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With prevailing global neoliberal ideology, teachers and teacher unions must respond to market-driven governmental policies intended to undermine public education. In Saskatchewan, Canada, teacher activists feel compelled to both counter neoliberal discourses and proactively advocate for equitable, high-quality public education. To explore acts of resistance, semi-structured interviews with four teacher activists were employed to understand how teachers enact advocacy within their union and through grassroots activism. Harding et al.'s (2018) framework of alliances, assemblages, and affects informed data analysis, which included the creation of narrative vignettes characterizing teacher voice. This paper specifically discusses findings which suggest that affect, or how emotions do things, presented teachers with new potentialities for shaping educational policy.

Background: The purpose of this observational study is to characterize the use of social media content pertaining to global surgery. Methods: A search for public posts on social media related to global surgery was performed over a 3-month window, from January 1st, 2019, to March 31st, 2019. Two public domains were included in the search: Instagram and Twitter. Posts were selected by filtering for one hashtag: #GlobalSurgery. A binary scoring system was used for media format, perspective of the poster, timing of the post, tone, and post content. Data were analyzed using Chi-squared tests with significance set to p < 0.05. Results: Overall, 2633 posts with the hashtag #GlobalSurgery were publicly shared on these two social media platforms over the 3-month period. Of these, 2272 (86.3%) referenced content related to global surgery and were original posts. Physicians and other health professionals authored a majority (60.5%, 1083/1788) of posts on Twitter, whereas organizations comprised a majority of the posts on Instagram (59.9%, 290/484). Posts either had a positive (50.2%, 1140/2272) or neutral (49.6%, 1126/2272) tone, with only 0.3% or 6/2272 of posts being explicitly negative. The content of the posts varied, but most frequently (43.4%, 986/2272) focused on promoting communication and engagement within the community, followed by educational content (21.3%, 486/2272), advertisements (18.8%, 427/2272), and published research (13.2%, 299/2272). The majority of global surgery posts originated from the USA, UK, or Canada (67.6%, 1537/2272), followed by international organizations (11.5%, 261/2272). Chi-squared analysis comparing Instagram with Twitter performed examining media content, tone, perspective, and content, finding statistically significant differences (p < 0.001) the two platforms for each of the categories. Conclusion: The online social media community with respect to global surgery engagement is predominantly composed of surgeons and health care professionals, focused primarily on promoting dialogue within the online community. Social media platforms may provide a scalable tool that can augment engagement between global surgeons, with remaining opportunity to foster global collaboration, community engagement, education and awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien is the property of Gesellschaft fuer Kanada Studien e.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper I will disentangle the real-existing suburbia from some of its enduring myths. I will do this mostly through a discussion of densities. Based on international experiences but also encouraged by recent developments in Canadian suburbs, I will argue that densities in suburbs have always been mixed and diverse. But the emphasis on a particular form of US-style individualized suburbanization has led to a focus on a cultural politics of social conservatism, property ownership and privilege which has obscured not just alternative social and built forms in suburbia, but has disempowered other, more progressive, labour and collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking forms of everyday suburbanism and the politics that result from it. It has also obscured some of the pathways through which post-suburban metropolitanism has to find solutions to some of the most pressing social, economic and environmental issues we confront in urban regions today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we propose the notion of real existing 'lived' regionalism as a rejoinder to the normative and ideological debates around new regionalism. Regional forms have shown little convergence in this age of globalized regionalization. Instead of an ideational construct or set of predictable practices, we argue that regionalism is a contested product of discourses (talk), territorial relationships (territory) and technologies (material and of power). The concept of real existing regionalism confronts the tensions between the discursive constructions and normative interventions characterizing much current regionalist debate and the territorial politics and technologies reflecting, generating and directing new state spatial strategic choices. The essay demonstrates the utility of the real existing regionalism framework through an analysis of the greenbelt, transport planning and post- suburbanization in Southern Ontario. We argue that regulatory institutions capture the Toronto region in a mix of rhetorical and technological change that complies with neither preconceived notions of regionalization nor the pessimism of total regional dysfunctionality. Rather, the lived experience of regionalization illuminates the emergent assemblages, multiplicity of everyday flows and ongoing multiscalar negotiations of diverse communities that produce the real existing region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the urban studies literature, urban politics is usually considered in two distinct locations: the city (often understood in quite conventional centralist ways) and the suburb (understood as spatially peripheral and politically at odds with the central city). At the metropolitan