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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Commercial Tattooing – What’s Old is News

May 14, 2026 No Comments

By Sean Graham

This week, I’m joined by Jamie Jelinski, author of Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tatooing in Canada. We talk about Jamie’s interest in the history of tattoos, the connection to art history, and the beginnings of tattoos as an industry in Canada. We then discuss questions over regulation and the criminalization of tattooing before chatting about some of the unique case studies in the book.

Historical Headline of the Week

Steven Dyer, “Tattoos in the workplace, how has society’s perception of ink changed?” CTV News, September 21, 2024.

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Hydro Power, Energy Transitions, and the Onset of Canada’s Great Acceleration

May 13, 2026 No Comments

Daniel Macfarlane

This is the second post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

If the Great Acceleration – the dramatic increase in human activity and the resulting impact on the Earth’s natural systems since the mid-20th century – is a valid framework, then surely Canada helped set the pace.¹ After all, Canada emerged as a major producer of fossil fuels during the Cold War and has earned the moniker of climate villain with one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

The start of the Great Acceleration (GA) is generally held to be about the midpoint of the twentieth century (for many, the GA is intertwined, even synonymous, with the Anthropocene). That the 1947 Leduc oil strike, marking Canada’s ascent as a major oil-producing nation, occurred at this time seems to solidify the applicability of the Great Acceleration frame.

But Canada was an energy superpower long before fossil fuels became one of the country’s major exports. And that was in the realm of hydroelectricity. Electricity has proven to be the foundational driver of modernity (and also of both the GA and the Anthropocene). To illustrate, while fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the consumption patterns of most Canadians, I can imagine my life free of hydrocarbons much more easily than I can imagine it devoid of electricity.

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Child of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration and a Reconnaissance of Canadian Environmental History

May 12, 2026 No Comments

Andrew Watson

This is the first post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

In 2016, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke made the bold prediction that “the Great Acceleration will not last long. It need not and cannot.”¹ A decade later, there are signs that this companion (some same synonymous) phenomenon of the Anthropocene endures. As one example, the energy required to generate the electricity needed to power accelerated servers that carry out the computational work of artificial intelligence (AI) is the next surge of the Great Acceleration.² And as with so much else during the Great Acceleration, Canada seems poised to play an important role in the rapid rise in the use of AI.³

According to Steffen, et al., the term, the Great Acceleration, “aims to capture the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System.”⁴ By many measures, as a social, cultural, and political idea, as much a socioecological and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. As the planet shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch, Canada served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.⁵

The concept of the Great Acceleration, therefore, offers a potentially valuable framework for a reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history, and a better understanding of the field within a broader global and planetary context. Several environmental historians have written synthesis overviews to provide coherence to the field.⁶ These early efforts to explain what is distinctive about Canadian environmental history will continue as scholars pursue new questions, sources, and innovative methods. What has been missing from these efforts, however, is a unifying theory or concept that researchers can apply, or work within, to investigate what helps the field hang together across time and space.

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