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This review article focuses on perspectives from Canadian Indigenous literature about decolonizing education on behalf of Aboriginal populations. The research informs accountability, education, and policy in Canada and globally. Components of colonization parsed in sources are tribal injustice, dispossession, discrimination, conflict, and miseducation. Experiential interventions for decolonizing curriculum, classrooms, and communities are described. Colonialism as a systemic problem to be tackled in education is a takeaway. Accountability in support of futurity is a life-sustaining direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses experiences of teaching Canadian literature in the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, Kenya. For a long time, the University of Nairobi syllabus required that teaching Canadian literature, or any foreign literature for that matter, should be related to an African experience. This paper explores a few possible but unworkable ways on how one could relate teaching Canadian literature to an African experience as a way of establishing its relationship to students in Nairobi, Kenya, which is over 10 000 kilometres away from Canada. On the whole, the paper argues that an effective approach to teaching the literature has been formalist that takes into account fidelity to the nature and function of literature, even as it reveals the universal in the particular that makes the form and content of Canadian literature relevant to Kenyan as well as to African experiences. In the end, the paper points out the past experience of teaching and learning Canadian literature must have been valuable to both student and teacher as two seminars held outside the university demonstrate that Kenyans can relate to it for — after all — literature is universal in the particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) often require lengthy tendering periods that can deter bidders, reduce competition for contracts, and undermine the overall social benefits of PPP procurement. PPP tendering periods in Canada are notably shorter than in other countries with mature PPP markets such as those of the United Kingdom and Ireland. We explore Canadian PPP procurement by using data on 160 PPP projects. By using duration analysis, we find that higher PPP contract values and greater risk transfer are associated with longer tendering periods. In addition, we find significant variation in tendering periods across sectors. We support our analysis with a review of the extant literature on Canadian PPPs and interviews with PPP professionals. This identified other important factors such as securing necessary approvals before commencing procurement, creating specialized PPP procurement agencies, contract standardization, lower information and design requirements, avoidance of additional bid stages, and the use of substantial completion payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon ethnographic research in Winnipeg, Manitoba, we complicate simplistic epidemiological and sexual health discourses that position African newcomer teen girls and young women as "at-risk" for HIV/AIDS and other consequences of being sexually active. By tracing the trajectories of sexual health messages and utilizing the concept of assemblage, we seek to account for the ways in which risk is actively made and negotiated in practice by African newcomer youth. By highlighting the perspectives and experiences of participants in relationship to Canadian literature on the subject of sexual risk, culture, and education, we work to counter essentializing, racializing, and pathologizing discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages selected moments in Austin Clarke's literary journey to argue that in spite of his involvement in the development of Canadian literature (CanLit) during the 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian literary establishment continues to pay little critical attention to his contributions. This lack of recognition is specifically evident in recent writings about Canadian literature and the literary figures who spearheaded its development after Canada's Multiculturalism policy of 1971. Canada's becoming officially multicultural required a new narrative of Canada and new literary depictions of Canadians in their national literature, as ethnically diversified but of a single citizenship. I argue that Clarke's legacy as a Black writer should be given more prominence in Canadian institutions because today this legacy is under threat of erasure as the number of Canadian Black voices telling mainstream stories about Black people's experiences is evidently in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines one aspect of Canada's early cultural diplomacy. During the late 1940s, the Department of External Affairs frequently received requests for Canadian books from foreign libraries. At the same time, many officials were eager to promote Canadian culture abroad. The Annual Book Presentation Programme was inaugurated with the intention of creating “repositories of Canadiana” which might stimulate interest in Canada among foreign readers. Although the budget for the program was always modest, over the years the department's book gifts did fulfill their aim, creating a basis for the later growth of Canadian studies in universities abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes literary biography as a genre which contributes to the writing of literary history in a unique way. The analysis of Charlotte Gray's Sisters in the Wilderness (1999), which recounts the life of two of the first major figures in Canadian literature, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, shows how the genre combines personal experience with historical and literary context, thus humanizing history and conferring transcendence to individuality. This is achieved thanks to the literary potential of biography which, out of perspective and tropes, creates harmonic portraits and, ultimately, literary myths. Such creation of myths is crucial for “young” literatures, as is the case of Canadian writing, and Sisters in the Wilderness succeeds in drawing a portrait of these pioneer writers which offers the eye-level view of the beginnings of literary production in English-speaking Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Canadian gay male scholar and activist ponders the transformation in his own thinking about bi male identity and GLBTIQA community politics over time. The author posits a four-stage process of social, legal, and cultural acceptance of sexual minorities and compares the civil-rights progress made by gay men and lesbians to that still being made by bisexuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Canadian graduate student scrutinizes his sexuality in terms of self-image issues and entering the erotic exchange of glances that affirms his sexual nature. The author asks: what is a bisexual self, or a sexual self of any kind, when one doesn't know how to approach men or women, and how does one learn to begin those approaches? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Canadian gay dad, married 51 years, answers the question: Why would a man not stay married simply because he chooses to take a male lover? The author examines the shared values (social justice, family, art, mutual respect and love) that enables "mixed" relationships to thrive and prosper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]