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Where does a young boy turn when his whole world suddenly disappears? What turns two brothers from an unstoppable team into a pair of bitterly estranged loners? How does the simple-hearted care of one middle-aged nurse reveal the scars of an entire community, and can anything heal the wounds caused by a century of deception? Award-winning cartoonist Jeff Lemire pays tribute to his roots with Essex County, an award-winning trilogy of graphic novels set in an imaginary version of his hometown, the eccentric farming community of Essex County, Ontario, Canada. In Essex County, Lemire crafts an intimate study of one community through the years, and a tender meditation on family, memory, grief, secrets, and reconciliation. With the lush, expressive inking of a young artist at the height of his powers, Lemire draws us in and sets us free. This new edition collects the complete, critically-acclaimed trilogy (Tales from the Farm, Ghost Stories, and The Country Nurse) in one deluxe volume! Also included are over 40-pages of previously unpublished material, including two new stories. This title has been voted by Canada Reads Top 10 title for the decade! --Publisher's description

Wrapped around the stories of these four women, is a mystery. Something''s gone wrong with the Mosquitos being built for the war effort -- they keep crashing in flight tests, for no apparent reason. Is the problem with their design, or are they being sabotaged? By whom? The traitorous Red Finns? The political subversives who have recently escaped from one of the nearby prison camps? Everyone''s on high alert, and "The Factory Voice" keeps abreast of the details. Or at least the rumours. --Publisher's description

Affectionate portrait of John St. Amand (1943-2007) who, under the tutelage of the left-wing labour activist, Madeleine Parent, moved in 1981 from Ontario to Nova Scotia to become a union organizer.

Through painful struggles and changing relationships, Thunder Bay’s working class defined itself during the tumultuous years before World War I. Labour Pains looks at many responses to the harshness of industrialism: trade unionism and labour politics, unrest and violence, the Social Gospel and socialism, mediation and conciliation. Alliances and conflict, many ethnicities and various expressions of class consciousness all contributed to the making of the working class whose members and defenders embraced many remarkable individuals, known and unknown. --Publisher's description. Contents: The beginnings of Thunder Bay's working class [Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario] -- Trade unions, municipal ownership & labour politics : Harry Bryan and the advent of organized labour] -- Dock workers, immigrants and the railways -- Socialism, the social gospel and labour politics [labor] -- The 1909 Freight Handlers Strike -- Who won the 1909 strike? -- Labour, socialists and the 1912 Coal Handlers Strike -- The Justice system, immigrants and waterfront strikes : socialists and violence -- The 1913 Street Railwaymen's Strike -- Reformers and rebels, good deeds and discord -- Appendix A. Labour unions in Port Arthur and Fort William in 1910. Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-174) and index.

The NFU was formed in 1969 through a merger of the Saskatchewan Farmers Union, the Ontario Farmers Union, the Farmers Union of British Columbia, and the Farmers Union of Alberta. In addition to these provincial unions, farmers from the Maritime provinces—not organized into farmers’ unions at the time—also became part of the NFU structure. Prior to ’69, these provincial unions each had worked autonomously in its respective province, but increasingly they were finding themselves at a disadvantage in attempting to work with the federal government. In an effort to solve that problem, the unions created a coordinating body, the National Farmers Union Council, consisting of representatives of the executives of each provincial union and representatives from the Maritime provinces. Over time, the officials and members from the provincial unions and the Maritimes realized that the major policy decisions affecting farmers were being made at the federal level. At a joint meeting of the executives of the provincial unions and others in Winnipeg in March 1968, the executive members passed a motion to strike a committee to develop a constitution for a direct membership national farm organization. The founding convention of the National Farmers Union was held in Winnipeg in July 1969. In the following months the provincial unions were phased out and their assets and liabilities transferred to the national organization. --Publisher's description

