Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring black slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, Loyalist families brought slaves with them to settle in the Maritime colonies of British North America.

The transition from slavery in the American colonies to slavery in the Marit …

When it comes to urban planning, to what extent and under what conditions should the community’s interest prevail over the rights of private property owners? Public Interest, Private Property addresses this question at a time when pollution, urban sprawl, and condo booms are forcing municipal governments to adopt prescriptive laws and regulations …

Globally, suicides account for a significant number of premature deaths every year. Traditional approaches to suicide research and prevention are not working for everyone, but why is this? And what can be done about it?

In Critical Suicidology, a team of international scholars, practitioners, and people directly affected by suicide argue that the f …

In the 1960s, a youthful and ambitious lesbian movement began taking shape in Canada. After decades of being pathologized, disparaged, or erased from public view, lesbians were ready to make a scene – both by calling attention to themselves and by creating places to come together and forge their own culture. Making a Scene tells this story, revis …

Canada likes to present itself as a paragon of gay rights. This book contends that Canada’s acceptance of gay rights, while being beneficial to some, obscures and abets multiple forms of oppression to the detriment and exclusion of some queer and trans bodies. Disrupting Queer Inclusion seeks to unsettle the assumption that inclusion equals justi …

The Liberal Party of Canada is one of the most successful parties in the democratic world. It dominated Canadian politics for a century, practising an inclusive style of “big tent” politics that enabled it to fend off opponents on both the left and right. This book traces the record of the party, unwrapping Liberal practices and organization to …

Canada is a country founded on relationships and agreements between Indigenous peoples and newcomers. Although recent court cases have upheld Aboriginal title rights, the cooperative spirit of the treaties is being lost as Canadians engage in endless arguments about First Nations “issues.” Each new court decision adds fuel to the debate raging …

Few moments in Canadian history are as intriguing as the political battle between Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the “Gang of Eight” provincial premiers who opposed his plans to “patriate” Canada’s constitution from Britain. Patriation and Its Consequences revisits these constitutional negotiations, including the personalities, visions …

Growing inequality within Chinese society has led to public indignation, petitions to Party and state agencies, strikes, and large-scale protests. This book examines the intersection between the Chinese government’s preoccupation with the “protection of social stability” (weiwen), and its legal commitments to protect human rights. Drawing on …

During the twentieth century, child care policy in British Columbia matured in the shadow of a persistent political uneasiness with working motherhood. Charting the growth of the child care movement in this province, Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma examines how ideas about motherhood, paid work, and social welfare have influenced univers …

Canada is considered a leader when it comes to LGBTQ rights, yet this is a fairly recent phenomenon – one that is largely due to the tireless work of disparate groups of LGBTQ activists. Queer Mobilizations examines the relationships between LGBTQ activists and local, provincial, and federal Canadian governments. The contributors explore how vari …

“I am not afraid to be called a politician,” declared Paul Martin Sr., defending his life’s work in politics. “Next to preaching the word of God, there is nothing nobler than to serve one’s fellow countrymen in government.” This book examines Martin’s remarkable career as a liberal reformer and cabinet minister who tackled the issues …

The wars on terror, economic crises, climate change, and humanitarian emergencies have challenged decision makers to institute new measures to maintain security. Foreign policy analysts tend to view these decisions as being divorced from ethics, but is this the case? Unsettled Balance, the first rigorous and sustained analysis of security and ethic …

When the G20 Summit was held in Toronto in 2010, people were shocked to see Canadian police officers acting in ways that appeared foreign and frightening. The riot gear, surveillance, mass arrests, and physical abuse of citizens were all indicative of an out-of-control policing operation. The conflict sparked widespread outrage and calls for a publ …

Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. The contributors to Beyond Testimony and Trauma consider other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on valuable insights gained from their work on long-term or …

During the Second World War, as Canada struggled to provide its allies with food, public health officials warned that malnutrition could derail the war effort. Posters admonished Canadians to "Eat Right" because "Canada Needs You Strong" while cookbooks helped housewives become "housoldiers" through food rationing, menu substitutions, and household …

