https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/John-Reid-January-17-2013.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadOn January 17th the students and faculty at Acadia University invited historian John G. Reid to provide historical context to the #IdleNoMore movement.  This hour long lecture builds on Reid’s forty-year career as a historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northeastern North America and expert witness in a number of court cases involving Treaty and… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Paul W. Bennett A Review of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada R. Blake Brown The Osgoode Society/ University of Toronto Press Hard Cover, 349 pages, $70.00 Guns in and around children in schools are frightening.  That is why gun culture and firearms control totally dominated the news media in the wake of the horrific… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Christine McLaughlin The Hudak Conservatives have unveiled plans to bring so-called “Right to Work” legislation to Ontario. Following in the footsteps of American Republicans, Ontario’s Conservatives are seeking to unravel an agreement that has maintained relative labour peace in the province for over half a century. This has been painted as a ‘progressive’ measure that will ‘modernize’ what have… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Christopher Moore This post was originally published on Christopher Moore’s History News Late in 2011, before Attawapiskat and Idle No More were as newsy as they are now, CBC Radio’s Ideas presented my radio documentary “George MacMartin’s Big Canoe Trip,” an exploration of how the James Bay Treaty was made in 1905. The radio-doc draws on the diary of… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Sean Graham On December 14, 2012, a man forced his way into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and killed 26 people. In a scene re-played far too often, that unspeakable horror led to a fresh round of debate over the reasons for why the United States suffers from gun violence at such a disproportionate rate when compared to… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Glen Coulthard The post was originally published on Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Much has been said recently in the media about the relationship between the inspiring expression of Indigenous resurgent activity at the core of the #IdleNoMore movement and the heightened decade of Native activism that led Canada to establish the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Tobold Rollo [This post first appeared on Tobold Rollo’s website.] As Chief Theresa Spence continues her hunger strike, her request that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Governor General meet with Chiefs to discuss treaties has many Canadians wondering what relevance treaties could possibly hold today. Anticipating this uncertainty, I wrote a pamphlet with the Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred,… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Christopher Grafos I should have written this article a long time ago. Selfishly, I have remained vaguely apathetic towards Greek politics in anticipation that the negative publicity and connotations of the Greek state and people would quickly dissipate. My assumption was wrong and now I realize that as an aspiring academic, I am, and have been, derelict. My doctoral… Read more »
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								People tend to have an immediate, visceral response to questioning the monarchy.  Whatever your initial reaction may be, I believe that a reflective, heartfelt, non-partisan and probably agonizing discussion about the monarchy’s place in our future, whatever we decide, would make us a better, happier nation moving forward.  
			 
		
		
		
	
	
		
		
		
		
				
				
				
			
								By Jay Young Change to Old Age Security emerged as a controversial element of the Harper Conservatives’ last federal budget.  Much speculation had been brewing in the months leading up to the budget’s introduction in March of this year, when federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced its details in the House of Commons as part of C-38, his government’s omnibus… Read more »