Democracy as a work in progress: the intellectual and cultural dynamics of the Canadian idea
BACS Annual Conference, New Hall Cambridge 6-8 April 2010
Wednesday 7 April 2010
SESSION C Neighbourhood cultures in the Canadian city Stephen Shaw, Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University Governmental and street-level cosmopolitanism in Montréal Through the lens of a translator, Shelley Simon (2006: 3) examines the (re-) presentation of Montréal’s distinctive cultural geography from post-war colonial city, through the Quiet Revolution, to a ‘cosmopolitan city with French as the matrix of its cultural life’. She notes recurring anomalies between official and street-level interpretations. Simon is discussing developments in Montréal’s literature that refers to - and in some cases narrates - the city’s multiple identities, but her critical perspective is equally pertinent to the city’s public spaces. This paper reviews some recent contributions by social and political scientists to explain how and why civic leaders have projected their particular visions of Montréal since the 1970s. Through examination of policy intentions, interviews with practitioners responsible for implementation and observations of outcomes, the author discusses contemporary expressions of “cosmopolitanism” in the development of Montréal’s Quartier internationale. This is followed by critical discussion of processes through which cosmopolitan identities have been negotiated in minority “neighbourhoods” associated with Montréal’s Allophone communities, and the outcomes of public realm schemes in “Greek” Rue Prince Arthur, Petite Italie, Quartier chinois, and most recently in the socially mixed district of Mile End. The study highlights the shift away spectacular makeovers that hard-brand specific identities into the urban landscape towards more pluralistic, fluid and subtle mixing of cultural signifiers in public space. The author speculates on whether this reflects accommodation of a more open-minded, democratic and evolving cosmopolitanism at street-level.
Rachel Walls, University of Nottingham Digital democracy in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood In this paper I consider the work of media arts organisations in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as an example of what Manuel Castell’s calls ‘“the grassrooting of the space of flows,” that is, the use of the internet for networking in social mobilisation and social challenges’ (402). Although this neighbourhood, the poorest urban postcode in Canada, undoubtedly demonstrates the persistence of the digital divide in the North American City, a number of cultural community organisations are using digital technology to strengthen community identity, empower residents politically and economically and tell otherwise neglected stories of the Downtown Eastside. I look at the following three examples: 1) Fearless City’s Mobile Swarm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP9RZoYfJOQ 2) AHA Media mobile video bulletins http://ahamedia.ca/ 3) Heart of the City oral histories http://www.heartofthecityfestival.com/community-stories/. I outline the production contexts, analyse how these screen stories shape both representations of the neighbourhood and how they work within its physical space—in Castells’ words, how ‘the space of flows is folded onto the space of places’. I also reflect on the role of digital media in the Downtown Eastside in Olympic era Vancouver. As the Olympics approach, tensions mount over issues of visibility of the Downtown Eastside and its residents, surveillance and security and civic pride. As I am planning a trip to Vancouver during the Olympics my paper should contain fresh insights in addition to observations made during my time with Fearless Media in February/March 2009.
Holly E B Kinnear, University of Cambridge Overlapping Territories / Contextualising a Neighbourhood: The Work of Robert Findlay in Westmount, the corner of Canada that is ‘forever England’ Marsan wrote that the elites of Montreal ‘looked towards the mother country, the ‘land of Hope of Glory’, for architectural forms which would best express their nostalgia and sense of belonging’, but how could Robert Findlay, the feted architect of Westmount, hope to feed this appetite for English nostalgia, when his experience of the ‘Mother Country’ was Invernesshire and Glasgow, the bastions of the Scottish Baronial and the French Classicism of the Beaux-Arts? This paper examines the paradox of a Scottish architect, trained in the Scots Baronial and the French Beaux-Arts tradition, who became a darling of the Montreal elite and helped to create the Anglo-Saxon enclave of Westmount, which used the nostalgia and Imperial nationalism of the Queen Anne style and its Kate Greenaway sentimentalism. How did Robert Findlay, the younger son of an Inverness engineer, come to encapsulate all that was English in Westmount: that neighbourhood of nostalgia? Findlay was essentially a Victorian architect and the point of Victorian architecture was ‘the idea of using borrowed forms not necessarily for any aesthetic pleasure or functional appropriateness, but primarily for the ideas associated with them…one of the ideas most eminently expressible in this way was that of the Nation’. If the ‘Mother Country’, the land of Hope and Glory, was at the core of Westmount’s architectural style, what were Findlay’s patrons hoping to replicate: the commercial prowess of the British Empire, the democracy of the newly erected British Parliament, the ‘sweetness and lightness’ of the Elizabethan home, and what of the influence of the nearby United States of America, how much did this neighbour influence the home style of the neighbourhood of the rich and powerful elite?
Richard Dennis, University College London ‘Cooperating and disputing’: apartments as community and apartments in the community. Apartment houses are often characterised as ‘communities of strangers’, the occupants of each flat living separate, private lives, bound together by little more than the desire to protect their environment from crime, unsocial behaviour and, for individual apartment-owners today, the depreciation of property values. Interaction between neighbours may be restricted to disputes over noise or the upkeep of the ‘common parts’ such as staircases and communal courtyards. Apartment owners or managers might even try to limit the extent of interaction between tenants, for fear of them combining to demand improvements or rent reductions. Raymond Williams (1976) observed that ‘unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc) it [community] seems never to be used unfavourably’ – which would imply that apartment-life was the antithesis of ‘community’; but Max Gluckman (1958) more realistically and more generously defined ‘community’ as ‘a lot of people co-operating and disputing within the limits of an established system of relations and cultures’ – which offers more scope for conceiving of an apartment building as a ‘community’. Apartment houses also impact on the neighbourhoods within which they are situated, frequently the target of NIMBYist opposition on the grounds that they will degrade the environment and devalue single-family dwellings. The threat of an apartment building can constitute a cause for the mobilisation of ‘community’. Once erected, concentrations of apartment buildings can create neighbourhoods in their own right, shaping an area’s social, cultural and political character. This paper, drawing on a wide range of evidence from newspapers, local government papers, novels and more quantifiable sources, will reinterpret Toronto apartment houses in the early twentieth century through the lens of ‘community’.
