Your search

Queer history in Canada has often centred around metropolitan areas, like Toronto and Montreal, usually foregrounding social movements. This means that queer histories of the periphery are often overlooked, and that histories of metropole are taken as representative of the national context. In this thesis, I examine queer oral histories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Through these oral histories I aim to complicate dominant narratives in both queer history and histories of deindustrialization in Canada. Cape Breton is a former steel and coal region in Nova Scotia that underwent a comparatively slow, state-managed deindustrialization in the latter half of the 20th century. Today, like in deindustrialized areas across the world, the “structure of feeling” of industrial life remains, despite plant and mine closure. Often, histories of deindustrialization center around a mythologized white male (and indubitably heterosexual) breadwinner, centering not just workers, but the specific function that masculine industrial labour played in the social reproduction of the Fordist accord in the household. By taking up the life stories of queer people, we can critically examine this centring of the nuclear family in deindustrialization studies. In the first chapter, I offer a theoretical and historiographical intervention arguing for a queer investigation of deindustrialization. In the second chapter, I apply this line of thinking to oral histories of Cape Breton queers, arguing that these narrators’ desires for queer history and queer future are ultimately filtered through the prism of deindustrialization’s half-life.

This thesis examines the experiences of pupils-cum-inmates who attended the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (OIB) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Customary assessments of segregated education, which investigate administrators’ campaigns to implement pedagogical or curricular advancements, have characterized institutionalization as educational and emancipatory. Instead, this project challenges identity-centric, rights-based narratives by reframing the OIB as constitutive of Ontario’s carceral apparatus. Drawing upon first-person testimony gathered during four investigations into the OIB conducted by the Government of Ontario, the analysis demonstrates that capitalist development dispossessed blind Canadians from waged labour, generating an underclass of precarious and oft-wageless proletarians. Institutionalization socialized the workers-in-training within a prison-like environment where punishments like whippings and beatings, solitary confinement, and material deprivation were commonplace. Educational opportunities were haphazard and irregular, while living and working conditions were uncomfortable, bordering on intolerable. Biomedical understandings of blindness rationalized the mistreatment of inmates, as administrators attempted to reintegrate graduates into waged labour. Children and adolescents survived by developing cultures of delinquency and transgression; inmates, especially working-class inmates, organized popular resistance movements that challenged institutional authority. Educational authorities responded by overseeing the repression of working-class culture. By funneling graduates into either working-class occupations or “gentlemanly” and “learned” professions, institutionalization fomented processes of class formation, creating, first, an underclass of labourers and musicians and, second, a vanguard of capitalists and professionals.

Scholarship on the development of slavery in the colonial Maritimes region during the pre-Loyalist period remains scarce, with even fewer studies examining slave ownership. By situating the expansion of slaveholding in the region (that makes up present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) within the Atlantic world socio-economic context, I show how Maritime society reproduced anti-Black attitudes and slaving practices found in West Indian slave societies. Through trading and social relationships with New Englanders, the region’s colonisation became tethered to the Caribbean. New England’s commercial dependence on West Indian plantations beginning in 1637, and expanding thereafter, fostered intra-regional mercantile and military ventures, bringing their Caribbean partnerships into the Maritimes after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The social aspects of these commercial interactions reveal how settling New Englanders transplanted their ideological, interpersonal, and familial connections to the Caribbean and their slaveholding norms to the Maritimes. By comparing Maritime slave-owning practices to those found in the West Indies, we see Maritime slaveholding to be, in many ways, a mere extension of the plantation regime.