Like migratory birds, most of Canada’s 20,000 “guest” farm workers arrive in the spring and leave in the autumn. Hailing primarily from Mexico, Jamaica, and smaller countries of the Caribbean, these temporary workers have become entrenched in the Canadian labour force and are the mainstay of many traditional family farms in Canada. Many of them make the trip year after year after year.Vincenzo Pietropaolo has been photographing guest workers and recording their stories since 1984 – in the process travelling to forty locations throughout Ontario and to their homes in Mexico, Jamaica, and Montserrat. The resulting photographs have been highly acclaimed internationally through many publications and exhibitions, including a travelling show curated by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography that opened in Mexico City.With a foreword by Naomi Rosenblum, this beautiful and timely book of photography and exposition aims to shed light on a subject about which many Canadians know all too little. --Publisher's description

[E]xplores the economic relationship that existed between the Blood Indian reserve and the surrounding region of southern Alberta between 1884 and 1939. The Blood tribe, though living on a reserve, refused to become economically isolated from the larger community and indeed became significant contributors to the economy of the area. Their land base was important to the ranching industry. Their products, especially coal and hay, were sought after by settlers, and the Bloods were encouraged, not only to provide them as needed, but also to become expert freighters, transporting goods from the reserve for non-Native business people. Blood field labor in the Raymond area sugar beet fields was at times critical to the functioning of that industry. In addition, the Bloods' ties to the merchant community, especially in Cardston and Fort Macleod, resulted in a significant infusion of money into the local economy. Regular's study fills the gap left by Canadian historiography that has largely ignored the economic associations between Natives and non-Natives living in a common environment. His microhistory refutes the perception that Native reserves have played only a minor role in regional development and provides an excellent example of a cross-cultural, co-operative economic relationship in the post-treaty period on the Canadian plains. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- 'Free Range or Private Property': Integrating Blood Reserve Land into the Non-Native Economy -- 'Selling to Outsiders': Marketing Coal, Hay, and Freighting Services -- 'All the Indians Have Gone to the Beet': Blood Labour in the Raymond Sugar Beet Fields -- 'A Prospective Citizen of No Mean Importance': The Bloods and the Business Community -- Conclusion: Change Over Time.

In a contemporary labour market that includes growing levels of precarious employment, the regulation of minimum employment standards is intricately connected to conditions of economic security. With a focus on the role of neoliberal labour market policies in promoting "flexible" employment standards legislation - particularly in the areas of minimum wages and working time - Mark Thomas argues that shifts toward "flexible" legislation have played a central role in producing patterns of labour market inequality. Using an analytic framework that situates employment standards within the context of the broader social relations that shape processes of labour market regulation, Thomas constructs a case study of employment standards legislation in Ontario from 1884 to 2004. Drawing from political economy scholarship, and using a qualitative research methodology, he analyses class, race, and gender dimensions of legislative developments, highlighting the ways in which shifts towards "flexible" employment standards have exacerbated longstanding racialized and gendered inequities. Regulating Flexibility argues that in order to counter current trends towards increased insecurity, employment standards should not be treated as a secondary form of labour protection but as a cornerstone in a progressive project of labour market re-regulation. --Publisher's description

Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means - such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales - to the forces driving labour market insecurity. --Publisher's description

“If you’re in my way I’m walking.” This arrogant statement by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the occasion of his physical altercation with a protester in Hull, Quebec in the mid-1990s symbolizes the spirit of the relentless drive of capital to rewrite the historical compromise reached with working people after World War II. This early post-war compromise—sometimes referred to as the Fordist Compact—was associated with improving wages and rising living standards for working people. But in recent decades those achievements of the working class are being deliberately rolled back. Workman surveys many features of this experience: changing public perceptions of working life, the deregulation of labour law, the decline in unionization rates, the eclipse of union militancy, the stagnation of real wages, the disproportionate absorption of women into the low-wage sphere and the dismantling of social policy. He demonstrates the unravelling of the post-war compact and its replacement with a far more ex-ploitative relationship between capital and labour. He also points to the decline of the Canadian left and its inability to counter the capitalist onslaught effectively. Nevertheless, there are reasons to be hopeful. Workman calls for a rebuilding of the left through the restoration of left culture. To do this he says that the left must “quit politics,” work to promote the collective memory of working-class achievements, create venues to listen to working people in today’s economy, reject nationalism outright and encourage the labour movement to exploit its disruptive capacity. This revitalized left will form the basis of a deepening social critique, the political lessons of which will prove to be invaluable for working people in the long run. -- Publisher's description