Aboriginal Studies Circle Presenters: Phil Fontaine, Kathleen Mahoney To mark our 15th Anniversary, the BACS Aboriginal Studies Circle proposes a special commemorative panel for BACS’ 35th Annual Conference, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 6th - 8th April 2010. The inclusion of this panel will significantly reassert the British Association of Canadian Studies’ commitment to engaging with Aboriginal issues at a time when ‘Managing Diversity’ has been benchmarked for priority by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s ‘Understanding Canada’ programme. Indeed, the Aboriginal Studies Circle believes that a discussion of ‘Democracy as a work in progress: the intellectual and cultural dynamics of the Canadian idea’ would be incomplete without a critical dialogue from prominent experts on the role of First Nations therein. Inclusion of aboriginal thought plays a vital role in the intellectual and cultural dynamics of contemporary Canada and this must be represented by the British Association of Canadian Studies to the wider international community of researchers. Having already secured the necessary funding, the Aboriginal Studies Circle proposes to provide sponsorship for a distinguished guest speaker to participate on a special commemorative panel that will debate the contemporary role of First Nations in the intellectual and cultural dynamics of the Canadian idea. It is the Aboriginal Studies Circle’s intention that such a panel will aptly review the progress that has been made on the situation of First Nations in Canada over the past 35 years of the British Association of Canadian Studies’ activities. The panel will also begin to highlight some of the key challenges that still remain in aboriginal peoples’ plight within ‘democracy as a work in progress’. When the University of Cambridge was founded in 1209 its scholars were over 200 years away from becoming aware of the existence of peoples living in the Americas. It is fitting, therefore, that exactly 800 years later the Aboriginal Studies Circle should be permitted to bring a critical First Nations voice directly to the heart of British academia. To this end, we propose sponsoring the inclusion of a respected leader who has represented all of Canada’s aboriginal peoples on an international platform whilst continuously fighting to protect their rights and welfare: Phil Fontaine. Having served three terms as National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Fontaine is one of the Canada’s most prolific Aboriginal leaders. As grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs in the early 1990s, Fontaine was instrumental in orchestrating the death of the Meech Lake Accord and brought about the dismantling of the Department of Indian Affairs in Manitoba. More recently, as National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Fontaine successfully negotiated Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2005. This resulted in more than $5 billion dollars in compensation to survivors; the founding of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and, led to a formal apology for the Indian Residential Schools system from Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada and all Canadians. Phil Fontaine has positively indicated his availability to the BACS Aboriginal Studies Circle for the conference; however, we await permission from the BACS council before proceeding to make him a confirmed speaker. Our 15th anniversary panel provides a forum for discussing some of the practical, ethical and intellectual/academic challenges posed by the study of indigenous issues. The inclusion of Phil Fontaine will offer considerable specialist insight and would significantly underline the British Association of Canadian Studies’ ongoing commitment to furthering the study of aboriginal-related issues within Canada.
Literature 3 Marianne Beauvilain , Mount Royal University Two Horizons: Canadian Narratives of Failed Integration Horizon is both the name of an actual town in southern Saskatchewan and also the name of a fictional town where two stories written by well-known Canadian authors are set. Both stories describe the arrival of newcomers who have optimistic hopes of settling in Horizon. Sinclair Ross’ novel As For Me and My House was published in 1941. It is written in the form of a diary, and describes a year in the life of a minister and his wife who have just been transferred to Horizon. Où iras-tu Sam Lee Wong? was published in 1975 in a collection of short stories written by Gabrielle Roy. It describes the life of a Chinese immigrant who comes to Horizon to open a restaurant. This paper will discuss how the heroes of both of these stories are portrayed as lonely, misunderstood men who do not adapt and are not accepted. They have, quite literally, no voice, and no way of connecting with the townsfolk. They remain the ‘object’ of the gaze of the citizens of Horizon, and are unable to integrate into the cultural fabric of the town. When they leave, as both do at the end of the narratives, they experience a profound sense of and loneliness and exclusion.
Jonathan Rollins, Ryerson University Canada and Open Space: Text, Nation, and Displaced Self-Refashioning in the Work of M. G. Vassanji In an age characterized by migration, exile, travel, commuting, and other displacements, “home” has become “a story carried around in one's head” (Rapport 268). In his novel No New Land, M. G. Vassanji refers to Canada as “a place to lay down your head” (34) or a place to set down your story, whether in the sense of committing it to language or in the setting aside of that story in order to “reinvent yourself” (157). Vassanji is not alone in this depiction of the country; Canada frequently appears to play the role of performance space – often a contested one – for those portable stories of home and self. In Vassanji’s work, Canada figures as just such a textual space where displaced narratives can be (re)performed and witnessed according to the logic of Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities." In order to stage these performances, Vassanji appropriates the highly problematic yet canonical image of the vast, empty national(ized) space that has played such an important role in efforts to define Canadian identity. He rearticulates this national space as palimpsest, open to additional layers of inscription. In place of the quintessentially “Canadian” emptiness of the Group of Seven’s northern landscapes, for example, that erase or omit reference to the cultural and demographic complexities of the nation, Vassanji posits a fictional “wilderness” that is not emptied out but, rather, open enough (though sometimes barely just and not without a struggle) to accommodate these narrative acts of home renovation and self-refashioning. In effect, he offers a post-colonial revision of the image of the New World as tabula rasa so often evoked in colonial discourse. In this paper, I examine Vassanji’s fictional Canada as a narrative staging ground and ask the question To what extent does Canada’s democratic pluralism facilitate and accommodate these narrative reenactments?
Fiorenza Dossetto, University of Nottingham A question of visibility: bringing the under-represented subject(s) onto the Canadian stage In the ongoing debate over whether theatre should be thought of as a politically indifferent, purely aesthetic form, or whether it should have social or political significance instead, Toronto-based Nightwood Theatre has always, uncompromisingly, adopted the latter position. Indeed, since its earliest days,Nightwood Theatre–which in 2009 celebrated thirty years of activity– has been promoting women-authored plays which explicitly challenge stereotypes and celebrate gender, racial, and sexual multiplicity. My paper intends to illuminate the ways in which this socially and politically-aware Canadian theatre group can, and indeed does,act as a democratic medium when it brings marginalized groups on stage, giving otherwise under-represented subjects a voice and a space for agency. To do so, I will focus on Nightwood’s adaptation, in the winter season 2008/2009,of Helen Humphreys’ award-winning novel Wild Dogs. Among the themes explored in the play, that of the love relationship between two female characters will be particularly relevant to my analysis. Along the lines of Derek Attridge’s claim that literary products, even when they are not political per se, exert an effective influence on political and ethical processes, I argue that Wild Dogs opens up a significant space for debate, by forcing the audience to re-think some of its assumptions about heteronormativity and otherness,at the same time inviting it to embrace (or at least acknowledge the existence of)more comprehensive notions of gender, sexuality and identity.
Anna Fahraeus, Halmstad University, Sweden Returning home: regional affect and masculinity in Proulx and Johnston Fictional literature has a representative and exploratory function in gender discourse. As material aspects of culture are analyzed, one aspect of masculinity that has come into focus is the role of the land in masculine identity formation. This paper explores the representation of emotional ties to land and how those ties are linked to masculine identity in fictions about Newfoundland. The two literary works in focus are Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993) and Wayne Johnston’s The Navigator of New York (2003). Both stories are about men returning home to the province after extended stays abroad, and both authors are realist writers who draw characters that resonate. What discourses of ‘home’ are invoked in relation to Newfoundland? What emotions are represented or evoked? What role do these emotions play in the formation of masculine identity, i.e. what discourses of masculinity are produced?
