By Christo Aivalis On January 1st of this year, the Ontario government instituted a minimum wage increase to fourteen dollars an hour, with a pledge to increase it to fifteen dollars by January 2019. While 60% of Ontarians support the increase, numerous businesses have retaliated against their workers by retracting things like benefits and paid breaks. Many examples have come… Read more »
David Blocker Editors Note: This is the second post in a two-part series on the history of NDP leadership conventions. The first post in the series can be read here. Today’s post continues an examination of past NDP leadership conventions as a means of looking for historical trends within the NDP leadership races. The two posts in this series aim to… Read more »
David Blocker Editors Note: This is the first post in a two-part series on the history of NDP leadership conventions. The second part to this series will be posted tomorrow morning. As the 2017 NDP leadership race concludes and results of the first round of voting are released on October 1, 2017 historians have a unique opportunity to reflect on… Read more »
By Aaron Boyes and Sean Graham Over the past month I have had, and overheard, many conversations with friends, family members, and coworkers about the year 2016, and the overwhelming consensus is that this has been an unusually bad year. Numerous events occurred that shocked the public, such as the outbreak of the Zika virus; the Brexit vote and its… Read more »
By Dennis Molinaro The First World War led to many profound changes in Canadian society, including expanding the security powers of the government and laying the foundations of the modern surveillance state. Through measures such as the War Measures Act and Section 98, certain wartime powers became a permanent means of judging people’s politics in peacetime. Surprisingly, this legacy of… Read more »
http://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Paul-Kahanx2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham One of the things that I often joke about when talking about finding new historical material to study is that you can always revisit an old topic – after all, there’s a new book about the American Civil War published every hour. Of course that isn’t literally true, but there does… Read more »
Alban Bargain-Villéger In recent years, serial political dramas such as House of Cards and the Danish series Borgen have enjoyed quite a bit of success in North America. Although one might argue that the genre is more of a child of the 1990s, since the original House of Cards trilogy (set in a fictional post-Thatcher Britain) came out in 1991,… Read more »
http://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Prime-Ministers-Row.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Before I moved to Ottawa, my only experience with the city was a brief research trip, during which I heard about the nation’s capital radius rule. The rule holds that if you’re standing on Parliament Hill you can walk 15 blocks in any direction and still feel like you are in… Read more »
By Oscar Winberg The U.S. presidential campaign is already in full swing, even though it is roughly five months before the first ballot will be cast in the primaries and caucuses that select the major party nominees, and over a year until the people will actually elect the 45th president. This summer much of the coverage has been reserved for… Read more »
As the media has made clear over the past several weeks, what took place in Scotland yesterday resonates strongly with past independence movements in Canada. What has been less apparent in these discussions, which usually focus solely on the Quebec referendums in 1980 and 1995, are the deep roots in which Canada’s political future was debated. One of those lesser known moments… Read more »