This dissertation provides the first historical overview of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU) and its affiliates from 1969 to 1992. Formed at the end of the 1960s as a foil to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), the CCU sought to nationalize the Canadian labour movement by fomenting the formation of Canadian unions. As a left-nationalist labour body, the CCU charged the CLC with conservatism, complacency, and collaboration in its approach to organizing and collective bargaining. Chief among the CCU’s concerns was the domination of American international unions in the CLC. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the CCU organized workplaces in unorganized industries, bringing a host of immigrant women into the ranks of the Canadian labour movement, while establishing large bargaining units in industries primarily organized by American unions. At the same time, the CCU forwarded a left-nationalist politics inspired by the New Canadian Political Economy (NCPE) that criticized Canada’s economic, political, and cultural dependence on the United States, and used this politics to mobilize its members against continental free trade and towards a nationalized, socialized home economy. The CCU and its affiliates also formed important linkages with the New Left and the women’s movement during these decades and proved itself a militant actor in confrontations with the state and industrial law. Several CCU affiliates eventually merged with the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) in the 1990s in the wake of extensive economic restructuring and corresponding changes in the Canadian labour movement. The dissertation contributes to the scholarship on industrial relations, industrial legality, and nationalism by providing a historical case study of a left-nationalist labour institution that simultaneously challenged and was shaped by federal and provincial law. It provides a critical institutionalist perspective on union federations that accounts for the law as a contested terrain, and nationalism as a historically contingent politics.

This dissertation establishes that work injury and injured workers are relatively neglected in Critical Disability Studies (CDS). A further observation is that CDS tends to avoid a class analysis of disability politics in favour of identitarian approaches. This research focuses on income security. Through a Marxist critical policy historiography, I compare workers’ compensation benefits and state-sponsored benefits for disabled people whose disabilities originated outside of the workplace in Ontario. I argue that the workers’ compensation program is superior to the state-sponsored program because of the class location and politics of the respective groups of people with disabilities seeking income security. The discussion also highlights some of the reasons for the missing injured worker in CDS. Specifically, injured workers experience disability as a loss worthy of compensation rather than a positive identity. Further, rather than viewing prevention measures as the erasure of disabled people, injured workers support the prevention of disability through occupational health and safety laws and workplace practices. By focusing on the political economy of each program, the historical narrative suggests that disability benefit programs in Ontario were developed less by moral suasion and more because of their role in capital accumulation. Although the argument holds for the early history of the two programs in their early history. the negative impact of neoliberalism on both workers’ compensation and the current benefits program in Ontario (the Ontario Disability Support Program) has created a convergence of interests between permanently impaired injured workers and other disabled people, underscoring the importance of including injured workers’ perspectives in CDS.

Embargoed until: 2025-11-29 This thesis explores Canada’s regulatory response to modern slavery in global supply chains. It investigates the factors which influenced Canada to enact transparency modern slavery legislation. It also analyzes Canada’s strategy of utilizing multiple soft and hard law governance and regulatory techniques to strengthen its response to modern slavery. Using a theoretical framework which combines global governance and regulation literature with literature regarding the national institutionalization of global norms, this thesis examines how international actors that comprise the global anti-slavery network disseminate anti-slavery and corporate accountability norms. These norms are subsequently filtered through a country’s domestic political economy, and are translated into either transparency or mandatory human rights due diligence (MHRDD) legislation. The qualitative methods used in this thesis were documentary analysis and key informant interviews. Key informant interviews in conjunction with an analysis of relevant reports and parliamentary debates provided insight into the influences behind Canada’s enactment of various governance and regulatory techniques. Doctrinal legal analysis, and an assessment of the various techniques implemented in Canada, revealed the effectiveness of the individual techniques and how they interacted with each other. This thesis found that Canada adopted a transparency law due to a combination of: (1) International norm diffusion via an epistemic, global anti-slavery network; and (2) Canada’s unique domestic political economy. Features of Canada’s domestic political economy, including its affiliation as part of the Anglosphere, and its powerful mining industry, ultimately determined the enactment of transparency legislation. The thesis also found that Canada’s use of multiple, increasingly hard law governance and regulatory techniques is currently ineffective as these techniques do not complement each other, and actually weaken Canada’s regulatory response to modern slavery. Consequently, labour standards have not improved for supply chain workers. This thesis posits that Canada should prioritize centering and empowering workers to protect their own rights.

