“This half century of struggle”: A Look Back at Child Care Advocacy

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In 1969, a sub-group of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Toronto organized a day care co-op on the U of T campus, winning university support after occupying the second floor of Simcoe Hall. In 1972, a group of parents demanding another building to meet growing demand occupied the meteorological building for 10 months. UOttawa, Canadian Women’s Movement Archives Collection.

Lisa Pasolli

If you know one thing about the history of child care in Canada, it’s probably that it is a story littered with disappointment. Over and over, studies and task forces have called for the building of a universal child care system. Over and over, governments have promised action only to walk back their commitments or have their plans derailed by shifting political winds. Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, however, has promised that “this time, we’re going to do it.” Budget 2021, which Freeland delivered on April 19th, included $30 billion in funding to build a universal early learning and child care (ELCC) system.

A few days after the budget speech, I watched a webinar hosted by some of the country’s leading ELCC advocates. While they were understandably wary about some of the fuzzy parts of the announcement, the overall mood was hopeful — and not just because of the amount of spending, which is significant, but because of its substance. Freeland set an affordability target: in five years, she said, parents will have access to services for an average of $10 per day. She promised to focus on support for the higher quality not-for-profit sector. Money has been earmarked to improve accessibility, and to support culturally appropriate Indigenous ELCC programs.

Affordability, accessibility, quality, inclusivity: these are all standards that have been lifted from the child care movement. In other words, decades of advocacy paved the way for Freeland’s announcement. Continue reading →

Community, Family, & the Hidden History of Southwestern Ontario

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By Thomas Peace

“Not acknowledging the multiplicity of histories that we carry around with us can separate more than bring us together and fail to demonstrate how the congruence of narratives that make up the past are the very stories that tell who “we” are in the present.” – Samantha Cutrara, Transforming the Canadian History Classroom, 6.

 “Community” is a tricky concept.

The word encourages us to conceptualize our place in the world through a singular sense of belonging. Put a bit differently: the idea forces us to think about groups that we find meaningful and supportive as entities somewhat isolated from each other. Our family is a sort of community, for example, but one that is distinct – often – from the communities we find in our neighbourhoods, at work, in prayer, or in recreation.

For many, though, our values and identities are bound up not in a single community but, rather, in multiple communities, anchored in specific sets of relationships that interlink us with diverse groups of people. We live in webs of communities rather than within one single collective unit. Each of these communities has value for us.

It is this difference, between a singular idea of community, and the reality that we live within many distinct communities, that the Hidden Histories of Southwestern Ontario project seeks to recognize.

The Hidden Histories Dashboard

Since the late eighteenth century, the plural reality of community and its mostly local and regional nature, has posed challenges for businesses, institutions, and politicians. Continue reading →

Historia Nostra: Commemorating French Canadian History in Stained Glass

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By Erin Isaac

I visited the Notre Dame basilica in Old Montréal for the first time in 2018. Having recently had the opportunity to visit the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, I was excited to see how the basilica’s architects were inspired by, or deviated from, the 13th century chapel built in the Gothic Rayonnant style.

Window commemorating the lives of Jeanne LeBer (left), Marguerite Bourgeoys (centre), and Kateri Tekawitha (right). Photo by author

Sainte Chapelle’s stained glass windows are its most famous feature with 14 out of the 15 windows depicting biblical stories. Knowing this, I was immediately taken by the stained glass windows at Notre Dame de Montréal which depict scenes from the city’s history.

Wanting to learn more about the windows and the stories depicted, I set to researching them. To my surprise, it was difficult to find resources about the windows (at least, in English). Few lists describing their contents exist, and the ones I was able to track down (en Français) were incomplete, lacked information, or had incorrect information. Continue reading →

There is No Solidarity in a Meritocracy: Precarity in the History Profession in Canada

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by Steven High

“We all love what we do deeply. … This love is taken from us by our institutions, employers, and administrators. It’s used to exploit us every time we do extra work or support the students we teach or mark papers properly even though we’re not paid enough to do it, or get a course outline just right even though we’ve only been given a week.”
– Dr. Jeremy Milloy, CHA round-table, January 2021 (and published in Active History)

“To all tenure-track and tenured professors who have and have not yet signed the letter: step up to the plate and take action. You benefit from a system that systematically exploits the labour of both precarious instructors and graduate students. You might think this has nothing to do with you, but it does. You might wring your hands and say it’s the department, but you are the department. You might say it’s the administration, but you are the administration. You have power and job security, and the ability to make real changes in the lives of so many people. It’s on you to use it.”
– Dr. Andrea Eidinger, CHA round-table, March 2021 (and published in University Affairs)

The Canadian Historical Association must recognize precarity within our discipline for what it is: a form of structural violence. The “collegial” structures within the academy implicate full-time faculty in a system, while not of our making, that is fundamentally unfair and exploitative.

