Toronto Globe Research Articles

Quebec's Politics of Vengeance

The victory of the separatist Parti Quebecois (P.Q.) on November 15, 1976, set off the liveliest public debate in Canadian history. For the first time since Confederation the unity of the country is seriously threatened.After the election the Toronto Globe and Mail made a cool analysis of the situation and concluded that the P.Q. victory “leaves us with no excuse for failure to recognize that this country is in great danger.” Donald Creighton, dean of Canadian historians, stated bluntly that the country now faces’ ‘division and possible ruin.''No one doubts that the dangers are well founded. The P.Q. was rowned in 1967 for the express purpose of establishing political sovereignty in Quebec. Rene Levesque, the dynamic and tough-minded leader of the party, has declared on numerous occasions that independence is “an absolute necessity.” His government has already issued guidelines for a referendum and set the fall of 1979 for the first vote.

Portugal in Africa: A Noneconomic Interpretation

Contemporary critics of Portugal's presence in Africa charge that economic exploitation is the basis of Portuguese colonialism. They often emphasize, to the exclusion of other factors, economic reasons for Portugal's past and present stake in the tropics. These arguments contrast the actual and potential mineral wealth, agricultural produce, and abundant sources of hydroelectric power in Angola and Mozambique with the lack of them in Portugal. The Portuguese goal is often characterized as making the African dominions yield a profit on investments, furnish raw materials, and provide protected markets for metropolitan industries (Hance 1967, p. 23). In a recent issue of Africa Today, Jennifer Davis concluded that “the prospects for profit are exciting. Small wonder that the Portuguese want to keep their colonies now” (1970, p. 6). John Gellner, in a special to the Toronto Globe and Mail (1971), wrote: “Thus the strategic aim of the Portuguese is to hold what is worth holding.…Angola is a very rich country.” African revolutionaries and their sympathizers reiterate these economic explanations of Portuguese behavior in a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and leaflets. Marxist in outlook, the authors couch their analysis of Portugal's colonial motives almost exclusively in economic terms. With the exception of revolutionary leaders such as Amilcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, who identified other reasons for Portugal's retention of African colonies, many of those favorable to African liberation emphasize the economic rationale for Portuguese colonialism. (For representative accounts, see Chaliand 1969, pp. 5-12; Dependency…, pp. 3-6; Davidson 1969, pp. 25-28.)

Foreign Policy and the Election: An Uncertain Trumpet

It doubtful if questions of foreign policy are of primary importance in elections even in such powerful and mature democracies as the United States and Great Britain. Canada certainly not a powerful country, and many would question its maturity. Yet foreign policy, in the broadest sense, has often been a major concern in our elections. There was the issue of Unrestricted Reciprocity with the United States in 1891, the controversy over Canadian participation in the Boer War in 1900, the dual question of reciprocity with the United States and naval policy in 1911, the fuzzy issue of imperial relations and dominion autonomy in 1926 and, perhaps, the vague problem of CanadianAmerican relations in the 1957 election. To many electors in times past these foreign policy problems doubtless loomed less large than they have to later textbook writers. Historians have exaggerated the electoral importance of external affairs if only because mouth-filling statements about foreign policy have been easier to isolate than the small, local discontents and bread-and-butter issues which today's omniscient, omnipresent pollsters tell us are the real determinants in voting. At any rate it would be particularly difficult to calculate the number of votes that were cast on April 8 with a particular eye to some complicated problem of Canada's role in international politics. Indeed some commentators and politicians maintained that defence and foreign policy problems should not be election issues for they were too complicated, too emotion-packed to be capable of democratic decision. Nuclear policy/' the Toronto Globe and Mail pontificated on February 19, is not a legitimate issue because it a matter involving high emotions which has nothing whatever to do with the future of this country. Yet, despite this and many similar preachments, foreign and defence policy statements kept slipping into speeches on economic planning, biculturalism, unemployment, stable government and what American

The Implications of United States Policy for the Canadian Wheat Economy

Some confusion regarding the present position ot the Canadian wheat economy is inevitable if one reads the newspapers at all. One press report will suggest a temporary lull in the almost monotonous prosperity in which the prairies are said to have basked for the last ten years or more; another suggests blue ruin and a return to the hungry thirties. The Toronto Globe and Mail, viewing the essentially simple economic and social phenomena of the hinterland as from a metropolitan eminence, attempted a compromise some weeks ago in a cartoon showing a horde of embattled western farmers descending on Ottawa demanding justice and parity in a fleet of Cadillacs. Yet the gibe seems a bit unfair at a time when the wheat farmer does not know where his next Cadillac is coming from. All this may suggest that an effort is necessary to find some middle path between the unfailing optimism of the Minister of Trade and Commerce, whose department and board have in their custody and care the disposition and sale of our wheat, on the one hand, and the almost unrelieved pessimism of certain other V.I.P.'s and the Interprovincial Farm Union Council on the other.If there are problems facing the prairie economy today they can hardly be charged either to reckless expansion of wheat acreage or to improvident gambling on high prices for wheat in the world market. Perhaps it is prairie experience with the heavy human and capital losses of prolonged depression, through the thirties and early forties, which explains why the wheat grower seems to have put so much emphasis on stability in the post-war period.

The Toronto Globe and Agrarian Radicalism, 1850–67

The Toronto Globe and Agrarian Radicalism, 1850–67

Mackenzie King Comes Back

Essay| December 01 1935 Mackenzie King Comes Back Frederick A. Acland* Frederick A. Acland* *The author of this article was for many years city editor of The Toronto Globe and for a time Deputy Minister in the Canadian Department of of Labor. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Current History (1938) 43 (3): 249–252. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.1935.43.3.249 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Frederick A. Acland*; Mackenzie King Comes Back. Current History 1 May 1938; 43 (3): 249–252. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.1935.43.3.249 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCurrent History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1935 by The Regents of the University of California1935 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Canada's Relations With the Empire as Seen By the Toronto Globe, 1857–1867

Canada's Relations With the Empire as Seen By the Toronto Globe, 1857–1867

ONTARIO'S VITAL STATISTICS.

The Registrar-General of the Province of Ontario recently published the complete returns of births, marriages and deaths, which are considered encouraging by the<i>Toronto Globe</i>, inasmuch as an increase of births is reported over the preceding year. The increase, however, is not great and still leaves the ratio lower than that of almost any other region of equal extent, viz., 19.9 per 1000, and less than that of 1898. It is to be presumed that vital statistics are kept more carefully in Canada than in some portions of the United States, but some of the small increase is attributed by the<i>Globe</i>to prosecutions of parents for neglecting to register the birth of offspring. Admitting a certain proportion of births not registered, the ratio is not encouraging, and the steady decrease of late years, only interrupted by the slight rise, is still less so. Even in the worst parts of