In recent years, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have increasingly turned their attention to the role of collective imagination in shaping sociotechnical futures. This scholarship leaves open the question of how the collectives involved in bringing these futures to life come into being. Starting with one episode in the ongoing conflict over the construction of Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory in settler-colonial Canada, this discourse analysis draws on scholarship in feminist, anticolonial, and co-productionist STS to study this process of collective formation in relation to sociotechnical futures. It does so by examining how oil and gas workers become enrolled into a sociotechnical imaginary I call Canadian resource techno-nationalism. Comparing media and politicians’ representations of oil and gas workers with White workers’ representations of themselves indicates that they can end up participating in this imaginary regardless of their affinity to it. Examining policy documents and scholarly literature about the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in impact assessment, as well as political debates and mainstream media coverage about the conflict over the Coastal GasLink pipeline, draws attention to how elites’ active construction and protection of the boundary between knowledge and politics works to enroll Indigenous people into oil and gas jobs and, therefore, into the collective performing Canadian resource techno-nationalism. In both cases, elite actors deploy the resources at their disposal in ways that help funnel oil and gas workers into lives imagined for them, securing the power of the settler state in the process. This dynamic illustrates the importance of disentangling participation in the collective performance of sociotechnical imaginaries from freely given consent. Residents of liberal states can end up performing dominant imaginaries less out of any sense of affinity to them than as a response to the disciplinary power these imaginaries help sustain.

Indigenous communities have been in direct conflict with the Canadian state when asserting their right to self-determination. Literature reveals that the Canadian state interprets Indigenous resistance as a threat to settler authority, responding with violence and criminal enforcement. This thesis investigates the relationship between the norms related to Indigenous rights articulated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the institutional enforcement response to Indigenous resistance in the case of Mi’kmaw moderate livelihood fishing. Through a critical discourse analysis of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s public statements, policy documents, and recorded actions, this research found a discursive influence on state institutions. Despite the rhetorical commitments, this research found that state response continued an approach of criminalization and violence against Mi’kmaw moderate livelihood fishers. These contradictions between rhetoric and practice challenge the institutional legitimacy of settler authority.

This study explores ableism within higher education through an examination of the collective agreements and institutional policies that govern the academic responsibilities of disabled faculty members. Critical disability theory serves as the theoretical framework for this study, which employs both institutional ethnography and qualitative content analysis in the review of the publicly available documents from English speaking U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities (n=13). The study unfolds in three parts: Part I presents the findings from the analysis of the collective agreements and institutional policies outlining the tenure and promotion process and the barriers disabled faculty members experience in fulfilling their academic responsibilities. Part II explores the tensions and contradictions between institutional accommodation processes and the language used in their public presentation of EDI initiatives, while Part III represents the everyday experiences of disabled faculty members though interviews, representing the embodiment and internalization of the texts examined in parts I and II. This research challenges and disrupts normative understandings of what it means to be a “good academic”, by addressing an absence in the literature exploring ableist representations and assumptions present in collective agreements and institutional policies. The examination of these texts and the lived experiences of disabled faculty members through interviews has illuminated the existing contradictions and tensions in these texts, showing ableism is strongly entrenched and condoned in university policies and governance.

Given the importance of the fishing industry to the Newfoundland economy and identity, understanding the realities of fish work in the province allows for a deeper understanding of labour practices, safety regulations, and the health of the many fisheries the bolster that Newfoundland economy and identity. Initially designed to assess the working experiences of migrant workers on Canadian fishing boats, this thesis turns to domestic workers to unpack labour realties and address the potential of exploitative and abusive practices that help chart fishing among one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. This research took place in Newfoundland in October of 2022, where crew members, boat captains, their owners, and industry and union representatives were approached to gather work experiences and opinions on the broader regional fishing industry in the province. From these experiences, an assessment of how and if exploitative working conditions can be improved utilizes existing and proposed international labour conventions, understandings of unionization, and the political economy, to represent exploitative labour conditions along a continuum. The evolving and changing economic and environmental realities of fishing both globally and in eastern Canada highlight how an already risk-taking, masculine, and community focused industry lives with, is shaped by, and can work towards limiting, the more damaging forms of exploitation. This thesis utilizes qualitative data to inform its assessment of precarious labour realities at sea in the Newfoundland fishing industry to further advocate for the move towards regionalized and industry specific seafarer support mechanisms. Through promoting these mechanisms, such as a seafarer support centre and the ratification of the Work in Fishing Convention (C188), this research calls for Newfoundland's fishing industry to lead the way towards better practices nationally.