Local Democracy Roberta Lexier, Mount Allison University Power to the People: Democracy and the Sixties Student Movement in Canada The rhetoric of democracy was ubiquitous in Canada and other western nations in the years following the Second World War; the media, the education system, and most commentators constantly asserted the superiority of democracy over communism and insisted that western society was founded upon its ideals. Young people born as part of the postwar baby boom, and bombarded with this message throughout their formative years, developed a strong sense of these values. This paper will examine the important role that conceptions of democracy played in the development of the Canadian student movement in the Sixties. While democracy is a complex system with numerous definitions, for students in the Sixties it did not refer to parliamentary politics or voting, but to what they termed participatory democracy. Ultimately this meant that people would have control over the decisions that affected their own lives and their own environment. Drawing upon international social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement in the American South and decolonization movements around the world, student activists argued that, like all people in a democratic society, they should participate in the governing bodies of their community and should contribute to the decisions that affect their lives. In this way, student leaders framed their demands for participation on university decision-making bodies. As most young people accepted the widespread rhetoric regarding the superiority of democracy, such demands gained support from a significant proportion of the student body and facilitated the formation of a powerful and relatively united movement. In this way, I argue that democracy was central to the Sixties student movement in Canada.
Geneviève Cartier, Université de Sherbrooke The Paradox of Democratic Bureaucracy In Democratic Autonomy - Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), H. Richardson points out that bureaucracy threatens democracy, however conceptualized. The threat of bureaucratic domination, says Richardson, flows in great part from the considerable power to “shape the law”, through the exercise of administrative discretion, that is diffused over a number of executive institutions. In my view, administrative discretion is compatible with democracy if it is re-conceiving through the metaphor of a “dialogue” between public institutions and individuals. On the one hand, discretion as dialogue conditions the validity of any exercise of discretionary power on the participation of the individual in the determination of the norms that will govern her situation. On the other hand, it requires that the outcome of the decision making process be responsive to the dialogue that took place, to the statutory framework and to the public interest. Hence, discretion as dialogue creates spaces for concrete, inherently democratic exercises of public authority and favours both participation and public accountability, which are central values of democracy. Discretion thus conceived provides public authorities with an occasion to communicate with, and to reach the best solution for, the citizens in the particular circumstances of their case, rather than expressing a top-down, “one-way projection of authority”. As a result, while the traditional conception of discretion tends to consider individuals as “subjects”, a conception of discretion as dialogue elevates them to the status of active participants. Paradoxically, while discretion traditionally conceived can be viewed as a threat to democracy, discretion as dialogue would not only be compatible with democracy, but might improve the democratic nature of administrative decision-making.
Byron Sheldrick, University of Guelph Strategic Litigation against Public Participation in Canada and the Judicialization of Parliamentary Democracy in Canada Strategic litigation against public participation is a term devised within the context of American politics to describe the phenomena of private interests suing their civil society/social movement opponents in an attempt to distract and derail their political campaigns. Generally, this has involved cases of slander or defamation brought by corporate parties against those organizing boycotts or demonstrations against their activities. While the term originated in the United States, SLAPPS take place in many western countries, including Canada and Britain. In Canada, SLAPPs have been given fairly limited consideration by the academic and policy communities. There have been some recent attempts to legislate against SLAPPs, which are seen as undermining democratic values of public participation and free speech. To date, British Columbia and Quebec are the only provinces to successfully enact legislation restricting SLAPP litigation. In British Columbia, however, that legislation was short-lived and was quickly repealed when a New Democratic Government was replaced by Gordon Campbell’s Liberals. This paper will examine the growth of SLAPP litigation in Canada, and policy options to deal with the issue. SLAPPs have historically involved private interests seeking recourse to the courts to prevent either social movement organizations or politicians, from criticizing their activities. More recently, in Canada, however, SLAPPs have been used within a parliamentary context, by politicians seeking to limit criticism by other political parties. The Cadman litigation, in which the Prime Minister Steven Harper sued members of the Liberal party for defamation will be provided, as well as other SLAPP cases, will be used to develop a typology of SLAPPS. The paper will offer an analysis of the limits of Canadian law, including parliamentary privilege, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for dealing the growth of SLAPPs.
SESSION D First Nations 1 Robert B. Carson, University of Edinburgh Northern Vision, Northern Strategy: Northern Policy? In less than ten years, in the writer’s experience with the Government of Nunavut, Canada’s North has gone from obscurity to relative prominence in the policy framework of the federal government. From not being on the priority and planning radar of the Chretien Government, through an all-of-government introduction to former Prime Minister Martin’s call for a vision for the North, to a comprehensive northern strategy being developed within the Harper Government, the North has emerged as a policy priority. This paper will review the intergovernmental processes and strategic documents during 2004-2009, including the Northern Strategy work in 2004-2005, the federal statements of 2006 and 2007, the territorial “repatriation” of a strategic role in the 2007 Northern Vision, and the emerging federal strategy to 2009. There have been calls for a joint policy dialogue on the North which would include northerners in the development of programs and priorities that impact them directly. The paper will review the proposals of Territorial Premiers and the Canadian representatives of Arctic Council Permanent Participants for collaborative work on both domestic and foreign policies in Canada’s Arctic. The paper acknowledges a capacity deficit in the North for policy analysis and development, and concludes with a discussion of whether and how to establish an intergovernmental mechanism for joint policy development across Canada’s North.
Frances Abele, Carleton University Northern Economies: Special Challenges of Analysis and Planning The remarkable political innovations of the last generation of northerners have not settled the major outstanding questions about the North’s economic future. It remains for northerners to consider how their economies (local, regional and territorial) should be structured, within existing –and continually evolving-- practical constraints. They seek the same level of control over their regional economies as that enjoyed elsewhere in the federation. One part of the urgency many northerners feel about gaining control over the levers of economic development is related to a desire for some control over the large changes that will come to their region. Another part is a matter of revenue. Northern societies face grave –and linked—deficits in infrastructure (housing, transportation, public facilities) and for new and more energetic measures to address deficits in health, education and social wellbeing. The distribution of wellbeing in northern Canada is uneven, but there is no question that many northern communities face serious growing social problems. At the same time, there are challenges at the national level. The threats to the integrity of the northern environment from global warming and international pressures for the rapid extraction and export of northern mineral resources require federal attention. In short, all levels of government in Canada have an important role to play –and a need to innovate—now. Cultural, social and economic well-being are linked in people’s lives, and they must be carefully connected in policy decisions and in supporting research as well. Today’s decisions about economic development projects will determine the quality of life in northern communities, with the potential to weaken or strengthen the productive base of the north’s distinctive Aboriginal cultures. This paper illustrates this situation with specific reference to Nunavut, reporting on some early findings of a SSHRC-funded project, Understanding the New Northern Economy.
