Active History

History Slam Episode Sixty-Eight: Grindstone Island and Non-Violence Resistance in Canada

August 26, 2015 1 Comment

By Sean Graham

In the past couple of weeks, the History Slam has looked at war resistance and human rights. Following a similar theme, this episode examines non-violence. The first thing I ever had published examined non-violent resistance in the context of the American Civil Rights Movement. The part about it that I find the most fascinating is that you need 100% buy in from the participants. As demonstrated beautifully in Selma, if one person retaliates, the whole movement can be compromised. To make a poor comparison, given how hard it is to get four people to agree on what type of pizza to order when watching sports, I find it remarkable that so many movements have successfully implemented a non-violent approach.

In North America, arguably the most prominent example of non-violent resistance is the aforementioned Civil Rights Movement. While not nearly as celebrated, Grindstone Island in eastern Ontario also has an interesting history with non-violence. Inhabited by Charles Kingsmill, the first admiral of the Royal Canadian Navy, in the early 20th century, his daughter inherited the site after his death. Intrigued by non-violence, she opened the island to serve as a Quaker non-violence training centre. What followed, as detailed by Tarah Brookfield during the CHA Annual Meeting, was an experiment with mixed results.
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Is Pre-Confederation History actually Declining? A Response to Thomas Peace and Robert Englebert

August 25, 2015 1 Comment

By David Zylberberg

In June, Activehistory.ca ran a series of posts focused on the topics discussed at the then upcoming Canadian Historical Association Annual Conference. As usual, Thomas Peace posted an informative analysis of the topics, regions, time periods and languages covered while Robert Englebert discussed possible reasons for the limited number of papers on pre-Confederation topics. Drs. Peace and Englebert are both skilled historians of pre-Confederation Canada who rightly perceive dangers for Canadian History as a field if it becomes overly focused on the second-half of the twentieth century. They use quantitative analysis of the CHA annual conference programs since 2004 to argue for a decline in pre-Confederation history. However, the CHA program is not the only metric to understand the interest of Canadian historians. Below, I will propose and briefly explore a few others, which suggest that the field of Canadian History generally places greater emphasis on early time periods than is evident at the annual conference. Continue reading →

Our Bodies and Inescapable Ecologies: A Look at the Mining Community of Sudbury, Ontario

August 24, 2015 No Comments

By Kaleigh Bradley

“Where does the body end and ‘non-human nature’ begin? When we recognize that human bodies are directly affected by their environments, we are forced to acknowledge that humans are not simply agents of environmental change, but objects of that change” – Linda Nash, Inescpable Ecologies

Last week I was surprised to hear about the toxic leak of nitrous oxide at Vale’s Copper Cliff Mine in my hometown of Sudbury, Ontario. Residents near the mine were told to leave or stay inside with their windows and doors shut until the toxic leak had cleared. Air quality readings showed levels of nitrous oxide that were about fifteen to twenty times higher than usual. A high-ranking mine employee told the CBC that the leak posed “no risk to the community,” although exposure to nitrous oxide is known to cause respiratory issues and it can be lethal in high doses. I wonder if after the gas had dissipated, and the residents and workers returned to their regular activities in the area, if they were completely safe from exposure? And what about the150 kilotonnes of sulphur dioxide that Vale’s Copper Cliff mine continues to release every year, despite its promise to reduce emissions? Is Sudbury a safe place to live today, even if it is a little greener?

800px-Blackened_rocks_in_Sudbury,_Ontario

Typical blackened rocks and stunted trees in Sudbury, ON. Source: Wikipedia.

Growing up in Sudbury, I didn’t think much of the industrial landscape that surrounded me. A
mining town with its black rocks, stunted trees, slag hills, and iconic Superstack, Sudbury was home. It was not until I began to venture outside of the Sudbury region that I realized something was very unnerving about my hometown. Trees growing in other cities, like Ottawa or Toronto were much taller and healthier. There were also several different species of trees besides birch or spruce lining the forests along the highways just outside of Sudbury. Rocks outside of town were any colour but black, and as far as I could tell, there were no slag hills, orange streams, or green-ish tailings ponds at our family’s cottage, about a 40 minute drive away. These other environments that I visited were not pristine because most ecosystems have been manipulated by humans. But why was Sudbury so different?

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Lowered Expectations and The Historical Origins of the ‘Great Decoupling’ in Canada

August 20, 2015 2 Comments

Pierre Elliot Trudeau, fundraising meeting at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montréal, Québec, 1980.

by Christo Aivalis

Recently many economists have emphasized that since the 1970s in western nations like Canada and the United States, high profits and productivity have been accompanied by stagnating wages, especially for lower income workers. These commentators, including Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse, and UNIFOR economist Jim Stanford, have argued that in the 1970s, wages became decoupled from profits and productivity, ending a pattern of complementary increases existing since the end of the Second World War. But still, major politicians, including U.S. Presidential Candidate Jeb Bush, say Americans need to work harder before better wages materialize.

