Canadian Cultural Research Articles

Canadian Cultural Nationalism in the Time of Digital Platforms: Reframing Proposed Amendments to the Broadcasting Act

Background: Last amended in 1991, the Broadcasting Act has recently been the object of legislative reform projects with the aim of incorporating online broadcasting into the existing legislative and regulatory framework and expanding the diversity representation mandate of the Canadian broadcasting system.Analysis: The article analyzes proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Act iterated in the third and final version of Bill C-10 (2021) and in the current version of Bill C-11 (2022) and develops a critical analysis of their implications vis-à-vis discursive constructions of Canadian cultural nationalism and the model of cultural citizenship that it fosters.Conclusion and implications: Proposed amendments recuperate the cultural nationalist logic that underscores Canadian cultural policy’s efforts to secure cultural sovereignty. In the legislative reform project, this logic manifests through the continued economization of cultural production in the digital era and the perpetuation of a settler colonial vision of cultural citizenship that remains skewed by ethnolinguistic hierarchies.

Defining wilderness: the evolution of Banff National Park

Internationally, Canada is a country known for its iconic, expansive landscapes. Images of the Rocky Mountains and destinations such as Lake Louise and Banff are instantly recognisable, drawing visitors from around the world each year. Wilderness is a term that has become irrevocably linked to Canadian national identity and Canadian culture. Nowhere is the significance of wilderness within Canadian culture and history more visible than in the country’s vast network of provincial and national parks. This article explores the history of Canada’s oldest national park, Banff, and the creation and evolution of its boundaries. It explores how park boundaries act as spatial tools to project legal frameworks and cultural values, creating landscapes and an experience of place rather than simply preserving existing conditions or ecologies. The history of Banff National Park is also used to explore the broader implications that idealised or romanticised notions of wild spaces have had in shaping Canadian cultural values, which in turn have shaped attitudes towards landscapes and the defining of landscapes into industrialised zones and zones of conservation. Fundamentally an architectural study of site, this article explores the evolution of the national park boundaries of Banff through their interactions with industrial interests, cultural landmarks and historical narratives, dissecting their capacities to control intensely layered and contested areas. Through a study of the park boundary and the forces that have shaped it over time, the dynamics of power, exclusion, exploitation and commercialisation inherent to the definition of landscapes and boundaries are investigated.

New Directions for Canadian Cultural Policy

Over the last two years of the pandemic, the arts, culture and heritage sectors have experienced unique challenges. These sectors have been amongst those hit hardest and longest by the COVID-19 pandemic. This has not only affected their economic viability but also their relationship with the public, whose interests, expectations, access and behaviours have shifted dramatically over the last two years. The pandemic accelerated a shift already underway in Canadian society. Polarization, disinformation, an unequal set of rules for the foreign online broadcasters and social media companies challenge social cohesion in Canada. This reality, combined with growing awareness of systemic racism and a greater acceptance of the need to confront the climate crisis have created a need to reimagine policies, principles, and practices to ensure continued long-term, sustainable growth, competitiveness, and vitality of the arts, culture, and heritage sectors in Canada. Canada’s arts, culture and heritage sectors play a fundamental role in building a stronger, more cohesive and resilient society. These sectors are not only significant economic drivers but they also contribute to Canada’s identity and social fabric. They help Canadians create meaning and forge a stronger shared identity based on shared values. However, to achieve these beneficial effects, there needs to be a renewed and shared understanding of these sectors’ fundamental roles and value. The Government of Canada convened the National Culture Summit: The Future of Arts, Culture and Heritage in Canada to help these sectors recover and thrive as well as mobilized these sectors around positive economic and social outcomes for Canada and discussed ways to support their own recovery and long-term growth and competitiveness. The Summit brought together leaders from across the country from these sectors for a national conversation on resilience, sustainability and transformation of the arts, culture and heritage sectors in Canada. The summit’s four themes were: •Promoting long-term competitiveness and growth; •The return of visitors and engaging new audiences; •The role of digital platforms in arts, culture and heritage sectors; and •The contribution of cultural sectors to reconciliation, combatting climate change and building an open and more inclusive society.