scale, the two types of urban politics are discussed in relation to one another. More recently, the metropolitan scale of urban politics has been expanded to regional dimensions. We pose the question of location of urban politics from a specific deficit in the geography of centre, suburb and metropolis. We argue that in today's regional political socio-spatiality, politics will have to be found 'in-between' the old lines of demarcation. Following Tom Sieverts' (2003) advice to look at the 'in-between' cities that are neither old downtown nor new suburb but complex urban landscapes of mixed density, use and urbanity, we reveal the political vacuum that is at the heart of the urban region today. Using the politics of infrastructure in Toronto as our empirical example, we will show that vulnerabilities and risks for urban populations in that Canadian metropolis' in-between city are co-generated by the failure of conventional political spaces and processes to capture the connectivities threaded through those places that are in-between the centre and exurbia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neorealist and neoliberal institutionalist explanations for the state and future of the Arctic region dominate the Arctic debate in international relations. While both schools focus on different aspects concerning the current and future state of Arctic affairs – neorealism evokes a confrontational rush for the Arctic’s resources, whereas neoliberal institutionalism propagates the necessary reform of the institutional system governing Arctic issues – both share the underlying assumption of significant and rising stakes towards Arctic commodities. However, this article argues that this debate has hitherto failed to substantiate the actual stakes of the main actors involved. Consequently, many studies make grandiloquent statements about prospects of cooperation and conflict and the appropriate institutional framework for the Arctic region, based on only limited empirical support. This article aims to fill this gap by analysing the Arctic oil and gas interests of the five Arctic littoral states (Russia, USA, Canada, Norway and Denmark/Greenland). The analysis shows greatly different levels of interests towards the High North among the Arctic states. The findings make it possible to make more credible statements about the likelihood of confrontation over Arctic resources and necessary institutional adjustments. The evidence shows that the often-evoked issue of geopolitical rush for Arctic resources is unlikely to eventuate. Nonetheless, there remain institutional challenges for the protection of the fragile Arctic ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The government of Ontario, Canada, has passed legislation to protect large parts of the southern portions of the province from most development. An extensive plan for a Greenbelt that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area and other regional growth centers was introduced. This article looks at the new policy as a spatial strategy that shifts the scales of environmental and growth management policy in Ontario. The legislation also sets the framework for a state spatial project; that is, a set of changes in how the regional state internally operates. The current Greenbelt legislation is a new step in a longer term development by which governments in Ontario have attempted to regulate the relationships between cities and regions, town and hinterland. Overlapping strongly with what is usually called the Toronto bioregion between the Niagara Escarpment, Oak Ridges Moraine, and Lake Ontario, the Greenbelt reorganizes space in southern Ontario in ways that would further ecosystem policies and practices in the area. Theoretically guided by newer debates on rescaling and regionalism, and based on close reading of the planning and policy documents on the Greenbelt as well as a series of expert interviews, we argue that the current Greenbelt legislation is an act of up-scaling traditional urban-regional regulation in southern Ontario, which we shall call extended metropolitanization. Such rescaling recasts traditional political conflicts in new terms. We conclude that extended metropolitanization in southern Ontario has been a process that has brought nature, the state, and governance together into a new regional sustainability fix. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that a new landscape of urbanization takes shape in Canadian cities. In-between the old downtowns and the new suburbs of urban Canada, a hitherto underexposed and under-researched mix of residential, commercial, industrial, educational, agricultural and ecologically protected areas and land uses has become the home and workplace, and increasingly also the playspace of most people in Canada. The article examines this new landscape through the lens of the specific risks and vulnerabilities experienced by its inhabitants and users. Using a propane gas explosion in Toronto in the summer of 2008 as an example, we demonstrate that the ‘in-between city’ is a space of great complexity, which has grown haphazardly and in a contradictory fashion, where, in contrast to the archetype of inner city and suburb, no clear spatial imaginary has been guiding urban development. This leads to always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous proximities between various and competing uses and social practices. This is nowhere as clear as it is in the splintered urban infrastructures that service this landscape or use the in-between city's space to service other adjacent or distant purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the transformation of metropolitan institutions in two Canadian city-regions (Toronto and Montreal). Taking Neil Brenner's argument about new state spaces as a starting point, we discuss comparatively how governance restructuring in recently consolidated Toronto and Montreal has been part of more general changes to the architecture of governance in Canada. We look specifically at changes to the mediation channels