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Nostalgia and the Politics of Selective Remembering

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The statue of John A. Macdonald in Victoria Park (Regina) was covered in a white sheet and police tape on 28 August 2017. Photo credit: Britton Gray.

By Omeasoo Wahpasiw, Adele Perry and Sean Carleton

Timing is everything, and context and connections matter. A week after the US Capitol riot on January 6 sparked a reckoning with the growing threat of white supremacy and far-right extremism in North America, an open letter appeared as a full-page ad in the National Post celebrating the “remarkable” legacy of John A. Macdonald. A week later, as Donald Trump prepared to leave the White House, his administration released the 1776 Report arguing for a revival of nationalistic, patriotic history education. The differences in these documents are many and obvious. But there are also connections, ones that highlight how nostalgia, nationalism, and selective remembering are currently being used to serve white supremacy and protect the colonial status quo.

The “In Defense of Sir John A. Macdonald and his Legacy” letter was released by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank established in 2010, and a group referred to as both the “Friends of Canadian history” and the “Friends of Sir. John A. Macdonald.” Beyond Ryerson Politics and Public Administration professor Patrice Dutil’s description of the “Friends” as “a loose association of colleagues and acquaintances” in Toronto, the organization is a mystery. As a text, the letter is homey and more hagiography than history. It was released on Macdonald’s birthday, and was intended to defend the former prime minister against his critics. The letter was published with 130 signatories and currently has over 200 names endorsing it.

The Macdonald letter makes the most sense when read within the wider context of colonial nostalgia for an imagined past when the relationship between history, nations, and empires was untroubled by critique. It presumes a divide between “those who see Canada’s history as little more than a shameful series of mistakes and failures” and those who pay Macdonald appropriate thanks.

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THE FREDERICTON GREYLINGS: Fredericton’s First Women’s Organized Hockey Team, 1903-1904

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by Roger P Nason

In the 1890s, efforts by women to bring equality into Maritime sporting activities were met with mixed results. Most noticeable was the emergence of ladies’ hockey in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Sheldon Gillis at Saint Mary’s University surveys the state of hockey within women’s sporting activities in his 1994 Master’s thesis with sources almost entirely focused on Nova Scotian university settings. Although prevailing attitudes among administration records reinforced the “frail Victorian woman” stereotype, progress was being made on campuses at the University of Toronto, Mount Allison, Dalhousie, and Acadia. By 1900, many colleges and universities included hockey in women’s competitive sports.

Although friendly games were held with Fredericton and Moncton, The Saint John Daily Sun reported that Saint John women “are very swift skaters and can dodge with the puck to equal some of the best of the gentleman players” in March 1895. By the next season, the newspaper cited the formation of a Ladies’ Hockey League in the city intent on having their first practice at Singer Rink.[1]

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History Slam 180: Gold Fever & Disaster in the Klondike

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By Sean Graham

In 1897, as news that gold had been found in the Klondike spread, over 100,000 of people rushed into the region in search of fortune. Unfortunately for many of them, the press typically didn’t highlight the harsh winter conditions in the Klondike, meaning thousands arrived completely unprepared. As the population grew, the situation on the ground continued to deteriorate as violence, particularly against local Indigenous Peoples, led to lasting human and environmental damage.

Despite this, there is a romance in the popular imagination of the gold rush. There is an image of a poor prospector venturing north with nothing more than a gold pan and a dream and finding untold riches in the midst of a cartoonish environment filled with non-threatening frontier caricatures. The reality, of course, bore no resemblance to this.

That is made very clear in Brian Castner’s new book Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike. Using a mix of archival and secondary sources, Castner brings the people to life. A veteran of the Iraq War who has published multiple outstanding volumes on his experiences, Castner’s ability to craft a captivating narrative is clear from the first page. Stampede reads like a novel, but is entirely based on real people and real experiences that challenge the existing mythology surrounding a remarkable moment where colonial, national, and local histories intersect.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Brian about the book. We talk about how his personal background influences his writing, his research process, and how his work differs from traditional histories. We also chat about the people included in the book, the colonial ramifications in the Klondike, and the lessons the gold rush that we can use today.

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Between Postwar & Present Day: The Possibilities and Perils of Contemporary History

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Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC), “Join Us” n.d, Rise Up Feminist Archive “Unions as Sites of Feminist Action”.

