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This article argues that public debt financing facilitated the appropriation of the territories of Indigenous nations in the British settler colonies and does so through a detailed examination of Prince Edward Island's public debt. The island's government used public debt financing as a technique to direct capital into the colony, but to receive loans, the colonial government first needed credit. Settler-colonial credit derived from colonial governments' claiming the territories of Indigenous nations as government assets. This history highlights the deeply racial characteristics embedded in the expansion of global public debt financing that characterized finance capitalism beginning in the 1820s. In this way, the unique history of the island and its "land question" can be placed into the broader global context of debt markets and processes of racial capital. Specifically, the 1853 Land Purchase Act used public borrowing to purchase lands from British landowners so that the island's government could hold the land title. British landowners had their ownership rights secured despite the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties that guaranteed the Mi'kmaq nation rights to their territory, which included Epekwitk, what the British named Prince Edward Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bac kground: The Government of Canada's Online Streaming Act attempts to incorporate online streaming services into the "single system" of the Broadcasting Act. The legislation has been heavily criticized for a variety of reasons, and constructive debate has been hampered by the lack of a clearly defined policy rationale or public interest objective--in large part because the term "broadcasting" is ill-defined in the internet context. Analysis : This article applies Georgist political economy to reinterpret Dallas Smythe's concept of the "audience commodity" for the purpose of integrating emergent theories about the economics of attention and freedom of speech in the context of broadcasting and online media regulation. The principal argument is that a resource-centric view of human attention creates a technology-neutral conceptual basis for determining the scope of what is and is not media broadcasting. Conclusions and implications : The conceptual framework developed aligns the audience commodity concept with the contemporary business reality of content creators and helps draw some defining lines around the concept of "broadcasting" in the era of Internet platforms. Transitioning the fundamental basis for the definition of "broadcasting" from one of transmission methods to one of controlling the bottlenecks of attention would make it far easier to construct meaningful legislation in the public interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incarcerated workers across Canadian prisons have organized and conducted strike actions. These actions, however, have been rejected by the Canadian state, on the basis that the incarcerated workers are not legally employees. The court ruling (Guérin et al. v. Canada 2018), while accepting evidence of the prisoners' material hardships from their low pay and from reprisals for striking, excluded them from the legal protections of employees and thus devalued the prisoners' labour. The selforganizing efforts reveal the levels of inequality experienced by incarcerated workers in the ruling order of global apartheid, "in which race and mobility feature as primary variables for which heightened security and militarization are the answer" (Besteman 2020, 1). This article discusses the effects of prisoners' organizing in the larger context of social justice. In so doing it examines cultural texts that document interactions between organizers inside and outside prisons and their contribution toward alternatives to carceral cultures. This article argues that the cultural production by prisoners and their supporters express the conditions in which prisoner selforganizing is necessary for larger social transformation. The creation and nurturing of collective relationships with one another, both within and across prison walls, clarify common grounds for liberation struggles, and connect envisioned freedoms to overthrow the various forces that enclose communities and hold significant numbers of us captive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what globalization means for the relationship between Medicare and Canadian identity. Typical accounts of this relationship explain it as either the result of deep-seated Canadian values, or as the result of government action in the postwar era. Starting from where the second group leaves off, this article explores how the Medicare identity was the result of very specific capitalist property relations that are now fading. The article begins with an analysis of the origins of modern national identities, linking them to the transformation of property relations that characterized the transition to capitalism. It then focuses on the rise of social rights and how these were used to craft social solidarity among disparate individuals and groups in Canada. The next section focuses on globalization and the shift to neoliberalism. The article concludes with a reflection on what the demise of Medicare might mean for Canadian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comment by Doyon, Bergeron, and Tamini (2018) criticizes the approach and the results of a study by Cardwell, Lawley, and Xiang (2015) that quantifies the distributional effects that Canada's supply management regime imposes on consumers. In this reply, we show that the main empirical result of Cardwell et al.—the degree of regressive distributional effects—is robust to alternative modelling choices and to alternative counterfactual price scenarios. We present new food price comparisons between Canada and the United States, showing that significant price premiums for supply-managed products persist under different exchange rates. Contrary to the results in Doyon et al., we find no evidence of systematic price premiums for non-supply-managed food products. Our new price comparisons highlight the shortcomings in the price comparisons in Doyon et al. and corroborate the results in Cardwell et al. Finally, we reject suggestions by Doyon et al. that our results are affected by research bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unpaid care work undertaken by family members and friends often continues when relatives move to long-term residential care (LTRC). Using a feminist political economy approach, this paper explores the labour and skills of family/friend carers—most of whom are women—in LTRC. Data were gathered using the rapid site-switching ethnography method, which involved document analysis, qualitative interviews with 25 family members, and observations in eight LTRC facilities across Canada. We present five themes, developed through a thematic analysis of interviews and observations, to give insight into the labour and skills of these unpaid carers in LTRC: maintaining relationships, navigating the system to assert residents’ needs, supplementing care, assisting other residents, and working for change. In our analysis, we tease out complexities between family/friend care work in practice and the descriptions of their involvement in resident and family handbooks—guiding documents that serve as touchstones for communication between LTRC facilities and families. We note discrepancies between the impoverished descriptions of family engagement in handbooks and the complex labour undertaken by many family/friend carers in LTRC. These discrepancies reinforce the invisibility of unpaid care and an undervaluing of the skills involved in this labour. To conclude, we suggest an addition to handbooks that could serve to better recognize the involvement of family members and friends in LTRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors show the relevance of a dialogue between several critical perspectives in order to properly analyse the digital information and communications technology (ICT). If the political economy of communication is relevant to highlight the inequalities and power relations in the organization of communication systems, this approach is limited when it comes to taking into account the autonomy of the social agents. They propose therefore to articulate in the analysis the structures of domination with the emancipatory potentialities through the combination of political economy of communication and cultural studies, without ignoring the materiality of the technologies. This would contribute to a critical intelligibility of the overall economy of digital technologies in the network age [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Marx's analysis as the point of departure, and drawing on a range of concrete examples, this article argues that rather than concentrating on the "new" forms of social and economic intercourse animated by digital media, and especially internet-enabled mobile devices, critical analysis needs to trace the ways in which digital consumption is intensifying the progressive integration of marketing, marketplaces, and forms of payment that have been central to the generation of surplus value and the maintenance of "business as usual," from the emergence of the modern consumer system at the turn of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant processes of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept of the "prosumer" is extended beyond notions of voluntary participation in Web 2.0 to the political economy of energy use. Within this broad framework we investigate national and local level "smart grid" campaigns and projects. The "smartening" of the energy grid, we find, is both an ideological construct and a technological rationalization for facilitating capital accumulation through data collection, analysis, segmentation of consumers, and variable electricity pricing schemes to standardize social practices within and outside the home. We look at BC Hydro as one illustration of where such practices are being instituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy creates health inequalities among Canadians by inequitably distributing the social determinants of health (SDOH). Political decisions by authorities bring about these public policies, yet to date there has been little resistance to these decisions by the Canadian public. This article proposes a research agenda for investigating why this might be the case by considering a) Canada's identification as a liberal welfare state; b) the relative power and influence of the corporate and business sector, labour, and civil society in shaping SDOH-related public policy-making; c) how population health researchers and public health practitioners understand health inequalities and their role in reducing them; and d) the public's understanding of SDOH and public policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are differing interpretations among health researchers about how income inequality leads to health inequalities, but there is consensus that income inequality is cause for concern. Alarms have also been sounded by public policy researchers and institutes, which see income inequality as having a corrosive effect on society by hindering economic growth, dampening political participation, and eroding quality of life. This article examines how various public policy models explain and promote policy change to reduce income inequality. The focus of this article is on income inequality, but its raison d'être is the assumption that income inequality is an important driver of the health inequalities that both diminish and prematurely end life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rise of formatted reality production and consumption in Canada, paying particular attention to their impact on global and local industry and culture. Attention is paid to how cultural production in the Canadian television industry is implicated in contemporary global and national political economic contexts. The study utilizes a political economic framework in order to situate industry reports, conferences/trade shows, ratings data and interviews with industry members. The overall objective is to better understand the Canadian landscape of original reality television, Canadian format adaptations, and imported formatted American format adaptations. At issue are funding mechanisms, technology, policy, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the political economy of procurement and purchasing policies, specifically at the sub-national level. It frames these policies historically and philosophically as struggling to articulate an alternative to capitalism while working within capitalist contexts. It then examines the proposed trade agreement between Canada and the European Union, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), as an exemplar of this struggle, concluding with three policy suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New media have expanded the size of the media economy without cannibalizing the economic base of traditional media. The current woes facing some media primarily reflect a short-term, cyclical decline in advertising revenue caused by the economic downturn, the accumulated results of media consolidation, and the financialization of the media. The latter process saw vast sums of capital investment in the creation of massive media conglomerates based on wildly optimistic projections where future profits would grow faster than the expanding network media economy and exceed the high profits that characterized the media in the past. When that rosy scenario failed to materialize, some media companies were indeed in trouble and saddled with unsustainable debts, but there has been no crisis of the media per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop an approach for normative engagement by academic criminologists through the test case of international policing-reform assistance. By examining some of the known controversies and difficulties associated with international policing-reform assistance, I illustrate the practical policy utility of Foucauldian genealogical analytic inquiry. I argue that the insights and capacities for lateral thinking opened up through this approach are usefully “brought to bear” by taking a page from Jürgen Habermas to institutionalize discursive space and thereby democratic experimentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the four original Canadian provinces, the politics of taxation were a central issue in the struggle to form Confederation, as they were in Newfoundland, the tax-adverse colony that rejected it. For many participants in the Confederation debate, the key issue was the optimal size of the state as a proportion of total economic activity. Janet Ajzenstat, Peter J. Smith, and Ian McKay have argued that Confederation represented a victory for the ideology of liberal individualism that underpins capitalism. The position taken here is that these scholars are mistaken about the ideological nature of Confederation, and that Confederation, instead, was supported by many colonists who were sympathetic to a relatively interventionist, or statist, approach to capitalist development. The anti-confederate camp of the time, by contrast, included the strongest supporters of classical liberal values such as free trade and low taxes. The struggle over Confederation involved a battle between a staunchly individualist economic philosophy and a comparatively collectivist view of the state's proper role in the economy. Consequently, it is far more accurate to describe 1867 as the birth of a Tory-interventionist economic order in Canada, rather than of a liberal one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]