Literature 4 Catherine Bates, Keele University ‘In the hope of making a connection’ (Munro): Rereading the archive democratically? As theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and de Certeau have all made clear, the archive is inextricably bound up in power structures which privilege certain stories, and decrease the possibilities for telling others. Diana Taylor is helpful in pointing out the myths attending the archive: that it is unmediated, that it resists change, that it is capable of providing ‘official’ state and national histories. If we are to try and pay attention to previously marginalised, unheard voice, that we need to question the archive’s perceived authority; Taylor impels us to acknowledge the ways it is ‘selected, classified, and presented for analysis’, and then interpreted to produce ‘stories’ with ideological agendas and biases. As de Certeau’s work on orality and the everyday has established, part of the problem is the archive’s reliance upon and privileging of written documents and so consequent potential denial of lived voices and bodies. As a performance theorist Taylor is keen to highlight the importance of ‘embodied memory’ in the telling of history whilst de Certeau’s resistant rereadings of the archive hear the voices of the marginalised through the documents which try to hide them - I consider the bodily invasion of the archive both imply to point to its more flexible possibilities. Marian Engel’s Bear and Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung’ can be read as enabling meta-archival stories which expand the archive’s possibilities; they develop alternative, potentially enabling strategies of reading, living and being with the archive. This paper will explore Engel and Munro’s strategies for allowing a rereading of the archive which lets the body in and, perhaps, allows us to begin hearing and feelings the voices and experiences of those not officially allowed to be residents of the archive: in other words, I will show the archive to be disrupted by bears and their erotic potential, shit and rubbish, menstruation, and the creative, political, democratic possibilities of doubt and desire.
Marta Bashovski, University of Victoria, Writing nation narratives: Reading contested multiplicities A state’s coherence is often secured through performances of nationhood. By reading performances of nationhood as processes of narrativization, it is possible to illuminate the exclusions, implicit and explicit, of the construction of an intelligible nation. In Canada, ‘official multiculturalism’ is popularly viewed as working against historic exclusions by actively promoting a ‘national culture’ of openness and diversity, and fostering a community of communities, united by mutual recognition and the celebration of differences. Through this characterization, the Canadian nation narrative has shifted to accommodate formerly excluded stories so that the Canadian nation narrative is now the space of all stories. I argue that it is in these unity-seeking discourses that so inflect discussions of diversity and multiculturalism in Canada that critique is subsumed and, in the guise of inclusion, permitted to exist in a weakened and static iteration. This is the theoretical framework from which this presentation will proceed. I approach the question of co-optation by asking, first, what can serve as a ‘nation narrative’ in the case of Canadian immigrant narratives and second, what constitutes a counternarrative in the face of the neutralization of difference as a critical discourse. I suggest that reading Canadian immigrant narratives as political texts can work to reinforce and/or disrupt the imagined coherence of the multicultural nation narrative by resisting closures and domains of acceptable speech, as well as disrupting the imposed linearity of national narratives. I will examine Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms as a key jumping off point to the multiplicities possible through the construction of a text as both a critique and a celebration, a case study that exemplifies the ambivalent juncture between the simultaneous opening and closing of critique enacted through the project of Canadian multiculturalism as a national narrative.
Ken Hirschkop, University of Waterloo Neighbourhood and City Hall: the dialectic of Torontonian democracy
Toronto boasts of being a “city of neighbourhoods”. It’s not surprising, therefore, that civic democracy usually appears in the guise of neighbourhood or community resistance to plans cooked up in City Hall or the provincial legislature. Communities, at once amorphous (they have no given structure) and distinctive (each has its unique texture), are ritually presented as the site and the agent of genuine civic democracy, compared with which formally constituted bodies, even when elected, are hostile, alien and authoritarian. In this paper I’ll explore the historical roots of this conception of civic democracy and its expression in the journalism, and literature of postwar Toronto. In particular, I’ll discuss the representation of certain key urban struggles, such as the infamous battle over the Spadina Expressway and the creation of Jamestown, and the role they played in articulating the neighbourhood and neighbourhood activism in Toronto’s political imaginary. The identification of neighbourhoods with civic democracy has gained depth and texture in journalism and literature. The Toronto Star, the city’s “campaigning” paper, has played a central role in the exaltation of neighbourhood politics and the veneration of “community”. At the same time, historical accounts of Toronto and its institutions, as well the treatment of “development” in fictions such as Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Michael Redhill’s Consolation, have cemented the notion that civic politics in Toronto is about the protection of spontaneously developing communities, repositories of the past, against the depredations of a false progress. In examining the journalism and the literature of civic democracy, I will discuss how the community or neighbourhood is defined, why it appears to have a privileged relationship with the urban past and with “ethnicity”, and the ways in which it is made the site of a particularly vital and vivid form of democratic – in all senses of the word – life.
History 2
Lucille H. Campey, Independent researcher'No game laws, no tithes and no taxes': a step towards liberty?In 1774, when lieutenant governor Michael Franklin recruited Yorkshire settlers for his estate in Nova Scotia, he emphasised that, unlike Britain, land was free of feudal restrictions and taxes. However, he was only offering leaseholds in much the same way that such land would have been granted in Europe. This practise was tolerated by most British settlers at the time but, after the American Rebellion, when more libertarian attitudes prevailed, freehold land tenure became the norm. In fact, the goal of owning land was one of the major pull factors that stimulated emigration. This paper will consider the progress of these egalitarian trends in early Canada. Having experienced an oppressive regime that stifled enterprise and personal advancement, British immigrants suddenly found that, in Canada, they could become independently-minded land owners. Using late 18th and early 19th century documentary sources, including the reports of contemporary commentators and immigrant letters, the paper will consider how Scottish and English settlers responded to their new social environment. To what extent did their experience of a rigid, class-based society in the Old World make them more receptive to democratic principles? Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of Canada from 1820 to 1828, and many others like him, believed that freehold tenure "fostered a dangerous levelling mentality". How did ordinary settlers cope with elitist pressure to fall in line with Old World, top-down practices? What proportion actually became land owners? Religion was also subject to political influences. Church of England missionaries sought to transfer hierarchical structures to Canada while their non-Conformist colleagues preached about a God who viewed all people equally. The interplay of Old and New World religions on social and cultural life will also be considered.
David Banoub, Carleton University 'To the Victors Go the Spoils': Government, Patronage, and Political Culture in late-nineteenth-century New Brunswick The Liberal Party’s campaign slogan in New Brunswick during the 1878 federal election was “to the victors go the spoils.” Facing criticism that they did not use patronage effectively and did not reward their allies properly, the New Brunswick Liberals promised to be more generous and more partisan in their allocation of appointments. Despite these promises, the Liberals lost this election. The Conservative federal government immediately began to reshape the bureaucracy. One proposed change was closing the Saint John Public Work Office. Letters written to Charles Tupper, the minister of public works, stressed the importance of this office as a place to appoint party supporters. These appointments, it was argued, were central in establishing links between the local and the federal party. Letters to Tupper also stressed that this office was staffed, in part, by francophones and Catholics – to close the office would further alienate these minority groups and would narrow Conservative party support in the region. This paper proposes to examine the rhetoric of the campaign speeches, newspaper editorials, and the letters opposing the closing the Saint John Public Work Office to explore cultural views of patronage and political culture. In late-nineteenth-century New Brunswick, one of patronage’s central uses was to negotiate links between the federal and local. To the consternation of the Liberal party, citizens in New Brunswick expected the government to grant them patronage. As the letters to the Conservative government show, these citizens also expected to have some control over how and to whom these appointments were distributed. Popular rhetoric suggests not only that patronage was central to Canadian politics, but that it shaped and reflected cultural understandings of respectability, public service, and state formation.