The third volume in the Canadian State Trials series examines Canadian legal responses to real or perceived threats to the safety and security of the state from 1840 to 1914, a period of extensive challenges associated with fundamental political and socio-economic change. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: From State Trials to National Security Measures / Susan Binnie and Barry Wright -- Part One: Fenians -- 1 'Stars and Shamrocks Will be Sown': The Fenian State Trials, 1866-7 / R. Blake Brown -- 2 The D'Arcy McGee Affair and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus / David A. Wilson -- Part Two: Managing Collective Disorder -- 3 The Tenant League and the Law, 1864-7 / Ian Ross Robertson -- 4 The Trials and Tribulations of Riot Prosecutions: Collective Violence, State Authority, and Criminal Justice in Quebec, 1841-92 / Donald Fyson -- 5 Maintaining Order on the Pacific Railway: The Peace Preservation Act, 1869-85 / Susan Binnie -- 6 Street Railway Strikes, Collective Violence, and the Canadian State, 1886-1914 / Eric Tucker -- Part Three: The North-West Rebellions -- 7 Treasonous Murder: The Trial of Ambroise Lépine, 1874 / Louis A. Knafla -- 8 Summary and Incompetent Justice: Legal Responses to the 1885 Crisis / Bob Beal and Barry Wright -- 9 Another Look at the Riel Trial for Treason / J.M. Bumsted -- 10 The White Man Governs: The 1885 Indian Trials / Bill Waiser -- Part Four: Securing the Dominion -- 11 'High-handed, Impolite, and Empire-breaking Actions': Radicalism, Anti-Imperialism, and Political Policing in Canada, 1860-1914 / Andrew Parnaby and Gregory S. Kealey with Kirk Niergarth -- 12 Codification, Public Order, and the Security Provisions of the Canadian Criminal Code, 1892 / Desmond H. Brown and Barry Wright -- Appendices: Archival Research and Supporting Documents -- A. The Sir John A. Macdonald Fonds: Research Strategies and Methodological Issues for Archival Research / Judi Cumming -- B. Archival Sources in Canada for Riel's Rebellion / Gilles Lesage -- C. Supporting Documents

In this new edition the author shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. The author uses both data, and examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not only updates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice, and the Employee Free Choice Act. --Publisher's description

Since the 1990s, Canadian policy prescriptions for immigration, multiculturalism, and employment equity have equated globalization with global markets. This interpretation has transformed men and women of various ethnic backgrounds into trade-enhancing commodities who must justify their skills and talents in the language of business. This particular neo-liberal reading of globalization and public policy has resulted in a trend the authors call selling diversity. Using gender, race/ethnicity, and class lenses to frame their analysis, the authors review Canadian immigration, multiculturalism, and employment equity policies, including their different historical origins, to illustrate how a preference for selling diversity has emerged in the last decade. In the process they suggest that a commitment to enhance justice in a diverse society and world has been muted. Yet, neo-liberalism is not the only or inevitable option in this era of globalization, and Canadians are engaging in transnational struggles for rights and equality and thereby increasing the interconnectedness between peoples across the globe. Consequently, the emphasis on selling diversity might be challenged.

Substantially revised and updated, this widely used introductory text emphasizes how values, objectives and activities of unions are shaped in the face of employer resistance and hostile governments. It includes an analysis of why workers form unions; organization and democracy; collective bargaining and grievances; historical development; and gains unions have achieved for their members and all working people. It also examines the challenges created by rapid economic and technological change, the rise of neoliberalism and the increasingly contingent and acialized character of the labour force. --Publisher's description

