The call for more female representation in Canada remains loud and clear as an online petition demanding that the Bank of Canada include women on Canadian banknotes opens 2015 with more than 52,800 signatures. The post Canadians still demand female representation on banknotes appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
Continue readingTag: Canadian history
In This Corner: Wildrose rollover a betrayal of epic proportions.
Q: What do World War II France and the Wildrose Party have in common? A: They both rolled over. At least the French were facing the Nazi Germany army, and almost certain destruction. The only thing the Wildrose was facing was losing the next election. Not quite the same thing,
Continue readingMontreal Simon: The Human Rights Museum and the Aboriginal Genocide
I see that the Canadian Human Rights Museum has finally opened its doors in Winnipeg.Which as someone who has fought all his life for human rights, is something I would normally celebrate.Except for the ghastly almost unbelievable fact that it doesn't recognize Canada's aboriginal genocide.Because Stephen Harper and his disgusting
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Government teaching new Canadians to hate Louis Riel
The government is rewriting Canadian history by poisoning the minds of new Canadians with an egregious misrepresentation of Louis Riel, the nineteenth-century leader of the Métis people and the founder of Manitoba province. The post Government teaching new Canadians to hate Louis Riel appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
Continue readingIn This Corner: Dear Canada: It’s time to upgrade our greatests lists.
Happy 147th birthday, my fellow Canadians. I hope you’re enjoying the day by spending time with the family, maybe going to the lake, attending various Canada Day celebrations, etc. Me? I’m going to work. One way for millions to celebrate the birth of the dominion is to go shopping, and
Continue readingIn This Corner: Watching Moncton, remembering Mayerthorpe. And why we still love the RCMP.
While watching the coverage today of the funeral of the three Mounties killed in Moncton, I was transported back to those bleak days in March 2005, when little Mayorthorpe was in the same situation. I was an MLA during those shocking days, and I was fortunate enough to have been
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Enough petulant propaganda, please: the hammer of D-Day crushed Hitler on the anvil of Russia
D-Day on Juno Beach: Canadians trudge ashore under a strange colorized sky. Below: The distinguished Canadian military historian, the late Reginald H. Roy. It’s been 70 years today since our magnificent Canadian soldiers went ashore at Juno Beach in Normandy to play their part the grim and deadly task of
Continue readingIn This Corner: Introducing The Idiot Historian, and happy birthday to Cecile and Annette Dionne.
Wednesday marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of one of the most amazing, uplifting and ultimately tragic stories in Canadian history. Let’s see if the lazy Canadian media, so terrible at telling Canadians stories about Canada, takes notice. On May 28th, 1934, in Corbeil, Ont., in a tiny farmhouse,
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum of Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and commentary about the story, she had been commissioned by the Museum to write a post about IWD for their collective blog. When she submitted the blogpost, it was initially approved, and then withdrawn when the communications department expressed concern over her comment on the current Conservative government. As a result, historians from coast to coast have been decrying the “censorship” and “silencing” of Strong-Boag by the museum (and speculating that the current federal government might have had a hand in this).
Shortly after the ActiveHistory piece was published, Franca Iacovetta, professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, and the current president of the International Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, published a condemnation of “the effort to silence Canada’s leading women’s historian” on the Berks website. Since that time, PressProgress has added their voice into the mix, commenting on the irony of a human rights museum censoring a commissioned blog. Both of these pieces have also received extensive coverage on Facebook and Twitter.
I have a somewhat different take on these events from many of my historian colleagues, and would posit a working theory. I suspect that Prof. Strong-Boag might have known full well (or at least strongly suspected) that her blogpost for International Women’s Day, which only includes one reference to Canadian governments past or present and does so to highlight the “anti-woman record” of “Canada’s Conservative government”, was never going to be approved by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The museum has been mired in controversies and funding crises for years – even before it has opened to the public. The people who commissioned the post probably were hoping for a broad overview of the history of International Women’s Day, or perhaps a post that included some discussion of how Canada’s governments (past and present) have dealt with women’s issues. This is not what they received, and someone probably balked at the fact that the sole reference in the post to Canada’s governments was a partisan attack on the current Conservative administration. An offer to add more detail to support the assessment of the current government as “anti-woman” was probably even less welcomed.
Here’s where I think the story gets interesting. By being “censored”, Strong-Boag has ensured that her message gets diffused to a much wider readership than the original blogpost itself likely would have been. It is a fairly standard social movement tactic to try to create a situation (a “grievance” to use the social movement scholarly jargon) that will lend itself to media exposure, with the movement able to cast itself as the aggrieved party. This helps to generate broader-based support for the movement, which is crucial to resource mobilization. I very strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who have commented and re-posted this story have never before read the blog of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and would not have seen the post had it simply been posted there. I had to scroll back to August 2013 to find a post on the CMHR blog that had a comment on it. It also isn’t a blog with a rich history of guest postings – only six names of guest bloggers appear on their contributors roll. The ActiveHistory.ca website, on the other hand, has a widespread readership among Canadian historians and engenders a lot of commentary. The Berks is the main conference on women’s history in North America. Far from being silenced, the decision by the CMHR to remove the post as written from their site has meant that Strong-Boag got a series of major platforms to attack the Harper government’s record on women’s rights, and along the way to damage the CMHR’s reputation and cast suspicion (possibly warranted, although this is unproven) of a sinister federal hand behind the removal of the blogpost. Meanwhile, there is no post for International Women’s Day on the CMHR blog.
