Canadian Politics Research Articles

Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions by Jon Gordon

Reviewed by: Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions by Jon Gordon Taylor McHolm Jon Gordon. Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2015. 288pp. $45.00. In the introduction to Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions, Jon Gordon offers a subheading that works as a fairly straightforward summation of the book’s concerns and its increasing relevance: “Literature’s Counterfactual Response to All the Factual Bullshit.” Gordon’s focus is the Canadian political and economic ideologies that reinforce Albertan bitumen extraction and refinement, and he handles the subject with depth and rigour to demonstrate the ways in which an overreliance on empirical rationality allows the Canadian state to justify the irrationality of tying a nation’s long-term economic wellbeing to a fuel source that will inevitably run out. Gordon’s analysis of the literary, economic, and political representations of the Albertan bitumen extraction and refinement processes is grounded in discursive and rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical analysis allows Gordon, and by extension his readers, to get past the bullshit—not just in the sense of getting to the “real” facts that bullshit tends to obscure but in the sense of moving toward ways of knowing that are, unlike bullshit, directly related to the matter and material at hand. Unsustainable Oil argues that literature provides opportunities for imagining the ethical, ecological, and social unknowns that are routinely excised by dominant narratives that appeal to the familiar Western tradition of tying reason and rationality to authority and, ultimately, prosperity. While the book’s focus is on Albertan tar sands and Canadian energy politics, Gordon provides a means of understanding the ideological wake of the UniAmerican election of Donald Trump as president. Published in 2015, Gordon’s book anticipates the era of so-called post-truth politics, demonstrating the necessity of literary and cultural analysis in a time when the denial of science and empirical reality is encouraged at the very highest levels of U.S. politics. When factual reality and scientific consensus are openly, and often hostilely, rejected, relying solely on empirical rationality and science has been ineffective. Gordon’s book demonstrates how literature might engage the Trump administration’s strategy of promoting what spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway termed “alternative facts,” which have been used to reject the factual reality of climate change. Gordon’s analysis demonstrates that literary and cultural representations are thus vital sites of imaginative resistance as the U.S. intensifies its fossil-fuel reliance through both policy and the appointments of Rex Tillerson, Scott Pruitt, and Rick Perry to key cabinet positions. [End Page 121] Unsustainable Oil begins with an understanding that the prevalence and expansion of bitumen processing in Alberta relies upon a dominant narrative that rationalizes sacrifices in the name of a greater prosperity. These sacrifices are made by both human and more-than-human beings, but the decision to make them, of course, is a solely human endeavour. Gordon’s central premise is that these decisions are made possible by a legitimating force produced by a strategic overreliance on the professed virtues of facts and rationality. Here, he follows Mike Gismondi and Debra Davidson’s important work, Challenging Legitimacy on the Precipice of Energy Calamity, which expounds the formation of legitimacy and ideology in support of tar sands operations. Where Gismondi and Davidson focus their attention on the industry and government sources responsible for the conditions of a populace willingly assenting to the legitimacy of the tar sands project, Gordon extends the conversation by focusing on the counterfactual works of literature that challenge this legitimacy and the privileging of (certain) facts and (certain) forms of reason. Throughout the book, Gordon argues that counterfactuals, imaginative scenarios typified by a “what if” or “if I had only known” conditionals, are necessary sites of investigation in order to analyze and imagine what should be done with Alberta’s vast bituminous reserves and the culture they have created. Given that so much of modern thought and culture has been made possible by petroleum, is it possible to attain the necessary distance from the resource and culture in order to imagine anything else? Gordon compellingly argues that counterfacts are one potential avenue. Through his archive, he demonstrates how...

Worth Fighting For: Canada's Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror ed. by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney

Reviewed by: Worth Fighting For: Canada's Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror ed. by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney Nathan Smith Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, eds., Worth Fighting For: Canada's Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror (Toronto: Between the Lines 2015) The edited collection, Worth Fighting For, is an important addition to historical literature about Canada. The nineteen different contributors provide insight into the politics, activism, institutions, social movements, and individuals that make up a long tradition of Canadian war resistance. The volume contains valuable historical information, engaging and important stories, and thought-provoking commentary. It certainly supports the editors' claims that "military conflict and mobilization in Canada have never gone unchallenged or unquestioned," and that "Canada's war resisters were a complex, active, and multifaceted group." (11) In addition to the editors' introduction, the book is composed of seventeen chronologically organized chapters, dealing with matters as far back as the Militia Act of 1793 and as recent as public debate about Canada's military mission in Afghanistan. The 20th-century and English Canada receive the bulk of the attention. Jonathan Seiling's discussion of the historic peace churches during the War of 1812 in Chapter 1 provides evidence of the complex reaction to that conflict in Canada, and of the significance of requisitioning and billeting as experiences of the burdens of war. Ross Fair impressively surveys the efforts of pacifist sects to secure exemption from military duty in Upper Canada and Canada West in Chapter 2. But that is where the book's pre-Confederation history ends. Pre-20th-century history ends with the next chapter, in which Amy Shaw offers a welcome new perspective on the Anglo-Boer War by reviewing opposition to Canada's first foreign war. The first three chapters suggest a relationship between war resistance and the extent of mobilization. The small-scale of mobilization for the war in South Africa must partly explain the "muted anti-war voice in Canada" (48) that Shaw analyzes. In sharp contrast is the War of 1812, which threatened homes and communities, and made demands Canadians could often not ignore. Whereas the War of 1812 transformed social life in parts of British North America, the Anglo-Boer War did not, however important it was politically. The practical and material realities of war played at least a role in determining the level and nature of opposition to war. The book offers 20th-century comparisons to these 19th-century conflicts in the form of the world wars, in which Canada mobilized on a massive scale, and the Cold War, which shaped Canadian politics and society for forty years, but led to participation in only one war, the Korean War. Two chapters in the book deal with the First World War and three with the Second World War. Seven of the remaining nine chapters look at the postwar period and Cold War issues, and the last two chapters are about the War on Terror. That nearly half of the book is about Cold War Canada means it is hardly even its historical coverage, but since a great deal has been written about conscription and the World Wars there is [End Page 316] reason to showcase scholarship on an era currently generating increased interest. One of the historical trends the chapters suggest is the declining importance of religion for war resistance. Of the eight chapters covering the period 1812–1945, five deal explicitly with religion, whereas the remaining nine chapters on the period after 1945 do not. This periodization proposes a pattern of secularization that is doubtlessly over-simplified, but it at least asks us to consider how moral philosophies and faith traditions have been important for war resistance over time. The book's chapters might lead to the conclusion that the ideological roots of modern Canadian war resistance are in internationalism and humanitarianism, especially their feminist versions. It is possible, however, that the peace activism addressed in several of the post-1945 chapters was partially informed by religion, or shaped to some extent by religious institutions. What is clear is that a moral or...

Escape from the Staples Trap: Canadian Political Economy After Left-Nationalism by Paul Kellogg

Escape from the Staples Trap: Canadian Political Economy After Left-Nationalism by Paul Kellogg

The Canadian politics of fair-share: the first burden-sharing debates about NATO

After the long domination of economic and collective action theories, the literature on the political aspects of Allied burden-sharing is growing. This article analyses the politics of fair-share in NATO from the perspective of Canadian officials during the first burden-sharing debates in 1949–1952. I focus on sense-making and, through an interpretive methodology, I reconstruct the Canadian discourse on fair-share. This article shows that for Canada sharing NATO’s burden was not only a matter of technicality or realist considerations; in order to make NATO burden-sharing work, the allies needed to balance three dimensions of collective defence burden: military, economic, and moral.

At His Majesty’s Service: Racial Policies, Policing, and Revolutionaries in Pacific Canada

This article highlights the events that led up to the 1914 Komagata Maru incident arguing that racialized Canadian politics of migration fuelled Indian anti-colonialism on the Pacific slope. The sequence of events, from the turn of the century to 1914, is examined within the scope of Canadian race relations as a member of the British Empire. Central to the events is the systematic policing and surveillance of the racialized “Other.” Of particularly interest in this article, and in the implementation of Canada’s Pacific system of surveillance, is the fact that the monitoring, policing, and surveillance of Indian revolutionaries in Canada was the undertaking of a single individual, William Charles Hopkinson, who was himself of Indian descendant, and therefore a racialized Other.

Escape from the Staple Trap: Canadian Political Economy after Left Nationalism by Paul Kellogg

<i>Escape from the Staple Trap: Canadian Political Economy after Left Nationalism</i> by Paul Kellogg

The Importance of Local Party Activity in Understanding Canadian Politics: Winning from the Ground Up in the 2015 Federal Election

AbstractPolitical parties have long been identified as critical players in Canadian democracy. In this address I focus on the activities of parties at the constituency level arguing that this is crucial to fully understanding many important questions in Canadian political science. By way of example, using data relating to the 2015 federal election, I argue that examining the relative vitality of local party associations in the period between election campaigns assists in a fuller understanding of election outcomes and that examining local party nomination dynamics is key to understanding the underrepresentation of women in the candidate pool and ultimately in the House of Commons.

