National Network for Equitable Library Service

"Canada's first woman trained for combat, a decorated officer in the "Van Doos" the legendary Royal 22nd Regiment, comes up against a system of institutional sexism. Throughout her training, Sandra Perron was repeatedly identified as top of her class, but was also subject to "pranks" that included stripping her uniform of insignia (which is a not-so-subtle way of informing her that her platoon did not have her back). The lessons she learned, however, weren't all negative - through several deployments, including Bosnia and Croatia, she forged lasting friendships with men and women.

In 1831, eighteen-year-old Oonagh Corcoran emigrates with her sister from southern Ireland to Upper Canada. In the deep folds of cool, green forest off the vast inland sea of Lake Ontario, she believes she has found paradise -- only to discover that the New World harbours its own horrible injustices when she meets a fugitive slave from Virginia named Chauncey Taylor. Love grows between them as Chauncey slowly reveals his terrible past to Oonagh, reliving the pain and tragedy he and his family suffered as slaves.

English novelist Guy Boyd's publisher forces him, against his inclination, to write a biography of the late Gabriel Brown, an eminent dealer in Old Masters. From the start, the project rattles the young Englishman, who has little interest in the Canadian-born connoisseur. As he settles into living in the dead man's house, interviewing his friends and lovers, Guy becomes fascinated with the process of life writing. He even travels to Canada to research the existence of a man who determinedly left no clues behind.

Shannon Carew has a complicated relationship with history. Born a Newfoundler, she has spent years on the other side of the country in order to erase her past and set down new roots. But when an opportunity to work with Newfoundland and Labrador's archaeological sites appears, Shannon cannot resist and decides to return home. What awaits her is unexpected - for among the threads of history, and the tangles of her old life, is the chance to discover a new connection.--inside front cover.

Few moments in Canadian history are as intriguing as the political battle between Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the “Gang of Eight” provincial premiers who opposed his plans to “patriate” Canada’s constitution from Britain. Patriation and Its Consequences revisits these constitutional negotiations, including the personalities, visions, and political struggles that shaped the resulting constitutional agreement.

Following significant increases in women's electoral representation in the 1980s and '90s, progress has stalled. Today, there are only a few more women in Canada's parliament and legislatures than a decade ago. What has happened to the representational gains for women and why does gender parity remain so elusive? To answer these questions, Stalled provides a detailed road map of women's political representation as candidates, office-holders, cabinet ministers, party leaders, and as representatives of the Crown at all levels of government across Canada.

Income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports; far more than the actions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers, it is these conditions that make the greatest difference in our health. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician in the inner city of Saskatoon, Mozambique, and rural Saskatchewan, Dr. Ryan Meili uses scholarship and patient stories to explore health determinants and democratic reforms that could create a truly healthy society.

Health activist, scholar, award-winning journalist, and cancer survivor Sharon Batt investigates the relationship between patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry as well as the contentious role of pharma funding. Over the past several decades, a gradual reduction in state funding has pressured patient groups into forming private-sector partnerships. This analysis of Canada’s breast cancer movement from 1990 to 2010 shows that the resulting power imbalance undermined the groups’ ability to put patients’ interests ahead of those of the funders.

With her linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the Great War. This book tells the story of the nearly 2,000 women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” overseas and at home. Well-educated and middle-class but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit.

We Interrupt This Program tells the story of how Indigenous people are using media tactics or interventions in art, film, television, and journalism to disrupt Canada’s national narratives and rewrite them from Indigenous perspectives. Accounts of strategically chosen moments such as survivor testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission combined with conversations with CBC reporter Duncan McCue and artists such as Kent Monkman bring to life Brady and Kelly’s powerful argument that media tactics can be employed to change Canadian institutions from within.