JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES-REVUE D ETUDES CANADIENNES最新文献

After long periods of activism and policy debate, Ontario and Quebec were the first two provinces to integrate midwifery into their health-care services. Despite its success and growing popularity in the post-legislative era, midwifery was a highly contentious policy issue, with debates emerging at every level of policy development. In this essay, the authors explore how these debates played out in media. Specifically, the authors suggest that the frames produced by newspapers during this period served to align midwifery with broader provincial socio-political discourses, which in turn legitimized state intervention in the area of reproductive health. At the same time, however, the authors demonstrate that where Ontario media representations muted differences between midwives and physicians, representations in Quebec emphasized them. Thus, the authors show that in very different ways, media representations of midwifery in Ontario and Quebec both established a discursive context in which the state had to "act on" midwifery and midwives, and also challenged the potential of midwifery to transform women's birth experiences.

This essay seeks to rationalize and explain the evolution of medical rhetoric in Cité libre by looking at trends in the journal's use of tropes of illness and disease. Through a combination of broad content analysis and close readings, it contrasts how individual metaphors create the impression of a sickening nation and the manner in which these metaphors collectively, albeit paradoxically, act as a national allegory of cure for mid-twentieth-century Quebec's social ills in general, and specifically for its pathological inferiority complex. By examining how the journal uses medical metaphors and specifically how the writers employed the trope of the body politic to illustrate Quebec's national failings, the essay demonstrates how Quebec challenges the rhetorical stability of the age-old metaphor as it attempts to solve, but also creates, problems within Quebec's articulation of its own nationhood.

Although there is a small but growing body of literature on Euro-Canadians who acted "with good intentions" towards the First Nations (Haig-Brown and Nock 2006), precious little has been written about those within the ranks of the Department of Indian Affairs who acted benevolently towards the Aboriginal peoples. James Gerry Burk, Indian agent for the Anishinabeg of the western Lake Superior region for three decades (1923-53), was one such individual. He chose to ignore the department's prevailing racist ideology in favour of nurturing the incipient desire for industry and enterprise that he saw first-hand among the Aboriginal constituents of his agency. In the process, he was compelled to overcome numerous obstacles that Indian Affairs placed in his way. As a result, Burk's career stands as a glowing testament to the indomitable spirit of one departmental official's commitment to assisting the Aboriginal peoples.

After the First World War, Canada's immigration policy became more restrictive and immigration more controlled. For English Canadians, immigration of the "right type" of people—those from the British Isles—remained vital to strengthening the nation. This article examines the 3,000 Family Scheme, a joint British-Canadian settlement project in which British families, comprised of over 18,000 individuals, were relocated to homesteads as colonizers of Canada's remote areas. There, many endured isolation and hardship, and were largely blamed for their own plight. A nation-building project that failed, the 3,000 Family Scheme reveals the connections among several enduring national myths in the interwar years: the potential for agricultural expansion, British superiority, and the capabilities of a maturing Canadian state to control the settlement process.

This essay examines the history of fluoride debates in four Canadian cities. It argues that fluoride's opponents were primarily motivated by what they saw as the health and environmental risks of adding fluoride to the water supply. They also believed that fluoridating the public water supply was a fundamental violation of civil liberties. The fluoride debates have much to teach us about how people evaluate potential health risks and how they respond to state interventions in the field of public health.

This essay reads the archived life of a Sydney-based woman - Ella Liscombe (1902–69) - as it was recorded in her diaries, notebooks, and especially her photograph album of a 1927 camping excursion to Ingonish, Cape Breton Island. This album features pictures of women in "cross-dress," and the writings that gloss these camping records express Ella Liscombe’s erotic same-sex feelings about her female companions. As this essay explores Liscombe’s sartorial and emotional aesthetics, it also makes distinctions between "mannish" behaviour and "boyish" performance/costume, ultimately suggesting that Ella and her friends indulged in "twilight moments" to escape the strictures of domestic femininity.

During the mass Jewish immigration of Eastern-European Jews to Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish publications offered a primary forum for a group of local writers to negotiate with their new identities as Canadian Jews. Within this wider process, Montreal writers H.M. Caiserman and B.G. Sack authored studies of Canadian literature in the early 1920s centred on Mohawk-English writer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). What these essays show is that, despite the long-standing association of Canada's Jewish population with the country's dominant English culture, their status as "other" impelled leading members of the local Yiddish cultural milieu to seek out literary models among other historically marginalized groups. For Caiserman and Sack, Johnson's Native heritage offered a model for resistance to assimilation into Canada's dominant culture. In contrast, the advent of literature responding to the Nazi Holocaust by A.M. Klein and Eli Mandel, Native peoples became a symbol of loss and vanished landscapes.

Debates in the Canadian House of Commons in the last two decades of the nineteenth century revealed persistent differences between the Conservatives and the Liberals over federal Indian education policy and the administration of industrial schools. Until their defeat in 1896, the Conservatives supported a denominational industrial school system and a policy of rapid assimilation. The Liberals generally opposed denominational schools and believed the industrial school system was too costly and was not leading to rapid assimilation. After gaining power, the Liberals stopped construction of industrial schools in favour of boarding and day schools, but denominational influence remained strong. The Conservative emphasis on assimilation was replaced by measures that supported reserve-based segregation as earlier hopes for rapid assimilation diminished. Despite policy differences, neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals held Aboriginal cultures in high regard, and debates regarding the means and intent of Indian education played out against well-known, high mortality rates and often abysmal conditions in the schools.