Lost in Translation? Conciliation and Reconciliation in Canadian Constitutional Conflicts

The concept of reconciliation is ubiquitous in contemporary Canadian politics, particularly but not exclusively with respect to Indigenous–state relations. This discursive framing is significant because the term has only recently emerged in the political sphere and is widely contested on several fronts, including opposition to the implication of a return to a formerly harmonious relationship that may not have existed. Thus, some suggest a focus on conciliation rather than on reconciliation. This article explores the complexities around reconciliation as a concept relating to constitutional relationships with Indigenous peoples, Québec, and ethnocultural and religious minorities in the multilingual Canadian context. Focusing particularly on the disjuncture whereby key official documents frequently invoke reconciliation in English and conciliation in French, it considers the legal and political implications of these linguistic variations and argues that there is a need for more clarity around the terms of the debate over reconciliation.

Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women During the Harper Government Years

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 4.5 times more likely to become victims of homicide than other women. Over the last 30 years, more than 1000 women identified as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis were murdered in Canada, and more than 100 are still missing. However, the Canadian government has not acknowledged the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. Focusing on activism around the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada during the years of the Conservative Harper Government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge Canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. Specifically, Twitter campaigns, memeing, the REDress Project, and Walking With Our Sisters are studied. Engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, this article, in turn, discusses how activism can disrupt violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces.

Marland, Alex, Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control.

Marland, Alex, Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control.

Restocking the British World: Empire Migration and Anglo-Canadian Relations, 1919–30

Throughout the 1920s Canadian politicians, immigration officials, eugenicists and political commentators talked about the need to ‘Canadianize’ all migrants who arrived in the dominion, including those from the mother country. This did not mean that Ottawa was out to ‘de-Britannicize’ those arriving from the United Kingdom. British migrants were given preferred status because their common heritage and shared cultural values mirrored those of most Anglo-Canadians. In other words, ‘Britishness’ made up the bedrock of Anglo-Canadian ‘national’ identity prior to the Second World War. Nonetheless, tensions existed between the competing notions of what it was to be ‘British’, ‘Canadian’ or what John Darwin has posited, the formation of a ‘Britannic’ identity. Using the formulation and implementation of assisted migration and empire settlement between 1919 and 1930 as a backcloth, this paper chronicles the long forgotten controversy surrounding the competing national and imperial interests that exacerbated relations between London and Ottawa after the Great War.

Representing a diverse canada in political science: power, ideas and the emergent challenge of reconciliation

This article examines Canadian political science and responses to diversity both in terms of who is included in the profession and their reported experiences. Utilizing extant national surveys, including from the Canadian Political Science Association, the findings show that in comparison to the 1970s, the profession today is clearly more “diverse” both in terms of its demographics, as well as what is researched and taught. This in turn relates to changing perspectives affecting policy, practice and research both in Canada and internationally. However, as will also be shown, there are evident and persistent structural inequities in the Canadian academy and the discipline of political science that have deep roots in Canada. Of particular importance in explaining these patterns is Canada’s foundation and legacy as a settler-colony, a feature thrown into sharp relief in light of current efforts at “reconciliation” between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. It is therefore argued that the state of diversity in Canadian political science needs to be understood in relation to both evolving ideas as well as the historical formation of the Canadian state and social power.

Book Review: Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control

Book Review: <i>Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control</i>

Framed: media and the coverage of race in Canadian politics

Framed: media and the coverage of race in Canadian politics

Alternatives: New Canadian Political Economy and the relations of ruling: a comment on C. Hurl and B. Christensen

This comment takes C. Hurl and B. Christensen’s recent article in Studies in Political Economy as an opportunity to ask how their retrospective construction of the New Canadian Political Economy reveals the way that the “ruling relations” shape intellectual histories. Too often, perspectives from white, straight, male “standpoints” are centralized, marginalizing the contributions of feminist, Indigenous, and queer scholars, among others. This comment explores how intellectual histories reproduce the social inequalities of the historical moment in which they are born.

Big tent politics: the Liberal Party's long mastery of Canada's public life

1 An Unnatural Party 2 The Natural Governing Party 3 Four Eras, Four Liberal Parties 4 A Different Kind of Party 5 The Life of the Party 6 The Chief Broker 7 Brokerage, the Liberal Party, and Canadian Politics Appendix: Liberal Party Leaders, 1887 to the Present Notes Further Reading on the Liberal Party of Canada Index

Investigating Afghanada: Situating the CBC Radio Drama in the Context and Politics of Canada and the War on Terror

In 2008, Globe and Mail theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck made a significant remark about Canadian theatre and the War on Terror, noting a clear absence of stage plays that addressed Canada’s participation. There was, however, a long-running CBC radio drama series, Afghanada, which centred fully on the experiences of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Because relatively little research has yet to be published about the radio series, Lindsay Thistle details Afghanada’s production history, major players, creative processes and goals. She also considers how the radio medium affected the objectives of the series and its ability to represent war, ultimately arguing that Afghanada was inescapably politicized throughitsrelationship with national institutions, its interest in realistic and true-to-life stories, its focus on everyday soldiers, its casting choices and its inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder. Throughout this investigation, Thistle raises important questions about the politics of dramatizing war while Canada itself was at war. She concludes by observing that while Afghanada avoids an explicit message in support of or against the Canada’s involvement in the War on Terror, it engaged with the political from its inception, through its creation, and in its reception.