Bush’s remarks are not novel. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau vocalized similar points in the 70s, arguing that prosperity would not come through better labour legislation or stronger unions. But through weaker labour unions and legislation, which would give job creators more space to create and trickle wealth down. In simple terms, Trudeau’s efforts during the inflationary crisis were primarily about lowering the wages and expectations of Canadians to help bolster corporate profitability and competitiveness, in part helping to initiate the current inequalities between wages and productivity. For example, Trudeau would cast inflation as a psychological malaise amongst the public, a social pathology to be cured, not simply through legislation, but through a public pedagogical effort to lower expectations:

People can only bring inflation down by lowering their expectations…because if we all adjust our incomes downward, then inflation will come down. But if we all think inflation is going up, then we all tend to adjust our incomes upwards and inflation will go up.[1]

With the above statement, and dozens like it, Trudeau stressed that Canadians needed to fight inflation by adjusting their mindsets. To let the status quo prevail was to enable a destructive “we want it all and we want it now…state of mind that can only lead to disaster.” For Trudeau, these unreasonable expectations were rooted in a postwar world where everything was deemed possible. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Sixty-Seven: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights

August 19, 2015 1 Comment

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By Sean Graham

Over the past few years, there has been plenty written on the changes in Canada’s national museums. A good deal of the focus has been on the renovations to the newly re-named Canadian Museum of History, but there has also been plenty of news out of Winnipeg and the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights. There have been questions related to the turnover in staff, the freedom granted to researchers, and the narrative used in publications. For as much as these have shaped the museum’s first year, however, they have been covered elsewhere and are not the focus here.

During the Canadian Historical Association Annual meeting, several curators from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights presented a panel on the visitor experience and exhibit construction at the museum. The discussion largely centered on the museum’s efforts to use first-person accounts and create an innovative environment for visitors.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Jodi Giesbrecht, manager of research and curation at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. We chat about the geography of the building, the creation of the exhibits, and the challenges of presenting difficult material in an engaging manner.
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Raising ‘Human Ammunition’: Motherhood, Propaganda, and the Great War

August 18, 2015 No Comments

By Suzanne Evans

motherhood WWI poster It’s no coincidence the monolithic “Mother Canada” statue proposed for the controversial war memorial on Cape Breton (and discussed in previous ActiveHistory posts here, here, and here) is the figure of a woman. Although women make only rare appearances in public memorials to the Great War, the “Mother Canada” statue evokes a long and potent tradition of both state and civilians mobilizing motherhood as the symbol of sacrifice in wartime. In her design, cowled and garbed in a flowing gown, “Mother Canada” is modeled after the monumental mother at the front of the Vimy memorial in France; she in turn bears a distinct likeness to images of Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as other prominent bereaved mothers associated with religious traditions such as the Jewish Maccabean mother of seven martyred sons, or al-Khansa the Muslim mother of four sons who died fighting for their faith. Each of these mourning mothers is portrayed in art and literature as grief-stricken but steadfast, holding true to her faith and ideals, and demanding that we remember and value the sacrifices they and their sons have made.

A woman whose body once gave life to the dead child she now mourns, enjoining – sometimes demanding – that the population honour her loss: this is the stuff of a propagandist’s wildest dreams. No surprise, then, that during the Great War “mother stories” were among the techniques used to spur military enlistment and civilian self-sacrifice. Continue reading →

Food Insecurity and the ‘Temporary’ Relief of Food Banks

August 17, 2015 1 Comment

by Krista McCracken

Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto. Creative Commons License.

There are currently over 800 food banks and 3,000 food programs across Canada. Each month approximately 850,000 people access services provided by food banks. The distribution of food to people in need is not a new occurrence. But the food bank model, as we know it today, was started in the United States in the 1960s by John van Hengel, a soup kitchen volunteer in Arizona. Food banks were created during an economic recession and were designed to be a temporary solution. The first food bank in Canada opened in 1981 in Edmonton during a recession caused by an oil industry bust. Thirty-four years later food banks are still widely used and there continues to be a need for them across Canada.

Canadian food banks are community run organizations that are typically run by volunteers to collect and distribute donated food to those ‘in need.’ Unlike the United States, Canada does not have federally funded food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or nutrition for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and food banks are often where Canadians turn when they are in need of food assistance. Canadian food banks receive no direct government funding and are driven by community donations.

The quality, nutritional value, and quantity of food distributed at food banks can vary greatly between communities and between visits. Additionally, the majority of food banks have policies around access and some require documentation to substantiate claims of ‘need.’ Food banks are not designed to meet all the food needs of all their clients. Rather food banks are often framed as sources of supplemental food and provide relief from immediate hunger. Continue reading →

Podcast: Commemorations in the National Capital Region: Evolution and Findings

August 14, 2015 No Comments

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During the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, a roundtable was held discussing commemorations in and around Ottawa, including the planned memorial to the victims of communism.