between civil society and metropolitan institutions. A "nationally" scaled comparison, this project must take into account the specific differences between Francophone and Anglophone Canada, between the different civic traditions in Montreal and Toronto and different traditional significance attributed to the scale and nature of metropolitan governance structures and variously scaled agency in both cities. This makes our case in many ways more like an international comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto, which killed forty-four and made hundreds sick, tested the multicultural model often presented as the reason for making that city a livable global metropolis. Billed as the "Chinese disease," SARS connected seamlessly with previous periods of racializing disease assumed to originate from migrants and foreigners in North America. Yet when restaurants in the city's three Chinatowns remained empty for weeks and close contact with Chinese citizens was avoided by others in public, the dynamics that unfolded also tied in with a new development in Toronto: the formation of the global city. As news on the SARS outbreak spread and the intricate details of travel patterns and infection-pathways became clearer, the relationships of Toronto diasporic communities and business ties with other globalizing cities like Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Singapore became obvious, and Toronto's vulnerability in the network of global flows of finance, culture, commodities and people was exposed. Our paper provides a narrative of the racialization of infectious disease in the context of Toronto's multiculturalism and the region's formation as a major global city. Providing evidence of racialization in public discourse, everyday practices and institutional policies, we advance the hypothesis that the SARS outbreak strained the usually happy appearance of this particular multicultural urban fabric of diversity. This analysis is part of a long-term research project at York University on SARS and the Global City, which addresses the network connectivity of Toronto in the global city hierarchy; the influence of infectious disease; and the re-scaling of the health governance system in Toronto in the wake of the SARS outbreak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which environmental justice (EJ)--in its myriad forms--has developed as a concrete and material challenge to the dominant (neo-liberal) discourse of ecological modernisation. The concept of 'environmental justice' is problematised and the fast conceptual transfer beyond the borders of the US, where it originated. The shift in the concept of environmental justice is explored in two urban environments in Toronto, Canada, and Hermanus, South Africa, with a specific emphasis on urban water policies and politics and their relation to concerns of environmental justice. The term 'environmental justice' in the context of urban environments must be defined within this context for each site under study; the paper argues against a universalising use of the term. In localising the term 'environmental justice', it is not proposed that its use be restricted to a specific site, but that its use is embedded in a multiscalar urban world specific to a particular site. It is argued specifically that what is and is not environmentally just cannot be discussed merely from the point of view of localised differentials in the exposure to environmental costs or benefits. Instead, the articulated scales of justice are explored in and among the case study cities. It is argued that in reality, injustice perceptions and justice demands are constructed through relative, scale-sensitive political and discursive processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a comparative study of environmental policy making in Toronto and Los Angeles. The study was intended to explain how social formations at the urban scale play an increasingly important role in constructing environmental policy and practice as articulated in documents, rhetoric and political actions. It is suggested that environmental policy is embedded in broader and more long-term political goals, and that ecological discourse is not only about the environment but also brings together various social projects under the environmental protection flag. The four case studies— in Toronto, contaminated soil and the Don River were examined, and in Los Angeles air pollution and the Los Angeles River—revealed considerable variation but all reflected an agenda of ecological modernisation. In particular it was found that demands for maintaining or improving environmental integrity and coherence have lost legitimacy to concerns for efficiency, competitiveness, marketability, flexibility and development. Similarly, market driven regulation and an openness to civil society have played a major role in transforming policy making apparatuses. In contrast, the cases revealed that relationships between nature and society go beyond those expected in ecological modernisation theory and include both social ecology and urban ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that urban neoliberalism can best be understood as a contradictory re–regulation of urban everyday life. Based on an analysis of neoliberalism as a new political economy and as a new set of technologies of power, the paper argues that the urban everyday is the site and product of the neoliberal transformation. Governments and corporations play a key role in redefining the conditions of everyday life through neoliberal policies and business practices. Part of this reorientation of everydayness, however, involves new forms of resistance and opposition, which include the kernel of a possible alternative urbanism. The epochal shift from a Keynesian–Fordist–welfarist to a post–Fordist–workfarist society is reflected in a marked restructuring of everyday life. The shift changes the socioeconomic conditions in cities. It also includes a reorientation of identities, social conflicts, and ideologies towards a more explicitly