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The author comments on historian Bryan Palmer's paper about the history of Canada. Topics include the author's view on Palmer's intervention in his paper about the intersections and alliances between the struggle for national liberation and working-class emancipation, his provision of clarity for social change action that made his work critical, the intertwine of the history of colonialism and capitalism in Canada in the work, and comments on the four periods of Palmer's Canadian history.

Background: This paper traces the changing dynamics of forest management on privately owned land in southern Ontario, Canada, using the conceptual lens of state legibility to highlight how incentive programs are creating new ways of seeing and engaging in stewardship. Specifically, the Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program (MFTIP) and its corresponding Managed Forest Plan are investigated as a means through which a diversified field of knowledge has been activated to enable climate-conscious adaptive stewardship across the region. Methods: This case study uses a qualitative approach, incorporating document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and direct observation. Similar patterns and relationships within and across sites are identified to build theory and shed light on the socio-ecological context of private forest management. Results: Set within southern Ontario’s history of forest management and the rise of neoliberal environmental governance, this paper contributes theoretically to scholarship on state legibility. The results illustrate a shift in stewardship on private lands through a rescaling of management responsibility that embraces different perspectives and builds place-based practical knowledge of forest systems. By mapping and building knowledge networks, diverse approaches to management have proliferated at the local and regional levels. These approaches have been influenced by previous management experience, different professional backgrounds, knowledge of participants, and the motivation of landowners to engage in active stewardship. Conclusion: The process of developing a management plan plays a key role in making landscapes legible to all stakeholders. The document also serves as an instrument of the state to build private landowners’ and forest consultants’ knowledge and capacity. This has set in motion a socio-ecological landscape strategy to address encroachment, invasive species, and climatic challenges in this increasingly urbanizing region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the "Challenging Labour" / «Le défi du travail» conference held at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, in October 2022, two plenary sessions invited scholars to engage in a dialogue on important historical and theoretical issues in the field of labour and working-class history/studies. One of these, on the entanglement of capitalism and colonialism, featured a paper delivered by Bryan D. Palmer and a response from hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies). These presentations are revised for publication here along with a rejoinder from Palmer in what is Labour/Le Travail's first "Forum" section. The aim of this section is to foster conversation, with scholars meaningfully engaging with each other's work across disciplinary, methodological, theoretical, or other kinds of differences in approach and understanding. The merit of this kind of dialogue is well demonstrated here by Palmer and hayetsk, and the editors would invite more such conversations for publication in this section in future issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basal gravel and sand mantling the bedrock floors of buried valleys throughout the Canadian Interior Plains, and conformably overlying proglacial lacustrine sediment, comprise the Empress Group. While previously conceptualized as stratigraphically equivalent deposits of preglacial rivers prior to the first and most extensive continental and montane glaciations, subsequent stratigraphic studies indicated that buried valley basal gravel must have been deposited between, or during, progressively more extensive continental glaciations and could not be stratigraphically equivalent throughout the buried valley network. However, in the general absence of formation-rank stratigraphic description of basal gravel units that might better inform the geologic history of the deposits, most workers simply consider Empress Group sediments time-transgressive. In this paper, we examine basal gravel at provincial and regional scales to understand its genesis and geologic history. At the provincial scale, we map basal gravel in three dimensions using a novel machine learning approach. At the regional scale, we formally define basal gravel formations at either end of the largest buried valley system in Alberta, which informs its glacial history and physiographic development and shows the importance of formation-rank stratigraphic description. Our results indicate that the buried valley network across Alberta is palimpsest in genesis and basal gravel units within it are chronostratigraphically intercalated between tills. We advocate that the Empress Group definition be extended across Alberta with modifications to improve its clarity and utility, and formally define the Old Fort, Unchaga, Ipiatik, and Winefred formations as part of the Empress Group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the official closing of many institutions for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities in Canada, the emotional and relational effects of institutionalization continue to reverberate in the families of institutional survivors. Although often an unheard group, siblings of survivors offer insights on institutions' long-lasting effects on individuals and families, and on the ways in which their stories can contribute to more just and sound policy decisions moving forward. In this paper, five siblings share their experiences of the intragenerational trauma they have experienced as a result of their brother's or sister's institutionalization and offer critical perspectives on addressing this chapter in Canadian history as one step towards creating policy that will address the needs and concerns of people labelled/with intellectual disabilities, their families, and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its beginning in the 1850's and being first in Canada to purchase a tile drainage trencher, subsurface drainage of agricultural lands in Quebec is poorly documented, which the present paper will try to document from 1850 to 1970. In Quebec, Catholic priests and monks played an important role in educating rural communities by establishing French agricultural schools throughout the province. For the English rural communities, Macdonald College (Macdonald Campus of McGill University) played a major role especially in preparing plans, besides promoting the technology. The Quebec Ministry of Agriculture encouraged subsurface drainage early in 1912 but would prefer investing in land clearing and watercourse deepening to establish more farms, from the employment needs created by WWI, the great 1930 depression and WWII. This work mostly completed in the early 1960's, the Quebec Government would then initiate a major subsurface drainage program, allowing private enterprises to take over shortly after 1967. Although the Ministry changed names several times even after 1967, the term 'Ministry of Agriculture' will be used throughout this article. To compare trencher performance, a 15 m average spacing is presumed. This paper is limited to the main events and persons involved, without being able to cover them all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper frames two generations of war resister