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Drawing on the manuscript records of the Department of Crown Lands, its published reports, and case law, this thesis examines the illegal occupation of rural land, known as squatting in the Eastern Townships of Quebec in the period 1838 to 1866. By 1838, demographic pressure in the seigneuries, inflated land prices due to speculation, and inaccessible public land granting practices had made squatting a commonplace strategy for land acquisition. The responses to squatting of the Department of Crown Lands, the Legislature and the judiciary are analysed for what they implied about ideas of property in Lower Canada. While the Department of Crown Lands' policy of pre-emption affirmed that squatters held rights to public land because they laboured to cultivate and improve it, the legislature refused to acknowledge that squatters could acquire such rights on private land; nine out of ten bills intended to ensure ejected squatters a systematically determined remuneration for improvements made by them on the private property of absentees failed to pass into law during the period. Most were rejected by the Legislative Council which defended the interests of landed wealth. Lower Canadian courts, meanwhile, struggled to sort out laws relating to squatting. Ultimately they found that while squatters on private property owned their improvements, they had no right to the land itself. Thus the judiciary applied a bifurcated concept of property to rural land in Lower Canada despite the prevalence of liberal theories of absolute property rights during the nineteenth century.
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Canadians might expect that a history of Canada's participation in the Cold War would be a self-congratulatory exercise in documenting the liberality and moderation of Canada set against the rapacious purges of the McCarthy era in the United States. Though Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse agree that there is some evidence for Canadian moderation, they argue that the smug Canadian self-image is exaggerated. Cold War Canada digs past the official moderation and uncovers a systematic state-sponsored repression of communists and the Left directed at civil servants, scientists, trade unionists, and political activists. Unlike the United States, Canada's purges were shrouded in secrecy imposed by the government and avidly supported by the RCMP security service. Whitaker and Marcuse manage to reconstruct several of the significant anti-communist campaigns. Using declassified documents, interviews, and extensive archival sources, the authors reconstruct the Gouzenko spy scandal, trace the growth of security screening of civil servants, and re-examine purges in the National Film Board and the trade unions, attacks on peace activist James G. Endicott, and the trials of Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman. Based on these examples Whitaker and Marcuse outline the creation of Canada's Cold War policy, the emergence of the new security state, and the alignment of Canada with the United States in the global Cold War. They demonstrate that Canada did take a different approach toward the threat of communism, but argue that the secret repression and silent purges used to stifle dissent and debate about Canada's own role in the Cold War had a chilling effect on the practice of liberal democracy and undermined Canadian political and economic sovereignty. --Publisher's description
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The article reviews the book, "The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy," by Roberto Franzosi.
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