By Aitana Guia Too many political leaders are banking on politicizing migration today. Culture has become a fertile battlefield. Food represents familiarity and safety. Eating is a daily activity that connects parents to their children, to their schools, and to their extended families. Social life in Southern Europe revolves around food and food rituals. Donna Gabbacia, a historian of the… Read more »
Tina Adcock, an editor of the Otter blog at the Network in Canadian & Environmental history website, organized a series of posts on the intersections between environmental and labour history for the month of November. John-Henry Harter opened the series with his post “When Blue Meets Green: The Intersection of Workers and Environmentalists”. This was followed by Mark McLaughlin’s “Seeing… Read more »
By Laura Madokoro The postwar era is often celebrated as a great time of liberalization in Canada, as far as immigration rules are concerned. What is often ignored is how hard people, including Chinese Canadians, fought to obtain equality of treatment, and how the federal government was incredibly reluctant to proceed with large-scale change until the 1960s. Indeed, under the… Read more »
by Christo Aivalis Less than two weeks ago, Justin Trudeau led a small parliamentary contingent from a distant third to majority government, overcoming an image of aloofness and style before substance. He stands poised to rule Canada for at least the next four years, carrying in the footsteps of his father Pierre, who stormed to victory nearly 50 years ago… Read more »
By David Frank For some years I taught an undergraduate seminar on the history of the Canadian left, and one of the things students did at the first meeting was to try to name people who represented the contemporary “left” in Canada. Last year, the answers included Jack Layton, Olivia Chow and Thomas Mulcair, an indication that at least in… Read more »
By Henry (Hank) Trim In this installment of my four part series on solar energy in Canada, I examine how small numbers of environmentalists introduced solar technology to North Americans and successfully championed it as the centerpiece of the first sustainable development strategies. (Click here to read part one) Solar energy has a long history. The first efforts to use… Read more »
By Mark Abraham Accepting her Video of the Year award at the 2015 VMAs, pop singer Taylor Swift, surrounded by the women who appear as weapon-toting warriors in her victorious video “Bad Blood,” said she was grateful that “we live in a world where boys can play princesses and girls can play soldiers.” That same night, writer Adam Fleischer posted… Read more »
By Gilberto Fernandes Whence they left Critics of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s citizenship, immigration and refugee reforms argue that they are grounded on lies, exaggerations, fear mongering, and narrow-mindedness. Their criticism boils down to the fact that Conservative policymakers have not been informed by reliable data, which is lacking on Canadian emigrants. Recognizing this problem, the Asian Pacific Foundation of… Read more »
By: Sonya Roy and Steve Hewitt In recent years, non-experts, with the Harper government leading the way, have advocated and pushed for a conservative rewriting of Canadian history in an effort to find “heroes”[1]. This “great man” rewriting of Canadian history focuses on White, middle-class politicians and businessmen, militarism, and monarchism and leaves out the experiences of ordinary people and… Read more »
By Gilberto Fernandes Who killed spawned Canadian citizenship? Like Gillian Frank and Jamie Duong, who challenged the Elections Act rule limiting the external voting rights of Canadian expats to five years living abroad, I too am an emigrant. I moved to Canada from Portugal over ten years ago through spousal sponsorship. I became a Canadian citizen as soon as I… Read more »
