Municipal Conflicts of Interest in Canada, Old and New

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By Daniel Ross

He was a controversial mayor from the start. An unabashed populist, he rallied support during his campaigns by promising to cut taxes and reduce waste at city hall. As a result, he won an impressive share of the popular vote. He never denied having links to the city’s business and development community—he ran a successful business himself—and his policies certainly reflected that. From early on, accusations of bending the rules shadowed his career. But it was a legal challenge from an ordinary citizen alleging a conflict of interest that led to him losing his job.

Rob Ford and William Hawrelak. Sources: City of Toronto; City of Edmonton Archives, EA-10-1600

That man’s name was William Hawrelak, mayor of Edmonton from 1951-59, 1963-65, and 1974-75. His story is remarkable, and not just because of its superficial similarities to that of recently deposed Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Few Canadian politicians have managed to combine success and failure as dramatically as he did in his 30-year career in public office. But in another way, his tale, like Ford’s, is nothing new. Concern over politicians using public office for private benefit has often dogged local politics in Canada, and one result has been strict conflict of interest law.

In this post I’d like to take a look at Rob Ford’s removal from office in light of a short history of municipal conflict of interest in Canada. It turns out there is nothing unprecedented about the penalty he faces, or the populist way he and his supporters have responded to his removal. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Ten: The Foundation for Building Sustainable Communities

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By Sean Graham

In the six months or so since I started this podcast, I’ve been amazed to learn how many different groups and organizations are working around the country to promote the study of history. For as much lamenting and hand-wringing that goes on every time a study is released decrying Canadians’ general lack of historical knowledge, there are thousands of people working to engage people in the stories of the past. At a time when there’s been lots of talk of cuts that could prove damaging to the discipline, it’s good to know that there’s so many people from coast-to-coast working so hard to promote Canada’s history.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with Glenn McKnight and Bob Bell from the Foundation for Building Sustainable Communities, a local historical group from Oshawa, Ontario. We chat about the group’s projects, which include the re-creation of a WWII Victory Garden, geocaching, and their new War of 1812 project, which included a dinner featuring regency dancing and “Kentucky militia” kidnapping the Queen’s representative. After talking about the American perspective of the war in an earlier podcast, it was fun to look at it from a local perspective.

As an added bonus, we also re-assemble the Prime Minister Fantasy Draft for a short recap. We talk about the responses to the draft – good, bad, and indifferent – and announce the big winner – even though it’s been pointed out to me that perhaps nobody can be a winner in a PM Fantasy Draft.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

Bookstores and Memory: Marking the Closure of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore

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By Adele Perry

Photo by Cory Doctorow, Oct 26 2012

Last Friday, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore opened its doors for the last time.  This is an occasion for the kind of celebration and mourning that has occurred in events held in Toronto and beyond.   It is also a chance to think about alternative bookstores, change, and remembrance. Continue reading →

Announcement – Far from Over: The Music and Life of Drake, 8 December in Toronto

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Click through for a PDF version of the poster.

On Saturday December 8th at 7pm, please join Accents on Eglinton and host Francesca D’Amico (York University PhD candidate in music history) for an evening with Dalton Higgins, award-winning journalist, radio and TV broadcaster, to discuss his latest book Far From Over: The Music and Life of Drake (ECW Press). Higgins and D’Amico will engage in a conversation intended to use the life and music of Drake as a lens by which to discuss and highlight how the historical meets the contemporary. The issues that will be under discussion will include: the history of urban music in Toronto in particular, and Canada at large; race and ethnicity (given that Drake is of Jewish and African American descent, born and raised largely in Toronto, and has spent the ocasional summer in Memphis, TN prior to signing with his American record label); the role of media and industry; music and technology; and the current state of Hip Hop, Canadian culture and Canadian cultural icons as exports in a global market.

