Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government's history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada's past.  If you're an academic who reads this blog, this collection might be of interest to you.


Call for Abstracts – Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With the 150th anniversary of Confederation coming up in 2017, it seems appropriate to reflect on the political, social and cultural forces which have shaped Canada over the course of its history.  National holidays and commemorative events provide an intriguing window into how these processes have affected, and continue to shape nationalism, culture and identity politics.  With this in mind, we invite interested authors to submit proposals for an edited collection that we are developing.  Tentatively entitled "Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics", our objective is to pull together scholarship related to national holidays and major commemorative anniversaries in Canadian history.  While our launching point for this collection is the celebration and observance of Dominion Day / Canada Day, we are taking a broad approach to the book's theme, and would like to include contributions that deal with major anniversary years like the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, the Centennial of 1967, Canada 125 and other related – or competing! - national holidays such as Victoria Day, la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste/Fête Nationale, and Empire Day. We welcome contributions that situate Canadian holidays in a broader international context. 

We have already been in discussions with University of Toronto Press, where there is keen interest in this project. Interested authors are asked to submit proposals to Matthew Hayday [mhayday@uoguelph.ca] by 2 July 2013 (the day after the Canada Day holiday!) including a 250-500 word abstract and the author's institutional affiliation and contact information.  Our planned schedule is to contact authors regarding their proposals by the end of July, and have first completed drafts due in late spring 2014.  We are planning to apply for a SSHRC Connection Grant, with an eye to having participants come together for a workshop in the summer of 2014 to discuss each other's work.  This should provide ample time for revisions and the peer review process to allow the collection to be in print no later than 2017.

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Matthew Hayday
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Guelph
mhayday@uoguelph.ca

Raymond Blake
Professor, Department of History, University of Regina
Raymond.Blake@uregina.ca

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Pining for the fjords

My blog isn't dead, it's not an ex-blog, it's just pining!

Things have been rather hectic for me in my professional life over the past few months, which is my lame excuse for the dearth of posts despite some very active political goings-on around Canadian history, national identity and commemorations - all topics dear to my heart - but I'm hoping that I'll get back into blogging over the summer, particularly as I am kicking off my first sabbatical year.

In the meantime, I haven't completely left the interwebs, and you can keep track of me over at Twitter, where I can be found at @mhayday.

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Define "junior", oh great Toronto Star!

Kathleen Wynne's new Ontario cabinet is being announced today, and my local MP, Liz Sandals, has apparently been tapped to become the new education minister.  But that's not the observation that leapt out at me from today's Toronto Star article about the cabinet shuffle.  Authors Robert Benzie and Rob Ferguson note that former Education Minister Laurel Broten has been "demoted" to Intergovernmental Affairs, calling it a "a ministry so junior McGuinty ran it himself for years."

 [ETA: Interesting to note that the updated version of the article calls Intergovernmental Affairs: "barely a stand-alone department because the premier usually handles all its major files personally."]

To me, this drives home just how ill-served we are by many of our journalists these days.  Just because a portfolio is held by the premier does not make it junior or unimportant.  Indeed, given how Canada's system of federalism works (or doesn't), the role of intergovernmental affairs minister can be quite important indeed.  Federally, that role was once held by Stéphane Dion, in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum.  Many Canadian Prime Ministers also acted as their own foreign affairs minister.  And what does it say that Wynne is planning on running the Ministry of Agriculture herself?  Just last Wednesday, the Star ran an article arguing that this decision was a way of signalling the importance of this ministry!

Just to be clear, I do think that the decision to move Laurel Broten out of education is probably a demotion.  But to conflate that with implying that the Intergovernmental Affairs ministry is insignificant betrays a woeful lack of perception of how Canada's system of government operates.

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Canadian Queer History in the Making - Kathleen Wynne

Ontario's Liberal party - struggling on so many fronts these days - nevertheless made history yesterday in selecting Kathleen Wynne as their new leader, and by extension, the new Premier of the province.  The second woman to head the Ontario Liberals, Wynne will become the first woman to be Ontario's Premier.  And more excitingly for me, she will be the first openly gay Premier in Canadian history.  Now, whether the Ontario Liberals, who are in a fairly precarious minority situation right now, will be able to hold on to power for much longer, is an open question.  But in the short term at least, history has been made, and there will certainly be a new line in Canadian history textbooks marking this Canadian first.

Of course, many have asked in the past 14 hours why the adjective "openly" is always added into the newspaper headlines and mentions by media commentators.  This speaks to the rather interesting media culture in this country.  From all accounts, Wynne is not in fact the first gay premier in the country (for the highest-profile instance, do a quick search on New Brunswick's long-serving Progressive Conservative premier Richard Hatfield, who passed away in the early 1990s, or follow this link to a story in the Globe.).  But the media culture in Canada is loathe to out a politician who has not come out.  And so we've probably had other instances of gay premiers, and likely gay party leaders, cabinet ministers, etc. who were not openly gay.  In many of these cases, their sexual orientation was an open secret to the media, their friends, their close acquaintances.  But there is still quite the culture of privacy in Canadian reporting on this issue.

So, congratulations to Kathleen Wynne on being selected as Ontario's new premier, and to Ontario's Liberal convention delegates for selecting her as your leader.  It is a marker of how much has changed in this province over such a short period of time.