Imagining the [Unbounded] Grounds of [Caribbean Canadian] Consciousness

The “Introduction” to this Special Issue on “Recognition and Recovery of Caribbean Canadian Cultural Production” surveys the multiple creative directions and critical orientations of Caribbean Canadian cultural production and raises key questions about the grounds on which Caribbean Canadian cultural production is recognized, especially in Canada. The guest editors also explore the productive, but sometimes problematic, relationship between Caribbean Canadian archives and the nation, Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness, publishing, popular culture, and settler colonialism. Even so, the writers see the possibilities of communities of relations as well as political alliances between different constituencies in both Canada and the Caribbean in confronting racial capitalism and the many afterlives of colonialism. Re-conceptualizing Caribbean Canadian cultural production as an archive, rather than a field of study, allows the guest editors to recognize the importance of certain commitments and values: an investment in an ethically conscious methodology, a refusal of reductive and essentializing conceptualizations of race, gender, sexuality, as well as the modern human, and a desire to build collectivities of political alliances. The unbounded and sometimes ungrounded nature of the Caribbean Canadian inspires an openness to new ways of thinking about the politics of cultural production in Canada and beyond.

Les expositions muséales parrainées par le pétrole et les politiques extractives de la production culturelle au Canada

Focusing on the Canadian Museum of History’s newest permanent exhibition, The Canadian History Hall (2017), and its sponsorship by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (), this article discusses oil-sponsored museum exhibitions and the extractive politics within which Canadian culture is produced. This article begins with an overview of The Canadian History Hall and the activist response to its sponsorship by Big Oil. It then situates the exhibition within a larger history of oil and museums in Canada, reflecting on the controversial, Shell-sponsored The Spirit Sings (1988) exhibition at the Glenbow Museum. The article argues that, as it reproduces the longstanding relationship between Canadian museums and the oil industry, the Canadian Museum of History’s recent partnership exemplifies the ongoing role of extractive politics in cultural production. While European museums increasingly face pressures to divest from fossil fuels, the entanglement of culture and extractive interests in Canada suggests the need for a unique and critical approach to sponsorship in Canadian cultural institutions.

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AS AN IDEOLOGICAL APPROACH: POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

The article presents a comparative analysis of the results of the state policy in the field of multicultural education in Canada under the title "Canadian Cultural Mosaic" and "unity of the people of Kazakhstan" in Kazakhstan today. Canada is a constitutional monarchy that occupies the second largest land area in the world in North America, with parallel English and French languages, technologically and industrially developed, multicultural and corresponding multinational parliamentary system. Kazakhstan is a multicultural multinational democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic, developing technologically and industrially, with parallel Kazakh and Russian languages, occupying the ninth place in the world by land area in the center of Eurasia. Canada and Kazakhstan on the world stage today have a similar multi-ethnic appearance, but their political and philosophical structure is divided into two parts. Both States create favorable conditions for the unhindered happy existence of ethnic groups devoted to their historical destiny, the preservation and improvement of the characteristics of their nation. These actions of theirs serve as an ideological approach and serve as an example for other States. It is obvious that in the case when the assimilation of nations does not occur naturally, there is a loss of the culture of ethnic groups that make up the minority, an aggravation of racism and, accordingly, the process of loss of national identity.

Digital Platforms and Analogue Policies: Governance Issues in Canadian Cultural Policy

Background: In Canada, a complex set of public action instruments have been used over the past 100 years or so to encourage, regulate, and support Canadian cultural expression. Analysis: During this period, governments were primarily motivated by three normative imperatives: national identity, economic vitality, and cultural diversity. This article explores the cultural stakes for Canada in the digital platform environment to determine if these normative perspectives are still valid. Conclusion and implications: Cultural policies rooted in the “analogue” past continue to be relevant in the “digital” present, but a new normative imperative—enhancing democracy, fairness, and cultural rights—appears to be emerging.

