformations in human activity.¹ Carbon emissions surged. Industrial production expanded. Highways, suburbs, pipelines, and hydroelectric megaprojects reshaped landscapes at unprecedented speed and scale. In Canada, the decades after 1950 saw massive infrastructural expansion: hydroelectric development across northern rivers, the growth of extractive industries, and the spread of transportation networks that integrated previously remote regions into national and global markets.

Yet these familiar indicators – energy production, extraction, industrial output – tell only part of the story. As economic and technological systems expanded, states simultaneously developed new forms of governance to manage the social disruptions produced by accelerated capitalism, urbanization, and settler colonial expansion. One of the most significant yet overlooked infrastructures in this process is the prison. Prisons have rarely been considered within environmental histories of the period, limiting how scholars understand the full scope of postwar transformation.

Carceral institutions must be understood as part of this broader process. Prisons are not simply social institutions that confine individuals; they are material landscapes that reorganize land, water, labour, and energy. Across Canada in the postwar decades, the growth of carceral systems reshaped rural environments, altered local economies, and reinforced systems of territorial control which were deeply entangled with wider environmental change. Recognizing prisons as environmental spaces opens a new perspective on Canadian environmental history in the age of the Anthropocene. This essay argues that the Great Acceleration in Canada was driven not only by intensified extraction and production, but also by the expansion of governance infrastructures designed to manage the social and environmental consequences of rapid change.

Three-quarter view of the main entrance of Kingston Penitentiary, with guard tower in background, entrance in the foreground.

Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario. Carceral institutions functioned as large-scale infrastructures embedded within regional landscapes during Canada’s postwar expansion. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

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Confirmation Bias and the Indian Act: How Common Knowledge Can Fuel Anti-Indigenous Racism

May 25, 2026 No Comments

Daniel Sims

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

In May 2024, I attended a meeting of Parks Canada’s Indigenous Cultural Heritage Advisory Council in Sydney, British Columbia. One of our agenda items was the federal government’s commemoration of upcoming historical events, including the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. The hope was that we would tell the federal government how to commemorate these events in an Indigenous way or at least in a manner that reflected the value of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous values. To say the council was not particularly excited was an understatement. Truth be told, the individual who presented the item to the council was equally unenthused. Yet it highlighted something the council kept running into during the entirety of its existence. How are celebration and commemoration related, and what do you do when things like the Indian Act hit a milestone in their history?

The National Aboriginal Veterans Monument, Ottawa (source).

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Mining Data and Canada’s Great Acceleration

May 20, 2026 No Comments

Josh Sandlos

This is the fourth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

Each year in my “Canadian History Since Confederation” survey class, I take my students on a deep dive into something that has high potential to be boring: Statistics Canada tables on historical mineral and energy production. I usually put several data tables on a screen and ask the students to form as tight a semi-circle as possible. Faced with columns showing mineral production rates by pound, and the value of the ore by dollar, I ask the students what a historian might do with such seemingly impenetrable collections of numbers. The broader purpose of the activity is (spoiler alert!) to illustrate the vast increase in material production that accompanied the Great Acceleration—the unprecedented surge in industrial production that occurred in Canada beginning in the 1890s.

After a fair bit of squinting, students inevitably offer their interpretations of the first batch data. Often the first thing they note is the dramatic change in copper between 1896 to 1914, roughly a sevenfold increase from just over 9,393,000 to 75,763,000 pounds. What might have caused this, I inevitably ask? “A big copper discovery,” is usually the first answer, not so far from the truth considering the commencement of copper production in Sudbury and elsewhere occurred withing this date range. “But,” I suggest, “nobody is going to invest money into big copper mines unless there is demand for it, so what big contextual changes in Canada during this period might be driving the production of so much copper?” Often a student will make the connection to the rapid development of electrical infrastructure during this period. “For sure,” I answer back, “think about what we talked about in other classes: urbanization, the rise of factory production, and rapid economic growth, all depended on electrical power, making copper wiring one of the hottest commodities of the day.”

A map of Canada showing a selection of major mining developments from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, identified by mineral type and nearest population centre.

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Reservoir Modernity: Lake Diefenbaker and the Great Acceleration on the Prairies

May 19, 2026 No Comments

John W. Bessai

This is the third post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

Lake Diefenbaker concentrates the Great Acceleration within one prairie watershed. It shows how postwar Canada joined environmental transformation, settler state authority, hydraulic control, agricultural expansion, and the reordering of Indigenous sacred geography within one infrastructure system. Postwar governments accelerated production through large technical systems that reorganized environments and extended administrative control over land and water.¹ Under a 1958 federal-provincial agreement, the Government of Canada and the Government of Saskatchewan advanced the South Saskatchewan River Project. Between 1958 and 1967, its main works, Gardiner Dam and Qu’Appelle River Dam, created a 225-kilometre reservoir, fixed the reservoir’s full supply level at 556.87 metres, and established storage of about 9.4 million cubic decametres of water. These dimensions mark a major transformation in the environmental history of the Canadian Prairies.²

Gardiner Dam gave that transformation its physical form. The dam stands 64 metres high and 5,000 metres long and remains one of the largest earthfill dams in the world. Its construction brought the South Saskatchewan River valley under a new regime of storage, release, and control. Seasonal flow became retained volume, scheduled discharge, and regulated supply. The South Saskatchewan River entered a system designed to stabilize production, expand irrigation, and support long-range settlement and development. Hydraulic engineering operated here as a large instrument of postwar environmental change. In Great Acceleration terms, Gardiner Dam converted a river system into a state-managed instrument of production, storage, settlement, and regional planning.³

Close view of the spillway gates at Gardiner Dam, emphasizing the infrastructure that regulates storage and water release.

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Canada Post and Labour Activism: An Interview with Evert Hoogers

May 15, 2026 No Comments

For the second feature in Active History’s series on Canada Post, we sat down with Evert Hoogers, a retired postal worker, long-time union activist, representative, and organizer with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Throughout our interview Evert shared his recollections, memories, and insider knowledge from a long career in postal work and as a labour activist.

This interview was conducted by the series editors, Annabelle Penney and Raffaella Cerenzia, and has been shortened for publication.

Active History: Let’s talk about your initial involvement with the CUPW in 1972. Can you clarify how you came to be involved with the union itself and tell us a little bit about the atmosphere of the union when you first joined?

Evert: When I started in ‘72, it was only five years since the certification of what was called the CPU, the Council of Postal Unions certification. It was only three years since the first negotiated collective agreement under what was known as the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the act that governed labour relations in the federal government. In 1965 there was a recognition strike…by the postal unions that forced this emerging legislation to include conciliation and the right to strike rather than simply compulsory arbitration. So at the time that I started in ‘72, the vast majority of the leadership of the Vancouver Local that I was in, were made up of people who had gone through the experience of that recognition strike and were a product of the understanding that when workers get together, when they unite, when they decide that they’re going to make their case known, that many things can be accomplished.

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