Far From Over is the first biography of the platinum-selling hip-hop artist; it examines Drake’s transition from Aubrey Drake Graham, heartthrob Canadian actor on the hit show Degrassi, to Hip Hop emcee. Featuring original interviews and insights surrounding the history of Canada’s Hip Hop scene, technology, social media and the music industry, and detailing the social and cultural conditions in Toronto that helped create the Drake phenomenon, Far From Over reveals the still unfolding story of an artist whose star continues to rise.

The event will take place at Accents on Eglinton located at 1790 Eglinton Avenue West in Toronto, at the intersection of Eglinton Avenue West and Dufferin Street.

Podcast: Ian McKay and What’s Wrong With Flanders Fields

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“Clearing the Battlefields in Flanders” (1921), by Mary Riter Hamilton. Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-142

This past Remembrance Day, historian Ian McKay gave a lecture titled “What’s Wrong With Flanders Fields.”

He argues that Remembrance Day in general and the poem in particular have been conscripted as part of what he calls the “right-wing militarization of Canadian society.”

McKay delivered the talk to the Queen’s University Institute for Lifelong Learning on November 11, 2012.

You can listen to a podcast of the talk here.

McKay is a professor of history at Queen’s University. He recently published Warrior Nation? Rebranding Canada in a Fearful Age   (Between the Lines, 2012), co-authored with Jamie Swift.

 

The Burdens of McHistory

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By Ian Mosby

Walking out of the subway into Yonge Station in Toronto recently, I was confronted with poster after poster bearing some strange, slightly off-putting questions about McDonald’s. These included, in big bold letters, messages like: “Is the meat fake?” “Are there eyeballs put in your meat?” Or, “Are McNuggets made from processed pink sludge?”

In the end, it was the presence of other posters assuring me that McDonald’s burgers and McNuggets are made of only recognizable cuts of the chicken or cow that finally tipped me off that the posters were, in fact, part of a McDonald’s ad campaign and not some kind of PETA-inspired anti-McDonald’s stunt. The question still remained, though: who thought this was a good idea? Like the recent Domino’s “Pizza Turnaround” campaign that bizarrely admitted that their food had been terrible for years (but was, supposedly, fine now), these ads seemed to remind commuters of the many reasons they’d likely developed over the years — both ridiculous and practical — not to eat at McDonald’s. What was going on here?

My search for answers eventually led me to the fascinating website yourquestions.mcdonalds.ca where, apparently, Canadians can submit questions like those plastered around Yonge Station and, within a few days, they’ll be answered by someone at McDonald’s and posted for the world to see. Initially launched this summer, the website currently contains hundreds of questions and answers that, it turns out, provide a fascinating glimpse into Canadians’ complicated relationship with their fast food and, perhaps more interestingly, McDonald’s ongoing and often failed attempts to deal with its own McHistory. Continue reading →

A Short Historical Primer on Canada’s Old Age Security Debate

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Signing of the Dominion-Provincial Agreement on Old Age Pensions, May 18 1928. Source: Library and Archives Canada / C-013233

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 budget bill.

Starting in April 2023, the age of eligibility for Old Age Security (OAS) benefits will shift from the current policy of 65 years of age to 67 years. The transition in policy will be complete by 2029.  In other words, Canadians born before April 1958 — anyone aged 54 or older — will be unaffected by the change. But those born after will not enjoy the income benefits provided by Old Age Security for another two years in their life.

The recent change to OAS provides a chance to reflect on not only the history of Canada’s pension system, but also the wider historical context of the baby boom generation. Continue reading →

Citizenship: Nothing Yet Everything

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The Matsuoka family on their just-cleared berry farm in Haney, British Columbia, prior to the Second World War. The author’s mother, Ritsuko is in the back row, far right. Source: author’s personal collection.

By Pam Sugiman

This is the third in a series of posts originally presented as part of a roundtable entitled “What’s the Use of History? Citizenship and History in Canada’s Past and Present,” held in Toronto on October 16th 2012.  The event was organized by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project.