Canadian Culture, Identity, and Canadian Children’s Literature

This paper illuminates Canadian children’s literature in relation to Canadian cultural characteristics. Canadian children’s literature is a cultural product of Canada’s soil, reflecting and shaping the identity of Canadians. In other words, the questions of what Canadian culture is and what Canadian children’s literature is have been the main concerns of Canadians who have attempted to find and build value systems that differentiate themselves from Britain, France and the United States, By the end of the 20th century, regionalism and multiculturalism, in particular, emerged as the core values ​​of Canada. Canadian values ​​that respect the characteristics and diversity of each region and pursue the coexistence of different cultures are found in children’s literature, and such Canadian values ​​are firmly established through multiculturalism. Voices that had been neglected in the traditional discourses began to be expressed. Minorities, including oppressed women, indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities, expressed their positions more actively and created a new cultural landscape by publishing various texts, reflecting the way of thinking and emotions of minorities and their lives.

Bangla and the identity of the heritage language teacher

Abstract Research on language teacher identity in the field of heritage language (HL) teaching has received little attention, although identity is a central concern in HL education. Our research seeks to address this gap in the research on language teacher identity. Drawing on the Darvin and Norton’s (2015) conceptual framework of identity and investment, we investigate the extent to which Bangla HL teachers are invested in teaching Bangla, and how their investment provides insight into their identity as heritage language teachers. The study was conducted at the community-based Vancouver Bangla School, and the data, which focuses on our focal participant, Mili, were drawn from a year-long qualitative case study. Data sources include participant classroom observations, field notes, interview transcripts, a questionnaire, and educational resources used in the class, which were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that Mili’s investment in teaching Bangla was deeply rooted in her ideological belief in the importance of HL maintenance for cultural continuity. However, she was also interested in the transcultural relationship between Bangla and English, and between Bangladeshi culture and Canadian culture. Her investment in teaching Bangla as a heritage language suggests that an HL teacher may serve as a cultural mentor, collaborator, innovator, and active community member. As a member of both the Canadian and Bangladeshi cultural community, she valued students’ Canadian cultural practices and helped students in negotiating their new transcultural identities as Bangladeshi-Canadians. Our study suggests that the identity of the HL teacher could be expressed as a transcultural identity that resists binaries and embraces hybridity.

Nobody Wins: The inequitable certification of archival materials as cultural property by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board

The Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board (CCPERB) was founded by the Government of Canada in 1977 to establish an idealized framework to value and certify items of significant cultural value. This research explores the CCPERB's time-consuming application process and rigid monetary appraisal criteria to demonstrate how the Board discourages the certification of archival material. Emphasizing the fair market value (FMV) of archives through sales data also places Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) creators, as well as digital records, at a disadvantage for certification. Reforming CCPERB’s processes requires an open dialogue with archival stakeholders to ensure the equitable certification of all forms of cultural property in Canada.

Parental acculturation and oral health of children among immigrants.

This cross-sectional study aimed to examine the associations between parental acculturation level and strategies and children's caries experience and oral health (OH) behaviors. Participants were immigrant parents of children aged 2-12 years. Data were collected by validated questionnaires gathering information on socio-demographics, child's OH behaviors, and parents'; acculturation and dental examinations determining child's caries experience using DMFT/dmft index. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were used. Three hundred and thirty-six parent/child dyads completed the study. Length of residency (B=0.103; 95% CI: 0.064, 0.141) parents' education (B=1.691; 95% CI: 1.228, 2.155), and household income (B=-0.959; 95% CI: -1.566, -0.352) significantly predicted acculturation level. Parents with high Canadian cultural knowledge reported higher frequency of children's toothbrushing (p-value=0.015). Parents of children who consumed sugar >1/day had higher mean scores of acculturation to Canadian culture (p-value=0.016), English language proficiency (p-value=0.024), and Canadian food adoption (p-value=0.046). Parents of children who visited the dentist within last 12 months had significantly higher assimilation and lower separation mean scores. Parents of children who visited dentist because of dental problems had higher marginalization mean score than those who went for check-ups (p-value=0.046). Parental acculturation was not significantly correlated with their children's dmft/DMFT level. Children of highly acculturated parents reported higher toothbrushing frequency and were more likely to consume sugar than children of less acculturated parents. Assimilated parents reported more and marginalized parents reported less favorable OH behaviors than other categories. Parental acculturation level or strategy was not associated with children's caries experience.