Historically, Canada's Constitution has been principally viewed as a federal framework or a rights bulwark. This book offers a new interpretation. The "Strategic Constitution," as proposed by Irvin Studin, is a framework for understanding the capacity of Canada to project strategic power in the world. First, Studin provides a wide-ranging audit of …

In Equality Deferred, Dominique Cl—ment traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins of human rights legislation. Focusing on British Columbia — the first jurisdiction to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex — he documents a variety of absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. Drawing on previousl …

Assumptions about the harmful nature of polygamy have left little room for debate, with monogamy coming to represent a hallmark of advanced societies, and polygamy the immoral alternative. Yet in this volume, eleven scholars ask whether this condemnation is justified by examining, among other perspectives, the lived experiences of polygamous famili …

Following the Second World War, liberal nation-states sought to address injustices of the past. Canada's government began to consider its own implication in various past wrongs, and in the late twentieth century it began to implement reparative justice initiatives for historically marginalized people. Yet despite this shift, there are more Indigeno …

Canadian legislatures regularly assign what are truly court functions to non-court, government tribunals. These executive branch “judicial” tribunals are surrogate courts and together comprise a little-known system of administrative justice that annually makes hundreds of thousands of contentious, life-altering judicial decisions concerning the …

This updated edition of Treaty Talks in British Columbia traces the origins and development of treaty negotiations in the province and includes a postscript, co-authored with Peter Colenbrander, that provides an extensive overview of the treaty process from 2001 to 2009. The authors outline the achievements of and challenges for the treaty process …

Standing Up with G̲a’ax̱sta’las tells the remarkable story of Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951), a controversial Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw leader and activist who lived during a period of enormous colonial upheaval. Working collaboratively, Robertson and Cook’s descendants draw on oral histories and textual records to create a nuanced portrait of a …

Canada has abundant natural wealth, beautiful landscapes, vast forests, and thousands of rivers and lakes. The land defines Canadians as a people, yet the country has one of the industrialized world’s worst environmental records. Building on his previous book, The Environmental Rights Revolution (2012), David R. Boyd describes how recognizing the …

Thomas Isaac looks at the broad picture of trends that are developing in the law and the background, highlighting aspects of Canadian law that impact Aboriginal peoples and their relationship with the wider Canadian society. While covering issues such as Aboriginal and treaty rights, constitutional issues, land claims, self-government, provincial a …

Preserving What Is Valued explores the concept of preserving heritage. It presents the conservation profession's code of ethics and discusses four significant contexts embedded in museum conservation practice: science, professionalization, museum practice, and the relationship between museums and First Nations peoples.

Museum practice regarding han …

British Columbia inherited a legal system that granted married men control over most family property and imposed few obligations on them toward their wives and children. Yet from the 1860s onward, lawmakers throughout the Anglo-American world, including legislators on the Pacific Coast, began to grant women and children new rights. Domestic Reforms …

Anti-globalization activism world-wide attests to the tensions between globalization and civil society. To better understand this fraught relationship, Dorval Brunelle compares two social orders separated by a half-century. The post-World War II order entailed a broad vision uniting three complementary objectives – security, justice, and welfare …

Human rights complaints attract a great deal of public interest, but what is going on below the surface? When people contact a human rights lawyer, how do they think about and use human rights discourse? How are complaints turned into cases? Can administrative systems be both effective and fair? Defining Rights and Wrongs investigates the day-to-da …

The moment of contact between two peoples, two alien societies, marks the opening of an epoch and the joining of histories. What if it had happened differently?

The stories that indigenous peoples and Europeans tell about their first encounters with one another are enormously valuable historical records, but their relevance extends beyond the past. …

Relations between Canada and Quebec have never been easy. Beginning with the Conquest and working through the many political permutations before Confederation and since, there has always been conflict between the two governments and, in particular, between two points of view. The rebellions of 1837-8, conscription, the Quiet Revolution, language la …

Theories of liberal multiculturalism seek to reconcile cultural rights with universal liberal principles. Some focus on individual autonomy; others emphasize communal identity. Andrew Robinson argues that liberal multiculturalism can be justified without privileging either. By appealing to the deeper value of meaningful life, he shows how autonomy …

Recent years have seen the retrenchment of Canadian social programs and the restructuring of the welfare state along neo-liberal lines. Social programs have been cut back, eliminated, or recast in exclusionary and punitive forms. Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship, and Legal Activism responds to these changes by examining the ideas and practices o …

Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association.