Matthew Bellamy, Carleton University Am I Canadian? Beer, History and the Canadian Identity In March 2000, a sixty-second television commercial became an overnight phenomenon and sparked a national and international debate on Canadian nationalism and identity. The commercial was crafted to promote one of Canada’s top-selling beers, Molson Canadian, which since the early 1990s had been sold using the tagline, “I am Canadian.” The 2000 commercial again used the phrase, at the end of a minute-long rant by a “typical” beer-loving Canadian named Joe. “Canada is the second largest landmass,” Joe yelled at the end of the advertisement, “the first nation of hockey, and the best part of North America… My name is Joe and I am Canadian!” The “Joe Rant” emerged as a passionate declaration of national pride and a definitive piece of popular culture. It also succeeded in increasing Molson’s market share. That the advertisement was so accepted and so celebrated by Canadians has been seen by many as evidence of the profound role that beer production and consumption has played in the Canadian historical experience. “We are, and have always been,” in the words of one prominent public thinker, “a beer-drinking nation.” To a certain extent this is backed up by recent statistics. Today the Canadian brewing industry is the largest component of the alcohol beverage sector, followed by distillery products, with the wine industry a distant third. Canada is the eighth largest exporter of beer in the world, while at home an estimated ten million Canadians drink beer. These statistics give grist to the mill of those who view beer as Canada’s “national drink” and therefore intertwined with the “national identity”.
But was this always the case? How “Canadian” is beer? When did it become intertwined with the national identity? The proposed paper will argue that – contrary to contemporary dogma – beer only became “Canada’s drink” beginning in the late 19th century. Before that time, Canadians preferred to drink distilled spirits, especially French brandy, West Indian rum and locally produced whiskey. Only when the forces of temperance, imperialism (as a form of Canadian nationalism and anti-Americanism), and industrialization emerged during the late nineteenth century did Canadians (for reasons that will be fully explained) turn to beer as their alcoholic drink of choice.
Linguistics 1 Anne-Andrée Denault et Christophe Traisnel Les francophonies canadiennes à l’épreuve du bilinguisme officiel : possibilité politique ou contrainte juridique ? Comme de nombreux auteurs le soulignent, le droit a pris de l’ampleur ces dernières décennies comme manière d’appréhender le social et le politique, à tel point qu’il apparaît parfois comme le terrain privilégié de l’expression –et du règlement- de certains conflits pourtant politiques. Ce mouvement de judiciarisation des enjeux politiques est particulièrement illustré au Canada par la question linguistique et la situation de la francophonie canadienne. Depuis une quarantaine d’années, l’État fédéral au Canada s’est investi dans un processus de reconnaissance du statut du français à travers le choix d’un cadre de références identitaires, celui du bilinguisme, traduit en termes de droits linguistiques et de principes, dont celui de l’égalité juridique des deux langues officielles. Ce choix visait à répondre aux revendications des francophones, et à leur garantir ainsi une progression vers l’égalité de statut et d’usage du français au Canada. L’objectif était, ultimement, de « rapprocher les solitudes » linguistiques entre la majorité anglophone et la minorité francophone. Or, cette judiciarisation de l’enjeu linguistique, comme nous souhaitons le montrer, a eu également pour effet de polariser les communautés francophones du Canada, en créant tout à la fois une possibilité juridique nouvelle pour les francophones en situation minoritaire, et une contrainte juridique supplémentaire pour le développement et la promotion du français au Québec. Nous montrerons en particulier à quel point cette nouvelle législation linguistique a nourri d’importants désaccords entre les francophonies canadiennes quant aux représentations des fondements du système politique canadien et du fédéralisme.
Irena Vassileva, South-West University “Neofit Rilski”IS THERE DEMOCRACY IN ACADEMIC COMMUNICATION? A LINGUIST’S POINT OF VIEW The paper will try to explore the interconnectedness of the discursive construction of national identity and extra-linguistic social structures and practices, dominant ideologies and beliefs as to the nature and function of science as an intellectual product. An interdisciplinary approach will be adopted combining the critical discourse analysis methodology with historical, cultural, sociopolitical and psycholinguistic perspectives. The study will be based on data from questionnaires and interviews with Canadian scholars – native speakers of English and French. Both the questionnaires and the unstructured interviews (conducted in September 2009 at various Canadian universities) were designed in such a way as to elucidate scholars’ use of English, respectively French, as languages for academic communication and the reasons governing their choice. The analysis throws new light on the status of the two official languages of the country as languages of knowledge construction and distribution and focuses on both state-of-the-art practices and on scholars’ attitudes towards these practices.
Keith Battarbee, University of Turku, Finland Language Policy and Democracy: Interrogating language policy regimes in 21st-century Canada from a democratic perspective Despite the common perception that Canada is ‘a bilingual country’, at least five distinct types of statutory language policy regimes can be identified within the country, operating on various levels and domains from the Federal to the Provincial and Territorial: 1) symmetrical bilingualism (Federal & nb); 2) monolingualism (ab, bc, nl, ns, pei, qc, sk); 3) asymmetrical bilingualism (mb, on); 4) asymmetrical multilingualism (nwt); and 5) in-spe symmetrical multilingualism (nu). (In addition, there are a number of aboriginal jurisdictions which also pursue distinct language policies, not discussed here.) Each of these regimes is the outcome of interactions between one or more ‘hyper-agendas’ such as nation-building or civil and human rights, targeted goals such as the protection of languages seen as endangered, and specific contingencies of demography, governance, and history. All language policy emerges from a constantly shifting process of overlapping and often contradictory turns of innovation and conservatism within the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of the state, interacting with (demo)linguistic continuities and shifts in the population. In democratic states, language policy characteristically incorporates an inherent tension between rights and obligations, between statist prescription and liberal empowerment, between inclusion and exclusion, and between the individual and the collective. Even more than other domains of governance, language policy is also particularly liable to a mismatch between stated principles or intentions, and actual practice. This paper sets out to examine and interrogate the various statutory language policy regimes in Canada from the perspective of an understanding of the democratic ideal as an on-going dialectic of competing ‘democratic’ values.
Multiculturalism 1 Charlotte Skeet, University of Sussex Mutual Recognition of Cultural Diversity”?: Legal Pluralism in Britain and Canada in the 21st Century This paper considers the extent to which ‘other’ law is given recognition in Britain and Canada and how this accords with Tully’s constitutional norm of mutual recognition as an ideal of contemporary democracies. Tully argues women’s claims to equality as a form of cultural recognition. Do claims to gender equality and claims for the recognition of ethnic or religious cultural legal norms necessarily compete as existing controversies around legal pluralism suggest?