migration from the United States to Canada and the social movements that supported them as contrapuntal histories, disparate yet woven together, and entangled across space and time. We argue that Canada has functioned at key historical moments as safe haven for war resisters from and others fleeing conflict led by the United States, but that this role was always provisional, historically contingent, and never guaranteed. It is therefore crucial to understand the social movements that arose to support the search for safe haven at different points in geopolitical relations and histories. We develop this argument with empirical research about people who migrated to Canada during wars led by the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In documenting both generations of resister migration, we move across scales to understand the highly embodied geopolitics of these journeys, which run parallel and diverge in key ways. Our analysis thus maps the shifting history of Canada as a safe haven for those seeking refuge from the violence of war and militarism in the United States. Key messages: Two generations of US war resister migrants faced disparate outcomes in their search for protection in Canada.We offer a contrapuntal history of their migrations to Canada, the enforced patriotism, masculinity, and militarism that fueled their flight, and the social movements that supported them.While Canada has functioned as a safe haven historically, this role is always in flux and influenced by shifts in geopolitical relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eocene to Miocene Cypress Hills Formation (CHF) spans 28 million years and forms the conglomeratic caprock of the Cypress Hills and Swift Current plateaus in southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. These stacked fluvial, floodplain, and lacustrine deposits preserve the only high latitude, non-polar mammalian fossil assemblage (Uintan to Hemingfordian land mammal stages) in Canada. The Quarry is the oldest CHF (Chadronian 1, late Eocene) site documented in the Cypress Hills region north of the town of Eastend. The Quarry was originally discovered in 1962, after bones were found to be eroding out of the base of a road cut north of the ghost town of South Fork on the southeastern flanks of the Cypress Hills. Numerous field campaigns have resulted in the collection of fossils from a multitaxonomic bonebed. This paper presents a detailed sedimentologic, paleontologic, and taphonomic study to establish a depositional environment framework of the Southfork Quarry. This site was deposited at the onset of the Eocene–Oligocene climate transition, a critical time of climate change during the Paleogene. Six facies and two facies associations are characterized for the Quarry, shifting from a braided-fluvial system to a debris flow-filled incised channel. Patterns of skeletal accumulations and bone surface modification indicate that the assemblage accumulated over a significant interval of time in different depositional environments. This study provides critical insight into environmental shifts driven by climate change and relates these findings to a broader understanding of the Eocene–Oligocene transition in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PAPER EXAMINES THE EXPERIENCE of C.B. Wade (1906-1982), a chartered accountant and university instructor who was recruited to work for organized labour during the period of transition from wartime mobilization to postwar reconstruction at the end of the Second World War. In hiring Wade in 1944, District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America became one of the first Canadian unions to employ a research director to help address the challenges of the new age of industrial legality and advance their social democratic agenda. The paper discusses Wade's background, including his involvement in the Workers' Educational Association, and documents his contributions to the work of the coal miners' union, including the efforts to promote public ownership of the industry. In addition, the paper discusses Wade's unpublished history of the union, a manuscript that has had a long life as an underground classic. While the negotiation of the postwar compromises between labour, capital and the state gave union staff such as Wade an increasingly central role in labour relations, this was not a stable context, and the paper also considers the deepening Cold War conditions that led to the end of his employment in 1950. In the context of labour and working-class history, Wade can be associated with a relatively small cohort of politically engaged intellectuals who made lasting contributions to the research capacity of unions and to the field of labour studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the United States became a significant imperial power with which an overstretched British Empire did not want conflict. The planting of numerous American flags in the Canadian Yukon, and especially in Dawson City, symbolized this dynamic, which was accompanied by some tension and apprehension on the part of British-Canadian authorities. At the same time, hints at a future friendly alliance between the United States and Britain can be seen in the mingling, in the Yukon Territory, of Yankees, Britons, and Canadians who all shared (among other things) a common literary heritage. Among these hints was an implausible but sincere proposal on the part of a US Congressman for the United States to cede the Alaska Panhandle to Canada. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on "The North and the First World War," held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though a small minority (approximately 1% of the Canadian population), Jews have been important in shaping Canadian culture and identity and have had an open presence in the country since 1760. This paper seeks to provide an historical overview of the immigration and settlement of Jews into Canada and the subsequent growth and development of the community. Using recent Canada census data and local Jewish community studies, it identifies key demographic features of contemporary Jewish life and, where possible, compares this to the United States. The paper paints a picture of Jews as fulfilling the twin promise of Canadian multiculturalism: they have been successful in integrating into larger Canadian society while at the same time retaining a vibrant internal Jewish religion and culture. By outlining current issues and trends in Jewish life in Canada, this work demonstrates the growth and maturation of the Canadian Jewish community. The paper moves beyond the outdated 'time-lag' theory in order to explain the more traditional nature of Canadian Jewry compared to the United States. It identifies a range of other historical, political and geographical factors to account for this difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2006 a group of Canadian researchers formally embarked on a collaborative project to explore how ordinary Canadians engage the past in their everyday lives. The Canadians and Their Pasts project was inspired by previous studies undertaken in Europe, the United States, and Australia that used survey data to probe people's historical consciousness. This paper will briefly summarize the findings of the earlier studies, offer preliminary results from the Canadian survey, and, where possible, reflect on similarities and differences in the consumption of the past across national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the website entitled "Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture in Canada, 1925–1960," jointly created by the University of Strathclyde and The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory/ Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada, available at http://www.middlebrowcanada.org/.