This thesis explores the lived experiences of international students in Canada, examining the impacts and outcomes of Canada’s International Student Program (ISP) that positions students as not only educational participants but also flexible economic assets. Through a brief review of international student policy developments, it is argued that these changes reflect a deliberate effort to commodify international students' labor to meet Canadian labor market demands. The thesis also draws on migration literature to highlight the exploitative risks inherent in foreign labor pathways, applying these concerns to the International Student Program. Through the use of qualitative semi-structured interviews with international students and support professionals, this study reveals the challenges students face under these policies including permit or program navigation, financial instability, and most notably adverse impacts on well-being. This study highlights the complex relationship between Canada’s various mobility programs and notes the benefits of utilizing qualitative methodologies in researching program outcomes.

This thesis investigates the role of Kelowna’s public transit union (the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1722 – ATU 1722) and a youth-led environmental group (Fridays for Future Kelowna) in the formation of the Okanagan Transit Alliance (OTA). The OTA is a grassroots movement for better public transit in the Central Okanagan. The central research question is, "how can transit unions engage in climate activism?". A participatory activist methodology is employed to study the joint campaign for more accessible, publicly managed, and community-driven transit. The findings are organized into three themes. The first theme is ecosocialism – a political ideology which centers ecological concerns in socialist thought – because the campaign advocates for an ecosocialist goal of ending the private management of Kelowna’s transit. The findings in this area highlight the importance of organizing around people’s basic needs, uncertainty about the role of the government in the campaign, and that engaging in collective struggle is important for developing working-class power. The campaign was co-led by the ATU 1722, and so the second theme, unions, examines their role in the campaign. Under this theme are the findings that the two leading organizations developed a mutually beneficial collaboration, and that the public facing role of bus drivers helped the union build connections with the community. At the same time, contemporary union challenges impacted the ATU 1722’s ability to engage in effective advocacy. Finally, under the third theme of organizing, the research broadly explores organizing tactics to develop the climate justice movement. We found that a welcoming environment and co-creation led to high participation levels, and that relationships were fundamental to the campaign. This thesis highlights the potential of unions to play a pivotal role in climate activism, bridging the gap between labor and environmental concerns. The case of ATU 1722, Fridays for Future Kelowna, and the OTA serves as an inspiring example of how labor organizations can actively contribute to the broader movement for environmental justice and ecosocialist transformation. This study not only informs the ongoing discourse on the intersection of labor and climate activism but also inspires future collaborations for anti-capitalist climate justice.

Despite new immigrants having higher educational attainment and an immigrant selection policy that admits “the best and the brightest,” one of Canada’s major social policy concerns is the continued deterioration of immigrants’ economic outcomes. This paradox is illustrated by data showing immigrants suffer from higher unemployment, earn less than similarly educated Canadian-born workers, face skill underutilization, and are relegated to the secondary labour market made up of low-wage, unstable jobs, lacking protections such as unemployment benefits. The underutilization of immigrant skills is economically disastrous; it costs the Canadian economy $50 billion yearly. While many studies discuss immigrants' poor labour market integration, offering explanations such as immigrant human capital factors or macroeconomic condition factors, few explore the role of meso-level organizational social actors who decide which immigrants are recruited, shortlisted, and ultimately hired. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by exploring the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals in immigrant labour market integration in Alberta. Using interviews and critical discourse analysis of HRM textbooks and course outlines, I examine HRM professional's decision-making policies, processes, considerations and constraints when evaluating immigrant applications for jobs. The study reveals that immigrants, particularly racialized immigrants, face barriers to employment in the primary labour market because of the professional and institutional logic of strategic human resource management (SHRM). SHRM promoted in HRM professional education recommends that HRM professionals prioritize business objectives over equal treatment, consideration, and fairness in hiring. SHRM enables unequal power relations between hiring managers (team supervisors) and HRM professionals, which enables cultural racism to go unchecked in hiring. SHRM justifies organizational discriminatory and social closure practices as well as enables the denial of immigrant claims for employment. This is based on the perception that immigrants pose administrative burdens and financial risks stemming from the misidentification of immigrants as temporary migrants and possessing human capital and cultural deficiencies. Hiring decision-makers often do not rely on objective assessments like work sampling tests when making hiring decisions. Instead, when evaluating immigrant job applicants, they rely on racial cultural stereotypes and signals of White Canadian cultural competency as the basis for callbacks and selection.