Like Wayson Choy and David Bezmozgis before him, Anthony De Sa captures, in stories brimming with life, the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience. At the heart of this collection of intimately linked stories is the relationship between a father and his son. A young fisherman washes up nearly dead on the shores of Newfoundland. It is Manuel Rebelo who has tried to escape the suffocating smallness of his Portuguese village and the crushing weight of his mother’s expectations to build a future for himself in a terra nova. Manuel struggles to shed the traditions of a village frozen in time and to silence the brutal voice of Maria Theresa da Conceicao Rebelo, but embracing the promise of his adopted land is not as simple as he had hoped. Manuel’s son, Antonio, is born into Toronto’s little Portugal, a world of colourful houses and labyrinthine back alleys. In the Rebelo home the Church looms large, men and women inhabit sharply divided space, pigs are slaughtered in the garage, and a family lives in the shadow cast by a father’s failures. Most days Antonio and his friends take to their bikes, pushing the boundaries of their neighbourhood street by street, but when they finally break through to the city beyond they confront dangers of a new sort. With fantastic detail, larger-than-life characters and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelos and finds there both the promise and the disappointment inherent in the choices made by the father and the expectations placed on the son. --Publisher's description

A new study of farm work in BC reveals systematic violations of employment standards and health and safety regulations, poor and often dangerous working conditions, and dismal enforcement by government agencies. The study’s authors propose comprehensive policy changes that would ensure farmworkers — most of whom are immigrants and temporary migrants — are no longer relegated to second-class status. “Farmworkers are at the mercy of a complex and confusing system that exploits, threatens and silences them while putting their lives in danger,” says study co-author Arlene McLaren, Professor Emerita of Sociology at Simon Fraser University. The study draws from numerous sources, including interviews with key informants in government and the farm industry, interviews with 53 Indo-Canadian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers, a survey 87 Mexican migrant farmworkers, and a review of better practices in other jurisdictions. The study is part of the Economic Security Project, a joint initiative of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Simon Fraser University. --Publisher's description

Nation and Society: Readings in Post-Confederation Canadian History offers students a sample of some of the best recent scholarship on the history of Canada since Confederation. The readings are grouped in a combination of time periods and themes that are commonly used in studies of the post-Confederation period: “Inventing Canada, 1867-1914”; “Economy and Society in the Industrial Age, 1867-1918”; “Transitional Years: Canada 1919-1945”; “Reinventing Canada, 1945-1975”; and “Post-Modern Canada.” --Publisher's description. Contents: Pt. 1. Inventing Canada, 1867-1914. Dispossession vs. accomodation in plaintiff vs. defendent accounts of Métis dispersal from Manitoba, 1870-1881 / D.N. Sprague -- Remoulding the constitution / Christopher Armstrong -- "The cititzenship debates": the 1885 Franchise Act / Veronica Strong-Boag -- Categories and terrains of exclusion: constructing the "Indian woman" in the early settlement era of western Canada / Sarah Carter -- Eldorado / William R. Morrison. Pt.2. Economy and society in the industrial age, 1867-1918. "Care, control and supervision": native people in the Canadian Atlantic salmon fishery, 1867-1900 / Bill Parenteau -- Necessary for survival: women and children's labour on prairie homesteads, 1871-1911 / Sandra Rollings-Magnusson -- Exclusion or solidarity? Vancouver workers confront the "Oriental problem" / Gillian Creese -- North of the colour line: sleeping car porters and the battle against Jim Crow on Canadian rails, 1880-1920 / Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu -- Unmaking manly smokes: church, state, governance, and the first anti-smoking campaigns in Montreal, 1892-1914 / Jarrett Rudy -- The roots of modernism: Darwinism and the higher critics / Ramsay Cook -- Remembering armageddon / Jonathan E. Vance. Pt. 3. Transitional years, 1918-1945. Dancing to perdition: adolescence and leisure in interwar English Canada / Cynthia Comacchio -- "The best man that ever worked the lumber": aboriginal longshoremen and Burrard Inlet, BC, 1863-1939 / Andrew Parnaby -- Indispensible but not a citizen: the housewife in the Great Depression / Denyse Baillargeon -- Introduction to Myths, memories and lies: Quebec's intelligentsia and the Fascist temptation, 1939-1960 / Esther Delisle -- Starting into the abyss / J.L. Granatstein. Pt. 4. Reinventing Canada, 1945-1975. Psychology and the construction of the "normal" family in postwar Canada, 1945-1960 / Mona Gleason -- "I'll wrap the f*#@ Canadian flag around me": a nationalist response to plant shutdown, 1962-1984 / Steven High -- "Character weakness" and "fruit machines": towares an analysis of the anti-homosexual security campaign in the Canadian civil service / Gary Kinsman -- People in the way: modernity, environment, and society on the Arrow Lakes / Tina Loo -- A Newfoundland culture? / James Overton -- Allegories and orientations in African-Canadian historiography: the spirit of Africville / James W. St. G. Walker -- "The Rocket": newspaper coverage of the death of a Québec cultural icon, a Canadian hockey player / Howard Ramos and Kevine Gosine. Pt. 5. Post-modern Canada. "This little piggy went to the prairies": growth and opposition to the prairie hog industry / Michael J. Broadway -- Political economy of gender, race, and class: looking at South Asian immigrant women in Canada / Tania Das Gupta -- Rights in the courts, on the water, and in the woods: the aftermath of R. v. Marshall in New Brunswick / Margaret McCallum -- Family policy, child care and social solidarity: the case of Quebec / Jane Jenson -- No exit: racial profiling and Canada's war against terrorism / Reem Bahdi.