Rémi Léger, Political Studies, Queen’s University at Kingston Contextual Multiculturalism The scholarship on multiculturalism is often pitched as “contextual” to emphasize the combination of philosophical abstraction with sensitivity to contingent empirical facts. As a result, the theory of multiculturalism is typically construed as speaking directly to the politics of multiculturalism. I take issue with this prevalent assumption. My argument proceeds in two parts. First, it points to how the scholarship on multiculturalism remains grounded in normative theory. The gist of the argument is that multiculturalists approach the claims of minorities from philosophical perches. The end result is an intellectual battle between different currents of liberalism over which response to minorities is more consistent with the fundamental tenets of liberal theory. While normative theory undoubtedly has a role to play in multicultural theory, I do think a prior, explanatory step is required. To put it bluntly, as a first step, I don’t really think it matters whether a claim is legitimate in the eyes of liberal multiculturalism, liberal egalitarianism, political liberalism and so on. What really matters is whether and how the said claim can be accommodated within its context, that is, within the institutional and moral parameters of the state in which the claim is being advanced. Second, the paper puts this approach to use by looking at the claims of Francophone minority communities on the Canadian state. Precisely, I evaluate their most recent claims for increasing autonomy in light of Canadian context, that is, Canada’s institutional and moral parameters.
SESSION E First Nations 2 Darcy Leigh, University of Edinburgh Ambivalent Boundaries: Articulations of Sovereignty and Indigeneity in Canada’s Arctic Indigeneity has played a central and constituent role in the emergence of modern state sovereignty, often constructed as the paradoxically excluded but essential ‘outside’ against which to demarcate the sovereign ‘inside’. In Canada, Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples have occupied specific, varied and sometimes conflicting positions in relation to this boundary, playing key roles in the practices and articulation of Canadian state sovereignty and of state sovereignties more broadly. The paper takes a genealogical approach: it explores the constitution of sovereignty with reference to the historical roles of the bodies, actions and representations of Inuit in Canada’s Arctic. Inuit have embodied specific versions of the Indigenous ‘other’ constructed through, for example, Arctic art and anthropology. At times, Canadian state activity, such as military testing or resource extraction, has been legitimised through the denial of the presence of human life in the Arctic. Having been erased, however, Inuit have then been written back into the Arctic and the Canadian inside in assertions of Canadian state sovereignty, such as Inuit relocation during the Cold War and Canada’s claims in today’s ‘race for the Arctic’. The paper provides a historical and discursive context from which to consider current Indigenous engagement with international organisations such as the United Nations, and transnational groups such as the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which can be seen to utilise, negotiate and challenges the authority of the Canadian state and state sovereignty more broadly.
Kiera L. Ladner, University of Manitoba Mobilizing Decolonization, Dismantling Democracy, Creating Good Governance First Nations communities in Canada have been described as hyper-democratic as it is not odd to see upwards to 10 to 20% of a community’s total population running for elected office. Despite this level of participation, most would argue that such communities are not totally committed to such processes have not provided for good governance nor responsible government. While it has been an assumption of the literature that good governance would be created as a result if self-government (by-product or otherwise), one has to question whether this is necessarily so. What is the meaning of good governance within an Indigenous context? Is it a gendered process? Is it democratic? How is it to be created and a new system forged? In this paper, I argue that good governance can only be built through the process community engagement whereby the community reaffirms the collective/nation and decides how it will govern itself. In other words, good governance for First Nations communities, I argue is more a result of decolonization and community-based processes of healing, identity and community building and less about inter-governmental negotiations and institutionalizing democracy.
Cora J. Voyageur, University of Calgary Not Just Small Change: Aboriginal Women And Entrepreneurship Canada’s Aboriginal peoples were active participants in the economy before and after the coming of the Europeans, and have made valuable contributions to the country's economic development. The data show that Aboriginal entrepreneurship is increasing at a greater rate -- 2.5 times that of the non-Aboriginal community. This is particularly true of Aboriginal women and youth. This presentation is details Aboriginal women’s experience with entrepreneurship and self-employment. The research aims to increase the understanding of this phenomenon with the objective to improve services and create more responsive policies for this segment of the workforce. This community-based project involved 50 female Aboriginal entrepreneurs from across Alberta.
Brian Calliou, The Banff Centre The Imposition of Law, Indigenous Resistance, and the Selective Use of the Tools of Modernity The assertion of jurisdiction by the Canadian state over Indigenous peoples and their traditional lands resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous inhabitants from their lands, marginalization from society and the economy, and the displacement of their traditional forms of leadership and governance. However, Indigenous leaders always resisted such external forces upon their sovereignty. In fact, today they have won significant victories in the protection of their rights to land, self-government and to benefits of resource development on their traditional territories. I will use the concept of “the imposition of law” as an explanatory tool for understanding the complex relationship between the liberal democratic Canadian state and its Indigenous peoples, especially in how the Indigenous peoples in Canada are today in a more powerful position since WWII. Law can be characterized as imposed where it is contrary to the normative order of those upon which it seeks to regulate or change. The relationship between Canada and her Indigenous peoples developed into one of unequal power where an external government imposed its ideas and values upon the Indigenous peoples through the imposition of law. Kidder has cautioned however that imposed law ought not to be too narrowly construed as a one way process that is used only for purposes of domination, but rather should be viewed more broadly as “an interactional process affected by power differentials.” Thus, I will use the concept of imposed law to help explain why Indigenous leaders have resisted such measures throughout Canadian history as well as why they have selectively embraced the imposed legal, political and economic systems as tools for pressing for their rights, interests and aspirations.
Quebec Studies 1 Raija H. Koski, King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario Théâtre et politique au Québec: le théâtre de Wajdi Mouawad Dans son article qui date de 1996, “Multiculturalism and Postmodern Theater: Staging Québec’s Otherness”, Jane Moss écrit que pendant les années 80 et 90, au moment où le publique québécois tournait le dos au théâtre politique, engagé, les dramaturges immigrants ont renouvelé le théâtre au Québec par moyen d’une mise en scène de l’altérité, ainsi souligant la contribution qu’apporte le théâtre à notre compréhension de et engagement avec les réalités sociales (94). Moss se sert des exemples de Marco Micone et Abla Farhoud entre autres afin de montrer que ces auteurs ont participé à la création d’un théâtre post-nationaliste (77). Je me propose d’étudier le théâtre de Wajdi Mouawad, écrivain d’origine libanaise, afin de montrer que la notion d’« engagement» et de « théâtre politique» ne réfère pas exclusivement à la question nationale, au débat constitutionnel. J’étudierai les pièces du début de la carrière de Mouawad, Willy Protagoras enfermé dans les toilettes (1993) et Littoral (1997), et je les comparerai à celles plus récentes, Ciels (2009) et Le soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder en face (2008) afin de montrer que les questions d’histoire, de mémoire et d’identité sont nécessairement politiques. En deuxième lieu, j’examinerai le rôle de Mouawad dans le milieu culturel québécois. En plus d’être dramaturge, il est le directeur artistique du Théâtre français du Centre national des arts à Ottawa, poste qui lui a permis de se lancer carrément dans le débat sur la dynamique entre art et politique, débat précipité par les compressions budgétaires du gouvernement fédéral conservateur.