The Divas Get Real: Training Singers for Success in the Canadian Cultural Domains

To the accepted three cornerstones for innovation of undergraduate music major curricula—creativity, diversity, and integration—must be added fourth, professionalization, that is, the establishment of viable professional identities. This article focuses on a subset of Canadian music undergraduate singers, reporting on research into the structure and reality of the eight cultural domains in Canada, and investigating three important themes that emerge from statistics for the training of singers in postsecondary training: the range of work available to music graduates, the portfolio nature of working musicians’ careers, and the increasing significant role of technological fluency in musicians’ careers today.

The State and Canadian Cultural Nationalism: Protecting Canadian Football

In 1974, Canada’s Liberal minority government introduced a bill designed to protect the Canadian Football League (CFL) from competition. It threatened jail for anyone who operated a football team in Canada having any connection with an American team or league. A particular conjuncture of factors prompted the government to act according to the rationale that protecting the CFL was critical to the national interest. Canadian football had become an identity marker that nationalists used to define the country and differentiate it from other nations. In the 1960s, post-war Canadian nationalism heightened concerns about Americanization as well as Quebec separatism. It also brought increasing state intervention, including cultural policies that grew in scope as they became more populist, from a government in a minority position facing a national unity crisis. In this research, the government’s unprecedented intervention is explained, by contextualizing it historically within the cultural, economic, and political conditions of the time. When the Canadian Football League, a national sporting league that represented the nation, began to struggle, the stage was set for the most significant government intervention in the area of Canadian professional sport to date.

Examination of the Reconciliation Movement in the Canadian Cultural Genocide

Examination of the Reconciliation Movement in the Canadian Cultural Genocide

Beyond National Time: Black Atlantic Temporalities and the Time-Space of Black Canadian Cultural Studies

This paper works with methodologies offered by Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (2015) to elaborate the complexities involved in conversations between the fields of Canadian Literature and Black Canadian cultural studies. As Siemerling argues, Black Canadian literature is marked by the transversal time-spaces of the Black Atlantic which run counter to linear national time. What are the implications, then, of the Black Atlantic’s incommensurable time-spaces in the ongoing project of institutionalizing Black Canadian literature?

The Culture is Prevention Project: Measuring Culture As a Social Determinant of Mental Health for Native/Indigenous Peoples.

This paper reports Phase 4 of the Culture is Prevention Project where we validated the Cultural Connectedness Scale - California (CCS-CA) with a sample of 344 Indigenous adults in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. In Phase 3 of this project, the CCS-CA was modified from the original Canadian Cultural Connectedness Scale (CCS) developed by Dr. Angela Snowshoe and colleagues to be a better fit for the more multi-tribal communities in urban California. Both the CCS-CA and CCS consist of 29 items that measure culture on 3 sub-scales: identity, traditions, and spirituality. The project demonstrated a positive link between cultural connectedness and mental health/well-being using the Herth Hope Index. We report results similar to the original CCS study by Snowshoe et al., where we found the CCS-CA to be a valid and reliable strength-based instrument and to support the conclusion that culture is a social determinant of mental health/well-being for Indigenous/Native peoples.