culturalist differentiation. Social difference does not disappear, but actually becomes more pronounced; however, it gets articulated in or obscured by cultural terms of reference. The paper looks specifically at Toronto, Ontario, as a case study. An analysis of the explicitly neoliberal politics of the province’s Progressive Conservative (Tory) government under Mike Harris, first elected in 1995, demonstrates the pervasive re–regulation of everyday life affecting a wide variety of people in Toronto and elsewhere. Much of this process is directly attributable to provincial policies, a consequence of Canada’s constitutional system, which does not give municipalities autonomy but makes them “creatures of provinces.” However, the paper also argues that Toronto’s elites have aided and abetted the provincial “Common–Sense” Revolution through neoliberal policies and actions on their own. The paper concludes by outlining the emergence of new instances of resistance to the politics of hegemony and catastrophe of urban neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses recent developments in urban planning in the City of Toronto. A municipality of 2.4 million inhabitants that makes up the inner half of the Greater Toronto Area, the City of Toronto was consolidated from seven municipalities in 1998. Planning practice, discourse, and “vision” in the new City of Toronto are shaped by the city’s bid for the 2008 Olympics, related proposals for waterfront redevelopment, and preparations for a new official plan. In the context of comparative debates on trends in local governance, we see current planning strategies in Toronto as one of several strategic sites in which Toronto is consolidated into a “competitive city.” Historically, the formation of the competitive city in Toronto must be seen as a result of the impasse of postwar metropolitan planning in the early 1970s, the sociospatial limitations of downtown urban reform politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberal restructuring and rescaling of the local state in the 1990s. Theoretically, we draw on the global city research paradigm, regime and regulation theory, and neo-Gramscian urban political theory to suggest that planning the competitive city signals shifts in the sociopolitical alliances, ideological forms, and dominant strategies that regulate global-city formation. These constellations and strategies threaten to reconstitute bourgeois hegemony in Toronto with a series of claims to urbanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the determinants of Canadian unemployment in a framework incorporating demand and supply-side variables such as the interest rate, taxation, foreign activity, minimum wages, union density, demographic pressure, unemployment insurance, and terms of trade. Macroeconomic and structural causes of unemployment.

The article discusses governance restructuring in Los Angeles, California and Toronto, Ontario. In Toronto an aggressively neoliberal provincial Ontario government decreed an amalgamation of six individual municipal governments and one regional administration. The consolidationist argument, often associated with dirigiste government and compact central city ideals, has now become the means of choice to integrate regional blubber belt hegemony in more than one jurisdiction in Ontario. In Toronto and Los Angeles, what appear to be limited struggles over local jurisdiction and administration of service delivery, are struggles over the urban dimensions of a globalized work, at least in part. Amalgamation and secession become fighting metaphors of change in the war of position in which urban actors find themselves in the age of the global city. Although the old City of Toronto, had retained its hegemony in the region since the introduction of Metro government exactly because it has become one, albeit the strongest, player in a regionally federated system of metropolitan governance, its position had also been waning in the final years of the Metro model.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the new Ontario guidelines for the clean-up of contaminated sites using Toronto as an empirical case. The contention of the paper is that Ontario's new soil clean-up policy is the product of a set of embedded understandings about the economy, about the environment and about deep interconnections between the environment and the economy. These understandings are, to a large degree, specifically local. We contextualise the new guidelines by arguing that they contribute to restructuring the political economy of Toronto from an industrial to a global city. The analysis is based on, among other sources, a series of interviews with policy makers, scientists, bankers, insurance representatives and other knowledgeable individuals in the debate on polluted soil clean-up. Substantively, the paper focuses on the introduction of various risk-assessment processes into the debate on contaminated sites. The paper concludes that these processes need to be made subject to democratic rather than purely technocratic processes of evaluation and decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the Canadian-United States unemployment rate gap that has persisted since 1982. Details on the two stages of the gap; Methodology used to gather the information; Summarization of the findings.

Derives approaches to modeling money demand functions in Canada. Estimation of the partial adjustment/adaptive expectations and rational expectations; Estimated error correction mechanism formulations; Implications for the conduct of monetary policy; Categories of the causes for the unsatisfactory performance of the demand for money.

Copyright of Canadian Public Policy is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Offers an introduction to the articles featured in the September 2005 issue of the "International Journal of Urban and Regional Research." Increase in the multicultural diversity of cities in Europe; Regulation of cultural diversity in Canada; Exaggeration of the virtues of multiculturalism.