To be perfectly clear, I don’t disagree with Strong-Boag’s stance on the Harper government’s policy record. But nor am I surprised that the museum would have shied away from her post. Strong-Boag engaged in a direct partisan attack. A paragraph discussing past-and-present Canadian governments’ decidedly mixed record on women’s issues (perhaps including Trudeau-era restrictions on the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s lobbying efforts that were linked to their government funding, or the successive failures of a series of federal governments to make any meaningful progress on the childcare agenda) might possibly have made it past the communications officers at the CMHR. At the very least, it would have been harder for a communications officer to defend the removal of a blogpost that presented a more balanced critique of the less-than-stellar record of Canada’s federal governments (Liberal and Conservative) on women’s issues that placed the current claw-backs in their historical context. But to me, the section on the current government in the post as currently written reads as an isolated (if deserved) swipe at the government of the day and explicitly partisan.
If this was a deliberate strategic move on Strong-Boag’s part, it has worked beautifully, so kudos to her for getting her message disseminated. Far more people have read her account of IWD than likely would have ever seen it on the CMHR blog. I just find it a little bit disingenuous to speak of silencing and censorship in what appears to me to be a case of a museum trying not to appear to be overtly partisan in its public communications. Even if it could have been claimed that this was a “guest post”, the museum would have been held accountable in the media, and with their various funders, for the content that appeared.
UPDATE (March 9, 3:10 PM): The story is now on the CBC website, with additional commentary from Strong-Boag, and a reply from the museum’s blog editor.
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: What To Do About John, Eh?
Bernie Farber had a piece in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday re our nation’s first Prime Minister: …Sir John A. Macdonald was also a racist who disdained Chinese rail workers, the very same men who helped build his national dream, by imposing a discriminatory head tax on each of them. And
Continue readingIn This Corner: Wanted: One Great Canadian history writer.
Is Canadian history boring? Or, has it been poorly served by boring writers? That’s a question that has been nagging me since I finished reading One Summer, written by Bill Bryson. As I mentioned in my best books blog, One Summer is a crackling-good read by one of the American
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Rumour: Johnny Of Johnny Burgers Has Retired!
Johnny has talked about retiring for several years now, as I reported here. Now I am informed that he has sold-out to some Chinese fellow, perhaps the little guy that worked for him forever who is visible center-left in the shot below. If so, that’s good news; that guy has hot
Continue readingThe Ranting Canadian: ● “People have got to know whether or not their…
● “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” – disgraced American president Richard Nixon ● “I don’t recall. I don’t recall that.” – disgraced American president Ronald Reagan ● “A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof?
Continue readingPample the Moose: Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics
With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government’s history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada’s past. If you’re
Continue readingPample the Moose: Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics
With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government’s history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada’s past. If you’re
Continue readingPample the Moose: Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics
With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government’s history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada’s past. If you’re an academic who reads this blog, this collection might be of interest to you.
Call for Abstracts – Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics
With the 150th anniversary of Confederation coming up in 2017, it seems appropriate to reflect on the political, social and cultural forces which have shaped Canada over the course of its history. National holidays and commemorative events provide an intriguing window into how these processes have affected, and continue to shape nationalism, culture and identity politics. With this in mind, we invite interested authors to submit proposals for an edited collection that we are developing. Tentatively entitled “Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics”, our objective is to pull together scholarship related to national holidays and major commemorative anniversaries in Canadian history. While our launching point for this collection is the celebration and observance of Dominion Day / Canada Day, we are taking a broad approach to the book’s theme, and would like to include contributions that deal with major anniversary years like the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, the Centennial of 1967, Canada 125 and other related – or competing! – national holidays such as Victoria Day, la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste/Fête Nationale, and Empire Day. We welcome contributions that situate Canadian holidays in a broader international context.
We have already been in discussions with University of Toronto Press, where there is keen interest in this project. Interested authors are asked to submit proposals to Matthew Hayday [mhayday@uoguelph.ca] by 2 July 2013 (the day after the Canada Day holiday!) including a 250-500 word abstract and the author’s institutional affiliation and contact information. Our planned schedule is to contact authors regarding their proposals by the end of July, and have first completed drafts due in late spring 2014. We are planning to apply for a SSHRC Connection Grant, with an eye to having participants come together for a workshop in the summer of 2014 to discuss each other’s work. This should provide ample time for revisions and the peer review process to allow the collection to be in print no later than 2017.
Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.
Matthew Hayday
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Guelph
mhayday@uoguelph.ca
Raymond Blake
Professor, Department of History, University of Regina
Raymond.Blake@uregina.ca
Alberta Diary: Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy … Jeffrey Delisle and the real betrayal of Canada
Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy … Below: H.A.R. “Kim” Philby; Philby honored on a Soviet stamp; Sub-Lieut. Jeffrey Delisle. Nowadays, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby’s betrayal of British and American military secrets to the beavering Bolsheviks of the Soviet security apparatus seems almost quaint. But that’s only because even with their
Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Queer History in the Making – Kathleen Wynne
Ontario’s Liberal party – struggling on so many fronts these days – nevertheless made history yesterday in selecting Kathleen Wynne as their new leader, and by extension, the new Premier of the province. The second woman to head the Ontario Liberals, Wynne will become the first woman to be Ontario’s
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