This text presents a hands-on examination of industrial relations balanced in both theoretical and practical coverage, as well as union and labour coverage. Industrial Relations in Canada is grounded in leading research and examines true-to-life issues. Experiential exercises, cases, and collective bargaining simulations bridge the academic content of the text with real-world issues in the field. --Publisher's description of 2011 edition.

In this indispensable study of Canadian industrialization, Craig Heron examines the huge steel plants that were built at the turn of the twentieth century in Sydney and New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and Trenton, Hamilton, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Presenting a stimulating analysis of the Canadian working class in the early twentieth century, Working in Steel emphasizes the importance of changes in the work world for the larger patterns of working-class life. Heron's examination of the impact of new technology in Canada's Second Industrial Revolution challenges the popular notion that mass-production workers lost all skill, power, and pride in the work process. He shifts the explanation of managerial control in these plants from machines to the blunt authoritarianism and shrewd paternalism of corporate management. His discussion of Canada's first steelworkers illuminates the uneven, unpredictable, and conflict-ridden process of technological change in industrial capitalist society. As engaging today as when first published in 1988, Working in Steel remains an essential work in Canadian history. --Pubisher's description

This eclectic and carefully organized range of essays--from women's history and settler societies to colonialism and borderlands studies--is the first collection of comparative and transnational work on women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. It explores, expands, and advances the aspects of women's history that cross national borders. Out of the talks presented at the 2002 "Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women's History," Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus have edited a foundational text with a wide, inclusive perspective on our western past. --Publisher's description. Contents: Connecting the women's Wests / Elizabeth Jameson -- Unsettled pasts, unsettling borders: women, Wests, nations / Sheila McManus -- Making connections: gender, race and place in Oregon contry / Susan Armitage -- A transborder family in the Pacific North West: reflecting on race and gender in women's history / Sylvia van Kirk -- Writing women into the history of the North American Wests, one woman at a time / Jean Barman -- "That understanding with nature":region, race, and nation in women's stories from the modern Canadian and American Grasslands West / Molly P. Rozum -- The perils of rural women's history: (a note to storytellers who study the West's unsettled past) / Joan M. Jensen -- The great white mother: maternalism and American Indian child removal in the American West, 1880-1940 / Margaret D. Jacobs -- Pushing physical, racial, and ethnic boundaries: Edith Lucas and public education in British Columbia, 1903-1989 / Helen Raptis -- "Crossing the line": American prostitutes in Western Canada, 1895-1925 / Char Smith -- "Talented and charming strangers from across the line": gendered nationalism. class privilege, and the American woman's club of Calgary / Nora Faires -- Excerpts from Pourin' Down Rain / Cheryl Foggo -- "A union without women is only half organized": Mine Mill, women's auxiliaries, and cold war politics in the North American Wests / Laurie Mercier -- Jailed heroes and kithen heroines: class, gender, and the Medalta Potteries strike in postwar Alberta / Cynthia Loch-Drake -- Gendered steps across the border: teaching the history of women in the American and Canadian Wests / Margaret Walsh -- Latitudes and longitudes: teaching the history of women in the U.S. and Canadian Wests / Mary Murphy.