Due to their status, it is difficult for temporary foreign workers to report grievances related to instances of discrimination, exploitation, harassment, abuse, and health and safety violations. While the subject of temporary migrant work and legal action has been studied before, available research focuses on the impacts of high-profile cases at the Supreme Court. As such, there is limited research about the tribunals that handle the grievances of TFWs most often. This thesis fills that gap by presenting a comparative analysis of the fortunes of temporary foreign workers in human rights tribunals and labour tribunals in Ontario and Alberta. This analysis shows the nature and outcome of these hearings have important differences that depend on the tribunal type. More specifically, human rights tribunals seem to be better equipped to assess the grievances of TFWs despite there being a higher volume of TFWs using labour tribunals.

This study traces the mid-twentieth century history of the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union (NSTU), with particular focus on the union’s democratic, professional, and bargaining structures. Traditionally underrepresented in labour union histories, teachers’ unions are a keystone public occupation with extremely high industrial density and a complex relationship with numerous levels of government. In the period studied, teachers were paid both by provincial and local governments but were technically only allowed to bargain with the former; this relationship was instrumental in keeping teachers’ demands depressed but was too unstable to contain teacher militancy effectively. Following an interrogation of the union’s restrictive legislative and organizational foundation, the thesis analyzes the adoption of professionalism as a status-raising strategy, but with severe exclusionary tendencies. The thesis continues with a chronological recounting of provincial and local-level negotiations, the contention of which forced the union and the provincial government to renegotiate their bargaining mechanisms.

Temporary migrant workers on closed work permits are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. To address this precarity, the Government of Canada introduced the Open Work Permit for Vulnerable Workers (OWP-V) in June 2019. This permit allows migrant workers in abusive situations, or at risk of abuse, to leave their employers and find new work in Canada for up to 12 months. Drawing from secondary literature, policy analysis and qualitative interviews with migrant support workers and experts, this research assesses the implementation of the OWP-V policy in the Maritimes by examining its benefits and critiques. This research demonstrates that although some perceive the policy as a step in the right direction, significant barriers remain that hinder the effectiveness of the OWP-V in removing migrants from abusive conditions. Further findings demonstrate that even with systemic and technological improvements, stakeholders remain dissatisfied with the policy as it fails to protect migrant workers from re-entering cycles of abuse and exploitation, serving only as temporary relief. To improve the implementation of this policy, stakeholders provided several suggestions pertaining to accessibility, language options, processing times, and inspections. Overall, this thesis argues that while these changes could help improve the working conditions of temporary migrant workers in Canada, substantial systemic issues remain.

This dissertation undertakes an affective reading of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Canadian primary sources through which to analyze the affective basis of judgments and narratives surrounding sexual commerce. Situated in the interdisciplinary subfield of the history of emotions, this dissertation centres sexual commerce as a site of colonial worldmaking in what are currently the southern regions of the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and traces emotional through-lines across fields in social space. Beginning with a self-reflexive prologue drawing from a method feminist theorist Clare Hemmings (2011) terms “situated horror,” this dissertation then turns to the Dominion of Canada’s post-1867 westward expansion, its legal mechanisms, and affective mobilizations. Across the empire, Britain tied legislative powers to feelings that reflected its goals, ideal social order, and habitus of its peoples. Like a mathematical equation, peace in the colonies would emerge through order and good government and law-abiding citizens would be its beneficiaries. That equation was integral to the shift from a fur trade economy to a settler colonial one oriented toward a British imperial and Canadian economic disposition. The corollary effect of the equation was the normalization of British and Canadian views on what constituted peace, their conceptions of capital, and the conceptual transplant of disorderly figures, such as the “rebel,” the “vagrant,” and the “prostitute” – or, broadly, people defined as “outlaws.” Three main sites of colonial worldmaking are examined in this work: that of the journalistic field in chapter four, that of the political field in chapter five, and that of the juridical field in chapter six. By tracing emotion in oft-cited, and not-so-oft-cited, primary sources that discuss concerns about and responses to sexual commerce, the emotions underpinning narratives and judgments surrounding sexual commerce become evident. This method offers an emotions history of western Canadian colonial expansion, revealing how sex workers, histories of sex work, and feelings about sexual commerce were integral to Canadian worldmaking. Responses to sexual commerce were informed by the Dominion of Canada’s worldmaking mission, concerns over human unfreedom, and dynamic social positionings in emergent settler colonial society. British imperial and Canadian whiteness were produced through gendered-racialized processes of differentiation at the local, municipal, provincial, federal, and imperial levels. White men’s feelings of satisfaction dominated in this history, as they intensified their gendered monopoly on resources, space, and authority in a region that had been known as Indigenous peoples’ territories. This analysis of masculinized emotions contributes to the feminist theorization of colonialism and sexuality.

