Tag Archives: Canadian history

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

Aerial black-and-white photograph of the Queenston-Chippawa hydroelectric generating station, showing the large powerhouse building at the base of a cliff with penstocks (water conduits) visible along the slope, surrounded by rural farmland and roads, likely taken in the early 1920s during or shortly after construction.

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… Read more »

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

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,… Read more »

Piecing Together Fragments: Historians and True Crime

Shannon Stettner As a child, on Friday nights just before 9:00 pm, I’d tuck myself under a living room end table. If I was quiet and hidden, I could usually get away with watching at least part of Dallas. I was equal parts enthralled and scandalized. The epic “Who shot JR?” storyline was my first memorable introduction to crime and,… Read more »

“No random historical exercise:” The Implications of Coupal v. Leroux

A Saskatchewan courtroom.

By Andrew Nurse This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series. On March 11, 2026, Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench Justice D.E. Labach issued a summary judgement against Darryl Leroux.1 The issue was whether Leroux, a well-known authority on “self-indigenization,” had defamed Michelle Coupal, a Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan, because he suggested Coupal used a fake… Read more »

The Complex Legacy of John Carr Munro

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By Daniel R. Meister When it comes to periodizing the history of federal policy of multiculturalism in Canada, existing models have loosely associated changes in policy with the changing of the governments.[1] But a closer examination of the earliest decades of the policy’s existence suggests that the Cabinet ministers responsible for the policy were more responsible for its evolution than the… Read more »

Poilievre’s comments on folklore aren’t quaint—they’re dangerous

A late-seventeenth century woodcut from “Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham,” black text against a brown background, and a depiction of people hunting deer in a forest with bow and arrow.

Poilievre’s allegory to Robin Hood was not, after all, a quaint diversion from matters of real political substance. His speech sets a dangerous precedent for shifting public discourse toward the mystical, exclusionary community of “the folk,” and that it is a threat against which we should all be vigilant.

Remembering Through the Body: Why We Turned to Research-Creation

By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown 231 Mutual St., Toronto, former site of Club Toronto and the Pussy Palace bathhouse events. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2023. When we began the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, we faced a familiar problem in queer oral history. Conventional interviews privilege chronology and plot. They… Read more »

Care Under Raid: Policing, Privacy, and Queer Resistance

Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown Leanne Powers, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025. “Suddenly, I heard nothing outside, and that was when the police were walking through that area. I heard a knock at the door, and I put myself in front of the person who was… Read more »

Listening to Youth: Historicising & Challenging Parental Rights Discourse

Derek Cameron, Karissa Patton, and Kristine Alexander A repeating pattern of multicolored prohibition symbols crossing out the words “Parental Rights.”  Created by Karissa Patton. In early February 2026, the United Conservative Party announced a change to MyHealth Records, a website that provides Albertans with online access to medical records. Previously limited to children under the age of twelve, parental access… Read more »

Judging a Book by its Cover: Making Sense of Sources and Silences in the History of Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Rural Nova Scotia

By Sarah Kittilsen In the summer of 2025, I was rifling through a box of uncatalogued materials at the Farm Equipment Museum in Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, when I happened upon an old record book. Tattered and yellowed with age, it had been used by fourteen-year-old Frank Daniels in the early 1930s to document what he expended and earned while… Read more »