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[Display omitted] • Conservation organizations use collaboration and confrontation to achieve goals. • An organization addressing urban bird collisions initially focused on bird rescue. • Soon incorporated data-backed advocacy to make buildings safer for birds. • Successes emerged gradually, and largely from collaboration. • Confrontation occurred indirectly through third parties using their data. To achieve their goals, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) frequently interact with public and private stakeholders. Interactions can be generally characterized as falling within a continuum of collaborative to confrontational approaches, with each approach having advantages and disadvantages. A more collaborative approach may lead to opportunities to share data and access funding; however an NGO may risk its goals becoming compromised. Similarly, a more confrontational approach can draw attention to NGO causes and effect change, but may limit opportunities for partnership. This paper considers how a NGO concerned with preventing bird-window collisions has balanced between collaboration and confrontation with municipal government and commercial properties. While this NGO's strategy has been largely collaborative, its experience also demonstrates that confrontational approaches, while less frequent and indirect, also have a role in attaining objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Mixed economies challenge the assumption that people need capitalist labour. • Canadian government is newly invested in incorporating Indigenous wage labour. • Diamond mines target Indigenous workers as marker of "responsible extraction". • The mixed economy resists dispossession by northern extractive capital. Grounded in an analysis of the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this article examines the contemporary relationship between surplus populations and colonial capitalist accumulation of new spaces. The functioning of the reserve surplus population requires that the unwaged, or under-waged, want, or need, wage labour. Thus, like all capitalist relations, a reserve surplus population is predicated on the separation of workers from their means of subsistence: what Marx calls "primitive" accumulation. Traditionally the home of the Dene and Inuit, and now home to approximately equal parts Indigenous (primarily Dene, Inuit and Métis) and non-Indigenous residents, the NWT mixed economy is a set of social relations that combine subsistence and social reproduction, wherein labour is oriented toward the daily and intergenerational wellbeing of the collective rather than the profit of the individual, with capitalist production. With a focus on the diamond industry, this article traces the shifting Canadian State approach to Indigenous labour in this space across time and the state policies and extractive projects that have both "made" Indigenous labour surplus and rhetorically justified their existence through evocations of regional unemployment and imagined dependency. In so doing, the paper identifies a move from the welfare-state era, wherein the state structured northern Indigenous "dependency", to the neoliberal era, wherein dependency became a problem to be solved through increased Indigenous incorporation into capitalist wage labour. The northern diamond mining industry, responding to both Indigenous demands for land recognition and neoliberal imperatives for lean operations, exemplifies this latter approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of several months in 2018, more than 240 people were arrested in Burnaby, BC, Canada for disrupting the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. While those arrested shared a willingness to defy Canadian law in opposition to this pipeline development, the police applied differing degrees of force and violence while making these arrests. Informed by interviews with land defenders and engagements on the frontlines of this conflict, this paper considers what these discrepancies in police tactics teach us about logics of settler colonial law, authority, and violence. We do so by engaging in a discussion of the foundational paradox of the state – that its constitutional law is unlawfully constituted – and by presenting the politics of recognition as a strategy employed by the settler colonial state in its attempts to reconcile the contradiction between the state's claims to legal authority and its own unlawful foundations. However, whereas recognition and reconciliation are often presented in contrast to earlier more violent eras of colonial governance, we argue that colonial recognition is a logic of state violence which determines how, and against whom, state violence is distributed. When assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction take unrecognized or deviant forms, the state ultimately resorts to violence to remove these competing claims to legal authority. Moreover, we argue that police violence against Indigenous peoples asserting "sovereignty on the ground" should not be understood as merely a matter of law enforcement – rather, this is a productive form of violence through which the legal authority of the state is actively established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This article answers criticisms about the malleability of the resilience concept. • The three necessary features of the resilience concept are clarified. • A parallel concept, 'resistance', is introduced and its necessary features defined. • Introduction of 'resistance' reinforces both what 'resilience' is and what it is not. • Clarifying resilience as distinct from resistance has implications for policy. Despite criticisms that emphasize the ambiguity surrounding its definition and applications, the concept of