Personal memory and history

As a contributor to this series on citizenship and history in Canada, I wish to offer some reflections on citizenship and its meaning — through the eyes of a Japanese-Canadian woman of working class origins. I am a Sansei (third-generation Japanese Canadian), born and raised in the west end of Toronto. I grew up in the 1960s. My Nisei (second-generation) parents were born in British Columbia (BC), where they lived until the events of the Second World War. Following the war, and to a large extent because of the wartime events, my father spent most of his adult life as a taxi driver for the Diamond Cab Company.  From the time that she arrived at Toronto’s Union Station, after a long train trip from Rosebery, BC, my mother made a living cleaning homes and taking care of children of upper-middle-class families in the affluent neighbourhoods of Rosedale and Forest Hill. Both of my Issei (first-generation) grandfathers immigrated to Canada from Japan in the late 1800s, first stopping to earn wages by doing agricultural labour in Hawaii. My mother’s mother and father’s mother both came to this country as Japanese picture brides. Prior to the war, they spent their lives in Canada raising children, cooking, maintaining the household, working on the family farm, and doing seasonal cannery work.

The author’s father, Ross Tatsuro Sugiman in London, Ontario where he was sent to perform low-wage labour, after being released from a POW camp. Source: author’s personal collection.

My reflections on citizenship and the nation are very much a product of my family’s historical experiences. And over time, these family experiences, now embedded in personal memory, have intermingled with the memories of the dozens of other Nisei women and men that I have interviewed over the past decade and a half, as an historical sociologist. Continue reading →

The History Wars: Where is the Media?

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Last week the Globe and Mail published an editorial about the video game Assassins Creed III . According to the Globe’s editors, the video game distorts the history of the American War of Independence by suggesting that native people (the protagonist, Ratonhnhaké:ton, is Mohawk) fought alongside the rebelling colonies.  Both gamers and historians quickly and resoundingly condemned the Globe‘s opinion as factually flawed (see here, here, and my own letter to the editor, here, for a sample of the critiques). I don’t want to rehash these critiques here. Instead, I want to ask some more pointed questions about why the Globe decided to run this piece in the first place.

It’s not everyday that a national newspaper decides to pick on an individual business over the quality of its product. Continue reading →

The Mosaic vs. the Melting Pot? A Roundtable and Podcast

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American Liberty stirs the Melting Pot. Source: http://chnm.gmu.edu/exploring/images/stir.jpg

By Benjamin Bryce

Over the past century, the ‘mosaic’ and the ‘melting pot’ have emerged in North America as concepts to explain Canada and the United States’ relationship with immigration and cultural pluralism. The term mosaic traces its origins to John Murray Gibbon’s 1938 book, Canadian Mosaic, while the melting pot emerged in public consciousness as the result of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot.

The two concepts remain powerful today because they are ideas about history. They contain a belief in collective belonging, upward mobility, and citizenship. The two phrases in fact describe national ideologies that embody how many Canadians and Americans think about integration as well as cultural and linguistic pluralism.

Many Canadians view the melting pot as the opposite of the mosaic and official multiculturalism. However, as the roundtable participants discuss, the two ideologies have much in common and mask many similarities when we examine the everyday realities of cultural pluralism in North America.

In this public roundtable discussion, five historians from the United States and Canada discuss the origins and development of these national myths. Grace Delgado demonstrates the ongoing importance of the melting pot for notions of citizenship. She examines how ideas of national belonging and exclusion are currently mobilized in Arizona. Patricia Burke Wood compares the concepts of the mosaic and melting pot, tying them to today’s multiculturalism. She criticizes the simplicity of the terms while also highlighting their noble idealism.

Russell Kazal examines the inception of the Canadian and American term multiculturalism, tracing it back to ideas of inter-racialism in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Randy Widdis presents the concept of transculturalism as an alternative. David Atkinson sheds light on the origins of the American melting pot, emphasizing its importance in American nation-building. He also discusses the ways that many people, particularly Randolph Bourne, challenged the myth of the melting pot in the early twentieth century.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

To watch a video of the podcast, click here. Continue reading →