Rachel Killick, University of Leeds Elites and democracy: Fashioning a theatre for our times. From Michel Tremblay and Antonine Maillet to Wadji Mouawad and Olivier Choinière The contradictory tensions of theatre as both an elite and a popular medium have made it throughout the ages a hotly contested public space of social and political power. From the late seventeenth century on, the Catholic Church in French Canada, intent on preserving social and moral control of the French-speaking population, strove to confine theatrical activity to a limited elite repertoire within the closely monitored arena of college and seminary performance. The advent of radio and then television put a decisive end to such endeavours, opening the way to new voices of democratic change. This essay will consider the continuing evolution and different permutations of the democratic dynamic/ in Quebec theatre from the 1960s to the present, through a comparison and contrast of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs (1968) and Antonine Maillet’s La Sagouine (1971) with Wadji Mouawad’s Journée de noces chez Les Cro-Magnons ( 1992) and Olivier Choinière’s Félicité (2007) and of their respective productions and receptions at home and abroad.
Scooter Pégram, Indiana University Northwest Fighting Back: Hip-Hop as a Means of Resistance in Québec Due to the the unique demographic reality that Québec is a majority Francophone society located in an overwhelmingly Anglophone continent can directly influence choices regarding the integration of immigrants and members of ethnocultural communities in the province. This unique linguistic and cultural challenge especially influences underprivileged and ethnocultural youths, as they often find themselves trapped between duelling cultural and class paradigms present on the North American continent (English versus French), as they struggle along the margins, trying to find their “sense of belonging” in a society that seeks their comprehensive integration into the French-speaking majority. Young Haitians and other youths are no exception to this cultural confusion. Yet, these young folks are fighting back against the majority society by voicing their frustrations with their subordinate spatial and class position through the medium of hip-hop music. Through the examination of lyrics and previous research, this paper examines the links between French-language hip-hop music and the social realities existing among Haitians and other underprivileged youths in Québec. It was found that young people in Québec are using the genre of “rap” music as a means in which to confront the societal marginalisation that they face by uplifting themselves and their cultural relevance and agency via the “mic.”
Canada and the World Donald Barry, Department of Political Science, University of Calgary, email: barry@ucalgary.ca INVESTIGATING HERBERT NORMAN More that 50 years after his death Herbert Norman remains a controversial figure in Canadian diplomacy. In 1950, Norman, who was an authority on Japan and a prominent member of the Department of External Affairs, was recalled to Ottawa from Tokyo where he had been head of Canada’s liaison mission to Japan, after his name surfaced during congressional committee hearings on Communist subversion in the United States and the FBI asked the RCMP for information about him. The Department’s investigation cleared Norman, but the case was reopened the following year after MI5 informed Canadian authorities that it had evidence that Norman had been a member of the Communist Party while a student at Cambridge in the mid-1930s. External Affairs again gave Norman a clean bill of health despite evidence that he had tried to conceal aspects of his past. Norman resumed his diplomatic career, serving first as high commissioner to New Zealand and then as ambassador to Egypt, where he took his own life in April 1957 after a congressional committee revived charges of espionage against him. The Department of External Affairs investigations of Norman are no less controversial than the man himself. Critic James Barros charges that the Department “based on flimsy consideration of personal acquaintance and collegial solidarity, was intent on giving Norman clearance, despite that fact that answers could not be found to [questions] raised by the RCMP, the FBI, and MI5.” Norman’s biographer, Roger Bowen, agrees with the External Affairs investigators that Norman “effectively broke with Communist thinking” before joining the Department and that there was no evidence that he was anything but a “trustworthy member.” This essay argues that Departmental officials were well aware of the implications, and while sympathetic to Norman they made no assumptions about the case, and found no evidence against him. Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the issue became embroiled in the larger currents of Canada-U.S. relations at a time when McCarthyism was at its height.
Christopher Kirkey, State University of New York, College at Plattsburgh Why is Canada in Afghanistan?: Explaining Canada’s Military Commitment Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan followed in the wake of the U.S. led October 7, 2001 invasion of the country. Starting on February 2, 2002, service personnel from the Canadian Forces have been deployed to and stationed in Afghanistan. Forming part of the International Security Assistance Force (initially under the auspices of the United Nations but since transferred to the command of NATO), the Canadian military presence has grown over seven years to some 2,500 soldiers. Perhaps the most striking feature of this engagement has been Canada’s involvement in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar - an involvement that has effectively placed Canadian Forces in a direct combat-oriented mission. Successive governments in Ottawa (led by Prime Ministers Chrétien, Martin and Harper) have renewed and/or extended Canada’s military commitment to Afghanistan on several occasions, most recently in March 2008 when the House of Commons approved an extension until March 2011. The cost to Canada of military engagement in Afghanistan has been and remains substantial – some 132 soldiers, 3 civilian aid workers and 1 diplomat have been killed, while in excess of 300 military personnel have been wounded in action. The financial outlay to support this commitment is estimated to have cost over $10 billion dollars. The majority of Canadian citizens, recent national public opinion polls have uniformly demonstrated, are decidedly against Canada’s continued military involvement in Afghanistan. So why is Canada committed to a military presence in Afghanistan? This proposed 2010 BACS conference paper is based on a research policy-focused study that analyzes and explains Canada’s military engagement in Afghanistan. Most specifically, this paper concentrates on the role and impact of the international political system in shaping Canada’s involvement. The findings to be outlined in this conference paper will advance our current understanding of the critical international factors promoting and sustaining Canada’s military commitment to Afghanistan, the constraints and incentives that impact and explain the broader conduct of Canadian foreign policy in the post Cold War bipolar period, and the formulation of policy guidelines for the pursuit and implementation of significant Canadian-led foreign policy initiatives.
Anastasia Tataryn, University of Ottawa Canadian Democracy on Contract: Developing national strengths on foreign imports James Tully was quoted suggesting that constitution is the dialogue involving“culturally diverse sovereign citizens of contemporary societies” that “negotiate agreements on their forms of association over time.” It is not a new fact that Canadian urban centresare home to significant numbers of recent immigrants, who are constantly negotiating and re-negotiating their identity within Canada. Significantly new, however, aretwenty-first century discourses of migration law that overtly restrict certain groups from permanent residency, but encourage temporary and seasonal labour migration, and have caused a sensational “hype” around migration issues in Canada. In questioning contemporary Canadian democracy and Canadian forms of recognition and freedom, I am challenged to consider how migrants who are only permitted participation in Canada based on temporary worker arrangements participate in the Canadian democracy they strive to reside in? And what does their presence, and Canada’s increasingly reliance on their labour, reveal about Canadian democracy? How does the“perpetual a temporary migrant worker” reflect on what it means for Canadians to “know the country we live in” (such as who produces our food? Who takes care of our children? Our sick? Our elderly?), and how does the presence of the migrant worker affect the “forms of association over time” within Canadian society? This presentation will explore the current role of citizenship, access to this freedom in Canadian immigration policy and law, and temporary migrant labourers, through looking at discourses of law and migration. This analysis suggests that Canada, like other contemporary “nation-states”,is caught in a struggle between upholding treasured values of democracy, rule of law, human rights and freedom, and maintaining a right to decide who are the “sovereign citizens” of Canada. This is struggle is embodied in the figure and the condition of the temporary migrant worker.