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Language Policy on a Global Scale

In this post marking my nine-year anniversary of blogging (less frequent postings now, to be sure), it seems fitting that my topic should be language policy.  I just got back from a two and a half week trip to Thailand and Vietnam, occasioned by a conference on language law and language policy in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Scholars from around the world came together to discuss various ways in which language policies and laws intersected with issues of ethnic conflict, and ways in which such policies could (or had) been used to hopefully mitigate such conflicts.  It was the second time that I'd attended this particular gathering (the last time was 2006 in Ireland), and I was struck once again by both the similarities of the challenges facing states around the world, but also the vast differences in contexts and needed approaches.  Many of the presentations that I attended had to do with language revitalization of indigenous languages in the developing world, particularly Latin America and Asia, where the core issues are quite substantially different from those of English-French bilingualism in Canada, and much more connected to revitalization of our own First Nations' languages.  For many of these countries, the key issues relate to illiteracy and/or marginalization of linguistic minority communities, often linked to violent ethnic conflict, and language revitalization is intended as a tool to promote both literacy and (more importantly for many of these states) national cohesion.  It was a stimulating conference that left me feeling re-energized for working on my book over the next year.

Language practice on the ground was also fascinating.  It's hard to ignore the prevalence of English as a global language when traveling.  We were able to get by with virtually no Thai or Vietnamese in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Hanoi.  In Vietnam in particular, there was ample English signage at the museums and travel points.  That being said, both my husband and I wished we could have spoken culinary Vietnamese to more fully sample the host of delicious foods that were available.  We did very well with the places with bilingual menus, and with pointing and gesturing elsewhere, but we definitely got a strong sense that being able to ask more directly for the wonderful things surrounding us would have led to an even richer experience.

Wishing you all a happy end to 2012, and great things to come in 2013!

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Maine, Maryland, and hopefully Washington!

Yes, yes, Obama won, and I'm relieved.

But perhaps more historic is the fact that on the four ballot measures dealing with equal marriage for same-sex marriage, supporters of marriage equality have already been declared the winners in Maine and Maryland, they are currently leading in Washington, and it looks like a measure to ban same sex marriage in Minnesota is going down to defeat.  This is really noteworthy, as every time in the past that this issue has been put to American voters, marriage equality has been defeated.  And that, I must say, is cause for some hope after this incredibly divisive election.

(For those who are wondering, I haven't abandoned blogging - despite appearances to the contrary - but various editorial and teaching responsibilities are keeping me pretty darned occupied at the moment.  I'm hoping to return in full force in the winter, with a few intermittent posts between now and then.)

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French Immersion in Peel Region - Plus ça change

The Peel District School board in Ontario has made headlines this week for an all-too-familiar Canadian problem: burgeoning enrollment in French immersion, and limited capacity to accommodate the student demand.  Sadly, the board has resulted to a tried-and-failed approach to dealing with this problem - using a lottery system to determine which students will be admitted to the program.  Today, the Globe and Mail has dedicated one of its editorials to criticizing this short-sighted policy.

It is an all-too-familiar problem in this country, and one which you'd think we might have solved by now.  French immersion has been around longer than I have, and yet the current situation faced by the Peel board has been repeated in province after province, board after board, over the past 40 years.  Lotteries, line-ups and other limited access solutions have caused outrage and problems in community after community.  Indeed, I've published an article on how a similar situation in Sackville, New Brunswick in the early 1980s was the impetus for a new province-wide policy of immersion on demand where numbers warranted it.  Of course, New Brunswick has recently been in the midst of major turmoil as it overhauls its French immersion offerings.

Alas, the problem of French immersion is not a simple nut to crack.  While many boards will use program costs as an excuse for not creating programs - an issue well debunked by the Globe editorial, which refers to the federal Official Languages in Education program funding - there are some real, structural problems which require long-term thinking and serious structural adjustments.  I would argue that these require province-wide policy directions, rather than ad hoc solutions at the board level.

Take for example, the issue of teachers.  Although the Globe editorialist notes that there is currently a surplus of French teachers in the province of Ontario, that is not the same thing as having a surplus of teachers who would be competent to teach French immersion - which requires a much higher level of oral fluency and mastery - as opposed to teaching core French as a school subject.  Teacher shortages have been a problem for decades with the French immersion programs.  Most parents ideally want a fluent francophone teacher, and in many jurisdictions, the available teachers who meet that criterion are currently teaching in the French-language schools targeted at the francophone minority.  Importing teachers as a strategy used in many provinces, but many Quebec francophone teachers have no desire to teach French immersion in Oakville or Calgary or Nanaimo. 

Then there is the question of teacher redundancy.  A jump in immersion enrolments from 10 to 25% of the grade 1 population over a decade cannot simply be accommodated by hiring more teachers.  There is a question of what to do with the English-language grade 1 teachers in the board who are no longer needed to teach in the English stream.  That is a major staffing challenge that requires long term thinking - and a compassionate approach to the existing teachers.

That is just the tip of the iceberg with this long-standing challenge of implementing French language instruction in Canada.  Solving it requires long-term strategy, a deliberate and well-thought-out set of provincial policies, and effective communication of educational policy objectives to the public.  I agree with the main thrusts of the Globe's editorial - access to quality language education should not be a matter of luck of the draw - but solving this problem requires long-term vision, teacher training and recruitment, and creative thinking about how to deal with the displacements created by new educational priorities and parental preferences.

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