National Network for Equitable Library Service

Canadian members of Parliament (MPs) are often dismissed as “trained seals,” helpless to do anything other than take commands from party leaders. Representation in Action challenges this view of MPs and shows that the ways they represent their constituents are as diverse as Canada itself. Royce Koop, Heather Bastedo, and Kelly Blidook examine the activities MPs engage in to represent their ridings and determine what accounts for differences in style and agency.

Migrant workers, though long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Marsden shows that people with precarious migration status face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their access to institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards.

In this first-ever international history of the influential feminist movement Wages for Housework, Louise Toupin draws on extensive archival research and interviews with the movement’s founders and activists from Italy, England, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Canada. Featuring previously unpublished conversations with Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the book highlights the power and originality of the movement, detailing its theoretical and organizational innovations around the unrecognized forms of labour performed largely by women.

The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy. Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) was the last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, and her biography opens a window onto the political and social landscape of her time. She embraced issues such as minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, and employment equality throughout her six decades of activism.

Political Elites in Canada offers a timely look at Canadian political power brokers and how they are adapting to a fast-paced digital media environment. Elite power structures are changing worldwide, with traditional influencers losing authority over prevailing social, economic, and political structures. This volume explores the changing landscape for power brokers, the ascent of new elites, and how they are using digital communication to connect with Canadians in unprecedented ways.

The achievement of the vote in 1918 is often celebrated as a triumphant moment in the onward, upward advancement of Canadian women. Acclaimed historian Joan Sangster looks beyond the shiny rhetoric of anniversary celebrations and Heritage Minutes to show that the struggle for equality included gains and losses, inclusions and exclusions, depending on a woman’s race, class, and location within the nation.

The idea of political unity contains its own opposite, because a political community can never guarantee the equal status of all its members. The price of belonging is an entrenched social stratification within the political unit itself. This book explores how the desire for political unity generates a collective commitment to certain lived fictions – the citizen-state, the market economy, and so forth – that shape our understanding of political legitimacy and responsibility.

Breaching the Peace tells the story of the ordinary citizens who are standing up to the most expensive megaproject in BC history and the government-sanctioned bullying that has propelled it forward. Starting in 2013, journalist Sarah Cox travelled to the Peace River Valley to talk to locals about the Site C dam and BC Hydro’s claim that the clean energy project was urgently needed. She found farmers, First Nations, and scientists caught up in a modern-day David-and-Goliath battle to save the valley, their farms, and traditional lands from wholesale destruction.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau – radical progressive or unavowed socialist? His legacy remains divisive. The Constant Liberal traces the charismatic politician’s relationship with the left and labour movements throughout his career. Christo Aivalis argues that Trudeau was in fact a consistently classic liberal, driven by individualist and capitalist principles. This comprehensive analysis showcases the interplay between liberalism and democratic socialism that defined Trudeau’s world view – and shaped his use of power.

Since the 2008 economic meltdown, market-driven globalization has posed new challenges for governments. This volume introduces the concept of “grey zones” of global governance, where state policy and market behaviour interact with respect to trade, the environment, food security, and investment. Grey zones allow for the bending of international rules, which both promotes uniformity in many areas of public life and facilitates diverse forms of capitalism in market societies, enabling governments to balance national and global economic benefits.