The roundtable was chaired by Yves Frenette (Université de Saint-Boniface) and featured Alain Roy (Library and Archives Canada), Nadine Blumer (Concordia), Alan Gordon (Guelph), David Akin (Post Media).

Activehistory.ca is pleased to present a bilingual recording of this roundtable.

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The 2015 Election and the Trans Pacific Partnership: A View from 1988

August 13, 2015 2 Comments

By Jonathan McQuarrie

John Turner and Brian Mulroney during the 1988 election debate. Photo via cbc.ca

Intensive negotiations in Maui over the last few days of July failed to finalize the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, the discussions continue. The negotiations for this comprehensive framework, which would incorporate twelve national economies[1] into an agreement with harmonized standards on tariffs, labour and environmental regulations, are to continue over the Canadian election period. Regardless of whether or not one supports the free-trade ambitions of the TPP, it is imperative that this agreement become a major issue during the current election, as it has far-reaching implications. To give three examples, dairy supply management might be reduced or even eliminated, investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms will challenge national programs, and access to generic drugs could be limited. Proponents of the partnership, such as the recently dissolved Conservative government, point to the potential benefit of access to new markets for an economy that relies heavily on exports.

In 1988, free trade was a relatively new concept, and one endorsed only by the Progressive Conservatives. The Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States, signed by Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney on 2 January 1988, prompted fierce debate between the three major parties during the November election. Subsequent scholarship has largely cast the 1988 election as a referendum on the agreement, whose implementation had been stalled by the Liberal-dominated Senate. Liberal leader John Turner justified using the (then, as now) unpopular Senate to stall the bill by insisting that such an important issue demanded public input.

The 1988 election debate, particularly an exchange between Turner and Mulroney, is justifiably famous in Canadian politics. Turner and Mulroney hotly debated the implications of the agreement, with Turner accusing Mulroney of selling Canada out, of yielding Canada’s control of its energy and agriculture, and of reducing Canada to an American colony. Mulroney countered with his own nationalist rhetoric, contending that the deal made the Canadian economy stronger, and contributed to the Canadian national project. Ed Broadbent, the NDP leader, is conspicuously absent from the clip, but his party also opposed the FTA. According to political scientist Robert Malcolm Campbell, the dramatic debate refocused the entire election into a referendum on free trade.

Compared to current discussions of free trade, the nationalist tone of the 1988 debate is quite remarkable. While emphasizing the potential risk for national sovereignty was undoubtedly a strategic decision, it is noteworthy that both the Liberals and the NDP felt that the nationalist appeal would work. Post-debate polls indicate that the discussion did spark an increase in anti-FTA sentiment, though the PCs retained enough support for the agreement to secure their majority. Despite the fact that the election was reasonably close, with just under sixty percent of the vote going to anti-FTA parties, the FTA became a fait accompli and a normalized feature of the Canadian economy. Most people in their twenties have lived their entire lives in a free trade Canada.

Political attention to the TPP reflects this normalization. In terms of the rhetoric about free trade and its implications for the nation-state, the 1988 election has more in common with the 1911 rejection of Laurier’s Liberals over the issue of reciprocity with the United States than it does with our current campaign. Aside from some comments on the need to protect farmers and the need for more transparency during the negotiations, the Liberal party supports the TPP. Likewise, the NDP have also come out in favour of the TPP, only criticizing the Conservative negotiators and likewise emphasising the need to defend farmers. Substantive criticism of the TPP has largely been confined to groups such as the Council of Canadians and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Given the magnitude of the deal, this is insufficient.
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History Slam Episode Sixty-Six: Worth Fighting For

August 12, 2015 2 Comments

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By Sean Graham

The United States has a long history of war resistance and war resistors. From the Quakers resisting the Revolutionary War to Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to go to Vietnam, American history is replete with examples of people who did not support the nation’s military goals. Depending on who you talk to, these people are heroes, traitors, or somewhere in between, but regardless of the perception, war resistance in the United States has received plenty of attention from historians south of the border.

With a shorter history and fewer armed conflicts, the same cannot be said of Canada. The narrative of war – in particular the two world wars – serving as universally unifying endeavours is particularly strong (as noted during this roundtable from the CHA). There is an emerging literature challenging that view, however, and giving voice to the thousands of Canadians who have openly challenged and questioned the country’s military actions.

One example of this is Worth Fighting For: Canada’s Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror. The book is an edited collection that traces the history of those who resisted war throughout Canadian history. The book includes every major conflict in which Canada has been involved as well chapters on the Canadian reaction to and reception of Vietnam war resistors and draft dodgers.
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