Category Archives: History and Policy

University Donations and the Legitimization of Far-Right Views

by Asa McKercher In 2016, Western University’s Department of History announced the establishment of a variety of graduate awards and scholarships named for Kenneth Hilborn, who had bequeathed $1 million to the university in his estate. A faculty member at Western from 1961 to 1997, Hilborn (PhD, Oxford) was of a generation where one could apparently secure tenure without having… Read more »

Teaching Life and Death Stories in University Classrooms – Part 4

Today’s post is the final essay in a four part series that began as different conversations about teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference, winner of The Indigenous History Book Prize, awarded by the Indigenous History Group of the Canadian Historical Association. Each week will will focus on one professor’s experiences teaching the book to undergraduate… Read more »

Teaching Life and Death Stories in University Classrooms – Part 3

Today’s post is the third in a four part series that began as different conversations about teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference, winner of The Indigenous History Book Prize, awarded by the Indigenous History Group of the Canadian Historical Association. Each week will will focus on one professor’s experiences teaching the book to undergraduate students… Read more »

Teaching Life and Death Stories in University Classrooms – Part 2

Today’s post is the second in a four part series that began as different conversations about teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference, winner of The Indigenous History Book Prize, awarded by the Indigenous History Group of the Canadian Historical Association. Each week will will focus on one professor’s experiences teaching the book to undergraduate students… Read more »

Teaching Life and Death Stories in University Classrooms – Part 1

Today’s post is the first in a four part series that began as different conversations about teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference, winner of The Indigenous History Book Prize, awarded by the Indigenous History Group of the Canadian Historical Association. Each week will will focus on one professor’s experiences teaching the book to undergraduate students… Read more »

Sex Ed, Gay-Straight Alliances, and the Alberta Curriculum

On May 21st, Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government introduced Bill 8: The Education Amendment Act, which will remove protections introduced by the NDP government’s Bill 24: An Act to support Gay Straight Alliances. Bill 8 removes provisions that had made it illegal for teachers to out students. Minister of Education Adriana LaGrange insists that existing privacy legislation will protect… Read more »

What Doug Ford could learn from Wisconsin about higher education

Dan Guadagnolo Buried within Ontario’s 2019 budget is a drastic change to how the province’s publicly funded universities and colleges will receive support. Though Ontario’s post-secondary institutions are some of the most accessible in the world, the 2019 budget indicates that by 2024-2025, Ontario colleges and universities will receive 60 per cent of their public funding through yet-to-be determined performance… Read more »

‘The Best Version of the Liberal Party’: One Feminist Lineage

Veronica Strong-Boag[1] Political parties are contested spaces. Few know this better than Canada’s Liberals. Regularly derided as the party that campaigns on the left and governs on the right, that aphorism captures a long-standing split in its zeitgeist and membership. Since at least the days of Laurier and Mackenzie King, the party’s ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings have been regularly at… Read more »

The 1934 British Columbia Penitentiary Strike and Prisoners’ Wages in Canada    

By Jordan House The early 1930s were marked by considerable labour unrest in Canada. Over this period, workers developed new, more expansive forms of trade unionism, as well as new tactics such as sit-down strikes and flying pickets. In the context of the great depression, this unrest was not only evident in the country’s factories, mines, and ports; workers and… Read more »

The limits of tax privacy

      1 Comment on The limits of tax privacy

By Shirley Tillotson Party politics made the privacy of the prime minister’s income tax return a sensitive topic in mid-July 1931. On July 16, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett stood up in parliament and declared that the income tax measures proposed in his budget would not benefit him personally, as his Liberal opponents had alleged. If that were so, he bridled… Read more »