The Alberta oil-sands bitumen deposits comprise one of the largest sources of hydrocarbon in the world, and have emerged as the fastest-growing, soon to be dominant, source of crude oil in Canada. Although the oil industry has made great strides in improving the effectiveness of gathering this resource, the main challenge that remains is the large quantity of energy needed in the process of extracting the oil and upgrading it to commercial levels. However, over the past few years, developments in oil- sands extraction technology, and developments in CANDU technology through the advanced CANDU reactor, (ACR™), have converged so that a practical, economical match of nuclear energy to the oil sands is now available. This paper describes recent studies by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) and by the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) to look at the adaptation of the ACR design for use in the oil sands, in particular with regard to economic viability. Issues raised in these studies are discussed, along with priorities for further work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central component of evaluating others as sources of information involves estimating how much they know about different domains: one might be quite knowledgeable about a certain domain (e.g., clocks), but relatively ignorant about another (e.g., birds). Estimating one's domain knowledge often involves making inferences from specific instances or demonstrations, with some suggesting broader knowledge than others. For instance, an American who demonstrates knowledge of an unfamiliar country like Djibouti likely knows more about geography as a whole compared to an American who demonstrates knowledge of a more familiar country like Canada. The current studies investigate the extent to which one potentially salient kind of knowledge - mechanistic knowledge - signals greater domain knowledge as a whole. Across four developmental studies, we find that both adults and children as young as six think that those who possess mechanistic knowledge about a basic level artifact category (e.g., clocks) are more knowledgeable about its superordinate level category (e.g., machines) than those with factual non-mechanistic knowledge (Studies 1a and 2a). We also find an analogous, yet delayed pattern with biological categories (Studies 1b and 2b). Together, these studies demonstrate that even young children, who possess little mechanistic knowledge themselves, nevertheless have a sophisticated sense of how knowledge of mechanism generalizes across related categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Sleep disorders are commonly linked to various health conditions, although it remains unclear to what degree they are linked with overall mortality. We compared mortality in different self-reported sleep disorders in a large population-based prospective study., Methods: In this case-control study within the CLSA cohort, participants completed a questionnaire at baseline (2011-2015) measuring overall sleep satisfaction, daily sleep duration, sleep-onset and sleep-maintenance insomnia, daytime somnolence, REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), restless leg syndrome (RLS), and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The vital status of participants was assessed in July 2019. Baseline sleep problems of participants who died (cases) were compared to those who survived (controls). For each case, five age/sex-matched controls were selected. Binary logistic regression was used to estimate the association between sleep symptoms and mortality, adjusting for age, sex, marital status, province, education, alcohol consumption, smoking, caffeine, and body mass index. In a complementary model, anxiety and depression were also added., Results: Among 30,097 participants at baseline, 974 deaths were reported in 2019 (60.7 % male, age = 72.3 ± 9.4 years). In the initial analysis, mortality cases reported more baseline sleep-maintenance insomnia (12.1 % vs. 8.0 %, Adjusted OR[95%CI] = 1.62[1.15,2.29]), daytime somnolence (2.4 % vs. 1.1 %, AOR = 2.70[1.34,5.44]), and higher possible RLS (16.4 % vs. 12.4 %, AOR = 1.50[1.09,2.05]). They were also more likely to screen positive for possible OSA (33.8 % vs. 24.2 %, AOR = 1.32[1.07,1.64]); however, this effect was not related to core apnea symptoms. Sleep durations exceeding 10 h/day were also associated with increased mortality (3.4 % vs. 1.9 %, AOR = 1.83[1.04,3.24]). Other sleep symptoms/disorders, such as sleep-onset insomnia (7.3 % vs. 4.3 %, AOR = 1.54 [1.00,2.37]), possible RBD (5.3 % vs. 5.1 %, AOR = 1.02[0.62,1.69]), and overall sleep dissatisfaction (26.5 % vs. 22.6 %, AOR = 1.14[0.93,1.41]) were not different among these groups. After adding anxiety and depression to the adjustment model, all differences attenuated to become statistically non-significant, except for daytime somnolence disorder. When stratified by sex, the association between sleep disorders and mortality was only observed in women, with men showing no association., Discussion: We confirm a relationship between numerous sleep disorders and mortality. This effect is most evident in women, and appears to be strongly related to co-existing anxiety and depression., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: R.B. Postuma reports grants and personal fees from Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé (FRQS), grants from Canadian Institute of Health Research, grants from Michael J. Fox Foundation, grants from Webster Foundation, personal fees from Biogen, personal fees from Curasen, personal fees from Novartis, personal fees from Eisai, other from Parkinson Canada, grants from National Institute of Health, personal fees from International Parkinson and Movement Disorders Society, personal fees from Merck, personal fees from Vaxxinity, personal fees from Bristol Myers Squebb, personal fees from Clinilabs, personal fees from Ventus, personal fees from Korro, personal fees from Calico, outside the submitted work., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)