resilience is featured prominently in studies of regional economies and regionally-based industries. This paper builds on this literature through a case study of Canada's automotive industry, an old industrial region (OIR) situated primarily in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. It also provides heightened definitional rigour to the concept of resilience and in so doing, advances the concept of 'resistance.' We argue that resistance better characterizes regional economies and regionally-based industries whose competitive advantages have eroded, are resistant to change, and remain locked into trajectories of slow decline but persist through shocks, disruptions and interventions, policy-oriented or otherwise. The clarification of resilience as distinct from resistance carries significant implications for policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Mainstream green economies are market-driven models centered on growth and profit accumulation. • An analysis of labour is essential to shed light on green economies' logics and practices. • Recruitment promotes a representation of green jobs as sites for environmentalist politics. • The politicization of green work is ideological as it normalizes precarious and unpaid work. • Putting environmentalism to work extends the reach of labour subsumption. Market-driven green economies are premised upon the exploitation and ongoing commodification of both labour and nature. Yet their concrete incarnations experiment with new strategies to "secure and obscure" such processes. These strategies include the formulation and dissemination of an ideological representation of green labour in which environmentalism is "put to work." In this paper I focus on worker recruitment in Toronto and analyze its role in constructing green jobs as a venue for environmentalist politics, and therefore as "good" and "meaningful" work. My empirical material consists of green job announcements posted on GoodWork.ca, the main platform for green worker recruitment in Canada. Building on a Gramscian understanding of ideology, I query the concrete and symbolic functions performed by job ads and discuss them in relation to the structural processes that characterize Toronto's contemporary labour market. I suggest that an ideological representation of green work is used to select motivated and productive workers, justify the offer of non-specialized, precarious, or unpaid positions, and ultimately extend the reach of labour subsumption into spheres traditionally considered outside the employment relation, such as environmentalist activism. In turn, such a representation conceals the extent to which green economies rely on the exploitation of labour while it circumscribes environmentalist critiques within market-driven and economic growth-centered initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Labour geography has yet to pay full attention to the experiences of public sector workers and their employer (the state). This article addresses this lacuna and provides some insight into the labour geographies of public sector workers through an empirical analysis of the centralization of governance, employment relations, and collective bargaining in Ontario, Canada’s publicly-funded elementary and secondary schools. This case demonstrates how one particular group of public sector workers – teachers – and their unions located and exercised agency in the arenas of politics and collective bargaining through a rescaling of their activities from the local to the provincial level. The paper also argues that the rescaling of politics and collective bargaining is problematic. Questions remain regarding whether or not Ontario’s teachers were able to increase their aggregate bargaining power through centralization or merely transferred agency and authority from one scale to another. Moreover, the paper engages with the fast-developing geographies of education literature, and is consistent with an outward-looking approach that links education to wider political and economic processes. In so doing, it extends the scope of the geographies of education to the employees of publicly-funded schools and their administrative bodies, and suggests value a theoretically- and empirically-informed dialogue between geographers interested in education and those interested in labour. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Canadian Medicare, the government financed national health care system, is seen by many as enhancing both social welfare and competitiveness. If true, this will broaden and further existing conceptions of competitiveness in Canada and beyond. Moreover, it will have important implications for the ongoing debate in the social sciences about institutional convergence and path dependence. The central focus of this paper is to evaluate this claim: Medicare’s impact on competitiveness, evaluated by using investment attraction as a proxy, is determined through reference to detailed case analysis and the insight into investment behavior gained from interviews. This paper concludes that Medicare makes a difference for certain reinvestment decisions but no difference for location and initial investment decisions. Several implications are drawn from this finding: Medicare’s impact on reinvestment decisions may stop certain Canadian firms from investing elsewhere but likely would not attract new investment into Canada from abroad. Industries with high labor costs will extract a disproportionately large benefit from Medicare; so, this type of institution is a source of competitiveness to certain industries if not an overarching source of regional competitiveness for Canada. I conclude that, no matter the size and scope of the competitive benefit, social institutions such as Medicare must be considered when evaluating regional competitiveness, having thus far been ignored by mainstream academic competitiveness theories. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper traces attempts to foster local, sustainable food projects in Niagara, Canada as part of community economic development (CED) projects during two distinct periods of provincial governance. In the first period (1990–1995), social democratic government support for local sustainable food projects through CED can be understood as neocommunitarian in nature. During this time there was a concerted attempt to link local people with access to local food and also to support a relationship between local food projects and agri-tourism. I argue that this neocommunitarian policy was an accommodation to a wider and more global neoliberal hegemony and was underlain by a romanticism of petty commodity production and a tenuous link to social and ecological sustainability. In the second period of governance (beginning in 1995) the progressive conservative government led by Mike Harris pursued particularly virulent, revanchist forms of neoliberal governance. With many of their state supports slashed, Niagara NGOs and activists turned, and were pushed, to more market-led, elitist forms of local food projects and agri-tourism. In these latter food projects, the practices of ecological and social sustainability were significantly hollowed out and their local and light green nature was harnessed as accumulation strategies. The paper is based on interviews conducted in the year 2003 with people involved in various urban and rural food projects (including community gardening, community supported agriculture, local/seasonal cuisine, organic/ecological farming and food box programs). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In May of 2000, thousands of residents of the town of Walkerton, Ontario became ill from drinking municipal water contaminated by Escherichia coli and Campylobacter jejuni bacteria. Seven people died, while many suffered debilitating injuries. A highly unusual and risk prone local hydrological regime, coupled with manure spreading on farms near municipal wells, and lax oversight by municipal water utility officials, were quickly blamed by Ontario government figures, including then premier Mike Harris. However, the scandal surrounding Walkerton''s tragedy and a subsequent public inquiry into the incident also implicated neoliberal reforms of environmental governance introduced by Harris''s government subsequent to its election in 1995. This paper examines the Walkerton incident as an important example of a “normal accident” of neoliberalism, one that can be expected from neoliberal environmental regulatory reforms arising from systematic irresponsibility in environmental governance. This irresponsibility is promulgated by an overarching hostility to any regulatory interference with free markets, as well as specific regulatory gaps that produce environmental risks. The paper also serves as a case study of the extent to which neoliberalism is constituted by environmental governance reform, and conversely, how environmental governance reform is reconfigured as part of the emergent neoliberal mode of social regulation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract While scholars typically analyze debt relations as social relations, often at the national or global level with respect to international flows of global capital and interest payments, there has been less attention on how international mobility and immigration are constitutive of geographies of debt. An urbanized nation with a reputation for welcoming high levels of immigration, as well as for escaping the worst of the global financial crisis with no banking crisis, Canada has also received international attention for high housing prices and high levels of household debt, particularly in its global cities. What has not yet received sufficient attention are the potential effects of federal government policies and programs in encouraging new immigrants to take out disproportionately large mortgages to access owner-occupied housing, nor the implications of such programs and migrant flows for understanding geographies of debt. Justified by proponents of asset-based welfare, homeownership is purported to be crucial for immigrant integration and economic mobility, and yet, literature linking the socio-spatial dynamics of immigrant debt to asset-based welfare policies and the creation of citizen subjectivities remains scarce. This paper investigates questions related to these issues in Canada's three global cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, using data aggregated at the neighbourhood scale. The results point to an interaction effect between federal policies encouraging homeownership, metropolitan housing costs, and neighbourhood immigrant debt levels. Not only do immigrants bear significantly higher debt burdens than do native-born Canadians, but many neighbourhoods with a high concentration of immigrants, particularly in the metropolitan areas with the tightest housing markets, have significantly higher levels of mortgage debt than other neighbourhoods. Such geographies of debt, we suggest, have implications not only for intra-urban spatial distributions of debt and wealth, but also for understanding how the spatiality of debt interacts with federal policies and national financial vulnerabilities and resiliences, pointing to the importance of immigration flows and policies in helping produce and maintain financial flows and financial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 4, 2014 the tailings pond failed at the Mount Polley copper, gold, and silver mine in British Columbia. The dam failure was amongst the largest recorded, and led to widespread debate in the province concerning weak environmental law and the effects of