Launch of People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada (ARP).
In 2009, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government changed the contents of the official citizenship guide that is given to all recent immigrants. The new version contained a lot more military history and plenty of information about the monarchy, but little about public programs such as medicare or education, or our rich history of social justice movements. Ignoring the work and democratic struggles of generations of newcomers, it presumes that new immigrants need to be taught how to “take responsibility” for their families. In short, the official guide outlines an exceptionally narrow, conservative view of Canadian politics and society. In People’s Citizenship Guide, a group of progressive scholars offer an alternative citizenship guide: a lively, political, humane—and more honest—alternative to Stephen Harper’s version of the story.
Esyllt Jones studies the history of health, disease, and social movements, and is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Manitoba. Author of Influenza 1918: Disease, Death and Struggle in Winnipeg, she is also a member of the ARP editorial collective.
Adele Perry is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in the Department of History, University of Manitoba. She is the author of On the Edge of Empire, a co-editor of Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, and is working on a book length study of an elite Creole/Metis family and circuits of migration and rule in the nineteenth-century British empire.
Also speaking this evening is contributor Debra Parkes, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba, with more speakers to be announced.
This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Human Rights Research Initiative at the University of Manitoba.
See:
In 2009, Stephen Harper's Conservative government changed the contents of the official citizenship guide that is given to all recent immigrants. The new version contained a lot more mili...
The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 killed as many as fifty million people worldwide and affected the vast majority of Canadians. Yet the pandemic, which came and left in one season, neve...
Mid-nineteenth-centure British Columbia hung precariously at the edge of Britain's literal and symbolic empire. A three to six month sea voyage separated the colony from its imperial hea...
The fourth edition of Rethinking Canada is representative of the most interesting work done in Canadian and women's history. Including sixteen new essays, this volume boasts the stronges...