Kevin Brushett, Sarah Nickel and Nancy Janovicek

We live in polarized times. After preaching for years that “the world needed more Canada” because of our “exceptional” ability to politely navigate the politics of diversity, Canadians no longer seem immune to the forces of division and dissatisfaction that have led to Brexit, to Trumpism, or to a myriad of other worrying signs of incivility stalking the globe. The lines of division go beyond where one stands on issues of reproductive choice, gun control, vaccine safety, or climate change. Socioeconomic disparities have been increasing over the past twenty years and with this growing disparities in the access to levers of power across Canadian society. These inequities are exacerbated by Indigeneity, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexual and gender identity. Growing disenfranchisement driven by these inequalities has deepened social and political polarization between those who advocate for greater state intervention to address them and those who argue for smaller government and more personal responsibility for solving them. In short, the “Age of Fracture,” as Daniel Rodgers once called the late 20th century, seems even more so in the 21st century. Understanding the contemporary historical origins of these fault lines has never been more important.

The upcoming online conference “Between Postwar and Present Day” (May 6-8, 2021) seeks to do just that by bringing together more than 80 graduate students, public historians, and scholars across 25 sessions to explore both the emerging scholarship as well as the lacuna within the field of Canadian contemporary history. Continue reading →

Take a Look Inside: What did we learn from a prison riot fifty years ago?

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By Catherine Fogarty

In November 2019, Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) were implemented by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) in all federal prisons to replace the old solitary confinement system. This new system was supposed to improve the lives of segregated prisoners who were often confined twenty-three and a half hours a day in small windowless cells with one hour of exercise and limited human contact. Inmates placed in the new structured intervention units would receive four hours out of their cells and at least two hours of meaningful human contact.

SIUs were introduced after the passing of Bill C-83 in June 2019. The bill was the government’s response to two lawsuits. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the John Howard Society of Canada sued the federal government over the use of solitary confinement, arguing it was unconstitutional, increased inmates’ suffering, and discriminated against offenders who are Indigenous or have mental-health issues.

The primary legislative intent was to abolish solitary confinement as defined by the United Nations Mandela Rules (confining inmates for twenty-two hours or more a day without “meaningful human contact”). The new system was to impose an initial limit of no more than fifteen days of confinement and introduce judicial oversight or independent adjudication for any length of stay in segregation beyond that time.

But an independent report and investigation released a year later in October 2020 indicated that very little has changed with respect to the number of hours and days prisoners spend in solitary confinement in Canada’s sixteen federal prisons, and in fact Corrections Canada was unable to supply the correct data to a panel of academic experts reviewing the implementation of the new structured intervention units. It appears that SIUs are just a fancy new title for a barbaric practice that has been going on behind closed prison doors in Canada for a very long time.

The Warden and Inmates Negotiate (Photo provided by the author).

Fifty years ago, on April 14, 1971, inmates at Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s oldest prison, overpowered unsuspecting guards and instigated one of the most violent and destructive prison riots in our country’s history. Prisoners were protesting against decrepit living conditions, overcrowding, inadequate rehabilitation programs, and harsh punishments. Step out of line and you went to the “hole” an escape-proof cellblock located in a concrete bunker. There were twenty metal doors and behind each door an inmate was confined twenty-three and a half hours a day, with one half-hour of exercise in a small, segregated yard. Sound familiar? Continue reading →

Finding History on Wilberforce Street

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By Isabelle and Ian McCallum

In the middle of March 2020, education for students in Ontario became a different reality. Learning in a classroom with peers was replaced with online learning as precautionary measures countering COVID-19. Students participated in learning at home, attending “google meets.” The postponement of extra-curriculars such as after-school activities, clubs and teams meant that the “busyness” of the week was now “quiet.”

For my daughter, Isabelle, this change was marked by a sense of loss. “Online learning is much different than in-school learning” she reflects, “because you are looking at a computer screen at a google meet, zoom etc.. thus, creating an environment with less engagement because it isn’t face to face.”

Distance learning offered an exciting opportunity to explore and to engage with questions new and old with deeper consideration than time usually offers. At different times, Isabelle and I often visited different points of interest near our home. These stops included historic buildings, churchyards and abandoned houses.

She would have many questions about the context of these places: Who lived there? What did it look like? What happened?

For more than twenty years I lived in a small, rural central Ontario community. I did not grow up on a farm, I was, however encouraged to help out on the local farms that surrounded our property. This involved planting, harvesting, cleaning cattle pens, haying and taking care of animals. Our home was located on Line 1, Oro Township in the County of Simcoe. Of historical significance, line 1 or Wilberforce Street was the location of a British government sponsored settlement of veterans from the War of 1812, specifically veterans of Captain Runchey’s Corps of Coloured Men. Continue reading →