deregulation. This paper examines the changing role of the law in British Columbia around mining and the environment in relationship to the Mount Polley disaster. It draws on the work of the early Soviet legal theorist Evigny Pashukanis to help understand law’s role in the commodification of nature. Pashukanis suggests a legal analysis of the commodity form and a study of laws role in commodification. However, contemporary law departs from the rigid and formal property and contract principles that Pashukanis considered, and now responsible to shifting social conditions, technologies and environmental concern. Yet even today, Pashukanis remains relevant, and provides a starting point for analysis of how nature is commodified. His work points to a study of the multiplicities of, and variegated legal geographies of, commodity forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an iteration of debate about seal hunting in Canada wherein the politics of nature and celebrity culture intersected via Web 2.0 in an unanticipated way. Our analysis focuses on a spike in social media posting that took place after celebrity Ellen DeGeneres took a ‘selfie’ photo with a group of movie stars live during the 2014 Academy Awards. ‘Nature 2.0’ is a relevant framing for this case because, in the weeks and months after the 2014 Oscars, many seal hunters and other pro-hunt advocates took to Twitter and posted personal photos and/or accounts of seal hunting and its significance. In a play on DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie, both types of posters often labelled their tweets with the following ‘hashtag’: #sealfie. Our analysis shows that, while important, the Oscars spectacle and the star-studded selfie did not alone the scene for #sealfies and their circulation. Moreover, we demonstrate that some #sealfie posters challenged the authority of anti-sealing organizations and employed Web 2.0 functionalities in ways that took debate about sealing beyond engrained moral and environmental binaries. We conclude that Web 2.0 not just enabled, but actually shaped, the form and function of #sealfies and the journalistic attention that the phenomenon received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploitation of international migrant workers in the Global North has been increasingly framed in terms of trafficking, in political and legal domains and by the media. Yet posing trafficking as a phenomenon that captures the unfreedom experienced by migrants obscures the variegated means through which unfree labour relations are both institutionalized, and related to more 'mundane' forms of exploitation including precarious employment (for migrants and non-migrants alike). In this paper we argue that conceptualizing forms of unfreedom along a continuum of labour relations highlights this interrelationship, which for migrant workers includes attempts to harness and control mobilities through immigration regimes that restrict mobility bargaining power within labour markets. We use the example of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) in Canada to show how precarious employment, precarious legal status and unfree labour relations interact, and how they are negotiated and contested by of workers themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review paper discusses the program called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), in North America, as an example of a subset of the care economy in which volunteers contribute to farm care. Human care is partly direct (some childcare, kitchen duties and other housework), but mostly indirect, in that farm families get time off. This review expands on previous work that considered farms in Ontario, Canada as spaces of care and farmwomen as the carers. It critiques other research that claims WWOOFers do not replace local labor and that WWOOF represents an idealistic and ethical space potentially corrupted by tourists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Ecosystem’, a term brought into scientific usage by English ecologist Arthur George Tansley in 1935, became a key concept for the development of ecology and nature management. In the twenty-first century, its uses continue to proliferate. For Tansley, the ecosystem was an interacting and interdependent system of organic and inorganic components. Within it, human activity was to be regarded as the most powerful biotic factor ‘which increasingly upsets the equilibrium of preexisting ecosystems and eventually destroys them, at the same time forming new ones of a very different nature …’ The influences on Tansley’s thinking have been detailed in terms of physics, psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy. This paper summarizes select debates regarding the emergence of the idea and its use and abuse vis-a-vis the politics of society and nature. It briefly traces the geography of the concept as it was taken up by Americans, becoming the basis of ‘systems ecology,’ and having varied applications in, for instance, forestry, fisheries, avian conservation, and environmental history. We end by looking at recent shifts in the British Columbian forest sector, resulting from the unprecedented range and impact of wood-boring beetle populations, where the ecosystem circulates as a highly politicized and contested term. Although we find that humans have figured differently over time and place in relation to the concept’s complex imaginary, it is important to recognize that with the term ecosystem Tansley also was addressing his own question, ‘Is man part of ‘nature’ or not?’ We conclude by highlighting potential connections to the other constructs addressed by other authors in this special issue, and suggest ways that key insights from Tansley’s work might contribute to just ecosystem futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizations (SMOs) play an important role in movement building, however, the particular context and structure of a SMO has a direct impact on its ability to foster and sustain collaboration. In this paper I investigate the unique positioning of provincial networking organizations (PNOs) in Canadian food movements and document their efforts to support alternative food initiatives (AFIs) to interact and act collaboratively for food system change. The research draws on a network survey, over 35 in-depth interviews, site visits, and background information collected in three Canadian provinces to explore the ongoing work necessary for linking together heterogeneous elements without central coordinating mechanisms. I describe the ways that PNOs have established a series of common networking strategies to bring AFIs together across sectors, scales and places: (1) the creation of physical spaces that involve direct contact in particular places; (2) the development of virtual spaces where connections are mediated through digital technologies; and (3) the use of scalar strategies that scale-up local projects to address provincial level policy. I conclude by identifying key areas of contention that arise within the networks, and show that the different structures of the PNOs impact their ability to establish and implement networking strategies. I argue that addressing these challenges must be a preemptive focus in order to sustain networking activity. My contention that contemporary structures of social mobilization require novel strategies and support from networking organizations provides insight for studies of SMOs and movement building more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalization of neo-liberal policy solutions to education problems has gained increasing dominance in recent years. In Ontario, Canada the success of this ideological discourse, particularly during the past decade, has been hard to combat due to the ideal message that it conveys to the general electorate, that is one based on efficiency, accountability and equity of resources across different school boards in the province. Despite protests from many activist groups (i.e. unions, educators, parent-groups) the implementation of such policies has been largely successful. By tracking education policies, statements and events, newspaper articles and other policy reports from 1995 to 2000, this paper seeks to understand the nature of its success during the early years of restructuring. I argue that part of the success lies in understanding the techniques and strategies of implementation or the process of rationalization. I argue that policies formulated at one spatial level operate quite differently at another and the spatial disjunctures that arise as a result of this process lead to the continued success of neo-liberal ideologies and inequalities in education. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper explores spatial changes to knowledge transfer by Canadian and American corporate networks from 1976 to 1996. Results support facets of a World Cities approach for Canada. Toronto lies at the top of the hierarchy, while Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver fall into a third tier of specialized regional cities. The American knowledge network also possesses facets of the world cities approach. The world city, New York, lies at the top of the hierarchy. Further down, Chicago is a specialized national city, while a number of regional centers have emerged to play a larger role over the twenty-year study period. A third tier of cities has emerged to play the critical role of specialized regional cities. This geographical phenomenon can be explained in terms of industry, headquarters locations, and network maturity. Finance, insurance and real estate, as well as “other manufacturing” are three sectors of the economy that are prominent in the network. In Canada, these sectors have increasingly centralized in Toronto while decentralizing in the United States. Similarly, the headquarters location of American firms is decentralizing from New York and Chicago, while Canadian headquarters continue to be centralized in Toronto. Finally, results indicate that the potential for knowledge transfer depends upon maturity of the system under investigation. The mature US network with a large pool of qualified business individuals is better suited for knowledge transfer at the regional level. The Canadian network is less developed and not appropriate for regional systems of knowledge transfer. The result is a Canadian corporate knowledge threshold that encompasses the entire country while a number of much smaller corporate knowledge thresholds appear across the United States. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Toronto’s quest to host the Summer Olympic Games has dominated both contemporary planning discourse and practice. For some, the pursuit of the games embodies Toronto’s transformation into a ‘competitive’ global city. Relatively unexplored in this discourse are the contradictory roles that labour plays in contemporary urban development. I argue that the new labour geography can provide some interesting insights into such processes. Specifically, labour geographers have given workers with divergent interests greater agency in shaping economic landscapes and have noted the multi-scalar organisation of labour. The paper looks at the contradictory and conflicting positions held by different labour unions in Toronto toward the city’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The case study suggests that labour is an active agent in processes shaping contemporary Toronto and support the bid for complex reasons ranging from the promise of jobs to potential future organising opportunities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]