The Politics of Mythmaking: Foreign Policy in Canadian Federal Elections 1958-1965

&lt;span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"&gt;The notion of a Canadian foreign policy “golden age” during the decades following the Second World War has shaped how Canadians have come to view their country’s place in the world. While recent historical scholarship has laudably done much to demonstrate how the idea of a Canadian diplomatic “golden age” is ultimately an exercise in mythmaking, historians have done comparatively little to assess when and how this mythological notion became ingrained in Canada’s political consciousness. This paper seeks to begin to fill this gap in the historiography of Canadian politics by analyzing the role of foreign policy in the four federal elections held between 1958 and 1965. This analysis not only reaffirms the mythological status of the “golden age” but also demonstrates how this notion was fuelled by the foreign policy rhetoric of the Liberal Party during Lester B. Pearson’s tenure as leader. &lt;/span&gt;

Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada by R. Blake Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada by R. Blake Brown Gary Mauser Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada. By R. Blake Brown. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. vii + 349 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. $34.95 paper. Early settlers in the Great Plains relied upon firearms to provide food for their families as well as to protect themselves against violence. Many Americans and Canadians still do. Lacking constitutional guarantees for an individual right to own firearms, Canada has approached regulating firearms somewhat differently than the United States. Non-English minorities have been particularly vulnerable. Canada is known for having restrictive gun laws. But for most of its history, authorities in British North America have actively promoted the ownership and use of firearms—at least by “trustworthy” citizens. Many important nineteenth-century Canadian politicians—including Sir John A. Macdonald (the first prime minister of Canada), Edward Blake, and Robert Baldwin—argued strongly that Canadians, as English subjects, enjoyed the right to bear arms; nevertheless, they supported imposing severe restrictions on firearms ownership and use by non-English minorities. R. B. Brown is to be commended for pointing out the racist roots of Canadian gun laws. In times of crisis, governments in British North America passed laws specifically designed to disarm groups seen as suspicious or threatening, including, in early centuries, Aboriginal peoples and the resident French population, and later, Irish and Italian immigrants. During World War I, Canada disarmed Ukrainian settlers, and during World War II, disarmed or incarcerated Japanese, Chinese, German, and Italian Canadians. Beginning in the 1990s, Canada imposed draconian firearms regulations on everyone. Unfortunately, Brown does not seem to realize that such restrictions sent a powerful message that the state viewed everyone as untrustworthy or even threatening. Such views have troubling implications in a democracy. Brown unequivocally aligns himself as a “progressive,” citing approvingly controversial icons such as Michael Bellesiles, whose claims in Arming America have now been thoroughly discredited. Unfortunately, Brown’s ideological biases lead him to ignore or misrepresent important fundamentals, such as the American Second Amendment. Too often he seems satisfied with stereotypes. Brown also makes minor errors regarding firearms, such as confusing semiautomatic and fully automatic actions. His errors are particularly glaring when he attempts to describe contemporary politics. Gun control endures as a robust perennial because it reflects the unresolved tension between individual liberty and governmental power. Curiously, present-day progressives appear not to fear governmental limitations on classic individual political freedoms, such as firearms rights or free speech. Without convincing [End Page 65] evidence, promises that draconian gun laws will improve public safety merely offer false hope while encouraging government to grow ever more intrusive. Gary Mauser Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies Simon Fraser University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Managing Dissent: Energy Pipelines and “New Right” Politics in Canada

This article explores the political controversy surrounding the proposed Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline by analyzing the modalities through which elite rationalities structure public news discourse. First, through a news analysis, the authors identify the most common pro-approval actors cited speaking in favour of the project. Next, they identify the most prominent pro-approval civil society sources and ascertain their level of embeddedness in conservative discourse coalitions. Finally, the authors identify the dominant framing techniques that disproportionately structure the public discourse around the Gateway project. The article ultimately argues that over-reliance on “official sources,” the prominence of industry-backed civil society organizations, and the influence of hegemonic discourses on journalistic practice all conspire to structure the public discourse on Northern Gateway in favour of elite preferences and rationalities.