Titipol Phakdeewanich, Ubon Ratchathani University The Development of Democratic Models in Canada and Thailand
Although today, Canada and Thailand are at very different stages of political, as well as economic and social development; both countries for different reasons, adopted political models similar to that of Britain’s, owing to the exceptional level of influence Britain held historically. Today both systems operate under a parliamentary democracy, with a monarch as head of state. In this regard, the Canadian case offers a special linkage towards a better understanding of North American political culture and its ability to influence the GMS, of which Thailand is a major gateway.
Children’s Rights Alan Pomfret and Carolyne Gorlick, University of Western Ontario The Legal Child in Canada Bill C-2 mandates among other items the inclusion of children as witnesses and decision-makers in various legal and court proceedings as of 2 January 2006. This has generated substantive discussions and experimentation within Canadian family court and criminal justice circles about how to put the procedural and evidentiary reforms requirements into practice. This paper examines these emerging discourses and related practices and technologies from the perspective of the new social studies of childhood, focussing on the images of childhood informing the discussions, the identification and proposed management of power and communication issues, tensions between existing child welfare and child rights perspectives within Canadian law, the shifting yet interconnecting relationship between the ‘best interest of the child’ and the ‘stated wishes and preferences of the child’ criteria, the presuppositions, pragmatic and otherwise, that appear to ground the various discussions, and the implications of the legal changes for the status of childhood in Canada. To help illustrate the analysis selective comparisons are made with similar discussions of England’s 1989 Children Act and subsequent legislation as well as the 1995 Scottish Children Act.
Ailsa. M. Watkinson, University of Regina The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Public Engagement and Children Rights In 1990 Canada officially signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and ratified it a year later. Earlier, in 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms became the ‘supreme law’ of Canada. Since then, there have been a number of legal cases, using the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and supported by the CRC, which have raised issues concerning the democratic rights of children. In 1995 I launched a Charter challenge to the use of child physical punishment. The case was the first children’s rights case heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. I propose to provide a first hand account of using the Charter to influence public policy while exploring the historical nexus of the Charter challenge, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of children’s rights and its implications. The case challenged a provision with the Criminal Code of Canada which exempts parents and other care givers from charges of assault when they use physical punishment on children to correct their behaviour. Similar exemptions are found throughout the Commonwealth. The Charter challenge argued that permitting the use of physical punishment on children violated their rights under sections 7 (the right to security of the person), s.12 (the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual treatment) and s.15 (the right to equal benefit and equal protection of the law). The process involved in challenging government actions using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the outcome of the case under consideration have policy implications in the area of public engagement, democratic rights and child welfare.
Rose Lipton, University of Utrecht/University of Oviedo Reexamining the “Promise of Diversity”: Fictions of Equality and Formulations of Difference in Ontario’s Public Schools. In April 2009, the Ontario Ministry of Education published a document entitled “Realizing the Promise of Diversity: Ontario's Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy” that outlined what would become their new approach to dealing with discrimination in schools - particularly sexism, racism and homophobia. My interrogations of this document focus on a few closely connected questions: Can representations of Canadian students in public policy documents contribute to how Canadians perceive of their own “student body”? How has the Canadian nationalist narrative of multiculturalism been simultaneously reinvented and reinforced within the medium of educational policy? And in what ways are these representations and constructions tied to normative social narratives in Canada of sexual, racial and gender identities? Public policy is a complex site of both declarative power and cultural narration, a location wherein social norms are simultaneously mandated and performed. Thus, rather than approaching the Education Strategy from a strictly policy perspective, my analysis focuses on the document as a cultural text utilizing deconstructive methodologies and contemporary feminist theories to elucidate the conflicting narratives of difference and inclusion that pervade the text. First, I examine the ways in which differences among students are addressed, classified and utilized within the text in order to underscore a totalizing fiction of the Canadian multicultural identity. Next, I examine the ways in which the legacies of “equal rights” discourse are present in the text and discuss the relevance of these ideas for Canadian diversity policy today. Ultimately, my discussion confronts the question of who, if anyone, is truly being represented within this brand new piece of legislation and are whether or not the needs of Canada’s increasingly diverse population can be met from the current approach to equity in schools.
Literature 5 Gillian Roberts, University of Nottingham and David Stirrup, University of Kent Just Borders? A Dialogue on Canada-US Border Studies This collaborative paper, between an Americanist scholar and a Canadianist scholar with shared interests in cultural representations of the Canada-US border, will explore the complications of engaging with this nation-state demarcation that is artificially drawn, on the one hand, and has come to be politically significant, on the other. The Canada-US border, by turns the literal and metaphorical ground of (cultural) identity formation and the blunt instrument of the nation-state, has long captured the attention of Canadian writers and cultural workers in visual media, partly because, as Ian Angus writes, “All concern with English Canadian identity, formulated abstractly, is engaged in maintaining a border between us and the United States” (47). But Anglo-Canada does not speak for all of Canada, and however tempting it is to consider “how a stable—indeed, fixed, unwavering, and meaningful—Canada-U.S. border may serve the useful purpose of containing the United States within the limits of its own boundaries and of forcing the expanding and increasingly corporate U.S. imperialism to stand in the light of recognition” (Traister 33), we must also acknowledge the violence that such a “fixed, unwavering” border both testifies to and perpetuates with regards to Euro-North American colonisation of indigenous peoples. With reference to literature from both sides of the border, this paper attempts to work through the difficulty of producing “a critical borderlands practice” (Traister 34) that can grapple effectively with both the enduring colonial legacy that the border embodies and the neocolonialism Canadian culture often attempts to resist through invocation of the border. In our focus on the border, we engage not only with our discrete disciplines of Canadian and American Studies, but we also enter into conversation with the new hemispheric paradigm for studying the continent from a comparative perspective.
Zalfa Feghali, University of Nottingham Pushing the Boundaries of Citizenship and the Poetry of Gregory Scofield This year Gregory Scofield published his most recent compilation of poems, entitled Kipocihkân: Poems New and Selected (Gibsons, B.C.: Nightwood Editions, 2009). Its title translated as a slang Cree word for ‘mute’ or ‘unable to talk’, this collection brings together work from his five previous collections of poetry, in addition to some unpublished work. Key to this compilation is the theme of breaking silence. In this paper, I discuss themes of silence and muteness in Scofield’s work. I will especially engage with how Scofield uses poetry to enact a strong politics of resistance against the forces that attempt to silence him. I show how Scofield’s work, characterized by its use of a Bakhtinian double-voiced discourse, reflects the multiplicity, and indeed the heteroglossia, of the Métis experience. Through such poems as “Mixed Breed Act” and “Answer to My Brother”, Scofield recognizes the position of the Métis as a native group ouside the legal framework that defines nationhood – and uses this recognition to devise a new kind of ‘status’, one in which, as he puts it, the Métis are Katipamsoochick – the People Who Own Themselves. My analysis of Scofield’s writing will show that in breaking his silence and bringing the Métis to the forefront of his writing, Scofield mainstream accounts of historycalls into question. This complicates traditional understandings of ‘nation’, and representation, particularly in the case of the Métis. Inevitably, this has implications for how we think about Canadian democracy and nationhood.
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