Canadian theatre has the potential to incite social change but inequitable working environments within theatre organizations have hindered this prospect. The sector needs new frameworks to improve conditions for arts workers. Inspired by several scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Lee Edelman, I look to the concept of queer utopia to address inequities within the theatre sector, with a focus on the role of theatre organizations. By defining Queer Utopian Theory (QUT), analyzing calls to action in the Canadian theatre sector, and employing three focus groups, I created a Queer Utopian framework for Canadian theatre organizations to answer the research question: What is the utility of the concept of queer utopia in addressing inequities in the Canadian theatre sector? My research found that relationship building, embracing fear, and subverting socio-political norms are aspects of QUT that are of utility to organizational leaders who wish to foster equitable environments.

In response to labour shortages across various sectors, including agriculture, the Government of Canada created the Temporary Labour Program, one stream of which is the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Mexico is currently the major partnering country, which runs the matching Programa de Trabajadores Agrícolas Temporales (PTAT) which accounts for 43.8% of all migrant seasonal farm labourers in Canada (SRE, 2022). With the increasing number of migrant workers in Canada, there are growing concerns about their labour and living conditions. Loo (2014) and other authors contend that to improve international labour programs so as to better serve foreign workers, it is critical to learn migrant workers’ perspectives by having their voices heard. There are, however, challenges to speaking with foreign farm workers, including language differences, rural locations, long workdays, living constraints, and fear of speaking out. Most research on migrant workers has been conducted in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, which have the highest provincial numbers. Conversely, there has been little research examining migrant workers’ experiences in the province of Alberta. My qualitative, participatory research contributes to the literature by exploring the perspectives of Mexican seasonal agriculture workers who have participated in the PTAT in Alberta. I used a focused ethnographic approach and methods of PhotoVoice and semi-structured interviews to learn about their motivations for enrolling in the PTAT and their experiences of working in the agriculture sector in this provincial context. Participants' narratives and photographic images provided information about: their motives for enrolling in the PTAT; how they navigated the application process; their lived experiences while working on farms and other agriculture businesses in Alberta; the impacts on their health and well-being; and, their perspectives on their role in Canada’s agri-food system. I also explored workers’ perspectives on being part of this international labour program during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this influenced the different stages of their experiences, both in Mexico and Canada. As part of the investigation of participants’ perspectives on health and well-being, I asked them about their access to health services and healthy and culturally appropriate food, and opportunities they had to experience community life in Alberta. Many of the findings from this research align with previous studies illuminating the vulnerable and challenging working and living conditions of migrant agricultural workers in Canada. Novel insights gained through this participatory research with Mexican migrant agriculture workers in Alberta focus on the application process and institutional context in Mexico, workers’ perspectives on their health and well-being, and their narratives and photographic images about their lived experiences in Alberta during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout Canada, the need for care provision services is on the rise. The number of people willing and able to provide these care services is insufficient to address the growing need for care. Care work is provided by a mix of paid workers and unpaid family members. The majority of both these groups of care workers are women. Care work has long been undervalued as feminized labour, resulting in insufficient government support for family caregivers, and persistent labour issues within paid care sectors. In this thesis, I explore two distinct sets of Canadian federal policies related to care provision – Employment Insurance (EI) benefits for unpaid family caregivers, and the Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker Pilot Programs, which facilitate the immigration of private in-home caregivers to Canada – in order to discover whether they are underpinned by a shared set of similar assumptions about the nature of care work, who is best suited to perform it, and how it should be provided. In examining the assumptions about care that underpin and shape these policies related to care provision in Canada, I identify a number of consistent gendered themes about care and care providers and analyze their impact on policy outcomes.