Patricia E. Roy examines the climax of antipathy to Asians in Canada: the removal of all Japanese Canadians from the BC coast in 1942. Canada ignored the rights of Japanese Canadians and placed strict limits on Chinese immigration. In response, Ja …

A political biography extraordinaire, Elusive Destiny reveals the inner workings of the Liberal Party in its heyday as charted through the meteoric rise and fall of John Napier Turner. It highlights Turner’s vision for the country and tallies the political price he paid when he deviated from the Trudeau legacy on matters such as language rights, …

The current Status criteria of the Indian Act contains descent-based rules akin to blood quantum that are particularly discriminatory against women and their descendants, which author Pamela Palmater argues will lead to the extinguishment of First Nations as legal and constitutional entities. Beginning with an historic overview of legislative enact …

The passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 focused attention on the ways in which Indigenous peoples are adapting to the pressures of globalization and development. This volume extends the discussion by presenting case studies from around the world that explore how Indigenous peoples are engaging with and challeng …

The lives of many lesbians prior to 1965 remain cloaked in mystery. Historians have turned the spotlight on upper-middle-class “romantic friends” and on working-class butch and femme women, but the lives of the lower-middle-class majority remain in the shadows. Awfully Devoted Women offers a portrait of middle-class lesbianism in the decades be …

Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man’s identity and a man’s right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evide …

Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 13 September 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms the “minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the indigenous peoples of the world.” The Declaration responds to past and ongoing injustices suffered by Indigenous peoples worldwide, and provide …

Canada is at a critical juncture in the evolution of its communications policy. Will our information and communications technologies continue in a market-oriented, neoliberal direction, or will they preserve and strengthen broader democratic values? Media Divides offers a comprehensive, up-to-date audit of communications law and policy. Using the c …

Our image of Canada’s postwar foreign policy is dominated by the Cold War, while the story of Canada’s response to decolonization in the Global South is less well known. This book explores Canadian-Indonesian relations to determine whether Canada’s postwar foreign policy was guided by an overarching set of altruistic principles. It shows that …

The urgent need to resolve conflicts over forests, fisheries, farming practices, urban sprawl, and greenhouse-gas reductions, among many others, calls for a critical rethinking of the nature of our democracy and citizenship. This work aims to move the ideas of green democracy and ecological citizenship from the margins to the centre of discussion a …

The introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 was accompanied by much fanfare and public debate, and the Charter remains the subject of controversy twenty-five years later. Contested Constitutionalism does not celebrate the Charter; rather it offers a critique by distinguished scholars of law and political science of its e …

Canada’s Supreme Court has established a new legal framework requiring governments to consult with Aboriginal peoples when contemplating actions that may affect their rights. Professor Newman examines Supreme Court and lower court decisions, legislation at various levels, policies developed by governments and Aboriginal communities, and consultat …

This book explores the family allowance phenomenon from the idea's debut in the House of Commons in 1929 to the program's demise as a universal program under the Mulroney government in 1992. Although successive federal governments remained committed to its underlying principle of universality, party politics, bureaucracy, federal-provincial wrangli …

Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada seeks to elucidate the complex and often uneasy relationship between law and religion in democracies committed both to equal citizenship and religious pluralism. Leading socio-legal scholars consider the role of religious values in public decision making, government support for religious practices, and the rest …

Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec’s massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and the …

In the first major study of postwar social movement organizations in Canada, Dominique Clément provides a history of the human rights movement as seen through the eyes of two generations of activists. Drawing on newly acquired archival sources, extensive interviews, and materials released through access to information applications, Clément explor …

Landing Native Fisheries reveals the contradictions and consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish, on one hand, and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers, on the other. Beginning with the first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, Douglas Harris maps the connections …