Choosing Canada: Canadian Cultural Policy in the Twenty-first Century

Cultural activities are central to Canadians’ prosperity, identity and well-being, but the evolution and availability of digital technologies has changed the context in which Canadians access cultural content. The promotion of Canadian culture must adapt to this new setting in which content delivery bandwidth is practically unlimited, and viewers are no longer captive to legacy media. Since access to digital cultural content uses the same broadband infrastructure as other commercial activities, policies must facilitate Canadians’ access and discovery of content without inhibiting the growth of our digital economy and affordability of broadband services. In this context, this Commentary recommends that governments support the availability of diverse Canadian cultural and information offerings, promote engagement with these offerings by audiences in Canada and the world, and build a more sustainable economic framework for the cultural and information sectors by: • Focusing more clearly the funding framework for public cultural agencies and for cultural subsidies more generally, including that for the CBC, on the production, dissemination, and exhibition of original artistic or literary works for which a commercial market is not yet established; or for which there is a clear public rationale. A clear public rationale may include educational, informational, or community engagement benefits, or the potential to seed long-term international demand for Canadian cultural offerings. • Working with all Canadian broadcasters and distributors of Canadian content on strategies and development to facilitate the “discoverability” of Canadian content on digitally mediated platforms, considering methods such as search engine optimization, targeted online advertising, mobile applications, and the translation of Canadian works for both foreign and domestic audiences; and encourage collaborative initiatives between content producers, broadcasters and distributors to develop and market Canadian content. • Setting up a new “Canadian Connections Program” to streamline existing subsidies and credits not effectively aligned with the above objectives. This fund will focus instead on initiatives specifically aimed at engaging non-commercially available Canadian content with Canadian audiences. This new program would be administered through an arms’ length body that would evaluate proposals based on criteria including type and diversity of content, and likelihood of engaging Canadian audiences. • In that context, eliminate mandated funding of Canadian content by cable and satellite providers and mandatory Canadian content quotas for broadcasters, and by reducing these costs, facilitate competitively priced communications services; while ensuring a level playing field with respect to the federal taxes applied to digital services purchased by Canadians and the deductibility of advertising expenses across media; • Reducing foreign investment restrictions applying to cultural industries, with the aim of attracting investment in Canada while retaining the ability to require of foreign investors undertakings toward boosting the financing and visibility of Canadian content.

Developing a GIS of Hazards for Canadian Cultural Institutions

The Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) has developed a Geographic Information System (GIS) of hazards for Canadian cultural heritage institutions. The greatly increased access to open data is changing how advisory bodies like the CCI and the public can access and share information. For the purpose of investigating how a GIS approach can assist the CCI with its mandate to improve the preservation of collections, a map layer of cultural heritage institutions across Canada has been assembled and continues to be upgraded for accuracy, inclusion and detail (Fig. 1). This was combined with a collation of hazard layers; a partial list includes: seismic risk, notably expectations of earthquake severity tied to improvements in the national building code, tsunami exposure, wildfire data, hurricane, tornado, lightning density, pest distribution, and energy use indicators such as heating degree days and climate norm data. The platform allows examination of expectations around climate change driven risks such as sea-level rise, storm-incursions, permafrost melt. The GIS approach will also allow reassessments around expected changes to flood risk maps issued by jurisdictions, as well as Statistics Canada layers on population related factors such as changes in numbers of local populations, income and demographic shifts which can be stressors or opportunities. Sources have been drawn from federal, provincial, municipal, and academic evaluations of hazards, which now are more commonly published as GIS products. Mapping Canadian heritage institution's within a GIS improves our ability to: visualise and interpret to clients the relative magnitude of their local hazards, make ties to more refined local analyses, and show adjacencies to mapped historical events. From a national perspective the GIS can generate profiles of aggregated institutional exposure to the hazards, and more readily identify sub-populations of institutions for which particular risks would rank higher or lower among their concerns. This improves CCI's preventive conservation advisory service's perspective on mappable risks for any institution we deal with as clients. Ultimately, through federal initiatives in open data, it is our intention that client groups can look at the GIS for the purpose of educating themselves on hazards they would want to prepare for.

American and Canadian Cultural Complexes Compared

ABSTRACTIt is difficult to speak about Canada without reference to its older half-sibling, a world superpower and primary trading partner, with whom it shares a continent. Understanding the psychology of one’s country and political self is key to one’s individuation as a citizen. Thus, this paper compares the spiritus loci or collective attitudes of the United States of America and Canada as symbolized in both country’s primary archetypes and cultural complexes.

Actual Aspects of the Canadian Cultural Policy

Actual Aspects of the Canadian Cultural Policy